Set of short stories -first-timer- pt deux

[WafflesToo]

I'm still in the process of reworking my set of stories describing a possible future space-combat set in a 'hard' Sf setting (only peice of 'hand-wavium' was the FTL technology). The death of the DB wiped that post and I've lost most of the critique information so I'm going to go ahead and resubmit them. I thank you for the last critique job and hope I can ask for it again.

Battle of Eden, as witnessed by Lt. Rick Collings, pt.1
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Collins studied the instrument panel in front of him. Four years of training and he still couldn't believe he'd been selected as the gunnery chief on the Richard Perry, an 18,000 ton fighter in the service of the United Nations. He also never dreamt he'd actually be sent to war either. Relations with those damned "Bebops" had been bumpy at best and now they were contesting Earth's claim to yet another system. Not without a fight they wouldn't, not this time. Silently the convoy drifted away from Sol so they could make the FTL transit, the Perry, three "gunboat-fighters", and a troop transport to actually secure their strategic point. The 6,000 ton gunboats would be useless if they ran into any real resistance as their fuel supply would barely be able to get them there (let alone maneuver), they were there to bolster their defense once the area was secured. The Perry was there to do the real fighting once they reached the system, if there was any to do.

"FTL in five, all crews to their transit stations.” Lieutenant Hapsberg announced over the intercom from the NAV/Helm station next to Collins. The Perry was basically a giant gun, with six Delta-2 missiles in the magazine up front as its primary punch. To effectively fire them, the Perry's vector would have to be as close as possible to a collision-course with their target with a flight time of not more than 8-hours to ensure the target couldn't dodge out of the way. They also carried a massive laser engine that had two independently targeting emitters as a secondary weapon, though he couldn't imagine ever getting close enough to another ship to actually use it. He always considered that a laser-duel between ships would be like a pair of snipers squaring off across a football field with scoped rifles, mutual suicide. The laser was there to try and deal with any missiles fired back at the Perry, a job he would gladly hand over to the computer fire control. Reflex-sighting the laser was technically possible, but he was awful at trying to acquire anything through such a narrow view-field. He always thought it better to let the automatics handle it.

Bzzt! “Commander, this is Sergeant Daniels, all crews accounted for and standing by for FTL." the intercom crackled slightly. Aft of the command center bunker the ship's crew were all strapped down to their bunks in the hab-module. Transitioning to and from FTL transit would require 5gs of acceleration and even a simple accident could be lethal. "Commander, all ships signal ready for transition", Signalman Gotman reported from the corner. Collins closed his eyes and braced, the sudden acceleration could easily render a man unconscious and he wasn't sure it would be a bad thing. "Lt. Torrie, bring this ship up to speed”, Commander Matthews ordered as she checked her own webbing to be sure it was snug. The engineer nodded and began the final sequence on his board.

Hundreds of feet behind the command bunker, boron rods lifted clear from their housings unleashing terrible energies within the reactor core. The hundred-foot tall cooling arrays fluttered slightly as they opened up fully to help disperse the added energy in their attempt to keep the reactor within its operating range. Massive relays snapped shut and the laws of physics rebelled for an instant as the ship rapidly shot forward. Within seconds all five ships had entered transit, heading towards their destination dozens of light-years away...

 

[WafflesToo]

Battle of Eden, as witnessed by Lt. Rick Collings, pt.2
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Painful, but he endured it this time without passing out. 5g of acceleration sounds like such a small number until you have to experience it first-hand he thought as he stood up from his workstation. The ship had left Sol well behind and was no longer near enough for its gravity well to effect them much, allowing them to drive to purely unfathomable speeds. The invention of the FTL Transit drive may have left Einstein spinning in his grave, but had opened the door for humanity’s spread from its birthplace. The transit to Eden would take around 30 hours to complete, 20-odd light years in less time than it takes a dry-cleaner’s shop to lose your shirt and it never stopped boggling his mind whenever he thought too much about it.

