They walked into the secret room to discover Walex Blissex working before them. He turned about to see what caused the noise of their entrance. Face warming into a smile he set down his interlinked datapads.
"Hello, Ranma. I've been working on some of those questions you posed last time we met. Those designs you showed inspired me to try increasing my knowledge of drives and engines. Senator Organa agreed to help me, and I believe I've got a breakthrough to show you."
Ranma almost groaned. He'd forgot that he hadn't had Ukyo stealing secret research and designs when he and Blissex last met. The big deal at the time was engines, because the Dreadnought was so slow, and he'd not had an answer back when they last talked! Slow sublight speeds on the Victory were testament enough the guy didn't, or hadn't apparently, known enough about engines. Apparently he'd decided to fix that.
Blissex was babbling on. Ranma tuned in listening and was slowly convinced his friend had become a leading expert on the subject. That was intriguing. He'd long known Blissex had a gift wherein he managed to get better performance out of existing components than the original designers of those components thought possible.
He broke into the older man's monologue to bring out a copy of his engine specs and soon the two engineers were so absorbed in conversation the discussion passed long into the night without either man noticing as plans took shape beyond theories and future experiments to prove them took form.
Padme left them to their work, already forgotten by both men.
===========
Alderaan hadn't always been pacifists. Back during the Clone Wars they had quite an impressive planetary navy, complete domestic production of one of the notable forces of the day.
Once the Clone Wars ended they had disbanded the force, declared a pacifist stance, melted most of the ships down as 'monuments to peace' that floated in among the other wreckage of the ruined planet the moment any enemy decided they were worth his time swatting - which was more or less the fate of all pacifists throughout history. They either had someone much stronger defend them, died horribly the first time an enemy spotted them, or they abandoned their pacifist stance.
Only those three things happened, never any others.
The secret defenses of Alderaan were insufficient. Even their navy might well have been insufficient, but it could have made Moff Tarkin more hesitant to use their star system as his first test of the Death Star battle station. An appearance of strength is often more use than the strength itself.
But that appearance is swiftly lost if you don't have actual strength to back it up.
Fortunately, Bail Organa knew that, and was giving serious consideration to giving up his positions of respect and power in the Imperial Senate to return to Alderaan and devote his attentions full time to convincing his people to renounce their pacifist ways. But it was likely he could not do so until he had a replacement he could trust to take over his position in the senate.
But even so, his limited efforts were having an effect.
In anticipation of future conflict, the Alderaan Royal Engineers were taking part in a secret rearmament program that was initiated on Alderaan. One part of that plan was to sheathe sections of the Alderaanian palace within plates of monomolecular armor against expected turbolaser attack they could be sure would eventually befall them as a rebel capital. Naval doctrines for this were already well established. Underground portions of the palace were to be hardened the same way to further protect the royal family from attack.
Interestingly, the monomolecular armor held. Those portions of the palace survived the eventual destruction of the planet in the standard Star Wars mainline.
When he learned of it from Blissex, Ranma offered to share his machinery for creating vast scale molecularly bonded objects. This saved the Royal Engineers vast costs for the gear used to make it, but also encouraged greater scale to their efforts. Instead of a few sheets put in quietly one at a time they could sheathe the entire palace complex in the material at one time.
It was always their plan to complete the palace protection, but a single bonded sheath was a thousand times greater in strength than many plates essentially welded. They fudged and expanded and manipulated his machinery to produce a single coherent shell for the palace and its underground areas.
Then, of course, the problem was fitting it on.
Bail solved that problem by announcing that the royal palace was to be improved. They would disassemble the entire structure and rebuild it as a new Flying Palace for Alderaan. All the engineers would have to do is fit the components of the palace inside their bonded armor shell (constructed to look identical to the old exterior) and attach repulsorlifts.
Then, because no one wanted the old palace grounds to be dormant or a crater, they built a whole new palace (also in a molecularly bonded sheath) in place of the old. Once they both were completed it was decided the Flying Palace could be outfitted with sublight and hyper drives and used as an emissary ship, conducting councils and diplomatic missions on behalf of Alderaan throughout the galaxy.
See, we're pacifists. We're peaceful. We're just doing this as diplomatic gestures.
Naturally, the Flying Palace design included lots of provisions for later inclusion of fighters and weapons. Actually, most of those were holdovers of the real palace from before the pacifist stance was enacted, and for 'tradition's' sake, were duplicated in the ground palace as well.
An ambitious project. Huge. And because of Ranma's machinery and public aid for the proposed renovation, it was conducted in less time than the old armoring project would have, and would therefore be completed years in advance of the Death Star attack. We do not yet know what good it could do them. But the possibility exists that should they install a sufficiently powerful anti-concussion field, those in the palace could survive the planet's fall.
Blissex also told his prodigy that, inspired by what Bail had told them of him, the Council of Elders were going to give Ranma what few ships the planet had squirreled away in secret from the public disarmament.
It wasn't much. Alderaan secretly maintained one Alderaanian War Frigate (Another Chance) and three Thranta-class War Cruisers (Courage, Valiant and Fidelity). Alderaan ships were among the most powerful warships of their size for their time, and these were slave rigged to the Another Chance, which itself was reconfigured to a droid crew and set on an infinite set of micro hyperjumps to avoid detection. The Alderaanian War Frigate was refitted as an armory ship filled with weapons, as were all three cruisers. But put together, three cruisers and a frigate was what the Alderaan navy used to employ as a single patrol. So it wasn't nearly what it could have been if they'd not scrapped the majority.
Still, the jewel of the choice was not so much the ships themselves as the plans to produce them, and more of the weapons they carried. Blissex had even modified the designs of the former Alderaanian fleet, including the war frigate and cruisers. These plans, along with those of the Y-Wing, were presented to Ranma for use and review.
Which made the boy Jedi feel somewhat ashamed. He hadn't even begun to have starfighter facilities yet. Other infrastructure costs had proved too expensive.
Alderaan had the facilities, turned from military to civilian use and serving the planet as commercial industries, serving peaceful ships like liners and freighters. Former big cruiser yards now serviced equally big peacetime traffic, while smaller fighter facilities met the needs of smaller trade ships. But that didn't make them available to him.
However, maybe, just maybe, the planet would get the initiative this time around to turn those to a military use again in time to do them good. Who could say?
===========
In their night of theories and planning, Blissex solved some problems with Ranma's drive, enabling it to switch between push and speed modes, also boosting the mass profile up to where it can drive a Victory (but not an Imperial) Star Destroyer and even adding a slight increase in speed over and above its already impressive rate. This meant ALL his cruisers can function as tugs, and the Victories can keep up with the fleet during sublight maneuvers, which is all of combat and therefore kinda important.
All of these would have to be tested and bugs eliminated, but both were convinced of their calculations, and Ranma's developing reckoning for machines was telling him this would work.
Yes, it was a very productive night indeed.
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(Posted Fri, 09 Apr 2004 01:09)
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