Chapter 52: Upgrades |
Derek couldn’t wait until the entire ship could hold air again. Even if every member of the crew had a [Skill] that let them operate perfectly well in a vacuum.
Unfortunately, opening a door to enter that area would vent the rest of the ship, and while the people could deal with that fairly well, the computers, and quite a few other pieces of tech, would absolutely hate it.
As such, they’d all relocated to the local habitable planet’s moon, which had happened to be nearby, and set up a portable shelter, complete with gravity runes, for eating, drinking, and other things that they might not need air for, but were definitely made much more bearable by its presence.
Not quite the “Robinson Crusoe fantasy” he’d imagined himself getting to live out at least once when first heading into outer space, but still cool, especially since it would only take a couple of days for the ship to be repaired, and much of that was only because Mimi, their engineer, wanted to train her [Skills] on the task.
But what were two days compared to the almost endless life any human had waiting for them if they were willing to keep walking the path to power … oh, and he also had quite a few productive things he could do with those days.
Like killing monsters, studying the records of the engagement that had resulted in their ship winding up in the state it had, to see where he could improve, learning magic, and so on.
It wasn’t quite the same as what Mimi was getting, after all, she had the help of an S-Rank magitech engineer who’d been brought out to check out the alien ship they’d managed to, for the most part, disable … sort of.
They’d shot out the engines and a sizable portion of its weapons, but then wound up having to resort to a ramming attack which Ye-in’s [Skill] had turned into a simple momentum transfer that left both ships undamaged (from the impact, at least) and seen the alien vessel spiraling off into the void between stars for the reinforcements they’d known to be coming to mop up.
All in all, it was a lot more than most people had expected them to achieve, but also nowhere near the total victory the press back home was claiming … mostly because “underdog victory” likely sold better than “underdog narrowly averts catastrophe, alien warship gets swatted like a fly by reinforcements.”
That left them with “just” Karl for protection, though the man was considered an S-Ranker for a damn good reason, and even half-damaged, him having access to the Dragonfly would still make him a damn menace if that wound up being required.
Suddenly, Derek’s phone rang. Well … it was still called “a phone,” but it had largely evolved beyond anything that the term “phone” had ever been intended to describe, fullfilling all the usual functions of a twenty-first century smartphone, as well as acting as an access point for the ship’s systems, assuming he was aboard, at least, but right now, the fact that it could interpret messages meant for starship receivers, even ones beamed clear across a star system, without needing any kind of more specialized equipment.
“Hi Mimi,” he picked up the call. “What’s up?”
“Can you come up to the ship? We’ve got some decisions ot make.”
Uh-oh … she might not have sounded worried, not to mention that it would have been discovered much earlier if the ship had been a write-off or something, but the fact that there were choices to be made meant that some kind of complication had arisen. After all, simply fixing the ship should have been a straightforward process, simple and devoid of branching paths. The fact that it wasn’t wasn’t necessarily that bad, but it certainly had him worried.
“I’ll get the others,” he said.
Legally, the Dragonfly was his ship. He was the captain, his name was on the paperwork, and so on.
Practically … Mimi was the ship’s engineer, as such, the ship was hers, a fact that he had been reminded of just about everyone except her. Well, she’d mentioned it like once, but that was fewer than many others, especially his older siblings.
In theory, between the two of them, he and Mimi could make decisions about what happened to their little ship.
In practice, everyone should get at least some input.
Quick message to Ye-in and Atticus via his phone, then Derek took a couple of steps outside the shelter and beyond the field of Earth-normal gravity, allowing the following jump to take him quite a bit higher than he might have otherwise reached … and missed.
Hell.
Derek sighed as he watched his ship flash past, the thirty centimeters or so he’d missed by not a distance he could cross by, say, angling his body to take advantage of air resistance, because there wasn’t any ‘cause, you know, space.
That was what magic was for, though, turning what should have been a suicidally reckless stunt in a saner universe, the fact that he was currently “breathing” in a hard vacuum notwithstanding, into something that was more “lazy” than anything else.