Collins would be off-duty for a while so he left his station in the care of Yeoman Phillips and climbed down to the ward. Up and down in a starship were such strange concepts, especially if it wasn’t under power. Structurally speaking, the Perry and all other ships like her had more in common with the Empire State building than any ocean-going vessel. When under power, the acceleration would effectively create the sensation of gravity to anyone inside facing back toward the drive unit, so decks are stacked perpendicularly to the unit’s line-of-thrust to take advantage of this. It also meant a careful arrangement of hatches and ladders so anyone unlucky enough to slip off of one would only fall one deck instead of the length of the ship.

“Taking a break already Gunney?” it was Wilma from NAV/Helm. She was already in the ward checking through her PDA and sipping occasionally from a water bottle. “Not much for a Gunner to do until we drop out of transit” I said, grabbing a bottle for myself. “If the Beebops have figured out how to fight at FTL speeds we’re sunk already” I added. “Hmmm-mm” she murmured, obviously engrossed in something she was reading from the diminutive device in her hands. The ship’s acceleration was already slackening, probably down to 1/10th of a g-force or so. Soon it wouldn’t even be possible to sit, or stand for that matter and he intended to make the most of it. Taking a drink from the bottle he looked up at the hatchway. The floor above the ward was one set of damage-control lockers. It was a secondary one though, there more to provide something else for “bad-stuff” to hit on its way to the command center. The actual damage control center was further down the ship. There the shift leaders worked with the enlisted crew to maintain the ship and to direct any damage control efforts should the ship be in a crisis.

Pulling out his own PDA he started flipping though screens looking for the latest intel pertaining to the mission. “So why did they send the gunboats with us? I mean, they’re going to be sitting ducks if we can’t get a fuelling station set up.” I asked, half to no one. Looking up from her PDA Wilma blinked, taken off guard by the question, “Huh? Well, heck I don’t know. I’m guessing they’re worried about leaving us unsupported if the OPFOR bring a heavier force of fighters after we get there.” Sucking heavily at the straw I pondered it, “Yes, but it would only do us any good if we get there first. If THEY’RE the ones who have set up shop already… I just don’t like thinking of what could happen.” This operation was effectively a race to see which side could get the most force there the fastest. It worried him that the brass might have been looking too much at numbers on a report and not enough at reality…

 

[WafflesToo]

Part three was a fairly extensive rewrite, I was in the middle of this one when the DB decided to go to its final destination.

Battle of Eden, as witnessed by Lt. Rick Collings, pt.3
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Eighteen hours ago the UN fighter, Richard Perry had reversed its heading and began its deceleration to drop out of transit near Eden’s inner system. As soon she dropped out of transit Collins had the computer initiate a full-spherical scan around the ship, it was the ventral mast-mounted IR camera that picked up the first signature. Without turning his attention from the scope Collins made his report, “thermal trace on one captain, we’ve got company.” “How big is it Collins? What are we up against?” asked Commander Matthews, with any luck it will only be a scout ship and not another fighter. The UN’s fleet looked impressive, with five ships but only the Perry was fully capable of fighting it out. “Not at this range captain, all I can tell is that it’s definitely a ship and it has altered its course to intercept us” definitely an armed Bebop ship. Commander Williams considered this for a moment, “Helm, I want an intercept course that will allow us to catch him far enough away from the convoy that he can’t threaten the transport.”

Maneuvering a starship is not very straightforward. It requires good internal communications and training amongst the crew. When a ship is in freefall, so is its crew so even adjusting the ship’s attitude can bounce personnel, tools, and equipment around inside the hull resulting in injury and damage. The proper technique is for the helm to signal the crew over the intercom the kind of maneuver to expect and the direction. Once all lose objects are secured and the crew is braced the shift leaders will signal back ready. The helmsman would then give a count-down prior to actually executing the maneuver. Of course things can become abridged somewhat during emergency maneuvering. And of course there is the issue of propellant. When she left Luna, the Perry massed 18,000 tons, around 12,000 tons of it was propellant. Exit maneuvering in Sol and FTL transit had consumed over 6,000 tons of it. After executing her intercept burn she was down to a slight 11,000 tons and had expended over half her total delta-V capacity and she was now hurtling towards an opponent who was hopefully in a similar condition. With any luck the aggressiveness of their actions would be enough to force them to turn away.

