To the corporate mind 'security' was almost the same word as 'isolation'. Therefore, when the Security division submitted a request to the Direx board for a shipyard to service its picket fleet, the words 'secure facility' passed through their tiny minds and they put it out of the way in an uninhabited system not on any trade routes.
The Empire would've taken over an existing shipyard and said "Go away, this is mine."
But, for its odd quirk, the Corpsec Security Shipyards worked well enough. Their primary duties were in constructing Marauder corvettes and in refitting larger ships bought at discount that other navies had thrown away.
A dozen Victory SDs, stripped of their weapons, floated there now awaiting refit.
The picket fleet of the Sector Authority was aimed at overawing smugglers, more of a coast guard than a true navy. It spent more than half its duties on patrol, keeping hyperlanes clean - with the remarkable effect that spacelanes within the Corporate Sector ran smoothly at very high speeds and very little danger, encouraging trade and commerce.
Whatever danger the picket fleet encountered was virtually always of small enough scale that a corvette could handle it with ease. They ran big ships for the same reason as the Empire did: to impress, overawe, and intimidate as a means of stilling disobedience. Unlike the Empire, the Corporate Sector ruled by the might of its credits, not by its guns, so the expectation of any fleet battles was so remote as to barely dim in the consciousness of its planners.
They wanted policemen, not warriors. If anything ever really happened it was always the expectation that the Empire would come and use its firepower to bail them out of trouble, at substantial cost, of course, but still cheaper than maintaining a true navy of their own.
With that in mind, it was of secondary importance how their big ships behaved in combat. The real burden of that lay with the corvettes, who dealt mostly with low-threat smugglers. And so with bigger ships merely to provide an image for the Authority, they did things like invest in the three-thousand year old Invincible class heavy cruisers. Massive protosteel mountains over two kilometers long that could barely stand up to a Marauder corvette in battle, but came cheaply because no one else wanted them, and hadn't for thousands of years.
But the average person does not have a thinking mind. Armed with facts, the Invincibles were pitiful. Swathed in ignorance, they were two-kilometer warships armed to the teeth and instilling obedience in all who saw them.
Two fully manned Invincibles floated on either side of the Kiveks Shipyards, their presence expected to lend an image of might fully exploited by the guide brochures. Add to that, the Authority had selected a partially volcanic world to base their shipyards on, giving it a very catchy name: Fireheart, and the PR firms of the Authority bubbled happily along, instilling a respectful image of enormous power among their consumers, and giving the Imperial Navy a good, well-needed laugh.
But the ships were still guarding functional shipyards, fitted with every tool, machine, droid and device needed to build and refit combat starships. And most of the equipment was top of the line, purchased at discount from the very companies that made up the Authority.
The problems began with an ore freighter.
A fairly simple trip for a superlift ore hauler, one that this freighter had done countless times before, was to arrive from the hyperspace navigation point, assume a hyperbolic course around certain system features and rendezvous with an orbital materials processing station at a gentle pace after a long deceleration.
Ore haulers not having the most sophisticated navigational computers, it plotted the best course it could and relied on adjustments while following the arc. The problem came in that the ship's drives went on the fritz and started to increase velocity rather than change vector. They didn't report it for two hours while they tried to fix it themselves, for fear of increasing their insurance premiums and bringing the wrath of the company supervisors on them. All this got reported, frantically, to spaceport control minutes before the crew abandoned ship minutes before the ore freighter plunged at 4.7 times regular cruising velocity right into the vicinity of the shipyards.
The rocketing ore freighter plunged into the side of a sleepy Invincible cruiser, snapping the warship in half like a twig as its ancient hull materials met the unabated force of the metal slug that was a freighter laden with ores to be processed into modern hull armors. Debris from the crash sprayed out, consuming in a hail of hard particles the communications array of the spaceport control facility the Invincible floated near while setting the wreckage of the cruiser spinning.
The remaining Invincible broadcast what was happening on the short range emergency frequencies (holonet being inactive), as the now mangled ore hauler clipped yet another ship in passing, one that was carrying highly charged Tibanna gas for the fleet's turbolasers.
The crippled freighter, leaking gas, plunged toward the helpless planet, exploding in high atmosphere. The volatile and noxious cargo it was carrying wouldn't dissipate for weeks, and created a cloud of charged particles which sent energy spiking through the atmosphere planet-wide, effectively knocking out communications as well as sensors, and grounding most craft.
With the planet blind, and the remaining cruiser shrieking for help across all local bands, remains of the first shattered Invincible spun lazily toward the now-panicking shipyards.
