The Drake: Revealed

So let’s talk about the layout of that mainstay of the Imperial fleet, the Drake-class frigate. (The numbers are for deck plans. My own sketches are far too horrible to publish, but… well, there they are.)

External

Like most starships, one could conveniently divide the Drake-class into a pressure hull and a drive bus. It’s a little harder to spot the connection than it is on many ships (like, say, the Cheneos-class freighter) because of the armor, but it’s still there.

The pressure hull is, essentially, the front half of the ship, a round-fronted, slightly-flattened cylinder, for the most part unbroken in its organic curves except for the few openings (stellarium, gun port, airlocks) mentioned below, for the six geodesic spheres – three on each side, arranged fore-to-aft along the mid-line – clamped to the hull, which contain redundant sensor suites, best not placed inside the armor, the four paired cheek-mounted light mass drivers to for’ard, the ship’s secondary weapons, and an antenna suite projecting from the dorsal pressure hull near its after end.

Behind this, the pressure hull stops, but the armor which covers it continues on past the aftmost pressure bulkhead, broadening the hull to port and starboard even as it narrows into the starship’s stubby “wings”. (Which are of course not wings – they’re the secondary radiators; double-sided radiative striping under transparent light armor, encapsulating more bunker space. These are considered the secondary radiators because they’re designed to carry only the life-support and low-power heat load.) The armor back here serves as a cowl wrapping around the propulsion bus, which is the usual tangle of structural trusses, cryocels (for the ship’s limited supply of afterburner antiprotons), spherical and cylindrical tanks (for deuterium/He3-slush fuel and heat-sink goo), auxiliary machinery, and at the aftmost end of that (such that the bunkerage provides additional shielding for the crew), the fusion torches sticking out the open back of the cowl.

(This is, of course, a weak spot in the starship’s armor, but such would the drives be wherever you put them. In practice, the argument goes, when you’re in the furball – well, million-degree drive plasma provides a poor approach vector even for a kinetic weapon, and when you’re not – well, just watch where you point your kilt, okay?)

The external parts of the primary radiators sit on top of and below the cowl; they’re liquid-metal droplet radiators, which extend perpendicular to the secondaries when in use. They’re intended to support full power-and-some-more on the reactors, such that you can make a fast retreat and chill down your heat sinks at the same time.

The lowest deck extends, squared-off and flat-bottomed, a little below the main body of the pressure hull and extends back some way below the cowl; as the large doors at front and aft would indicate, it’s the landing bay.

The hull itself is gorgeous in shimmering military indigo; naturally, leading edges and other salient points are highlighted in intricate swirls of embedded gold-filigree brightwork, just because the IN can and wishes to emphasize that small point. (Close inspection will also note the apertures of attitude-control system thrusters, especially to outboard for the largest moment arms, and scattered black, glassy domes concealing the point-defense laser grid.)

Internal

Internally, the Drake has five decks dorsal-to-ventral. It uses the classic belly-lander arrangement because it’s considered possible to land a frigate planetside, or at least small-planet-side, or operate in atmosphere. (In the latter case, under the “with sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine” principle.) Frigate captains rarely want to, though.

Despite that, there’s no artificial gravity on a Drake; while in space, the starship operates in microgravity.

Communication between decks is provided by a pair of elevators/shafts running between decks 1 to 4, and a staircase providing access to deck 0, along with various maintenance ladderways and such (especially in engineering). The elevators don’t run under microgravity conditions; they’re only for use under gravity. Rather, the elevator car is open-topped and is locked down on deck 4 in flight, allowing the shafts to be used as any other passageways.

As far as possible, auxiliary machinery, further storage tanks, etc., are wrapped around the outside of the ship, between the decks and the hull, to use as additional protection in the event of an armor-penetrating strike.

Deck 0

Deck 0, “the loft” is the smallest deck, squeezed in between the ceiling of deck 1 and the hull. Fortunately, it contains (for the most part) spaces which will be unmanned at general quarters or higher readiness states.

Specifically, at the fore end, there’s (1) the captain’s cabin, including a small office and private ‘fresher, from which a central corridor runs aft past (2) and (3), VIP staterooms which include the ‘fresher but not the office, ending at (4) the auxiliary sensory and communications room (approximately beneath the antenna suite mentioned above. Outside this room, a foldaway spiral staircase (i.e. serving as a microgravity shaft in flight) descends to the main corridor of deck 1.

Deck 1

Deck 1 is the first of the three “main” decks of the pressure hull.

Starting from the for’ard end, we begin with (5) the stellarium, which is literally the only room on the ship with windows, of which it has a continuous strip around the periphery and overhead. It also, being intended to entertain visitors and provide somewhere to get away from inside for a moment, comes with comfortable microgravity-adaptive seating, a few potted plants, and a wet bar.

More important for military purposes, while the windows are tough, they aren’t that tough, and as such the armor layer passes comfortably behind it, and access is through a sequential pair of spacetight doors. Naturally, it’s unmanned at general quarters or higher.

Behind this, another central corridor runs aft past (6), a conference lounge to port, and (7) an office for ship’s business – usually the Flight Administrator’s domain – to starboard, reaching the for’ard entrance to (8) the bridge/CIC, which takes up the full width of the ship in the center of the deck.

The aft entrance to the bridge/CIC opens into a second central corridor, this time passing (9), the server room containing the ship’s primary “dumb” servers and avionics systems to port, and (10), the ship’s AI’s cogence core and primary mentality substrate to starboard, terminating in a five-way junction containing the access to deck 0. To port and starboard, a cross-corridor terminates at the elevators/shafts, each with a ‘fresher located adjacent; aft, a door provides access to (11) the maneuvering room, in the form of a well-insulated gallery overlooking (12) the engineering space, which spans all three main decks.

(Secure backups for the cogence core and the substrate also exist buried in the middle of the propulsion bus section.)

Deck 2

Deck 2 is the central deck of the ship, and to a large extent is divided into two non-communicating parts. As a frigate, the Drake-class is built around its main gun, which occupies the axis of the ship and thus the center of the deck. While access is possible to the mass driver chamber (which can even be pressurized, with the gun port in the bow closed, for maintenance), it’s normally kept evacuated and is not, in any case, a very comfortable place to be.

The mass driver runs down the center of the deck from the gun port at the bow to (13) its “breech”, which sits directly against the engineering space bulkhead. Straddling it on either side are (14), the magazines for its k-slugs, which are also kept evacuated under normal conditions for ease of autoloader operation.

Starting this time from the aft end of the ship, at far port and starboard against the engineering bulkhead are the elevators/shafts and the associated adjacent ‘freshers, and the accesses directly to the engineering space. Corridors lead forward from these against the inner hull until they pass the magazines, at which point they turn inwards to reach, and proceed to the bow against, the central mass driver (for ease of accessing the driver coils for maintenance from these corridors).

On the port side, the majority of the space for’ard of this corridor is given over to (15) the medical bay, and at its for’ard end (16), the nano/cryostorage unit, used both for patients in need of return to fuller hospital facilities and doubling as the ship’s brig.

(It should be noted that the medical facilities are quite limited; the nature of the space combat environment is such that the window between “fine” and “chunky salsa” is quite narrow, and as such the medical bay is oriented more toward treating illness and minor injuries among the crew than it is to handling massive combat casualties.)

On the starboard side, the equivalent space is used for (17), a combined laboratory, workshop, and engineering support area.

The remainder of the space for’ard of these, behind the avionics area at the bow, contains the equivalent of two small rooms on either side (18, 19, 20, 21), connected by double spacetight doors; this is the modular function area. With sufficient engineering support and at a yard, these independently-encapsulated areas are designed to be disconnected from the ship’s infrastructure and framework, pulled out as a whole – along with their associated outer-hull plate and armor – and replaced with other modular capsules of equivalent specification. This feature permits the Drake-class to be customized for special functions – such as the electromagnetic radiation shielding we saw at the Battle of Eye-of-Night – much more flexibly than would otherwise be possible.

As mentioned, main access to the (12) engineering space is on this deck, although catwalks lead up and down to the lower level and to the maneuvering room gallery. The nearer part of the engineering deck contains a variety machinery, although also housing to port and starboard the two auxiliary fusion plants used to provide power to the starship when the drive is shut down. Beyond it, a half-octagon wraps around the bulk of the vector-control core and the reaction wheels, containing in their own sections the (22) life support systems to port, and the (23) robot hotels for the ship’s mechanicals to starboard.

Amidships between these, a small airlock and external robot hotel provides access to an unpressurized maintenance crawlway running through the propulsion bus. Normally, this is only used by robots or for occasional yard maintenance; radiation levels are unhealthy back there with the drive running, to say the least, but access may be necessary in emergencies.

Deck 3

Deck 3 is primarily the crew deck. At the for’ard end, along the centerline, is the (24) mindcast receiving room, allowing visitors received as infomorphs to borrow one of the ship’s spare bodies for the duration of their visit; aft of that, a cross-corridor links the (25) port and (26) starboard airlocks, each of which is accompanied by a small conning station (usually disabled) for use while docking.