“Looks like she’s a heavy fighter ma’am” Collins reported as they drifted close enough to their foe to begin to make sense of her signature. They were now on a good collision course and were about 14-hours away, to give their missiles any real chance at hitting they needed to be within 12-hours or it would be entirely possible for them to escape from the weapons by forcing them to exhaust their delta-V capacity. It was always a long wait.

“Stay frosty people, Collins, I want two missiles spaced fifteen minutes apart as soon as we’re in range, Hapsberg I want maximum decel-burn as soon as the second missile clears. We need to stay between them and the convoy so we can fire again if we need to” Matthews was playing it by the book, but everyone was feeling tense. Duels between space fighters play out over hours, lots of time for mistakes.

Collins blinked, and checked his instruments, then checked them again, “l-, launch! Captain, definite launch off of bandit! ETA thirteen hours-twenty, we’re sti…”

“EVADE!” the commander’s voice nearly cracked as she cut Collins off. She calmed slightly and continued the order to the Helmsman, “I want a full burn perpendicular to the weapon’s course for twelve hours.” They’d been suckered of course, if the Beebop heavy was packing delta-3s then they were already well inside of their range, but still too far away to effectively shoot back.

Lt. Hapsburg was already on the ship’s intercom in preparation for maneuvering the ship when Cdr. Matthews turned her attention to Collins, “Gunney, I want you to fire one missile now, and another one in ten minutes. At the very least that should force them away from the convoy, even if we can’t hit them.”

I quickly finished programming the missile I had been prepping and fired it off before the ship started its maneuvers and turned my attention to the next missile in line. Holding our current course would only guarantee that they’d be hit, trying to evade didn’t seem any more likely to succeed. Either way, the need for quick action was dire even though the outcome was hours away…

 

[WafflesToo]

Battle of Eden, as witnessed by Lt. Rick Collings, pt.4
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It was long-since obvious that the Beebop fighter had been packing a pair of delta-3s, they had been hurtling towards the UN ship Richard Perry for about half a day now and were approaching rapidly. The main drive shut down to save on propellant and she was in final preparations to fight for her life. The cooling array covers closed over the delicate radiator array (the Achilles heel of any space going fighting ship) and the masts were folding back along the spine of the ship like a cat laying its ears back. Once fully retracted, the radiators could continue to dump waste heat into the propellant tanks for a short while, but with her mass down to 9000 tons her thermal endurance in this mode was very limited.

Collins monitored the situation from his console; the radical burn had done nothing but burn up another 2000 tons of propellant and completely spoiled his shot. It looked unlikely that either of his missiles would hit anything, although the gunboats had opened fire as well, complicating the enemy warship’s maneuvering. To conserve thermal endurance he had the laser operating in a low-powered “dazzle” mode in an effort to burn out the missile’s sensor systems. Even in dazzle mode the laser could only fire for a short pulse so the trick was to guess when to fire the weapon to catch his target with its sensor shutters open. So far it had been an exercise in frustration. Whoever had programmed the missile had done a damn good job, the software was having a heck of a time finding a pattern and frankly he wasn’t doing any better. For the hundredth time in an hour the laser warning light lit on his console, “No effect, target is still pinging us.” The Commander continued her conversation with the engineer, not that he blamed her, concentrate on anything but the steadily approaching doom. There really wasn’t much that anyone could do about it anyway. The weapon was growing frightfully large in his scope, any moment it would…

Close and far are very relative terms, and when it comes to spacecraft it’s like trying to hit a grain of sand hundreds of feet away. Self-guided munitions were part of the solution. The other half of the solution was a combination of Jon’s law and a fragmenting warhead. Jon’s law states that any object traveling at 3km/s will release its weight in TNT as energy on impact (and relative velocities were often many times that). The fragmenting warhead simply uses a carefully metered bursting charge to scatter 1kg shot pellets into an area roughly three-times the dimension of the target, ensuring sufficient density for several to strike the target and to make it nearly impossible to dodge the attack by applying thrust at the last minute. The microscopic brain within the missile had calculated and recalculated the proper distance to set off its bursting charge to achieve just this effect, and it decided that now was the optimal time.

