M.J. Markgraf
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Blue Star Enterprises Chapter 2-47
🕑 Added 2024-10-21 12:00:16 +0000 UTCLOCATION: EDEN’S END
SYSTEM: Y6X-3H2
DATE: 2400
Alexander couldn’t believe everything was going right for a change. There hadn’t been any pirate activity since Fury left, which was something of a minor miracle. To add to that, Shall had finally finished patching up his ship and had left the system only a day prior.
It had taken the smuggler a month to patch the holes caused by the defensive railguns, which was rather impressive considering the man had refused any and all help. The old man’s cantankerous attitude hadn’t stopped Damien from forcing his way aboard and helping anyway, so Alexander decided to thank the quick turnaround to the Chief of Security.
The annoying man’s absence was just in time to celebrate Eden’s Resolve being completed. Resolve was a slightly smaller ship than Fury, necessitating a change in design. Lasers worked on Fury because the unneeded crew space had been converted to power storage and capacitor banks.
He could have gone the same route with Resolve, but it would have meant either removing the secondary bunk areas where soldiers or more likely passengers would be housed or the hangar to make it happen.
Considering how dangerous space out here was, Alexander figured transporting people in a warship was a much better plan than doing so with a dedicated ship while escorting it with a warship.
Having a shuttle hangar seemed prudent in making that plan a reality. That meant he couldn’t get rid of either of those spaces to make room for the batteries and capacitors.
With that in mind, Alexander engineered railguns for the ship. He would have preferred Gauss cannons for their maintenance simplicity, but he would make due.
Thanks to everything he learned while designing the surface weapons and installing the ones on Destiny, Alexander had been able to improve upon the design quite a bit.
He ran his hand along the two vertically stacked rails as he stood on the ship’s hull. It was one of three sets on this turret. With the ship sporting two main gun mounts, Alexander had effectively tripled the ship's fire firepower. Each set of barrels could independently adjust its angle but they were all locked on the same rotation.
Each barrel was loaded by a central tube that could feed and fire each barrel once every two seconds. The ammo storage for each turret only held a thousand hundred tungsten penetrators, so whoever captained this ship would need to keep that in mind. A thousand rounds seemed like a lot until you realized each stack could fire off sixty in a minute.
Alexander did keep PDC lasers. They didn’t need to be nearly as powerful to shoot down incoming missiles, and lasers were much faster, had a longer range, and were quicker to aim than standard kinetics.
He entered the ship through the airlock and walked the freshly painted corridors. The color scheme matched the Fury inside and out, but Resolve had a few more amenities thanks to the added space not being taken up by energy storage systems.
He stepped into the cavernous hangar. It was about the same width as the one on Fury, but it was longer. Just long enough to house two of the engines he promised Fletcher if he cared to load them inside.
The Resolve’s hangar wouldn’t be relegated to hauling engines, Alexander had another idea in mind for that. He walked to the bridge, waving to some of the engineers testing the Resolve’s systems.
Not all of the Engineers on Eden’s End had taken him up on his offer but some had, and it made this part of producing his own ship go much quicker.
Alexander entered his command codes into the bridge terminal and brought up the holo display. It was the same kind that Fury had. He poked at one of the icons and it zoomed in, showing a large frame being assembled. It was nearly complete as it was only a frame designed to hold three engines in cradles. There wasn’t any sort of covering, engines, or power systems, it was simply a metal skeleton with attachment points.
That metal frame was designed to attach to the Resolve. He had specifically engineered it to fit within the warp bubble that the ship would create, ensuring easy transport.
There were only a few things holding up his delivery. The first was a crew. Na and his people had taken some time off, but they were already back in the outer belt, making good use of some of his bots that had been converted for mining. Besides, Alexander hadn’t been lying to Fletcher, he wasn’t going to ask Na to fly back and forth between systems for him. The man was much better suited to running the mining operation here.
The other issue was the lack of a supercomputer for the Resolve. The systems could all function independently without that, but he couldn’t fly the ship properly without a full crew instead of the five it would take to operate with the core in place.
