Blue Star Enterprises

LOCATION: EDEN’S END

SYSTEM: Y6X-3H2

DATE: 2400

Alexander couldn’t believe everything was going right for a change. There hadn’t been any pirate activity since Fury left, which was something of a minor miracle. To add to that, Shall had finally finished patching up his ship and had left the system only a day prior.

It had taken the smuggler a month to patch the holes caused by the defensive railguns, which was rather impressive considering the man had refused any and all help. The old man’s cantankerous attitude hadn’t stopped Damien from forcing his way aboard and helping anyway, so Alexander decided to thank the quick turnaround to the Chief of Security.

The annoying man’s absence was just in time to celebrate Eden’s Resolve being completed as well. Resolve was a slightly smaller ship than Fury, necessitating a change in design. Lasers worked on Fury because the unneeded crew space had been converted to power storage and capacitor banks.

He could have gone the same route with Resolve, but it would have meant removing more bunk areas or the hangar to make it happen. He didn’t want to do that for a few reasons.

Alexander needed the ability to transport people without building a ship specifically for that purpose. That might change in the future but for now, all he had was warships so he needed to have them fill multiple roles until that happened. It wasn’t the most ideal situation, but it would have to work.

Having a shuttle hangar aboard each ship also seemed like a good idea since it allowed people to disembark without waiting for another shuttle to dock. That meant he couldn’t get rid of either of those spaces to make room for the batteries and capacitors.

With that in mind, Alexander engineered railguns for the ship. He would have preferred Gauss cannons for their maintenance simplicity, but he didn’t have plans for those so he would have to make do.

Thanks to everything he learned while designing the surface weapons and installing the ones on Destiny, Alexander had been able to improve upon his original design quite a bit.

He ran his hand along the two vertically stacked rails as he stood on the ship’s hull. It was one of three sets of double-stacked barrels on this turret. With the ship sporting two main gun mounts, Alexander had effectively tripled the ship’s firepower without increasing the weapon footprint. Each set of barrels could independently adjust its angle but they were all locked on the same rotation.

The weapons were loaded by a central tube that could feed and fire each barrel once every two seconds. The ammo storage for each turret only held a thousand tungsten penetrators, so whoever captained this ship would need to keep that in mind. A thousand rounds might seem like a lot until you realize each barrel stack could fire off sixty shots a minute.

Alexander did keep PDC lasers, although, he should call them PDLs. The defensive lasers didn’t need to be nearly as powerful as the main guns to shoot down incoming missiles, and lasers were much faster, had a longer range, and were quicker to aim than standard kinetics.

He entered the ship through the airlock and walked the freshly painted corridors. The color scheme matched the Fury inside and out, but Resolve had a few more amenities thanks to the added space not being taken up by energy storage systems.

He stepped into the cavernous hangar. It was about the same width as the one on Fury, but it was longer. Just long enough to house two of the engines he promised Fletcher if he cared to load them inside.

The Resolve’s hangar wouldn’t be relegated to hauling engines though, Alexander had another idea in mind for that. He walked to the bridge, waving to some of the engineers testing the Resolve’s systems.

Not all of the Engineers on Eden’s End had taken him up on his offer but some had, and it made this part of producing his own ship go much quicker.

Alexander entered his command codes into the bridge terminal and brought up the holo display. It was the same tactical display that Fury had. He poked at one of the icons and it zoomed in, showing a large frame being assembled. The frame was nearly complete, having been designed with only one purpose in mind, and that was to hold three of the engines Alexander had promised Fletcher. There wasn’t any sort of covering, engines, or power systems, it was simply a metal skeleton with attachment points.

That metal frame was designed to attach to the Resolve. He had specifically engineered it to fit within the warp bubble that the ship would create, ensuring easy transport. It was a quick and dirty answer to his shipping issue.

There were only a few things holding up his delivery. The first was a crew. Na and his people had taken some time off, but they were already back in the outer belt, making good use of some of his bots that had been converted for mining. Besides, Alexander hadn’t been lying to Fletcher, he wasn’t going to ask Na to fly back and forth between systems for him. The man was much better suited to running the mining operation here.

The other issue was the lack of a supercomputer for the Resolve. All of the ship’s systems could function independently without that, but he couldn’t fly the ship properly without a full crew instead of the five it would take to operate with the supercomputer core in place.

That was fine. In a little over a month, the Hawks and Jasper would be back. Then both of those issues would be resolved.

Alexander took a quick look at his orbital printers and the six engines attached to the refueling station; ready to be delivered. Completing fifteen of them was going to be easy.

