"No, let's trade ships. I've got a better one for this." Her brother corrected.
"What do you mean?" She looked at him.
"Well, one thing's certain. The more Jedi you gather together, the easier it is for the Empire to find them. You and me wouldn't be a big problem, but we've got Utena and she doesn't know how to hide her signature at all. Fortunately, not being trained, she doesn't have have the same intensity of signature, nor the same range, in spite of her inborn talent. But if we're ALSO grabbing Obi-Wan and dragging him forcibly over to where mom is, that's all too many Jedi together for comfort. And we'll have to STAY together while mom trains us, and Obi-Wan distracts mom, and we teach the kid."
"This is beginning to sound like a circus." The flame-haired Jedi female showed concern.
"Yah, I admit it does. Which is why, good as a Marauder is, I don't think it's enough ship to get us through this little adventure alive."
"And you have one that is?" With his own deepdock, that wasn't to hard a proposition to believe, though she would've laughed at the concept even a few hours ago.
"I do." Ranma walked over to the viewport, then touched a remote control on his wrist that had the ship they were on pivot 90 degrees, bringing a different part of the starfield into view. There hung a dozen ships, floating in space. Ranko could see the size was off. They looked like giant, scaled up versions of the Marauder corvette, even down to the elegant aft wings and sleek superstructure - completely unlike the unromantic and somewhat bulbous blocks of the Katana Fleet they'd just brought in.
Then she realized the scale wasn't off, These *were* the new revisions of the Katana ships like those they'd brought. Her brother was refitting them extensively indeed.
"Our Dreadnoughts, the complete version. The original pre-Clone Wars ships had slow speeds, weak shielding, inefficient power generators, low fire power and high crew needs. The Katana Fleet has full slave-rigging, which makes the crew needs only about an eighth of what it was. Most of the rest of those problems, though, could only be resolved through a total overhaul - which, happens to be exactly what we are doing."
He touched a control and the window became overlaid with diagrams.
"Blissex had devised the first power system for the original Star Destroyers, and when his daughter copied the design to make the much larger Imperial class you see in spacelanes today she lost much of that efficiency. When he went over my designs, he gave me a production plan for an energy system superior to the one he'd based the first run of Star Destroyers on. That gives us alot of power to run shields and weapons off of."
Dreadnought schematics appeared on the window, acquiring detail and highlights as they were discussed, and switching from the old designs to new ones. Right now the power system was on display, moving to the engines.
"Sienar Fleet Systems is one of the corporations that make up the Sector Authority. They play with designs that never make it into production runs; because of cost or manufacturing sometimes, but most often because of the petty bickering and political power games of the jackals that Palpatine has running his Empire. Right now Ukyo has wormed her way into the top echelons of that part of the R&D division that handles shutting down projects that are scrapped. It's low-glamor, and considered a garbageman slot by those executives vying for company control (who then ignore it). But what the Empire and Sienar are throwing away is making us rich.
"One of the designs to get scrapped was a big ship stardrive that could not be scaled up to propel even the smallest Star Destroyer, but went a phenomenal three times their sublight speeds. Well, the Emperor is interested in big ships, the bigger the better, and when it became clear this project would never push a monolith the size he was planning, Ukyo got the order relayed through the execs to terminate it - and it went straight to me. Maybe later they'll wish they'd saved it to put on convoy escorts or something, but right now that's not an issue as there's nobody I can think of the Empire has to be wary of - and the order has been relayed down from the highest levels to go for massive ships, even the present Star Destroyers aren't big enough. Any expensive ship projects not suitable to the really huge stuff or fighters to go on them is scrapped to save their budget for things that do. So we got a stardrive that leaves anything the Emperor has reeling in our dust, as the facility to make those engines got liquidated by you-know-who and landed right here with yours truly. It's a research plant, not a high-volume production line, but we'll use it all the same and upgrade when and if we can. For right now it just about suits our refit capacity.
