In that instant he had a flash of inspiration and the power of the Force was upon him.
A swift query to the Deepdock control got plans for both vessels downloaded to his work computer, a new high capacity design machine on loan from Blissex. As swift as that he went to work as deep in the meditative design trace as before, if not deeper.
As much as he needed the ships, Trade Federation vessels were a liability. Their image was one of the most hated in the galaxy and all the Empire had to do was link him to it and the Jedi's cause would be discredited. Thousands of neutral worlds would turn away, and he'd need to convert those same worlds to his side to win this little war.
So their appearance had to change, and the modified herdship had provided the idea.
First he took the two overdomes of the garden ship, cut them apart from their moorings, and put them top and bottom over the incomplete ring of the droid battleship. Then he took the ball from the center of that ring and moved it to the gap, closing that off to make a complete ring. In the space now free in the center of the ring he fit the rest of the herdship city plans, resort and gardens.
Simple to talk about but it took most of the night engineering it, integrating hull framework, power, vital systems and life support, crew accommodations and everything else. It had a third rate power system well below modern standards, but that was not something he was expert on just yet. Again, he'd have to seek out Blissex once more for help. He provided enough weapons mounts, giving them excellent fire arcs, though he never really expected to fill them as weapons were too dear to spend on non-combatant ships. Armor plating of older alloy types on the other hand was something he had to spare so he liberally added to that defense, even adapted his shield mountings to match this bulbous design.
Having switched out the command duties of the former central sphere, he kept its ability to make planetary landings and outfitted it as a cargo pod, enabling the ship to conduct trade business even without a proper spaceport on a world.
Of course, these things were outfitted to carry massive droid armies able to conquer entire planets, and, much as it pained him, he saw the need and retained the capacity. He would not fret nearly so much about combining their function as both cargo ships and luxury resort cities. Adding extensive hospital facilities over and beyond what the Talaria was capable of was just what came naturally.
Population centers that could run away from an enemy were a good thing in this type of war, and the hardest aspect of maintaining crew morale during fleet duty is obtaining leave to visit a planet, or, ideally, a resort to unwind. Having some that could follow behind a fleet with a Deepdock and other support facilities was just about the perfect solution to certain long term deployment problems. Their cargo capacities remained so large they could, by default, be used as mobile supply depots with small cargo ships reporting to them as the fleet ships resupplied from there, simplifying that aspect of naval maintenance significantly and cutting further headaches from his command staff, improving their performance as well.
The resorts themselves he left up to the Alderaanians for customization. It would be best for all involved if each one was unique, and therefore refreshing, instead of part of a boring sameness that would decrease in value the more you visited it. If each one were different they could reassign which fleet they were following now and again and solve that problem.
As a final touch, to change their outline yet more, he added smaller domes around the outer rim, changed the surface structure a touch, added a few protrusions here and there, both to incorporate his solar and fuel scoop as much as contribute disguise, then at last ordered the outer hulls colored green.
It wasn't something easy to mistake for what it had originally been.
That was good. It made their propaganda value less if their origin was ever found out. The quick, deep reaction was hard to counter, but required instant recognition. If the Imperials had to explain what the ships originally were then an explanation of reasons to counter that could be heard. It removed them from imminent danger.
Between this ship, which he decided to name the Starhaven, the Talaria emergency vessel and a Deepdock, he had most of a mobile support network, able to stretch or realign itself as his combat fleet moved.
But there was no getting around the fact that they had a huge number of former battleships coming in and only a handful of herdship cities. It's just the Ithorians had never built enough herdships to fill the centers of all the Trade Fed battle ships he'd recovered. They could take them all and never have the herdships they'd need to fill the thousands of Trade Federation starships.
Well, he'd designed the plans, they could build from scratch what they needed, even if that was less elegant that what he'd planned, pure construction consuming more resources than even the most intense refit.
Still, the crystal and transparasteel domes were cheap to construct. They could install those and move the ground-landing balls, along with doing most of the external fittings, even on the ones they didn't have herdships to meld with just to change their outward appearance. The double domes would create a ball area in the center they could use for extra cargo space. With the magnetic scoops they could collect atmosphere for terraforming, and with tractor beams to pull in small asteroids they could collect raw material for breaking down and refining, essentially mining space.
In their cargo raids they'd recovered dozens, even hundreds of TIE launching and landing systems. Those used tractor beams to grab incoming TIEs, navigate them carefully into a hangar, and hang them like laundry on their racks, then do the same in reverse to launch. That same system could be used to collect small meteorites and could clear space lanes of small debris, make navigable paths though asteroid belts, gather up raw minerals for processing, stacking them neatly at the same time. Add some bigger tractors with the same fine control and you're really in business, grabbing small and large.
The same ship could do double duty, pulling asteroids into an empty globe, storing gases between the double walled domes. The properties of the crystal his engineers had used came to mind and he discovered it had significant electrical potential.