He thanked the Engineers for their work and headed back to the surface with Branston. The Engineers would stay up there for the next week while they ran tests, but Alexander needed to finish work on his current projects. He also wanted to be home for Yulia.

He was working on two projects concurrently with another handful started. The two major ones he was focusing his time on were the space station design and the Class 8 thrusters for the Talon. Class 8 was just the military version of Class 5 but there were some key differences.

Those differences made the job a bit more challenging. As if building a compressed plasma ejection thruster wasn’t already hard enough.

Once he was back in his workshop, Alexander pulled up the schematics. He didn’t have the Talon’s layout, but he did have the space requirements and mounting locations thanks to Chief Engineer Sullivan. Alexander also didn’t have design specifications for a Class 8, since he wasn’t authorized to purchase military designs.

He had spoken to Aria Sullivan at length about the engines, even though she hadn’t been able to provide him with the repair documentation. The biggest thing she kept bringing up was redundancy.

So that’s what he tried to do with his first design, build redundant parts for the entire system. He was sure if he had built his first iteration, it would have been the most robust Class 8 engine around. The problem was it would never fit in the designated space and it would have been a nightmare to maintain.

The first item he scrapped on the design was the redundant reactor. Fitting two reactors inside the engineering space, with his current level of understanding, simply wasn’t going to happen. Instead, he added multiple shunts for each of the four engines. That required additional electromagnetic shielding which conflicted with the other shunts.

Rearranging the power delivery system into a circular pattern on the rear of the reactor took care of that issue, bringing him to iteration three of his design. Now he had to figure out how to bring those tubes back together so they wouldn’t conflict but could also go into the same thrust chamber.

He had to do this while avoiding all the containment systems and cooling pipes that needed to run through the engine to keep it from melting into slag. His current design looked like a madman had built it, and he was certain Sullivan would have chewed him out if she saw it. Thankfully, this was only a proof of concept and it would never see the light of day.

Alexander looked at how the Destiny’s engine was laid out. It was a Sinorus design, but it was better than nothing. The Destiny’s propulsion system was a much simpler design because it lacked the same types of redundancy Alexander was adding. When he got to the point where the main plasma shunt went directly into the center of the combustion chamber, he realized he had been overthinking his design.

He removed all the superfluous piping and containment systems in his design. Then he ran each set of pipes into a smaller containment vessel, equally spaced around the circumference of the chamber at a forty-five-degree angle. Getting the electromagnetic containment to play nice in the collector was a bit of a challenge, but he figured it out after a few tries. From there, it was a single flow to the thrust chamber.

After those changes, Alexander was left with a much cleaner-looking design. He let it run on his simulation software while he switched his focus to the station.

He had modeled the latest design of the station a bit like Petrov if it had a single ring. This was a major departure from his initial design which looked like an enlarged version of the fueling station.

Alexander chose a ring design because he didn’t have the money to purchase the necessary gravity plating the station would require. The ring wasn’t very big, perhaps three times the size of the fuel depot. And it was shaped a bit like a top. Having to spin the station presented a few new challenges for Alexander, mostly how to dock ships to it.

He managed this by adding a second ring that was attached to the station, and making the main ring spin instead of the entire station. A large circular construction hangar also sat at the end of the station opposite the thrusters.

It wasn’t large enough to fit something like the Talon, but he could fit a heavy destroyer like Dawn inside the space if it came down to it.

The biggest issue with something so large was figuring out weight distribution and power requirements. It would have to be built in orbit, so he wouldn’t need to do all the logistics of how to launch parts from the surface. He did need to provide the station with enough thrust to keep it in orbit or adjust its orbit as needed. That was going to be a challenge.

Before he could begin to design those systems, he needed Dr. Lund’s help. He sighed and pulled up the schematic she gave him.

She hadn’t specified when she would need the device, but he figured if he was going to ask for help, he had best come with a gift.

Alexander had only a vague idea of what the esoteric piece of science equipment did. It was some sort of measurement or testing device, that much he could tell. He went over the entire design, finding it rather inefficient at whatever it was designed to measure. Using his engineering knowledge, Alexander cleaned up the design. The only thing he didn’t change was the small circular chamber in the center. Just to be safe, he printed his design and her original one.

The required tolerances meant his latest generation of printers would take an entire day to print both designs. That was the problem with making things more accurate, they took far more time.

Shortly after sending them to the printers, he got a beep from the simulation software, letting him know it was done. He looked at the issues it found but wasn’t deterred. It was an interesting challenge, and he loved that. He quickly set about addressing the issues and designing the next iteration of the Class 8 drive.