"Again, the Emperor's waste benefits us, in that he has the whole settled galaxy to draw men and materials from, and doesn't feel the need to economize. So, when auditors in Industrial Automation caught small projects for reducing crew needs they terminated them immediately. Buuut, Shampoo happens to work there in a similar position to Ukyo's, and, well, you get the idea. Dreadnoughts are such an old ship design that even with full slave rig they take alot of crew. Now ours take less, about a quarter even what the Katana ships did before refit. This is a good thing for a few reasons. One, we don't have many men and the fewer we have to spend to get each ship fighting the more ships we can eventually hope to fly, but also these ships were designed with crews upwards of twenty thousand men. Between the slave rig and modernized automation we've brought that down to a touch above six hundred sentients. That leaves a TON of space for equipment and systems upgrades. Plus, we're taking another terminated project and outfitting each ship with the ability to hold and deploy a droid army."
"Droids?" Ranko's tone was distasteful.
Her brother nodded. "I've seen too many Jedi die before attacking droids not to respect them. You should too. Besides, a decent engineering section can keep droids running for generations. Real men are a ton more difficult to supply, and need a thousand times the space. We're on a shoestring budget trying to defend against the settled galaxy with only the stuff we can scrape together, which ain't alot. Every little thing has got to account for the most we can possibly wring out of it. That means we'll have to capture more ships, and that means boarding actions and that requires troops. We'll have some real troops around when we can afford them. But the price of failure is too high not to warrant equipping these things as well we may." He shrugged. "We had the droid facility free when the company termed the related programs. We might as well use it."
Ranko agreed, motioning her brother to go on.
He did. "There was a project called Star's End, that was supposedly an unbeatable prison. But, somebody beat it and the market for it collapsed. With Kessel around there's hardly any need for prisons that are merely 'good'. So when the prototype failed there was no market for franchise branches and, again, the project was termed. Apart from one less atrocity in the galaxy, there's one more bit of good news from that: the primary detention tower of the prison was sheathed in a single, coherent, molecularly bonded, dense metal armored shell."
Ranko goggled! That stuff was rare and staggeringly expensive! Dense metal enhanced molecular bonding created one of the hardest and most durable substances known in the galaxy, virtually immune even to heavy turbolaser bombardment.
But the cost!
The process of bonding molecules at the subatomic level was seldom used. Performed across the entire surface of a selected object gave it a cohesive, totally sealed and nearly indestructible shell in the form of a single, near-infinitely complex molecule. The perfect physical armor.
But it was so expensive that molecularly bonded objects were considered individual works of art. The vast expense incurred because of the immense amount of raw materials and energy needed to produce it (not to mention the equipment: texture molding tractor fields, ion fusers and charged particle arrays capable of the necessary frequencies of vibration didn't exactly come cheap) ensured that the stuff stayed rare.
Xim the Despot was rumored to have an entire suit of personal armor made out of the stuff. Tiny machine parts required to endure enormous amounts of wear were about the only other use she'd heard of, and those in mega-important facilities that could shoulder the cost.
Seeing her shock, her brother grinned wolfishly. "No, I can't afford to invest in that. Frankly, building our own Star Destroyers would be cheaper. BUT, I did acquire the equipment. The prison franchise manufacture center was gearing up, having already produced the prototype for testing, when the whole thing went belly-up. The industrial machinery needed to create that scale of bonded armor didn't suit itself to smaller projects, and was supposed to have been warehoused. But I got it. Once I got it I got a few friends to ferret out the location of the former prison and picked up the remains of that tower. Using the bonding machinery that made it, I reconfigured the shell into a hull in which I constructed that Dreadnought right there: The Flamberge."
Ranko's eyes had grown to rival gravballs.
Ranma came and sat down beside her, enfolding her in his arm while looking back at the display screen. "There's tons of things we don't have, of course. We're stuck with their old shield generators. The weapons of these old rustbuckets haven't been upgraded - too much demand for them in this Empire for those projects to get scrapped, and too hard to acquire in normal ways. We've upgraded their armor, of course, and the power system is in place to give these boats a really impressive warload of weapons and shields where we can get them. Blissex added a round forty missile tubes to my design, but I haven't got the supplies to put missiles in them. Likewise, they can carry one hundred and forty four fighters - twelve squadrons, but I haven't got one to put in a single fighter bay. There's lots of things I could do, if only I had the industry for them: Faster hyperdrives, better sensors, all sorts of systems, but for right now this is what we have.