Aft of that, another small room serves as a quarterdeck/reception area and security post. From there, a central corridor leads aft through the (27) crew quarters – the corridor itself is lined with access hatches to what are, in effect, double-sized personnel capsules – to the (28) comfortably furnished mess deck, which incorporates a (29) standing galley to port, and the (30) ship’s locker to starboard. Beyond the mess deck, hatches to port and starboard – a design choice permitting a large screen to be mounted on the mess deck’s after bulkhead – lead through inner-hull-hugging corridors past the (31) accumulator room to port, and the (32) auxiliary control room and (33) a small gymnasium to starboard, to another cross-corridor against the engineering bulkhead, providing access to the elevators/shafts and the ‘freshers on this level. However, there is no routine access to the engineering space on this deck.

Deck 4

Deck four, slung beneath the ship, is primarily its (33) landing bay; one large space, extending fore to aft. Space is reserved at port for the (34) armory, used to equip shore parties if necessary, and at starboard for a (35) second workshop space. These are each located for’ard of the elevators/shafts which open into a small hallway offering access both to these, and to an airlock opening into the landing bay. There are no associated ‘freshers on this deck.

A Drake-class frigate is typically equipped with a single cutter, an interface vehicle, or both; the relatively large landing bay permits it to also store the frigate’s complement of drones, and to serve as a cargo bay to such extent as space permits. Overhead manipulators permit vehicles to be moved to engage with either the fore or aft mass catapult for launching, reshuffling of the cargo, or retasking of the cutter, as desired.

Flight operations are handled from the bridge/CIC. The bay can be pressurized with both doors closed, but at general quarters or higher readiness states operates unpressurized to expedite operations and avoid unnecessary risks.

(For those paying attention to the implications: yes, the very same vector control tech that lets you make kinetic barriers lets you make nice air curtains that would hold air in even with the door open, while still letting you fly in and out. [Well, mostly: for molecular statistical reasons, they leak, but it’s manageable.] Some civilian ships use those for the convenience. Military ships prefer not to have unexpected depressurization incidents when someone gets a lucky shot in on the emitters when they don’t have to. Sure, it’s a pain to have to wear a skinsuit all the time, but you’re in the Navy now! Also, you’re less likely to get brained by a flying spanner if there were to be a curtain oops.)

Ships of the Fleet

So, in today’s piece of worldbuilding, have an analysis and explication of the different classes – or the different types, rather – of military starships operated by the Imperial Navy. (The basis for the ternary plot I’m using is, of course, Winchell Chung’s analysis here, so you might want to go read that first if you’re not familiar with the concept, then come back here.)

Types

shipgrid05The chart on the right illustrates the differences between the various types and classes of warship in common use by the Imperial Navy by their P/D/W ratio – i.e., the relative trade-off between propulsion, defenses, and weapons (i.e. offensive armament):

“in common use” should be read as “not counting all the weird-ass specialist ships we build for special cases”; also, it doesn’t include auxiliary vessels (oilers, hospital ships, etc.) since they’re not operated by the IN, but by the Stratarchy of Military Support and Logistics.

Battleships, Dreadnoughts and Superdreadnoughts

“I am an Imperial Mandate-class dreadnought, and you are within a million miles of me. Ergo, you continue to exist solely on my sufferance.”

an early experiment in AI captaincy

Battleships, dreadnoughts, and superdreadnoughts (B, D, S on the chart) are capital or supercapital ships mounting heavy long-range firepower as their primary function.

These types, the ships of the wall, are the kings of the outer engagement envelope, engaging each other with powerful weaponry at ranges of up to two light-minutes, and rarely closing beyond one to two light-seconds range (a zero/zero intercept at this residual range is considered a “set-piece” battle). They are the purest of all naval vessels in function, existing simply to counteract each other in the battlespace of major fleet actions, or to own the volume of space they can dominate if not opposed; the ultimate argument of star navies.

The principal difference between two of the three types is simply mass and volume; doctrinally, the majority of the ships of the wall of any given time should be of battleship classes, with their larger cousins the dreadnoughts providing heavier stiffening formations to the wall and occasional nasty surprises.

Because while it sure would be nice to build nothing except dreadnoughts, even nearly-post-scarcity economics doesn’t stretch to overbuilding everything just in case.

Superdreadnoughts, while sometimes referring to particularly large dreadnought classes, more typically refer to ships falling in the dreadnought type by mass, while using much of their internal volume for specialized systems: typical examples would include the command superdreadnought, the information-warfare superdreadnought, the anti-RKV superdreadnought, and so forth.

Mauler Superdreadnoughts

One example of this listed separately (L on the chart) since its P/D/W ratio moves it well outside the standard range is the mauler superdreadnought. In this case, the specialized systems in question are a very, very large mass driver or laser, with propulsion and defensive systems stripped back to accommodate it.

Mauler superdreadnoughts are not considered ships of the wall, but rather are specialized vessels used to attack specific hardened targets. Since their low speed and weak defenses render them vulnerable “glass cannons”, they are typically operated as part of a task force including close-in point-defense cruisers, and only brought up once opposing fleets and mobile defenses have been cleared away; however, in their specialty role of cracking hardened fixed bases, they’re unequalled.

Hyperdreadnoughts

The “hyperdreadnought” is a peculiarly unique version of the superdreadnought type, of which the Empire fields three, each unique within its class; Invictus, Imperiatrix, and God of War.  In order, they are the home of Admiralty Grand Fleet Operations, the Imperial Couple’s personal flagship, and the literal embodiment of the archai/eikone of war.  Any one of them turning up in the battlespace would have implications that, by and large, no-one wants to think about thinking about.

Battlecruisers and Cruisers

The backbone of the fleet, battlecruisers and cruisers (C on the chart) are middle-weight combatants, more heavily armed than destroyers and frigates, and yet more maneuverable than battleships and larger ships of the wall. Most cruisers also maintain limited AKV facilities. They are perhaps the best balanced (between operational aspects) of any of the Imperial Navy’s standard types. The distinction between cruisers and battlecruisers is simply one of mass and volume, with battlecruisers identifying the significantly larger and heavier classes of the type.

In fleet operations, battlecruisers and cruisers serve as screening elements and operate on the fringes of the close-in battlespace, maneuvering aggressively for advantage. For the most part, however, these middle-weight combatant types are intended for patrol operations and long-endurance “space control” missions, sometimes alone and sometimes in flotillas, as well as serving as the IN’s go-to types for independent missions of almost any type. In areas of heavy patrol activity, cruisers may lead destroyer or frigate flotillas into action.

Cruisers are also the type within which most variation exists, and cruiser classes may wander quite far from the indicated P/D/W ratio. Of particular note here is the point-defense cruiser (“pd” on the chart), the one type which you might see as a ship-of-the-formation, stripped of most of its offensive armament in exchange for point-defense enhanced to the point of augmenting that of other ships, but many other specialized varieties exist: the assault cruiser (optimized for planetary assaults, i.e., heavy on the ship’s troops and capable of launching drop shuttles and drop pods into atmosphere; some of these are aerospace cruisers, which atmospheric interceptors can sortie from before there’s an orbithead established); the diplomatic cruiser (a big stick to transport the softly-speaking); and the interdictor cruiser (specializing in the volume-security mission, which is to say, to chase down, capture and board other starships).  The primary battlecruiser variants are the command battlecruiser (optimized to carry the admiral commanding a CC/BC task force) and the carrier-battlecruiser (which carries AKVs – see below – as well as its internal armament; this is the type of battlecruiser usually found operating alone, due to its significantly enhanced operational envelope and capabilities).

Due to their versatility, the IN maintains a greater tonnage of battlecruisers and cruisers in commission than starships of any other types.

Destroyers and Frigates

Destroyers and frigates (D, F on the chart) are small, fast, maneuverable ships used for screening larger vessels, as escorts, and for patrol work. On their own, their capacity is severely limited, for which reason they typically operate in flotillas assigned together.

As with the above two types, the most obvious difference between destroyers and frigates is their mass and volume. That said, the strict difference between these two types is that while a destroyer may possess very limited broadside armament, due to its limited volume, it does possess it. A frigate, however, possesses no broadside armament; its spaceframe is essentially constructed around its primary gun.

Like cruisers, destroyers and frigates are designed for the “close-in” battlespace – with the understanding that close-in, in space terms, means anything under one light-second of separation. Indeed, these types arguably dominate this battlespace, since they form the majority of the IN’s screening forces, whereas cruisers are largely incidental to “set-piece” naval engagements. In this area, they use their superior maneuverability to both engage each other with wolf-pack tactics and to swarm larger ships at close-in range. Their lesser defensive capabilities than their larger cousins reflects the intention that they should substitute speed and maneuverability, avoiding being hit, for the ability to withstand taking one.

