A ship with catastrophic atmosphere loss looked like it was exploding.
One other method was to have a hit on your drive or reactor system cascade until it blew the ship up spectacularly into tiny pieces, or just forced premature shutdown. The Corellian corvette's one drawback as a combat vessel was the dorsal fin could be hit hard enough to set up vibrations throwing the main reactor out of alignment and forcing shutdown to avert an explosion. It took hours or days in dock to recalibrate and restart the reactor safely after such a hit. But, fortunately, it took a big laser to hit that hard, and it wasn't an easy spot to target.
The Republic had big ship battles so infrequently they had very limited setups to take care of cleanup afterward. But of those, a space tug to haul the destroyed craft to shipyards was probably the most important.
A thing of interest to future military historians was that, with the advent of the Star Destroyer, the space tug lost most of its military role in the Empire. There simply was no existing tug robust enough to take the hulk of a destroyed Victory or Imperial SD and haul it a sufficient distance through hyperspace to where the wreck could be salvaged or repaired. And if it was smaller than a Star Destroyer the Emperor didn't want it.
Intimidation, don't you know. Also ego, which was a tricky point with most megalomaniacs.
It was three times as cost effective, if not always as easy, to repair even a destroyed ship than it was to build a new one. Armed with proper tugs, a navy at war could replace its losses almost three times as fast. Faster, if they chose to salvage enemy wrecks as well.
But a tug cost a substantial fraction of the ship type it was to service, and so if the Emperor chose to build a decent tug fleet he'd have fewer Star Destroyers. Not many fewer, it was true, but the orders had been given to float every SD the Empire could put in service. Long term military planners swallowed their pride, just planning on introducing a proper support fleet after the ship building mania had passed.
But it never did pass. The Emperor stayed firm about building maximum-sized, maximum-numbers up until the bitter end. From the beginning, he'd never planned on losing battles, and he was not enough of an expert on everything to think much on replacing losses other than to build more of the same in construction yards.
He never changed this strategy.
Point of fact, the Emperor didn't care much for infrastructure. If he didn't want a specific result from it, it was invisible to him. Several of his cronies appointed to high command thought as he did and aspects of the support fleet they did not see as immediately useful (tugs being high on the list) got switched to other roles, like carrying cargo, or phased out entirely. The budget got spent on other things.
This would hurt them grievously in their Civil War and eventually make salvage a huge business in all but a few Star Wars universes as whole fleets of destroyed ships from both sides sat unclaimed and forgotten at the sites of every major battle. If a starship couldn't move or fight it got abandoned.
The Rebels didn't traditionally have the energy to spare for a support fleet, either. All the support ships they did have were taken from the Empire and hard pressed to keep up their duties as far as medical care or moving supplies.
By the end of the Civil War, both sides were so accustomed to writing off destroyed ships they were left to drift and breed mynocks, completely forgotten by their makers.
Except for Ranma.
To steal what he had stolen it had already become necessary to have full tugs. The Victory SD's taken from the CorpSec refitting yard - not to mention the yard itself, weren't going to move out under their own power before a scheduled arrival discovered them. Since doing the theft in secret was the point, he'd had to have big tugs moving them. So he'd adapted huge cargo ships (another thing neither Empire nor Rebellion could spare much of during the war) and made do with that, plus whatever appropriate sized tugs could be scrounged from scrap yards on short notice.
Ranma also knew the value of a tug, as he understood and liked infrastructure alot more than Palpatine did. Which meant that he got a ton more work out of less production and money that the Empire did, and that was a good thing because he'd never outspend them.
But still that issue of cost didn't quite go away. It rankled even him to have expensive ships sitting idle because he didn't have work for them outside of a fighting conflict or the rare raid. Actually that made them sound like combat ships.
That thought bore thinking on.
A tug typically was defenseless as any freighter, which meant since they went into battle sites to do their business they either had to wait til the battle was cold, days or weeks later, or required escorts against any stragglers or survivors. One that could defend itself could go plunging into a battle site that was barely a few hours old. Properly armed they could linger near an ongoing battle without needing a small fleet detached to protect them, and so get to their subjects within minutes of the combat's end. Add firefighting gear and outfit them as a rescue ship and he'd cut crew losses drastically, not to mention that putting out blazes inside a ship before they'd ravaged the entire contents of the hull could cut his repair and salvage time and costs to a fraction. It would make the tugs' job more dangerous, but he could armor them as a precaution.
Again, tugs were typically built as cheaply as freighters were, light hulls plus heavy drives for pushing. Rescue ships were separate jobs, as were firefighters. To roll all three into one could save him half the potential cost of a support fleet. It would require better trained crews to handle the duties, and better equipment all around (armored vac suits was only the first item), but all three ship types normally worked in the same environment. Properly armed with the right shuttles one ship could do all three jobs. Or, he didn't see why it couldn't.
To make the same vessel a light duty (or self-escorting, he told himself) combat craft would get it where it needed to be quickly, But it would also entail certain design difficulties. In other words, it was going to be a monster to get right. Poorly done, a ship of this type couldn't do spit. It'd mess up and fumble around so much it wouldn't be worth building. Done the right way, with careful attention to detail and all the right tweaks in the design cycle, this could be a potentially paradigm-shifting model of support vessel.