Playing with the concept, Ranma discovered the same crystal domes could serves as com nodes with very little tweaking, giving him portable holonet stations and therefore the ability to restore some hyperspace communication among his forces. Fiddle with access codes and frequencies a bit so the old equipment in Imperial hands couldn't access it, and that was one significant advantage.
Actually, the thought came to mind, with that much space you could fit a complete, mobile repair base for smaller starships inside the reworked battleships - and even an Impstar was smaller than a Trade Fed battleship. That was something that could supplement Deepdock repair capabilities, having capacity for a dozen Dreadnoughts. It could gather fleet fragments from a battle site, bringing home ships too destroyed even for tugs to move for recycling into new ships and erasing battle site evidence, depriving an enemy the ability to look over even your fragmented vessels and thus much needed intelligence on your capabilities.
Then again, if you had the option to open up and swallow a ship whole (or many smaller ships), what was to say they always had to be friendly? Thinking about this, it came to mind the space in between the outer transparasteel and inner crystal domes. That could be blaster gas pressurized in there just as well as any other, domes of the right crystal were already installed. All he'd have to add were a few nozzles and the right arrays and the whole transport turned into one, gigantic ion gun fully as powerful as a planetary defense battery, if not more so.
They could stun a ship and suck it in.
It'd take some careful engineering and management of the space to do that for an Impstar. But they could tweak some corners and design the space to get it in. Then, whatever crew or troop resistance they encountered could be dealt with by a few hundred thousand battle droids. They could be capturing entire Imperial class Star Destroyers by ambush and surprise. A light ion charge in the dome could keep the captured ship stunned while they poured boarding droids onto it.
And during the times when they weren't out in the galaxy fetching back Imperial captures they could be running normal cargo for the Rebels, sucking up ships from old battle sites to bring back, or even use the internal space of the ball pressurized and fitted with equipment to be a mobile training base.
He decided to move them up in construction priority. They weren't just a hobby anymore.
Of course, these were shaping up to be rather a bit different than the Starhaven resort ship he'd first planned. Those were still equally vital. Many of those would have to be built with center cities of pure construction. But this new class would probably be more numerous even so. On a whim he decided the new class could be called the Dragon Turtle because of their habit out of legend of swallowing ships whole.
Next up on his screen were the Trade Fed battle droids. He had millions of them, doing his force a great service as general laborers and crew for the cargo battleships soon to become Starhavens and Dragon Turtles.
Well, he'd had Ukyo turning rejects and scrapped projects over to him from inside Industrial Automation for years. He had alot of droid foundries, parts and technology. A simple program change had the former battle droids working as labor, but he could do better than that. Change out the head for one containing a droid brain and he eliminated half the trouble of using them as well as improving their useful skills.
His engineers had put them on so many different assignments: crop harvesting, light lifting, spaceship service, construction and repair, not to mention running some starships, that he couldn't easily fit all that flexibility into one brain. His techs did it by changing the programs they broadcast to the droids over certain areas. That had the drawback of limiting all those droids in one area to the same skills, though, and he could arrange changeable program chips to be switched out very easily.
Hmm, give his droid stations the ability to do the required chip switching automatically, then add switch-out modules on his crew droids so they can do different tasks, repair, battle, etc. A quick refit and he could have a labor force specialized to dozens of different tasks in a heartbeat, changing arms and modules like a man changes clothes, and with an appearance only slightly similar to before at first glance. Keep some of the transmission control abilities and they'd have coordinated group control as well.
An excellent general labor pool just got better.
Then there were those droid fighters. Old, which made them weak, behind the technology curve, but as he had no other fighters yet it couldn't hurt to use them some, just replace the solid fuel slug with a twin ion engine and improve the lasers. Ranma had enough spare TIE parts to outfit a few thousand of the things that way.
Smaller than a TIE, they should be even faster, and it did away with the expensive limited fuel slug. Now he was wishing he had more than sixteen crates, at a hundred per crate, of the interrogation droids stolen with the depot station, because those droid brains made an almost perfect match with his need here: small enough to fit in the cranial space of the droid fighter, hostile to people labeled 'enemy', and tied in with the droid fighter's regular control circuits made them capable of independent action as well as coordinated group tactics. It was also a combination that enabled the fighters to be used offensively much more than 35 minutes of fuel and limited Control Ship transmission ranges had previously allowed.
Pity the Empire didn't use fighter-scale shields much, as he'd love to put some on these droid fighters to lengthen out their useful combat lifespan. Still, he included space for them to be installed later while doing a general facelift to alter their distinctive appearance, retooling the whole lot of captured Trade Fed gear to fit parts for his fleet standards and reduce future supply headaches, even if it did require grinding down and resmelting half those parts right now. At least they'd never be recognized again.
After the last keystrokes were completed and the designs sent back to the shipyard Ranma collapsed, and given the massive size and scope of the project just completed and how short a time he'd crammed it in it was amazing he only slept for a week.
Conversion of the former Trade Fed vessels and droids began almost at once.
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(Posted Sat, 08 May 2004 00:47)
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