Destroyers and frigates are also intended to serve in escort and patrol roles in relatively safe space, where antipiracy patrol is the main concern (a flotilla of destroyers or frigates is considered an effective counter to a single cruiser-class vessel, which would be a rare high-end encounter under such circumstances); and in small numbers and specialist classes as scouts, avoiding engagement entirely.

Some frigate classes, uniquely among naval vessels, are capable of atmospheric entry and landing. Such frigates occasionally serve an additional role with Imperial Naval Intelligence.

Autonomous Kill Vehicles (AKVs)

AKVs (A on the chart) – autonomous kill vehicles – are extremely smart multi-bus, multi-munition, multi-mission missiles. An AKV is, in effect, a small, stripped-down, AI-piloted starship – capable of much higher acceleration and greater maneuverability than a standard design, albeit with much less endurance – designed to act in multiple roles: as a mobile reconnaissance platform; as a “fighter craft” used to swarm and destroy larger starships from inside their own point-defense zones; or, when it loses all other fighting ability, as a kinetic energy weapon in its own right.

As indicated on the chart, AKVs have essentially no defensive weapons of their own; the intent is that they should substitute their vast advantage in speed and maneuverability for armor and point-defense.

Monitors

A monitor (M on the chart), in essence, is a fixed base – an orbiting station or asteroid base – used for local defense. Their W/D ratio is skewed more towards defense than the ship-of-the-wall types, since unlike those, they lack even minimal maneuverability to avoid incoming fire or to retreat from the battlespace; on the other hand, their lack of concern for acceleration or other propulsive matters means that there is effectively no upper limit on the mass of the weapons or defenses that a monitor can mount, and asteroid-based monitors may make extensive use of the asteroid’s mass as armor and heatsink both.

Carriers

Carriers (V on the chart) are battleship or dreadnought-sized vessels which eschew armament of their own in exchange for carrying a large number of AKVs, along with AKV replenishment supplies, strap-on AKV thruster packs, observation platforms, etc. Since they are not generally maneuverable enough or well enough protected (the massive flight deck of a carrier is essentially a corridor through the armor into the heart of the vessel) to survive heavy attack, they are usually held back from engagements, and as such their designs heavily emphasize point- and local-space defense over additional propulsion.

Assault carriers

Assault carriers – i.e., those carrying dropships rather than AKVs – also fall into this category. The same general operational rules apply; they are held well back from any engagements, and do not move in to the target area until the high orbitals have already been cleared of the enemy.

Starfighters / Scouts

Starfighters (“sf” on the chart) are not manned fighter-class vessels. (The intersecting rules of physics, economics, and tactical effectiveness do not, in the general case, support a fighter-class of spacecraft in direct analogy to fighter aircraft. Rather, such craft can be replaced trivially by an equivalent vessel removing the biosapient pilot, their life support, and the ensuing limitations on maneuverability, acceleration, and computational performance, and replacing them with a computronium block; in effect, converting the spacecraft into an unmanned AKV.)

Rather, starfighters and scouts are essentially mini-carriers, suitable for operation by a very small crew, or even on occasion a single sophont, dedicated to the special operations and reconnaissance roles. They are small, no-frills starships designed to carry a limited, but still useful, number of AKVs or observation probes in exterior clamps. On arrival at their target, the AKVs or probes are then released to carry out the mission, while the starfighter itself serves as a command post, repair and replenishment depot, and coordination node in the tactical ‘mesh.

Couriers

Couriers (“o” on the chart) are simply militarized (in construction standard) versions of the equivalent civilian type. While remaining, for the most part, “all engine”, military couriers add limited defensive and extremely limited offensive capability to give them at least minimal survivability in the event that they must pass through an engagement envelope; doctrine, on the other hand, demands that couriers should avoid engagement at all costs utilizing their superior acceleration and maneuverability to any other warship type.

The Breakfast Of Champions

DROPSHIPS: EMPIRE OF THE STAR

The final entry in this section, affectionately known to the Imperial Legions as the “Big Ugly Breakfast 1” – and less affectionately known to almost everyone else as “Good gods, what is that thing?” – is the Flapjack-class cavalry dropship (Eye-in-the-Flame Arms/Artifice Armaments). Uniquely among Imperial starship designs, the Flapjack has adopted the rare “disk” or “saucer” hull form. It does this because the Flapjack-class is equipped with not merely a single, but a pair of nuclear-pulse drives, using the relatively environmentally friendly laser-fusion or (in the Flapjack II) antimatter options, the descent and deceleration drives; the dorsal and ventral hulls of these ships are in effect simply the pusher plates for these drives. The main body of the vessel, suspended between these on hydraulic dampers, is a short, wide cylinder, heavily structurally reinforced and itself surrounded by  “sidewall” armor as thick and refractory as the pusher plates.

The intended usage of the Flapjack is orbital insertion of armored vehicles, en masse, into hot zones. To enable this, after being decoupled from a carrier in the high orbitals of a planet under attack, the Flapjack uses its descent drive to accelerate downwards through the atmosphere, minimizing dwell time within range of orbital and anti-air defenses. In addition, while the descent of a Flapjack obviously has far too bright a sensor signature to be concealed, the combination of the radiation hash from the descent drive’s thrust bombs and the plasma sheath formed by its hypersonic atmospheric transit together render it extremely difficult for weapons systems to attain successful guidance lock, and terminal guidance (especially to the fine degree necessary to insert a weapon into the narrow window of vulnerability between the pusher plates and the sidewall armor, even if the weapon is capable of surviving and maneuvering in the immediate environment of an active nuclear-pulse drive) virtually impossible.

At the end of its descent trajectory, the Flapjack uses the more powerful thrust bombs of its deceleration drive to perform a “suicide burn”; i.e., maximal deceleration at minimum altitude, compatible with lithobraking in a manner which preserves the integrity of the ventral pusher plate. This deceleration burn serves the additional functions of preparing the drop zone for the arrival of the dropship by flattening any structures or prepared defenses, and eliminating any but the most heavily armored, secured, and radiation-proofed resistance in the immediate area. Once the ground is reached, multiple armored cargo access doors with integral ramps and excavation drones permit the Flapjack to be actively discharging combat vehicles within minutes of a successful landing.

A proposal for an infantry dropship along the lines of the Flapjack, tentatively designated the Pancake-class, has been advanced by Eye-in-the-Flame Arms, but at the present time the high-radiation aftermath of such a vessel’s landing is not considered viable for personnel wearing M-70 Havoc combat exoskeletons or N45 Garrex field combat armor, the current legionary standards. While this would not be a problem for troops equipped with the specialized N45r Callérás high-rad field combat armor, its associated disadvantages and the expense of refit ensure that, for the foreseeable future, infantry will continue to be landed via drop shuttle (q.v.)

– Naval Starships of the Associated Worlds, INI Press, Palaxias, 421st ed.


1. A statistically improbable number of combat drops take place at planet dawn.

Trope-a-Day: Space Is An Ocean

Space Is An Ocean: Partially played straight, partially (and in all the scientific ways) averted.  In rough order of examples:

The Imperial Navy does use some wet-naval terminology and protocol – but then, that’s only logical, because it was the wet navy that had all the experience in running small-town-sized vessels in hostile environments for extended periods of time, with little direction from home – just like starships.  But if you were to examine this matter in detail, IN terminology and routines are probably about one-third wet navy, one-third air force, and one-third unique to their new environment.

(Also, while there are some class analogies to be made… and while there may not be schooners and canoes, there are clippers among the lighthuggers, and there are Space Junks, of exactly that kind, among the free traders… there are no lifeboats, escape pods, etc.  Since Space Does Not Work That Way.)

Space is definitely not two-dimensional.  In fact, one of the major impetuses for even fairly backward and morphological-freedom-hating species (of non-aquatic or non-avian heritage, anyway) to get with some of the transsophont program is that splicing the ability to handle the third dimension, at least, into your brain is one of the things most useful in preventing your fleet from losing horribly to anyone with a better head for strategy.

Space, obviously, does not have friction.

The IN does use naval ranks (except in the Flight Ops department, which uses air force ranks – translated British-style), but doesn’t use naval command structure (see here).  And the IN’s ship’s troops aren’t marines, because the Empire doesn’t have a separate service for such; they’re just that portion of the Imperial Legions that happens to serve on starships, and as such, they’re still just called “legionaries”.

The Bridge is always located as close to the center of the vessel as possible, with the only proviso being the need to keep it a decent distance from the backup bridges.  And has no windows.  Only an idiot puts their bridge somewhere it’s likely to get shot off.

And since most military vessels are in inertially-damped microgravity, internally, the decks are in whatever layout is most convenient, whether tail-lander, belly-lander, or more outré, with no particular need to match each other, never mind a consistent orientation to the direction of flight.  Likewise, there is no distinction between “top”, “bottom”, or indeed “sides” on anything that doesn’t do planet landings – shipboard directions such as “port”, “starboard”, “dorsal” and “ventral” are defined by angle around the thrust axis – and indeed, radial symmetry is probably more common than bilateral in ship designs.