In order to do any good at all rescue ships and firefighters both had to plunge into the midst of battles. Where they were needed was where it was worst, and consequently both were built small and cheaply as duties allowed, as those types of risks meant both kinds of ships got lost alot, in explosions, collisions, or 'accidental' fire. If they weren't in the midst of battles they'd have to plunge in immediately afterward. The duties of rescuing crewmen and putting out blazes to save functioning ships from becoming nonfunctional ones wasn't something that could wait long.
A ship that could survive those risks could consequently be loaded with better equipment and so do a better job. It could even be made cruiser-sized, have the same engineering deck he was putting in his Flamberge class, and even a matching medical bay, putting right in the thick of things all the right types of emergency ships under a nice thick hull and shields.
If it worked, he'd save uncountable assets in the shape of lives and costly starcraft. If it didn't he'd just have them hang back out of effective weapon ranges and do their work by shuttles until the fighting was over, and still save more than the present arrangement of support craft could. It put all the specialized support right with the fleet and left little but cargo hauling for the transports.
Dang! He'd have to track down Blissex again! This was just too much design to handle by himself. That man had rolled a mobile repair yard, fleet tender and heavy equipment hauler together with a combat craft to make his Star Destroyer class. This was right up his alley. If the same could be done here it would save his commanders a logistical nightmare keeping track of and replacing all the scattered types of specialized support craft a fleet required.
Pull a heavy burden off a man and he's liable to do the rest of his jobs better.
Hmm, he'd have to capture more Deepdocks. They'd be the perfect compliment to this. The shorter the distance a tug had to haul a destroyed starship to get it to docks, the more time could be spent with the fleet performing its other duties.
Deepdocks were one of the few, perhaps the only, nod toward infrastructure Palpatine ever made. They were mobile shipyards, able to move through hyperspace to be positioned wherever the Navy wanted them. They usually stayed out of sight to avoid raids (in 'deep' space, hence 'deep-dock'), but close enough to the action as to be able to repair damaged craft in order to quickly return them to action, or get them able to stagger back to permanent facilities for extended repairs. They could also do secret construction projects away from prying eyes, and tended more and more toward that as the Emperor leaned that way later on.
By itself a Deepdock was only half a system to Ranma's mind. The Imperial Navy would never commit them to a battle site, even a cold one, so unless a ship was intact enough to reach the Deepdock under its own power it could not get repaired. Even a very simple tug could double what could get there, but the Empire'd never deployed even one. The only thing that even bore the name in the Empire were small utility vehicles used around docks and yards to haul cargo modules, smaller than shuttles and bearing as much resemblance to a hyperspace fleet tug as they did to a Death Star.
Cagy admirals and Moffs would later sneak in some mobile maintenance and repair capacity for their big ship fleets, mostly under guises of modular or multipurpose ships meant for a range of purposes (often to include spying - always a purpose dear to the Emperor's tiny and withered heart and thus sweeten him on the sale). But even that was on a small scale and light performance compared to real tugs. And multipurpose ships, especially ones that could be used for spying (something Imperial Security could never do enough of, especially on themselves), often were used for purposes outside fleet repair, getting less use out of those ships than they might've.
But then the Emperor had never planned on losing battles, or even losing ships in battles. His big, tough Imperial SD's were built so large in part because weren't ever supposed to be destroyed. Damaged, maybe, that made Deepdocks perfect for fitting them out again for other battles, but never destroyed.
Ranma's tugs would be perfectly complimented by Deepdocks, and vice versa. But to get there he'd have to get the docks, and, more importantly, design the tug.
Okay, to start he'd need an engine. He only had one, but fortunately one of the things tried by Seinar before scrapping the stardrive project that became his was to boost thrust at cost of speed. Their trouble was they'd run into technical difficulties that made the engine either perform fast for a cruiser or slowly push a Star Destroyer load - no middle ground. And the Star Destroyer engines now in use had better speed at those loads.
Hey, perfect for a tug. Once he found that data and could recreate the experiment, all he'd have to do is perform a little tinkering to get the bugs ironed out for his stardrive facility and he'd get tug engines able to push a Star Destroyer. Of course that was in normal space, but positioning a hulk along a route to enter a hyperspace path was one of the things a tug had to do to move it. A normal drive was required for that part.
He'd have to ask Ukyo to look into hyperdrive projects once she got back to Seinar after her 'business trip'. That inability of his to produce his own was getting troublesome, as nobody made any tug hyperdrives he could steal. Even pulling them off of captured SDs would be troublesome, as they were too bulky to use in a smaller ship easily, and no way could they push an SD and a tug the same size both through hyperspace.
The Victory SD series had a faster hyperdrive than the standard for the fleet, fast enough to be used as interceptors versus fleet-grade drives. So maybe Blissex could provide some ideas to start them off if Ukyo couldn't turn up anything.
His ponderings followed him out of his room.
Ranko came across his design notes as she was cleaning up for bed. After reading what it was to do she named it the Talaria, after a bird on her homeworld that was remarkably good about caring for other members of its flock.
Meanwhile Ranma,
Read the comments on this episode
See other episodes by Lionheart
(Posted Tue, 30 Mar 2004 02:33)
Questions? Problems? Suggestions?
Send a mail to addventure@bast-enterprises.de
or use the contact form.
らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
All other series and their characters are © by their respective creators or owners. No claims of ownership of these characters are implied by the authors of this Addventure, or should be inferred.
The Anime Addventure is a non-profit site.