That was fine. In a little over a month, the Hawks and Jasper would be back. Then both of those issues would be solved.
Alexander took a quick look at his orbital printers and the six engines attached to the refueling station; ready to be delivered. Completing fifteen of them was going to be easy.
He thanked the Engineers for their work and headed back to the surface with Branston. The Engineers would stay up there for the next week while they ran tests, but Alexander needed to finish work on his current projects. He also wanted to be home for Yulia.
He was working on two projects concurrently with another handful started. The two major ones he was focusing his time on were the space station design and the Class 8 thrusters for the Talon. Class 8 was just the military version of Class 5 but there were some key differences.
Those differences made the job a bit more challenging. As if building a compressed plasma ejection thruster wasn’t already hard enough.
Once he was back in his workshop, Alexander pulled up the schematics. He didn’t have the Talon’s layout, but he did have the space requirements and mounting locations thanks to Chief Engineer Sullivan. Alexander also didn’t have design specifications for a Class 8, since he wasn’t authorized to purchase military designs.
He had spoken to Aria Sullivan at length about the engines, even though she hadn’t been able to provide him with the repair documentation. The biggest thing she kept bringing up was redundancy.
So that’s what he tried to do with his first design, build redundant parts for the entire system. He was sure if he had built it, it would have been the most robust Class 8 engine around. The problem was it would never fit in the designated space and it would have been a nightmare to maintain.
The first item he scrapped on the design was the redundant reactor. Fitting two reactors inside the engineering space, with his current level of understanding, simply wasn’t going to happen. Instead, he added multiple shunts for each of the four engines. That required additional electromagnetic shielding which conflicted with the other shunts.
Rearranging the shunts into a circular pattern on the rear of the reactor took care of that issue, bringing him to iteration three of his design. Now he had to figure out how to bring those tubes back together so they wouldn’t conflict but could also go into the same thrust chamber.
He had to do this while avoiding all the containment systems and cooling pipes that needed to run through the entire system. His current design looked like a madman had built it, and he was certain Sullivan would have chewed him out if she saw it.
Alexander looked at how the Destiny’s engine was laid out. It was a Sinorus design, but it was better than nothing. It was a much simpler design because it lacked the same types of redundancy Alexander was adding. When he got to the point where the main plasma shunt went directly into the center of the combustion chamber, he realized he had been overthinking his design.
He removed all the superfluous piping and containment systems in his design. Then he ran each set of pipes into a smaller containment vessel at a forty-five-degree angle at the start of the thruster section. Getting the electromagnetic containment to play nice was a bit of a challenge, but he figured it out after a few tries. From there, it was a single flow to the thrust chamber.
In the end, Alexander was left with a much cleaner-looking design. He let it run on his simulation software while he switched his focus to the station.
He had modeled the latest design of the station a bit like Petrov if it had a single ring. This was a major departure from his initial design which looked like an enlarged version of the fueling station.
Alexander chose a ring design because he didn’t have the money to purchase the necessary gravity plating the station would require. The ring wasn’t very big, perhaps three times the size of the fuel depot. And it was shaped a bit like a top. Having to spin the station presented a few new challenges for Alexander, mostly how to dock ships to it.
He managed this by adding a second ring that was attached to the station, and making the main ring spin instead of the entire station. A large circular construction hangar also sat at the end of the station opposite the thrusters.
It wasn’t large enough to fit something like the Talon, but he could fit a heavy destroyer like Dawn inside the space.
The biggest issue with something so large was figuring out weight distribution and power requirements. It would be built in orbit, so he didn’t have to do all the logistics of how to launch parts from the surface. He did need to provide the station with enough thrust to keep it in orbit or adjust it as needed.
Before he could begin to design those systems, he needed Dr. Lund’s help. He sighed and pulled up the schematic she gave him.
She hadn’t specified when she would need the device, but he figured if he was going to ask for help, he had best come with a gift.
Alexander had only a vague idea of what the esoteric piece of science equipment did. It was some sort of measurement or testing device, that much he could tell. He went over the entire design, finding it rather inefficient at whatever it was designed to measure. Using his engineering knowledge, Alexander cleaned up the design. The only thing he didn’t change was the small circular chamber in the center. Just to be safe, he printed his design and her original one.