"The Empire is given to extravagance and excesses. You know that, but we can't afford to duplicate them. Our design expands the engineering deck to handle most repairs in-ship. I've added fuel converters, solar arrays, and a magnetic scoop, so they can refuel just by loitering close to a star, and recharge ship oxygen, water supplies and blaster gas just by swinging by the right gas giant's outer atmosphere. All of that means there's less down time for each ship, and longer operational ranges, while they're cheaper to support."
But Ranko's smile had grown sad. "Isn't that all pretty futile, bro? The Empire's got ten thousand ships at least."
Ranma's hope melted his sister's concern, as he stated, "that covers an empire of over a million inhabited worlds. They're spread pretty thin. While all we have to do is get local superiority in a few places to make a start. We get planetary shields around a few friendly worlds so we don't have to get in fights we don't want to, and this little fleet of mine could cause enough trouble to draw away a thousand ships to hunt it - which makes the imperial presence all that much weaker on all other worlds, giving them a chance to revolt, and win."
He rubbed her shoulder. "Combine that with a corps of persuasive people and we could start a rebellion against the galactic empire. It's worth a try, sis. Besides, if I get the right type of gear to finish these upgrades, these babies could win in fights against Imperial Star Destroyers with only two-to-one odds. If I get a fleet that can take on a hundred Imperial Star Destroyers, a few Jedi to captain them and the Force to guide us - that's not the worst way to start the overthrow of an Empire, is it?"
Ranko was shaking her head. "Jedi doing industrial espionage. Who would have thought? You know, we used to stand *against* that sort of thing."
Ranma looked embarrassed. "Yah, I know. But look at it this way, these are all pro-imperial companies on which Palpatine's whole order rests. Without them his Empire would fall. So I look at this as just another battlefield. One where we have a slight advantage for now. Jedi make superb spies, when inclined to."
"Okay," the sister rolled to her feet, bouncing over to the viewpane and pointing out to the Flamberge. "So you've described to me a battlewagon. How does that make it our perfect ship?"
"Simple." Ranma rolled to his own feet and stood beside her. "There's a close ally of 'can't find me' and it is 'can't catch me.' We get half a dozen Jedi together and we'll probably be found. We can't say for certain, of course, but it is likely. So, aboard the Flamberge, even if we are found out we are unlikely to be brought to heel. We can outrace any ship we face in subspace. Any chase that goes to hyperspace we can win, most likely, by using the Force to guide us and ducking through uncharted or cluttered space simple navicomputers cannot follow into. If an enemy gets a shot at us they are very unlikely to bypass the armor and do any harm. And we don't have needs to visit ports for most supplies, making us that much harder to trace. I would like a better weapon profile and more shields and other options, not to mention fighters. But for what we have, we get the security that virtually nothing we can't outfight can chase close enough to us to bring on a battle we don't want."
"I don't want to disregard stealth as an option." Ranko corrected. "Unique ships stand out."
"True enough. But the superstructure is designed to accommodate a Marauder corvette in a docking cradle, topside aft. The Flamberge can hide at the edge of a system while we coast in aboard my corvette, or a shuttle as appropriate. We're never too far from rescue, but can make planetary landings looking quite normal. My personal Marauder has the same sublight drive I've told you about. It's very hard to catch us. Plus, if one ship is disabled, we have an extra."
Ranma looked into her eyes, touching her chin and making her melt. "Nothing is perfectly safe. The Emperor is very powerful, we have to admit. But can you think of something better?"
Ranko heard the 'fresher stop. Utena would be joining them soon. The time to decide was now, before they had a needy child to comfort.
See other episodes by Lionheart
(Posted Sun, 01 Jun 2003 08:49)
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