While there are some (artificially engineered) Space Whales, space is definitely not chock full of them.  And there is also a distinct shortage of Negative Space Wedgies like ion storms, etc., hanging around.  Mostly, space is full of empty.  That’s why it’s called space.

Non-Standard Starship Scuffles

(So there’s this trope which I missed when I originally put my list together (and which I will no doubt get to again in due course).

It’s called Standard Starship Scuffle, and it pretty much encapsulates every TV-scifi cliche imaginable. So, y’know, since I now have various fictive people critiquing it in my head with extra sarcasm, here’s some metafictional commentary on the way things actually work:)

Detection and Stealth

Before you can engage the enemy, you must first detect the enemy. Paradoxically, this is both extremely easy, and rather difficult.

To begin with, detection itself is easy. There is, to sum up many an armchair strategist’s lament, no stealth in space. Running the life support alone makes a starship stand out 300K hotter – for warm-blooded oxygen-breathers – than the background of space. Using power plant, thrusters, weapons systems, or anything else aboard only makes it more visible. Starships stand out plainly against the near-absolute cold of space, even across entire star systems, and this is inescapable.

Stealth, such as it is, would be better described as masquerade. One cannot avoid being detected; but one may be able to avoid being identified, or identified correctly. Performing such masquerades by altering one’s sensor signature is an important part of the function of a military starship’s defense drones.

It is difficult, on the other hand, because light, that sluggard, imposes an absolute limit on the currency of the data available. No sensor yet developed is capable of detecting objects in real time at a distance: at best, one can see what the situation was when light left that region.

Longscan

The answer to this is longscan.

Shortscan is what one’s own starship’s sensors, passive and active, are reporting.

Longscan, on the other hand, is the informational gestalt of that shortscan information along with all informational available from other sources (other starships in one’s formation or elsewhere in the system; tactical observation platforms; civilian navigation buoys or stargates, when available; and so forth), along with AI predictive extrapolations of what each starship or other object visible in longscan has done since the last update and/or will do, based on further extrapolations of what their longscan is telling them – and projections, likewise, of what they can know about your actions.

(Establishing this is in turn complicated by the nature of the tactical networks that provide that informational gestalt; modern navies provide their ships with tangle channel FTL communications between themselves and their own observation platforms, but since tangle-channel relays are point-to-point, this does not apply to most civilian sources except, in wealthier systems, as relays between STL EM communications buoys. Determining the “shape of the information wave” – who can know what, and when – is one of the most complex problems a warship’s tactical department faces.)

All of this information is displayed upon the tactical display, along with probability and reliability estimates, in graphical form. Learning how to read these tactical displays at a glance is, in itself, a significant part of naval officer training.

Observation Platforms

One of the greatest advantages one can have, therefore, is expanding one’s informational gestalt. Thus, virtually all military starships carry observation platforms with them for ad hoc deployment; and indeed, most navies routinely seed their own systems (and neutral systems in which they may operate) with dormant, concealed observation platforms awaiting activation when necessary by starships on the scene.

It is, of course, much harder to sneak concealed observation platforms into the sovereign systems of other polities, current enemy or not, and as such the information advantage in invasion scenarios is almost always with the defender.

Information Warfare

The nature of this data environment highlights the importance of information warfare in naval operations. One of the most valuable things it is possible to achieve, when still maneuvering for engagement, is to successfully infiltrate the tactical network of the opposing force. While direct stealth in space is impossible, the ability to distort one’s sensor signature, inject fake signatures, and otherwise falsify the information upon which one’s opponent is basing their tactical decisions is extremely valuable.

As a result, any major naval engagement is invariably accompanied by high-intensity information warfare, as each side attempts to corrupt the tactical networks and other data systems of the other.

An even greater coup, of course, is to penetrate the internal networks of an opposing starship and, having established a degree of computer control, simply order it to drop its kinetic barriers, shut down its point defense, vent its fuel, disable its life support, or otherwise change sides. Although remarkably difficult to achieve at the best of times, such a victory is almost always complete.

Offensive Systems

Mass Drivers

The main weapons system of most military starships, mass drivers propel solid, dense-metal slugs at extremely high velocities (a respectable fraction of c). These are usually pure kinetic energy weapons (KEWs); at the velocities attained by the projectiles, the damage done by KE alone renders most warheads superfluous.

(While provision is made on some larger vessel classes to add antimatter warheads to mass driver projectiles, it is usually thought that the increased potential for damage is more than offset by the additional potential risk posed by a magazine full of antimatter.)

Of these, the primary is usually a spinal mount weapon (since a longer accelerator barrel is capable of achieving higher terminal velocities, and therefore greater impact), aimed by pointing the entire ship, although most of these are capable of firing between 30 and 40 degrees off-bore by magnetic field adjustments. Larger ship classes include banks of “broadside” railguns, capable of firing both forward and to the side, for additional flexibility.

Lasers

Usually considered the secondary weapons system, the majority of military starships also mount banks of “broadside” lasers separate from the point-defense laser grid, intended to pump heat into targeted enemy vessels. Due to the nature of modern armor (see below) they rarely do significant direct damage, but contribute significantly to the task of wearing down one’s opponent.

AKVs

AKVs – autonomous kill vehicles – are extremely smart multi-bus, multi-munition, multi-mission missiles.

An AKV is, in effect, a small, stripped-down, AI-piloted starship – capable of much higher acceleration and greater maneuverability than a standard design, albeit with much less endurance – designed to act in multiple roles – as a mobile reconnaissance platform; as a “fighter craft” used to swarm and destroy larger starships from inside their own point-defense zones; or, when it loses all other fighting ability, as a kinetic energy weapon in its own right.

Other

For the sake of completeness, it is also worth mentioning two other potential offensive systems. These are:

First, gravitic weapons: which are not a specific weapons system in themselves, but which constitute repurposing standard tractor-pressor functionality in order to grab, shake, crush, shear, etc. other vessels. These do possess a slight advantage inasmuch as they cannot be shielded against other than by precise counteruse of one’s own gravitics, and as such software for this is included in most tactical suites. However, since using such weapons requires closing to a range far below even “knife-fight” range and placing oneself not only within the inner engagement envelope but deep within the point defense envelope of one’s opponent, they are almost never of any practical use.

Second, one’s drive, the high-temperature emissions from any reaction drive in use being very readily weaponizable; anything in the danger zone when such a drive is activated tends to melt like wax under a plasma torch. Its practical limitation, however, for any drive smaller than a lighthugger’s, is again that one must close upon the enemy to an unacceptable degree before this use is possible – although leftover superheated and/or radioactive emissions may pose an environmental hazard in a “knife-fight range” battlespace.

Defensive Systems

The innermost of a starship’s defensive systems is its armor. The primary armor is a multilayer (“honeycomb”) system over the core hull, composed of multiple vacuum-separated layers of refractory cerametals, sapphiroids, and artificially dense metal nanocomposites, strapped together via flexible, shock-absorbing forms. Atop this, a thick sprayed-on layer of foamed-composite ablative armor (whose vaporized form is designed to scatter incoming energy weapon fire) provides additional protection.

To provide thermal protection, each of these layers is threaded through with a mesh of thermally superconducting material, preventing heat input from lasers or other energy weapons from creating localized “hot spots”. This mesh spreads out external heat inputs, and ultimately dumps them into tanks of “thermal goo”, an artificial substance of very high specific heat capacity. Under normal circumstances, this heat is disposed of via the ship’s radiative striping and external radiators, but if necessary, the thermal goo can be vented to space, taking its heat (and, unfortunately, its heat capacity) with it.

Outside the armor, starship defenses come in three more layers:

First and innermost, the kinetic barriers. These are not a single, all-encompassing bubble; rather, they are a grid of plates of gravitic force, instantiated as needed to intercept incoming material objects. (They cannot shield against massless radiation.) They don’t attempt to directly retard incoming projectiles; rather, their job is to “slap them aside”, imposing enough sideways vector on them to generate a miss.

Outside that, the defense drones: a military starship at general quarters surrounds itself with a “cloud” of small defense drones, serving multiple purposes: as electronic warfare platforms to obscure its signature; as participants in the kinetic-barrier generation and point-defense grid; as additional sensors; and ultimately, as sacrificial platforms capable of physically intercepting incoming projectiles or AKVs before they reach the ship itself.

Outermost is the point-defense zone guarded by the point-defense laser grid, extending substantially outward from the ship itself. Composed of phased-array plasma lasers which can be generated across large regions of the starship’s hull, the point-defense grid is used to vaporize incoming projectiles (or to use partial vaporization to decelerate incoming projectiles for the kinetic barriers and armor to deal with more effectively) and to force AKVs operating nearby – which have relatively little heat-dissipation capacity – into thermal shutdown.

The point-defense laser grid can also be used as an offensive weapon against any other starships unwise enough to stray into its range, but few captains are stupid enough to bring their starship into another ship’s point-defense zone.