“BURST! Scatter burst on weapon one, definite incoming!”, Cold sweat poured from Collin’s brow as he cruelly twisted the power level knob on the laser to full power and toggled the weapon over to full automatic. The computer took note of six objects on a collision course and began using the beam to vaporize them one at a time. With each firing the weapon would heat up and was taking longer, and longer to cycle. “Rick…” Wilma looked at him with wide, terrified eyes and he slowly shook his head as the final seconds ticked away. He felt as though he were naked inside a small fishbowl. And then someone drop-kicked it…

 

[WafflesToo]

Battle of Eden, as witnessed by Lt. Rick Collings, pt.5
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The total launch package for an average delta-3 missile was around 500 tons, including the weapon, launch tube, covers, bumpers, and all of the other launch equipment. The weapon itself weighed in at 250 - 300 tons, including 100 tons of propellant. The control and armor/hardening packages weighed another 50 - 70 tons, leaving over 100 tons of warhead comprising of thin-wall tubes loaded with 1kg steel shot and lined with det-cord. All of this effort, mass, and energy had been expended to strike the Richard Perry with two, 1 kg metal spheres. The first one passed through a dorsal propellant tank and punctured three of the 12 radiators of the dorsal array. The second struck the corner of the command bunker, breaking apart as it passed through the Whipple shield and perforating the hull underneath. On striking the main skin of the ship the fragments virtually exploded, blowing apart the computer core located there and scattering fragments into the main compartment.

The sound had been like a cannon going off next to his head. Collins swooned, suffering the effects of the overpressure from the explosion. It was dark in the bunker, not even the emergency lighting was on, only the winking lights from a few consoles. His scope was dead, the ships electronics knocked out by the EMP of the impact. Slowly recovering he noticed that he was having trouble hearing and it was getting difficult to breathe. People were shouting and moving around on the bridge, “I think they’re both dead!” “We’re holed up here! Where is it?!” “Stuff your damn shirt in it!” Not so much outright panic as a massive triage, the crew doing their best to save the ship and each other. His senses snapped back into focus as he had a cold realization, there was still a second missile bearing down on them!

His scope stubbornly mocked him, dark and powerless. He struck its face several time to no effect, the problem was further up the line. Only the electro-mechanical systems were working now. He had to attempt to manually acquire and then shoot down the weapon, a skill he was never very good at in a nice safe trainer let alone here. Slipping the cover off of the telescopic sights and letting it float away he reached up to a lever and flipped it over to “Reflex”.

Reflex sighting a laser head involved using a shutter-mirror to look through the optic, in theory allowing the operator to see exactly where the laser was pointing. The limitations in manufacturing tolerance and the inevitable wear of moving components limited accuracy however, so your field of view could be a fraction of a second off from the emitter’s. This slight variation was insignificant on a short-ranged shot of a few hundred kilometers, but as hundreds gives way to several thousands and hundred-thousands such an error could mean missing a target by a wide margin. Then there was the problem of even finding the target in the first place.

Pressing his face up to the sight and zooming the view out as far as possible he peered out into the star-lit sky. The emergency lighting finally flickered on around him, the ship was recovering but there were still no command systems working. Watching the background carefully he noticed the stars moving slightly, the impact had invariably imparted a two- or even three-axial spin on the ship, he needed a steady platform for this to even work. “Helm, we’re spinning. I need the ship stable!” There was no response, “Wilma dammit, snap out of it!” He took his face away from the sight to smack the helmsman in an effort to jar her awake and just as quickly mashed it back, closing his eyes as hard as he could. Oh god oh god oh god, we’re all going to die out here, where his friend had been sitting only moments ago was just a ribcage and pieces of meat. Barely able to move for fear, he forced his hands up to his console and hit the override to take helm control. He would have to be responsible for both steering the ship and operating the weapons for now.

 

[WafflesToo]

Battle of Eden, as witnessed by Lt. Rick Collings, finale
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Propellant leaking from the ruptured tank was spewing into space, puffs from the maneuvering jets fought against it to keep the ship stable. Finally the tank emptied and Collins was able to bring the Richard Perry to a halt. Slewing the laser emitter one way, then the other he searched for the second missile that would surely kill the ship and everyone else on-board if he didn’t find it.