The required tolerances meant his latest generation of printers would take an entire day to print both designs. That was the problem with making things more accurate, they took far more time.
Shortly after sending them to the printers, he got a beep from the simulation software, letting him know it was done. He looked at the issues it found but wasn’t deterred. It was an interesting challenge, and he loved that. He quickly set about designing the next iteration of the Class 8 drive.
Comments
Silver Beard
@ Shmooggie - no life for at least 10 years... if you are any good you won't miss them. Be more worried about budget cuts than missed dates
ben russ
Congrats on getting in. Be prepared to have no life for the next four years ;)
Shmooggie
Yooo I’m an first year engineering student
ben russ
Fair, and this is your sci-fi world not mine (and I do love your story telling, this is me being nit-picky); however, it does not take the core getting hit to render it useless. One of the primary reasons the US has the strongest military is because of its Electronic Warfare capability. EW applied correctly can and does result in the US's enemies literally hurting themselves because we convinced their computer systems to target their friendlies. In addition, any hit to any data lines can cut off functionality from the core. I struggle to believe that chips that are more advanced than our own wouldn't be able to independently operate systems at a level equivalent to supercomputer control. Where I do see a supercomputer being relevant is solely in either directing EW, running an AI, or processing vast amounts of data.
mmarkgraf212
Understandable. The ships can be operated without the computer core. There are computer systems in all of the electronics. Having the supercomputer is more about assisting with automation and some other neat features that make Alexander's ships punch above their weight class. It also helps him stretch his limited fleet personnel, which is essentially just Captain Na and his people along with Branston at the moment. Losing it would be extremely detrimental but if the core is hit, they probably have other concerns.
ben russ
That was probably the best most realistic part of the whole series.
Silver Beard
Battlestar Galatica ftw!
Silver Beard
He's a month out from getting new super chips, etc. let's not push more than resource gathering and see what tech he can come up with?!
ben russ
Oftentimes in fighters and other aircraft there are two or even three flight computers steering the aircraft, each independently making decisions using their own methods and then checking them against each other. And that is done intentionally.
ben russ
There is no reason for a big centralized computer for a large spaceship. And I would argue that especially for ships flying a military designation there should be no centralized computer. A centralized anything is a target that crippled the corresponding capability. There is no reason that a targeting computer, for example, needs to be controlled by the same computer running the navigation. Now the navigation is important in targeting, so you would want a crosslink exchanging data, but they NEED to be able to function without each other or some centralized computer.
ben russ
Engineer here (both electrical and mechanical, who works in aerospace and defense)... I don't get the obsession with supercomputers. I've shut my mouth about the hand waviness when it comes to computer "chips" in this story, but the whole supercomputer hand waviness is pushing it over the top. (See explanation in comments)
mmarkgraf212
The good ol sunk cost falicy. Is it better to wait for a breakthrough, or move forward with what's available?
Silver Beard
He needs a breakthrough on the gravity plate. The station he wants to build will not work well long term. He needs to make one big ring. His projects, ships yard, etc. fill that little thing he's started in zero flat and the expense/time will have been wasted.
mmarkgraf212
That's assuming he has his pick of ships and crew, which he doesn't. Easier in the short term just to ferry people on the same ship that's doing patrol.
Gabriel Melnik
It's when things scale up that this becomes a money dump.
ShadeByTheSea
Plus in hostile space where you have limited crew than armed transports make a lot more sense. It's not perfect, nor best practice, but you have to work with what you have. It's relatively safe too as long as he's not transporting random people.
Zachary Patterson
Thank you for the chapter!
ElAdri1999
If fuel is not an issue then it should be fine, but I think Alex will get around to making are armed transport
Hammy
Agreed. It why most wet navies have armed logistic ships. But I do not think he is up to building a ship from scratch yet.
Gabriel Melnik
It's not the best idea to use warships as transport ships unless you are really strapped for cargo space due to budget. You can haul more things with less fuel when dealing with an armed transport ship than a warship working as a taxi.