The final defensive system that any starship has is drunkwalking: when at any alert state higher than peacetime cruising, every military starship engages in a pseudo-random “drunk walk” of vector changes around its station-keeping point or base course. This ensures that the starship is almost impossible to achieve a firing solution upon from a distance, since its movement since your most current observation of the target is unknown, and further increases the difficulty of achieving a solid firing solution in close.

(Of course, this depends greatly upon the quality of your drunkwalk algorithms and that they have been kept secure from the opposing force, which again underscores the importance of information warfare in the modern battlespace. A starship whose base course is identifiable and whose drunkwalk algorithms are known is a sitting duck even in the outer engagement envelope!)

A Note on Classes

The armament mix described above is accurate, in a well-balanced form, for cruiser and battlecruiser class military starships. These have been chosen as representative for the purpose of tactical illustration, as the classes designed specifically to operate independently.

Other, more specialized classes have different armament mixes (comparing, for instance, the mass driver-heavy armament of a battleship or a destroyer with the AKV-heavy armament of a carrier) intended to operate in interdependent squadrons. Operations involving these classes will not be covered in detail at this level, although certain specific details will be mentioned where relevant.

Engagement Envelopes

All battles in space take place at what are, by groundside standards, extremely long ranges, measured in ten-thousands, hundred-thousands, or millions of miles. Not only do these battles take place outside visual “eyeball” range, but even starships in the same formation are outside visual range of each other, being hundreds or thousands of miles apart. (Closer formations would pose both an unacceptably high risk of collision under battle conditions, when ships in the formation are drunkwalking independently, and would be likely to cause point-defense fratricide.)

The only exception to this rule are AKVs themselves (even when not acting as auxiliary KEWs), which often come within single-digit mile distances of their targets; i.e., operating effectively inside the innermost point-defense zone.

Outer Envelope: The Wolves at Hunt

The outer engagement envelope begins, depending on various environmental factors, at between one to one-half light-minutes range.

Battles taking place in the outer engagement envelope are essentially always inconclusive. While historical examples of lucky hits from these ranges do exist, the probabilities of such are sufficiently low that no-one would count on them; and at such ranges, it is virtually always possible for the weaker opponent to disengage at will.

(The exception being, of course, when someone has managed to sneak an observation platform in close to the opposing force without them noticing it, which gives them a great – albeit temporary – advantage in generating long-range firing solutions.)

Rather, the purpose of engagements in the outer envelope is to wear down an opponent closing upon one’s inner envelope, forcing them to generate heat and expend point-defense resources; and to herd opponents away from the danger zones generated by one’s fire.

While it is impossible, without both fortunate geometry and superior acceleration, for a single force to bring an opposing force to battle if it is actively trying to refuse such, it is sometimes possible through strategic outer-envelope engagement and misdirection to force them to pass through the inner engagement envelope of one of a set of multiple forces (including, for this purpose, fixed system defenses). This is the end to which tactics are directed in the outer engagement envelope.

At these ranges, the primary weapons are the spinally-mounted mass drivers of larger ship classes. Carriers may attempt to use “missiles” – actually strap-on, discardable thruster packs – to deliver AKVs close in to the opposing force, but many captains prefer to reserve their AKVs for inner-envelope battles where they can be better supported.

Inner Envelope: Let’s Dance

The inner, close-range engagement envelope – in which actual battles are fought – begins at roughly a light-second of separation. This reflects the difficulties of accurately targeting an opponent engaged in active evasion (drunkwalking, ECM, etc.) when the light-lag is greater than that; essentially, you have to close to within a light-second to get a firing solution whose hit probability is significant.

Reaching the inner engagement envelope implies either that one party is attacking or defending a specific fixed installation (such as a planetary orbit, drift-habitat, or stargate), or that both parties have chosen engagement. It is relatively rare for such battles to take place in open space otherwise, since in the absence of clear acceleration superiority, it is usually easy for the weaker party to disengage before entering their opponent’s inner engagement envelope. The only way to guarantee that an opponent will stand and fight is to attack a strategic nexus that they must retain control over.

Within the inner engagement envelope, all weapons come into play. Light lag becomes low enough that information warfare can come into play in full force, firing solutions are usually possible on all craft, and AKVs have the range and maneuverability to be committed.

As the opposing forces enter the inner engagement envelope, larger ship classes typically keep their distance, maintaining formation and lateral drunkwalk evasion, as they engage in mass driver artillery duels.

Cautious admirals also hold their screening forces back at this point, preferring to weaken the enemy force before pressing further. More aggressive admirals press in immediately, moving their lighter squadrons into the center of the battlespace and deploying AKVs likewise.

Unlike the larger ships, cruisers maneuver aggressively for advantage, forming the characteristic “furball” as fleets intermingle; once this stage is reached, it becomes very difficult to retreat in good order. Cruisers attack each other with close-in, off-bore mass driver projectiles and heat-pumping lasers; the highly maneuverable destroyers and frigates engage in “wolf-pack” tactics throughout the battlespace, both targeting each other, and swarming damaged larger ships at relatively close range.

Knife-fight Range

Any battle in which the battlespace is smaller than a tenth of a light-second in diameter is referred to as taking place at “knife-fight” range. Such engagements usually occur around fixed points when the attack is pressed hard, are short and vicious, and typically result in extraordinarily high casualties – usually for both sides.

Defeat

Unlike starship armor, neither the point-defense laser grid nor the kinetic barriers are subject to direct attrition; if subjected to low-volume or low-power incoming fire, either or both could continue to destroy or repel it essentially forever.

In order to defeat these defensive systems, it is necessary to swamp them; to concentrate incoming fire to the point at which the defensive systems are unable to handle it all simultaneously. At this point, attrition may take effect as kinetic effectors and laser emitters are destroyed, but more importantly, it generates heat.

Heat is the primary limitation on combat endurance. Maneuvering burns, the use of high-energy equipment such as the point-defense grid, the kinetic barriers, and so forth, as well as the ship’s normal operation, all produce heat. In combat – when the ability to radiate heat is limited, usually to radiative striping and small (and exhaustable, if the starship is forced to maneuver) droplet radiators alone – military starships generate heat more rapidly than they can radiate it to space. As heat increases beyond the critical point, the efficiency of onboard equipment begins to fall (processor error rates rise, for example, and tactical officers must conserve their remaining heat capacity), some equipment goes into thermal shutdown, and the crew spaces become increasingly uninhabitable.

While some starships in any major space battle are destroyed physically, reduced to hulks, the majority of starships are defeated by either heat-induced equipment failure, or by being forced to surrender and deploy radiators lest their crew literally cook.

– excerpted from “An Introduction to Elementary Starship Combat Tactics”,
37th ed., IN Civilian Press

Trope-a-Day: Military Moonshiner

Military Moonshiner: Played straight for some reason, despite the fact that neither the Imperial Navy nor the Imperial Legions is a dry organization.

(Also in the Imperial Exploratory Service, which contains the expected number of people who consider “can we make booze out of it?” to be one of the mandatory tests worth performing on alien plant life.)

Giving Flak Some Flak

Don't do this. Don't ever do this.

Don’t do this. Don’t ever do this.

There is one other small point to make, it occurs to me, regarding lasers and appropriate uses of same.

One of which is that the Imperial Navy, by and large, uses carefully targeted laser weapons for short-range point defense, the intent being to vaporize small projectiles, blind sensors, overheat close-in AKVs and send ’em into thermal shutdown (being small, they have precious little heat-dumping capacity, relying instead on avoiding being hit), and convince missile warheads (for those people who feel the need to use missile warheads, kinetic energy being plenty of fun on its own) to explode before they actually get to their target starship.

Some folks (the screenshot on the right is from Battlestar Galactica) are of the opinion that an even better way to do this would be good old-fashioned flak. Mount point-defense turrets on your ship, and fill space around you with enough projectiles that anything incoming gets shredded by those before reaching you.

What those folks forget is that Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space!, ’cause all those projectiles – all those clouds of projectiles – will keep moving, with all their kinetic energy, until they hit something, and ruin its day. If you’re lucky, that will be whatever poor bastard is next to you in the same formation, weapons and small craft you’re trying to use, or your own ship on some future occasion, and you’ll only manage to hurt yourself. If you’re unlucky, they’ll just carry merrily on hitting things completely unrelated to the original target at random and providing people with casus belli, atrocity fodder, and other reasons to whup your ass for the next ten thousand years or more.

Cleaning up the debris after a space battle to ensure this sort of thing doesn’t happen is already a giant pain in the ass (the kind that there’s even a dedicated class of fluffship – crewing which is generally thought to be the worst job in the IN – to handle) when all you have to worry about is hulks, spallation debris, ricochets and accidental misses, and such-like, without deliberately making the problem a million times worse by filling the sky with high-KE flak. You don’t fire anything without a firing solution attached to it. Here endeth the lesson.