To their vast and immeasurable relief, a Victory Star Destroyer chose that moment to exit hyperspace in system, at a military debarkation point that was actually close enough to do some good.
Frantic pleas filled the comm waves, and the Victory moved into position to pulverize the wrecked heavy cruiser with both its missiles, converting the scrapped ship into thousands of tiny particles of protosteel small enough for the minimal shields of the orbital shipyards to divert themselves.
What was NOT expected was that same Victory pivoting around then converting the intact Invincible into a cloud of particles no bigger than the first with a second missile barrage that cought them completely by surprise. As the shipyard was undergoing a rather nasty debris shower their scanners were blind, so they didn't even notice this second assault, and the mass of boarding shuttles accelerating out of the Victory's hangar would arrive completely undetected.
The shipyards were not fitted with marine barracks, and riot control duties were a planetary concern. At most their officers carried blaster pistols. The real weapons, what few there were, would be in armories they could never reach in time.
As the Victory stood guard, four massive container ships and a dozen oar haulers dropped out of hyperspace at the same navigation point. These ships were little more than massive engines to which cargo modules could be attached, and they arrived empty, quickly fitting into place where forward tractors and locking machinery began connecting to the shipyard itself and its many floating modules, hooking them up like simple cargo canisters while the hail of protosteel bits flooded across their augmented shields. The cargo ships began hauling the shipyard away even while mechanics among the boarding crews disengaged connecting struts between the segments, freeing the yard segments to travel.
Crew transports, also appearing from the same military nav point, sped toward each of the deactivated Star Destroyers awaiting refit. It could be hours bringing their own plants online, but these crews would board and do that in transit while the tugs that also appeared with them pushed the massive, but obsolete, warships out-system in short hyper jumps.
The shipyard was already disappearing into hyperspace when a third group of tugs dropped the asteroid they'd been accelerating toward the planet and left to assist the moving of the Victories - which, in spite of being the smallest Star Destroyers went well beyond the ability of conventional space tugs to move easily or quickly.
Blinded, the planets Kiveks did not see the asteroid until impact, by which point the space dock, the Victories and their assailants were long gone. The meteor made a low velocity impact on the planet's unoccupied continent, causing massive damage but few casualties as the already volcanic world spewed forth lava from every spout in taking the shock.
Later investigators would examine the logs taken from the floating starship debris and fine one oar transport company a hideous amount as compensation for the destroyed heavy cruisers, and for a collision which ulttely caused what they could only determine was a push that made their entire shipyard crash into the planet.
A data unit floating among the scattered bits was identified as station wreckage and showed that all twelve Victories had been previously brought close and docked with the yards to begin preliminary systems checks preparatory to refit, and hence were lost with the station and so added to the bill.
The shipping company's insurers were VERY unhappy with that company.
The Direx Board would decide that Corpsec needed Two military shipyards, and so began construction on suitable locations at once, one on an ice world and another on a tropical paradise too bug infested to use as a resort. One got immediately dubbed Coldheart, and before the PR goons could decide on something catchy for the other it got named Swampit by the disgruntled engineers who arrived for setup, and in spite of massive ad campaigns that name stuck.
Sadly, both were off the main hyperlanes and one of their largest shipments of machinery, droids and parts fell foul of a dirty space lane, converting a hundred container ships worth of construction materials, virtually a whole shipyard worth by itself, into tiny space debris.
The Corpsec Navy never got to really hear the end of that one.
The Imperial Navy got a very hearty laugh out of the debacle at Corpsec's expense, but still got to endure their own bureaucrat's sudden paranoia over a similar incident and had to put up with excessive, cumbersome, and entirely unnecessary restrictions on yard traffic. It also got to endure doubled patrols for clearing hyper lanes, so the laughs quickly turned to bitter mutterings about incompetent Corpsec-ers.
The newly formed Rebel movement would leave Corpsec alone for some time after that, as two big thefts of high-ticket shipyards was entirely too noticable and if raids continued then no one would think they were accidental.
It would be six months before the Rebels got their captured shipyard functioning at full capacity in some remote system beyond the settled slice, but it was doing well enough at two months to begin progressing on ship refits. It would be another year before they had finished construction of the stolen cargo of materials into another functioning shipyard, also well hidden far out of the way in what would be the focal point to a whole new sector.
But they would get it done.
Blessed with a Deepdock and two static shipyards, the Jedi rebels would find their next most imposing difficulty in finding the supplies to feed into them to get out the production they so desperately wanted.
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(Posted Wed, 17 Mar 2004 23:31)
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