And Derek had decided to keep his palms permanetly transformed a while ago, the ability to grasp onto the underlying fabric of spacetime far too useful, even if he still hadn’t quite mastered the art of walking on it, leaving him “stuck” with Tarzan’s playbook for moving around in outer space, but that was fine, just not very impressive looking from the outside.
So, one quick grab at the empty space to halt his momentum, a quick tug to sling himself at the main airlock, and one more to actually reach the airlock, and he was inside.
The ship was looking much better on the inside than it than he had last seen it, several areas still devoid of air but they were at least capable of being pressurized, something that was a particularly big change in the corridor he was presently within, which had lost over three-quarters of its exterior wall, something that had been made starkly apparent by the fact that the replacement section was the yet to be painted. For the most part, Derek liked the azure wallpaint of the Dragonfly’s interior, but it also meant that even a scratch was rather apparent, and the recent damage was a hell of a lot more than a “scratch.”
At right that moment, he decided that would be his first priority the moment he was “allowed” back onto the ship on a more permanent basis.
Derek hauled open the door to the bridge and stepped through, only stopping at the yelp of “Ow!” from right next to him, so he turned to see Atticus standing not even ten centimeters from him, holding his nose.
“Did you teleport into my shadow while I was walking through the door?” he asked.
“I didn’t know that’s what you were doing,” Atticus grumbled. “And it was either your shadow or the table’s.”
Derek snorted at that mental image. The bridge was sufficiently brightly lit that underneath the table was the only place with sufficient space that Atticus’ ability to teleport through shadows could take him, and crawling out from under there would be an awkward affair, to say the least.
Ye-in popped in through the opposite door at that point, still wearing the exercise clothes, a tank top, and sweatpants, both glittering with ice crystals where her sweat had frozen in the vacuum of space.
“Alright, now that everyone’s here, I have got some good news to share,” Karl announced, the tall, blonde engineer waving his hand towards the back wall, where Derek’s captain’s chair stood, causing the rearmost quarter of the bridge to vanish, granting direct sight to the reactors.
It was an obvious illusion, not least of which because the reactors were further back than they were shown here, but it was a damn impressive one.
“There are probably a thousand different bits of knowledge we can get from going through every molecule of that alien ship, with tens of thousands of applications, and it’s going to take some time to find them all, but I’ve got a couple of systems that are so flat out superior to what we use that we can just import them wholesale.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“First, the fusion reactors. They’re better than anything we had by every metric, so I upgraded yours, then replaced your spare parts and user’s manual.”
“I can also fix it,” Mimi said. “We can now run at twenty percent over full combat power without even thinking of switching on the main reactor.”
That was …
“Insane,” Atticus voiced what Derek had been thinking.
The “main” reactor ran on the blood of Demon Lord Raid Bosses, producing absurd amounts of energy in a genuinely tiny amount of space. It also needed some of the hardest to procure fuel in existence, which was well beyond the capacity of him and the rest of the Dragonfly’s crew to get.
As such, they kept it off ninety-nine percent of the time; any time they didn’t need to energize their weapons, that was.
If their fusion reactors could produce even more than that … that was a lot of extra energy to play with any time they fired up the demon blood reactor, and recharging their primaries near-instantly was only the start of it.
Of course, there were still limits as to how rapidly they could fire their weapons, the railgun had a five-second cycle time because that was how long it took to put the next shell into position, if they could power the railgun’s capacitors more quickly than that it wouldn’t make a lick of difference, and the electron beam would need at least thirty seconds between shots to avoid running into overheating issues, on the parts of both power conduits and the weapon itself, but having that much spare power to play with was, bluntly put, a gamechanger.
“Thank you,” Derek said, the others echoing the sentiment mere moments later.
“Second is the armor,” Karl continued, the image of the reactors vanishing, replaced by a display of the cross-section of their exterior armor, or rather, a version of it. “I’ll be blunt, their armor is a hell of a lot better at foiling energy weapons than anything we can make, at least on the scale required to protect starships.”
“Yeah, we noticed,” Atticus said. “That ship was a damn bullet sponge.”