129,600 spatial degrees surrounded the ship, with his view zoomed out as far as he could get it Collins could see maybe 3. It was an impossible task without some kind of plan to narrow the search area. Luckily, objects in space obey Newton’s general laws of physical motion so the missile’s course was pretty predictable. Unfortunately the forces of the impacting shells and escaping gasses had slewed the ship across all three axii changing his viewpoint drastically from when he had attempted to engage the first missile. With the computers off-line he couldn’t simply tell it to regain that heading either. The only instrument at his disposal that might help was the 8-ball.

With the danger of disablement from EMP effects most warships are equipped with a variety of electromechanical devices as backups. The most important functions are generally covered such as rudimentary navigation, fire control, and avionics. The 8-ball was a gyroscopically stabilized ball that marked out the ship’s attitude along all three axii. As long as the gyros were spinning inside the device it would never deviate from its own plane (even if its power were knocked out the gyros would keep it true for a while). Thing was, Collins hadn’t been paying much attention to it when they were hit so it would be a guess. But it would still cut his search area down considerably.

He keyed the intercom, there were only minutes left to act, “All hands! Rotation, Multi-Axial in 10, 9, 8…” The crew on the bridge who had left their seats quickly reached for the nearest handholds to them and tried to secure anything floating nearby, time was critical so Collin’s couldn’t afford to be gentle. It took about a half-minute to get the ship back to where he thought it had been facing and all the rotations halted, time was not on his side. “Secure from maneuver!” where was that thing, it had to be near the other weapon. They had been fired only 30 minutes apart so angular separation would be minimal. Forcing himself to go slowly, he started slewing the emitter, watching a section of sky for a ten-count, and then slewing again. It was nerve-wracking, he must have gotten the ship pointed wrong, it should be right THERE! A small twinkle caught his eye, studying it for a minute he determined it was moving in relation to the star-field behind it. It HAD to be it.

Carefully centering it in his sights he zoomed in as far as he could, the object was roughly cylindrical with a short shaft-like object sticking out from one end. Damn it was close. The laser was still at full power, he thought about turning it down to try and spotlight it instead but decided against it. Only going to get a few shots before it goes terminal, and there’d be no way he could burn a path through the shot-cloud. He held his breath and pressed the firing stud on the control handle. The laser engine emitted a deep, vibrating rumble like a pissed-off x-ray machine. And nothing happened. The weapon began cycling for another shot as Collins nearly frantically rechecked the sight alignment, it was dead-center and it should have hit. The ready-light cycled to green and he pressed the firing stud again, and still nothing happened. Closing his eyes tightly he forced down the wave of panic he felt. The sight must be misaligned. Carefully he slewed the sight off the target and slewing it back on making sure to let go of the control when it was back on the target. The sight drifted slightly after he released the control and was no longer centered. Have faith Rick, this has to work, fighting the urge to put the sight back onto the target he pressed the firing stud. For a split second nothing happened, then a shower of sparks flew from that target like a Fourth-of-July sparkler. It took a long time for the weapon to cycle again; it was probably going to be his last shot. Repeating the technique he fired as soon as the crosshairs were on the target, a long shower of sparks flew from the weapon and then something “popped”, sending the weapon spinning from his view…

Down in the wardroom, Collins was recuperating from the ordeal. He’d been relieved by the Captain and had been checked over by the ship’s doctor. The fragment that had killed his friend missed him by mere inches, the shockwave had hurt him, but not as badly as they had feared. An impact like that could have hemorrhaged his lungs but he’d lucked out. Their friend, the Beebop heavy fighter had suffered delta-exhaustion after outmaneuvering the first wave of missiles and the gunboats had sent a second wave after him, it was doubtful he’d survive it. Captain Matthews was going to pilot them into orbit around Eden-III where they’d meet up the rest of the convoy and set up shop. All of the ships were nearly exhausted after the fight, but they’d won this round, and Collins hoped it would be the final round of this bout…