Or, as Mass Effect 2 put it in a somewhat more pithy manner:

Trope-a-Day: Flaunting Your Fleets

Flaunting Your Fleets: Even more than routine commerce protection and anti-piracy operations, this is why the Imperial Navy bothers to run patrols from the Core out to Fleet Bases Coreward, Rimward, Spinward, Trailing, Acme, and Nadir – and, not coincidentally, why every other Great Power, with the exception of the Photonic Network, has their own set of similar patrol routes.  A little bit of showing the flag and making the presence felt provides discouragement altogether disproportionate to its size to all the crazy people/organizations/polities who might otherwise get ideas.

As a side note, this is also why the Empire invests money into making all its ships look that sleek and shiny and covered in lovely polished brightwork.  A little bit of “we are wealthy enough to afford to be able to do this, and moreover, we can do it without impairing combat performance” also goes a long way.

Military Uniforms

Among the things I have finalized recently in my notes are the details of the field dress uniforms for the Imperial Legions and Imperial Navy, and since I have them all finalized and polished up as of now, I present them for your envisioning pleasure:

Field dress (Imperial Legions & Home Guard)

The basic field dress uniform of the Imperial Legions consists of the following elements:

Beret: The velvet beret is worn in branch colors (dark crimson and gold for the Legions, emerald and silver for the Home Guard), with the serviceman’s unit crest in front. Non-commissioned and warrant officers add a silver oak-leaf cockade, and officers a gold oak-leaf cockade, around the unit crest.

Tunic: The thigh-length tunic, belted at the waist, is also worn in the branch colors (dark crimson with gold trim, or emerald with silver trim), single-breasted, with a high stand-up collar to protect the wearer’s neck[1] and five brass buttons impressed with the Imperial crown-and-star. The front of the tunic actually overlaps completely – the inner layer fastens at the opposite shoulder to the outer layer’s buttons, thus doubling the protection over the wearer’s vitals, and making it impossible to slip a blade through the seam. It is worn over a double-layered silk shirt.

For rankers, brass collar-pins on the gorget patches also show the crown-and-star, whereas for officers they hold rank insignia, in silver for non-commissioned and warrant officers, and in gold for higher ranks. Rank insignia is also worn as a knot in matching cord on the left breast. Ribbons and knots for medals and other awards are worn on the right.

Runér, exultants, and praetors may wear certain insignia related to their associated rank and office on their tunics in accordance with service regulations; most typically, their family or personal arms may be worn on the left breast, adjacent to the rank-knot.

Detachable shoulder-boards are added to the tunic to show unit affiliation, on a black background for regular units, a crimson background for units designated as Guards units, and a gold background for units designated as Coronal’s Guards. The design on the shoulder-boards is the battle flag of the unit to which the legionary belongs, or the ship’s crest in the case of ship’s troops.

Sword-Baldric: The legionary sword (a teirian) is worn on a wire-reinforced braided synthetic leather baldric hung over the right shoulder to hold the sword at the left hip. The hanrian and sidearm, conversely, are worn on the tunic belt, at the right hip. The baldric also contains attachment points for grenades, replacement heat sinks, and powercells.

Breeches: The breeches, black regardless of branch, are worn tucked into the boots, and have piping to match the tunic’s trim, bordered with silver braid for officers, or gold braid for flag officers.

Boots: The high (mid-calf), glossy black boots have no buckles or snaps, and are made of internally-reinforced synthetic leather.

Cloak: In wintry conditions, a heavy wool cloak may be worn over the field dress uniform.

Special note: Heavy legionaries who do not wear the uniform when in the field wear instead a surcoat[2] over their combat exoskeleton in circumstances that would ordinarily call for field dress, bearing rank insignia, battle honors, etc., as the tunic does for conventionally dressed legionaries.

Field dress (Imperial Navy)

The basic field dress uniform of the Imperial Navy consists of the following elements:

Hat: Imperial Navy officers wear tricorne hats in the Navy’s silver-trimmed midnight black, a tradition inherited directly from its wet navy precursors. Naval tricornes bear the ship’s crest at front right, surrounded by a silver cockade, or a gold cockade for flag officers.

Unofficially, naval officers who are members of various IN internal societies and clubs may wear a variety of feathers in their hats to denote this, according to their own internal traditions, something broadly tolerated even on formal occasions.

Non-commissioned officers and men do not wear hats.

Shirt & Jacket: The single-breasted naval jacket, of black wool and leather trimmed with silver, is worn over a simple black silk shirt. Rather than buttons, it seals to itself along its edge, in a similar manner to many vacuum suits.

Since the naval jacket has a down-turned rather than a high collar, rank is indicated not by collar pins but rather by the arabesque-embroidered cuffs of the jacket, including either silver or gold rings to indicate basic rank, and colored rings to indicate departmental specialty. As with the legionary uniform, rank insignia is also worn as a knot in matching cord on the left breast; in the case of enlisted ranks, this knot surrounds the symbol of their rating. Qualified pilots (in the Flight Ops department) wear their wings above the rank knot. Ribbons and knots for medals and other awards are worn on the right.

Runér, exultants, and praetors may wear certain insignia related to their associated rank and office on their tunics in accordance with service regulations; most typically, their family or personal arms may be worn on the left breast, adjacent to the rank-knot.

The ship’s crest is worn as an embroidered badge at each shoulder.

Trousers: The trousers of the naval uniform are of heavy black wool. For officers, they have silver braid piping, or gold braid piping for flag officers. Sidearms are worn on the belt, as is the naval sword on formal occasions.

Boots: The naval boots are low, black boots, without buckles or snaps, made of internally-reinforced synthetic leather. They include soles designed to interlock with the gratings used in starship engineering sections, and magnetizable clamps for use elsewhere.


[1] A communication transceiver is often woven directly into the collar, into which a visor can be connected.

[2] A huge, long-sleeved tunic that fits over the armor and hangs to the knees.

Trope-a-Day: Elaborate Underground Base

Elaborate Underground Base: The Imperial Military Service (various, with special props going to the Imperial Navy’s hollow hangar moon at Palaxias IIb), the Imperial Emergency Management Authority’s Crisis Citadels, more than a few data havens, the original location of Argyran Depository, the Nightfall Complexes (retreats for city populations in the event of nuclear war, asteroid impact, etc.), and oh, yes, all the entire cities built down there by people who just found that they liked it…

Trope-a-Day: Drinking on Duty

Drinking On Duty: Averted inasmuch as neither the Imperial Navy nor the Imperial Legions, nor indeed any other part of the Imperial Military Service is dry, even on duty.  Drinking enough to render yourself unfit for duty, on the other hand, and the punishment for same, is played very straight indeed.

On the third hand, between the biotech upgrades you start out with and the ones which you acquire mid-way through boot camp for your shiny new military-basic body, you would have to drink truly heroic quantities of booze – enough that you’re unlikely to be able to have it with you on post, unless your duty station is engineering and you’re slurping the reactor coolant directly – in order to render yourself unfit anyway.  (This does mean that you can’t drink to forget the horrors of war, but since you can visit a memory redactor for that, it’s probably not so bad a trade-off.)

They’ve Been Doing This Far Too Long

Galch (Vanguard Reaches) a.k.a. K-11/54 (Vonis 36) [DISPUTED]
Demilitarized Border Zone

“Unknown ship, we have you on our screens.  Identify.  Over.”

“Republic vessel at 220 asc 14, nineteen-point-three light-minutes, confirm identity.  Over.”

Imperial vessel, this is our space.  We say again, identify.  Over.”

“Republic vessel of approximate destroyer class, the hell it is, but as a courtesy, this is CMS Gold and Iron, armed merchant of the Centralia Line.  Over.”

Gold and Iron, this is VNS Solidarity.  We read you as a cruiser-class vessel.  You are in violation of treaty.  We order you to heave to and prepare to be boarded.  Over.”

Solidarity, Gold and Iron.  Whether we are or not is irrelevant, since we are a civilian vessel owned by a merchant concern which may legitimately go armed in unsafe border regions.  And in any case, if you check that treaty, we’re fully half a displacement-ton smaller than its definition of the cruiser class.  You, meanwhile, are quite definitely armed with energy weapons larger than the treaty permits.  You heave to and prepare to be boarded.  Over.”

Gold and Iron, Solidarity.  We most certainly are not.  This is an vessel of peaceful exploration.  We are merely equipped for remote geological surveying, including breaking up asteroids and drilling planetoids. All of which is permitted by the treaty.  Your request is denied.  Over.”

The channel is silent for a few seconds.

Solidarity actual, Gold and Iron.  Do you think that’s enough posturing for form’s sake, Holoth?  Over.”

Gold and Iron actual, Solidarity.  Yeah, Galen, I think that should do.  Do you have leave on Ódeln again next month?  Over.”

Solidarity actual, Gold and Iron.  As ever.  Bring some decent booze next time.  Gold and Iron, clear.”

Freeing the Will

It used to be, by my predecessors’ memoirs, that you could almost feel good about taking a slave ship.  Kill the slavers, free the prisoners from the slave-holds and explosive collars, ferry them back to their homes, and chase down the next one; a good month.

Those were more innocent times.  Few slavers use such simple methods today – not when mind-states can be hacked, consciences redacted, loyalties imposed, and brains washed, and not when semislave minds can be built with no thoughts in their head but to obey their masters.

When we took a slave ship, it meant that the slaves were on the front lines, desperate to save their owners.  We’d count ourselves lucky not to lose a few burning our way into the slaver.  Then, the worst of all possible hostile boarding actions: where those our legionaries were fighting had full-power weapons, but the legionaries had to try to preserve their lives if they could – and where the commanders at their back wouldn’t hesitate to blow out a lock or flood a compartment to kill us.  Their men could never lose their programmed loyalty, and what are the lives of merchandise worth?

The worst part, though, came after the battle’s done, when you could extend no trust to the slaves you took off, because they’d do anything to get back to their owners – if they hadn’t been imprinted with some sort of emergency sabotage or self-destruction programming – and when you had to have a half-dozen legionaries drag them in and hold them down, as they screamed and fought and begged to be allowed to go back, to serve, to stay with the people who they firmly believed were the center of their universe, while the redactors ripped the control compulsions out of their minds.

It’s still good work, restoring volition to those who’ve had it taken away or impaired from their birth.  I know that.  But be damned to me, I’d rather fight a dozen fleet actions or a half-dozen antipiracy patrols than take one more tour of the slave routes.  It’s enough to rip a soph’s heart right out.

– Cdre. Rakhaz Neraxinax, Imperial Navy
interview for IBC drama-documentary, ‘Senior Service’

Any You Can Walk Away From

“Drop shuttle (n.): An armored crate flown by a maniac.”
– The Unofficial Guide To The IN

Flying a drop shuttle is a unique sort of piloting. You’re always deploying under combat conditions, and often before you’ve established orbital superiority, so people are shooting at you from the moment you undock from the mama bird until the moment you hit ground, which means you want to come in as fast as possible. And flying re-entry at speed makes you a big, hot, glowing target, so you want to come in even faster than that, right on the hairy edge of burning up, and stay that fast until you’re too low for their flak to train on you, and that means damn near treetop height.

How do you decelerate at that height? We call it “lithobraking”. Anyone who doesn’t fly drop shuttles calls it “crashing”. Ever seen the ablative armor they pile on the nose of those things? That’s not for re-entry, and it’s not for flak – that, and the outsize inertial dampers, and the concussion gel that fills the cabin’re all there ’cause you and the ground are planning to get real friendly later. That’s also why they’re single-use. A good landing in a dropper is one that doesn’t crack the egg and smear your ass all over the landscape. Keeping the rest of the ship in one piece is optional, and I’ve never seen anyone opt for it yet.

Still the best ride there is, though. Besides, when you’ve been shooting these runs for a while, it’s hard to get a contract doing any kind of civvie piloting once they get a look at your flight records…

The Status is Not Quo

FROM: CORE COMMAND
TO: FIELD FLEET SPINWARD COMMAND (CS LIBERTY’S PRICE)

*** PRIORITY PRIORITY PRIORITY
*** EYES ONLY SPINWARD OPS
*** STANDING ORDER UPDATE (SEQ 4377)

FLT ADM DAPHNOTARTHIUS, COMMANDING FIELD FLEET SPINWARD:

1. THIS MESSAGE CONSTITUTES A MANDATORY UPDATE TO STANDING ORDERS PRESENTLY IN EFFECT.

2. RULES OF ENGAGEMENT AILÉK-1 ARE IN EFFECT EXCEPT WHERE OTHERWISE NOTED.

3. MAINTAIN PATROLS IN FORCE ALONG THE INTERFACE WITH THE VONIENSAN NEXUS, IN PARTICULAR ALONG THE BORDERLINE ROUTE FROM ISTRIA (CRIMSON EXPANSE) VIA KARAL (VANGUARD REACHES) TO QUOR (CSELL BUFFER). RULES OF ENGAGEMENT BICÉK-2 ARE IN EFFECT WITHIN ALL INTERFACE SYSTEMS AND OTHER SYSTEMS WITHIN ONE LINK. INTELLIGENCE REPORTS ESTIMATE MODERATE PROBABILITY OF CASE SABLE WITHIN THE NEXT HALF YEAR.

4. MAINTAIN PATROLS IN FORCE ALONG MAJOR GALITH WASTE ROUTES. RULES OF ENGAGEMENT BICÉK-2 ARE IN EFFECT IN ALL SYSTEMS WITHIN THE GALITH WASTE. PER IMPERIAL SECURITY EXECUTIVE DIRECTIVE GW/41/3, PATROLS MAY ENGAGE:

A. SILICATE TREE VESSELS ENGAGED IN ACTIONS AGAINST CIVILIAN TRAFFIC;

B. VESSELS OF OTHER POWERS ENGAGED IN ACTIONS AGAINST SILICATE TREE VESSELS, PROVIDED THAT THE SILICATE TREE VESSEL DID NOT INITIATE THE ENGAGEMENT. PATROLS MAY NOT INTERVENE IN SUCH ACTIONS IF THE SILICATE TREE VESSEL INITIATED THE ENGAGEMENT;

C. VESSELS ENGAGED IN PIRACY, SLAVETAKING, OR OTHER CAPITAL-CLASS CRIMES UNDER ADMIRALTY LAW.

5. PER IMPERIAL SECURITY DIRECTIVE GW/41/4, VESSELS TRANSPORTING INFOMORPH OR MECHANICAL REFUGEES FROM ANY POLITY ON THE KNOWN LIST OF DIGITAL SLAVER POLITIES OR OTHERWISE PRACTICING DIGITAL SLAVERY, WHETHER ATTEMPTING TO REACH THE GALITH WASTE OR TRAVEL ELSEWHERE, ARE TO BE RENDERED ALL AID AND ASSISTANCE.

6. ROUTINE PATROLS THROUGH THE REMAINDER OF THE SPINWARD SEXTANT AND ASSIGNMENT OF PICKET FORCES TO SPINWARD EXCLAVES ARE TO BE CARRIED OUT AT YOUR DISCRETION.

7. IN THE ABSENCE OF FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS FROM COMMAND AUTHORITY, INDEPENDENT ACTION IS AUTHORIZED AT YOUR DISCRETION.

8. AUTHENTICATION: PADLOCK WILLOW WOLF GATEWAY CIRRUS PRAYER / 0xAE9532BB81200A18

ADM/FLT RELEQ CLAVES-ITH-LELAD, FIRST LORD OF THE ADMIRALTY

The Burning of Litash (6)

The rings of Depot, Palaxias system.

One orbital warehouse among many, Armory S7-224 was a simple “tin-can” habitat, dozens of red-striped modules plugged together onto a central interconnection frame. A freight cutter, just undocked, fell backwards away from the docking spine on the way to its next errand.

Within its second upper module, two loader robots backed away along their rails from the red-striped cargo containers they had brought from the freight cutter, now stacked along with the dozens of others the module held.

On the outer side of each was stenciled:

SPECIAL WEAPONS STORAGE
STELLAR COUNCIL AUTH ONLY
CALYX HOLLOW
QTY: 16

~~~

From Fleet Admiral Caliéne Sargas-ith-Sargas, CS Unyielding Order, Field Fleet Coreward, to Esitariel Cyprium-ith-Avalae, c/o Core Command, Calmiríë, greeting.

Dammit, Cyprium. Can’t you let us keep just one of the new toys?

The Burning of Litash (5)

“These images are taken from the records provided by the command vessel of the fleet that carried out ‘Operation Ruby Gauntlet Sable’, the Unyielding Order…”

The ravaged planet hung in the center of the Conclave amphitheater, surface black and charred save for its fiery disfigurement; a crater over a thousand miles wide, filled with a sea of magma welling up through the world’s cracked crust, belching steam into the wracked air at its edge where it intersected the former coast.  Newborn volcanoes shouldered their way into the sky at its fringes and along radiating cracks, as the world heaved in the orogenic aftershocks of the detonation.

“These are simply the primary effects of the strangelet bomb deployed by the Empire’s task force.  The detonation set the atmosphere of the planet ablaze.  Firestorms driven by the pressure wave swept around the world, incinerating not merely everyone who escaped the initial blast, but the entire planetary ecology.  The direct radiation and particle showers produced by the bomb have rendered much of the planet radioactive.  That alone will render Litash unhabitable for a thousand years.”

~~~

“Ah, ni Korat, sit down.  I’m surprised you wanted to be seen meeting at a time like this.”

“We’re already so close to you in the public eye, it’ll hardly matter.  And all of us are nervous right now – everyone’s counting on me to find out what’s going on.”

~~~

“Technically, this is not a violation of the Accords as written.  Litash was not a signatory to any of the Accords, nor has there been any specific prohibition on the use of strangelet weapons.  Litash was a world which supported piracy, slavetaking, and other crimes against Accord members; a general threat to all the Worlds.  None of us here would quibble with the right of any Accord member to destroy the Litashian fleet with no quarter given, nor to prosecute general warfare against the Litashian government.  But this!  This is the destruction of an entire world, its entire population, its entire ecology.  This cannot be tolerated by the galactic community, surely.  If a smaller polity of the Accord had done this, it would be subject to the most severe censure, and it must therefore be so even if one of the Powers.”

~~~

“They’re really out for blood.  All your old enemies and half the neutrals are salivating over the chance to stick the knife into one of the Presidium powers.”

“I should certainly hope they are.”

~~~

“The Qiraf Assembly concurs with the League of Meridian.  While not a technical violation of the Accords, this attack violates their spirit in every way possible.  We condemn the actions of the Empire in destroying Litash-world in the strongest possible terms, and call for them to provide surety that they will never again use weapons of this nature!”

~~~

“We’ve always been your allies, and now we’re going to be caught in the backlash of this. All your allies are going to be caught in it.  Dammit, Calis, what are you going to do?

“We have it in hand.  Trust me on this.”

~~~

“This was an act of barbarism, of madness!  We cannot permit this to happen again!  The Calyet Guard demands that this assembly condemn this attack in the strongest possible terms, and we urge the other Presidium powers to take action immediately to prevent these madmen from repeating it!”

~~~

“But what are you going to –“

~~~

“The Presiding Minister for the Empire, Calis Corith-ith-Corith, now has the floor.”

“Gentlesophs of the Conclave, honorable representatives, at this time I would introduce Ambassador Extraordinary Cyprium-ith-Aelies, who speaks on our behalf.”

“Presiding Ministers, Representatives of the Conclave, on behalf of the Empire, I stand before you today to speak on the matter of the destruction, the burning – as the media is calling it – of Litash.  Let me first be clear on one point: we maintain absolutely that the destruction of the Litashian fleet, as active agents in piracy, slavetaking, and other crimes against sophoncy, was within our sovereign rights, as it would have been within those of any Accord member.  Moreover, we further maintain that the destruction of not merely the Litashian government, but also of the Litashian population, was justified as active supporters of these agents.  I remind you that the Litashian economy was principally driven by support for the criminal activities of its so-called fleet.”

“This being said, however, we acknowledge the legitimate concerns of the representatives here gathered where the excessive destructive power – unanticipated even by our own forces, as the bridge transcript records of the Unyielding Order show – of the strangelet bomb is concerned.  We do not desire any further destruction of worlds or ecologies to take place, at our hands, or indeed at any others’.”

“Therefore, the Empire moves that the Ley Accords be amended to include strangelet bombs, star- and planet-targeted respectively, as Tier I and Tier II prohibited instruments under Chapter I; and moves further that the protections and prohibitions of Chapter I be extended to all worlds and systems, not merely those actively claimed by Accord signatories.”

With that, the entire amphitheater erupted in general tumult, all but a few chagrined faces among the crowd – some of the former condemners prominent among them.

~~~

“You devious –“

“Would we ever have got those amendments passed if we’d proposed them cold? As it stands, the pirates are eliminated and the ambitions of a few dozen rogue states against their neighbors and Peripheral non-signatories will be neutered for the next century or two, all at the cost of one ecopoesed ecology duplicated elsewhere. All for the good of the Worlds, wouldn’t you say?”

The Burning of Litash (4)

CS Unyielding Order, Litash high orbitals.

“Grid configured.”

“Special package CALYX HOLLOW on the rails, launch when ready.”

“Permissive action set, authentication 0x991AC38575AA0D0E.  Admiral, do you wish to deploy the weapon?”

“Deploy it.  Right in the starport center, Mr. mor-Calarek.”

“Aye-aye, ma’am.  Right in the center.”

90,000 miles above the surface of Litash, battered in places but still mostly untouched, a near-imperceptible thrum was felt aboard the battlecruiser as one of its axial missile tubes opened and spat out the CALYX HOLLOW package, a tiny cylinder of gray-painted metal.  Twin flashes of light, one upon the ship’s hull and one upon the package, marked the invisible beam of a plaser reaching out from the ship and burning off a fragment of the package’s ablative propellant; and at this touch of thrust, it began to accelerate downwards into Litash’s gravity well.

CALYX HOLLOW was a weapon almost trivial in design.  No trigger or detonator was needed, and no guidance system fitted.  Once it had been launched, the weapons package simply tumbled on a ballistic trajectory into Litash’s atmosphere.  A few surviving ground weapons attempted to engage it, without hope of success with the orbital and ground sensor networks both smashed, but even had they been able to target it, it would have made no difference to the outcome, for the best they could achieve would be to fragment the casing early.

But the tough casing remained intact, cloaked in the plasma shock of its uncontrolled reentry, until only a few miles above the planet’s surface the stress of burn-throughs ripped it apart, shattering the delicate containment system within it and exposing its contents to the planet’s air.

Strangelets.  Unstable particles, kept artificially intact within the weapon; generated in nature in tiny quantities, harmless due to the speed of their decay.  But this was no single strangelet generated by a cosmic-ray impact; within CALYX HOLLOW’s containment was a mass of strangelets calculated to cause immediate prompt criticality. As they spilled into the relatively thick baryonic matter of Litash’s air, they merged with nearby nuclei, catalyzing their immediate collapse into more strangelets, and more, and more…

From the Unyielding Order, light flared over the target, blossoming instantly from a blue-white pinprick to an eye-searing flare hundreds of miles across, driving a visible miles-deep ripple of atmosphere before it, only to crash back into the hollow remaining as the flare itself collapsed – and the display blinked out and filled with sensor failure warnings, while the particle detectors screamed and fell silent as the radiation wavefront swept across them.

Caliéne Sargas’s throaty chuckle filled the silent bridge.  “Ha!  Well, Cyprium, now we know the damn thing works.”

“Indeed.  Although I’m considering passing a note along to the design team about their stand-off range estimates – that was a bit closer than I’d’ve liked.”

“Captain, damage reports as soon as possible, and contact the rest of the squadron for theirs.  And have the Surgeon-Lieutenant report to the bridge with his rad-test kits.”

She paused, then added, “And get someone out there in a cutter to find out if the planet’s still there.”

Trope-a-Day: Boarding Party

Boarding Party: Where battered hulks and surrendered ships are concerned, yes, if the delta-v needed to catch them is within reasonable bounds. Even occasionally elsewhere, with some specially designed boarding pods – but that’s crazy-difficult enough there has to be something really valuable on the other ship.  Of course, where it differs from the standard trope is in the flood of hunter-killer microbots (to turn anyone not planning on surrendering/honoring their surrender into hamburger) and infowar automation (to seize control and ensure no-one gets any clever-clever ideas about grav pong) that comes along with the guys in power suits.

The Burning of Litash (3)

CS Unyielding Order, Litash high orbitals.

The circumambient skies over Litash burned three times over; with the pin-point blazes of wounded ships venting hot gases and of ongoing warhead detonations in the low orbitals, with the long bright streaks of hulks destroyed before they made it to orbit reentering uncontrolled, and with curtains and sheets of brightly-colored auroral fire as the atmosphere reacted to the particles sleeting down from the battle zone.

It would be quite a show for anyone on the ground, Councilman Cyprium reflected sourly, but then, anyone on the ground with half a mind would have fled for deep-crust shelter when we took the high orbitals.

“Close up the englobement over there, Aís!  You’ll have some punchcraft making a break for it on your shortscan in a quarter – don’t let them reach orbit.  Flag actual, clear.”

The plan, of course, had worked perfectly.  Sweeping in with tangle-aided simultaneity from both of the system’s stargates and ignoring the planet itself, task force 3-46 had caught most of the Litashian fleet between hammer and anvil as it climbed out of the gravity well of the system’s gas giant and burned hard to acme to get clear of their convergence; the superior mobility of the Imperial cruiser squadrons had run it down – the fleet was, after all, mostly composed of destroyers, frigates and the disguised “naval auxiliaries” for which Litash had gained infamy – and destroyed it in a single pass.

“Negative, stay in position, Peremptory.  Leave him to the destroyers.  Flag actual, clear.”

Leaving the destroyer screen behind to picket the stargates, the cruisers had then rejoined forces to sweep down on Litash itself, blasting the highports and defense stations, and occupying the high orbitals in a textbook blockade globe – giving them room and line to sight on any ship trying to leave the planet. The steady stream of would-be escapees, over the last two hours, had dwindled to a trickle.  Few had made it past the englobement, and those wouldn’t escape the destroyers.

The Admiral looked over at him.  “Running out of things to kill down here, Cyprium.”

He nodded.  “It’s time.  Let’s make an end of it.”

“All cruisers, this is Admiral Sargas.  Reform the englobement at twelve planetary diameters, best speed, and report when in position.  Stand by for the deployment of CALYX HOLLOW.  Flag actual, clear.”