“I can replace your armor with their alloys basically in an instant, it’s simple transmutation, and until the navy certifies the new armor as acceptable and actually retrofits its ships, you’ll be as resistant to energy weapons as a heavy cruiser, not counting its electromagnetic deflectors. But you’ll be sufficiently protected against particle beams that that shouldn’t be much of an issue,” Karl added.
“But…” Derek offered.
“I can’t make it,” Mimi said. “I’ll have to use ‘normal’ alloys to fix the hull, and depending on how badly the ship gets banged up, that’s going to cause problems.”
Creating weak points where the various materials met, or leaving obvious vulnerabilities where the hull had been fixed. Hell, if they got torn up enough, the hull might not even be fixable overall without a yard.
Worst-case scenario, they’d wind up having to fly back to somewhere that could fix the ship in a vessel that could hold no atmosphere, with no working reactors, forced to rely on their vacuum-breathing [Skills] and magically generated lights, thanking their lucky stars that their method of FTL travel was entirely magical, only requiring them to be alive to trigger the effect. Also, depending on their distance from the nearest gravity well, someone might also have to step out and push the ship into a place where [Alcubierre Bubble] could be triggered …
It would still absolutely suck, but also be quite handleable. Not to mention that if they managed to get the upgraded ship shot up thatbadly, the Dragonfly, as she was right now, would already be destroyed anyway, so there was no reason whatsoever to not go through with the upgrade.
Except, perhaps …
Derek just looked at Mimi. “You’re the one who’s going to have to deal with it if the ship gets damaged again, it’s your choice.”
She just shrugged. “I know you’re going to listen to me if I tell you we need to go back for repairs, that’s good enough for me.”
“That’s that settled, then,” Karl said, raising his right hand and snapping his fingers, a barely perceptible ripple of energy going across the walls around them. “There, upgrade complete. Now, the other thing I’d like to do is expand the Moebius Array, make it also able to cover the particle beam, not just the railgun.”
That was … certainly something.
The Moebius Array was a spatial magic enchantment atop the Dragonfly’s bow, which, upon activation, compressed space between the muzzle of their railgun and any target up to one light second away to a bare handful of kilometers, allowing a projectile that would have been perfectly dodgeable into something nearly impossible to avoid, but it hadn’t been designed to function with the ultra relativistic electron beam they had as their other primary weapon, lying a mere two meters below the magically guided weapon, never even having entered his mind as being compatible.
Oh, it absolutely should have … but it hadn’t, and he’d likely be kicking himself for missing that trick for a while more.
Overall, it’d grant them three massive advantages.
First, firing the near-light-speed particle beam through the section of shortened space would allow it to hit near-instantly, functionally undodgeable, and an effectively guaranteed hit from their strongest weapon. In fact, measured by the distance it crossed in uncompressed space, it’d go quite a bit faster than the speed of light.
Second, the weapon effectively skipping an entire light second of distance would increase its effective range by that light second, a flat fourty percent increase that would catch any opponent entirely off guard the first time they whipped it out, and it’d still be a potent tool even against enemies who knew they had it, because they had to play around it, if nothing else.
And the third point was effectively a re-hash of the second one from a slightly different point of view. While the Moebius Array was active, anything on the other end was, for the brief instant when space was compressed and the beam fired, at point-blank range. Now, an ultra-relativistic electron beam did not spread out anywhere near as quickly as its slower, non-relativistic counterparts. After all, that was the major selling point of this weapon; it did grow less focused and therefore less powerful over time.
So if they hit an enemy at normal engagement ranges through the Moebius array … lights out. Unless it was a battleship or something, but that was a whole other problem he was honestly not sure any kind of magitech trickery could resolve on its own.
Unfortunately, the same could not be said of their railgun; the projectile would not be slowed over time as space was devoid of an atmosphere, but then again, its hitting at all would make one hell of a mess, and the only possible defense against kinetic projectiles, being somewhere else, would fail miserably against their weapon.
It sounded overpowered. Hell, it was overpowered.
And while the man offering to install it was one of the best magitech engineers humanity had ever produced, Derek couldn’t help but wonder …
“What’s the catch?”
“Expanding the field is going to increase the mana cost,” Karl said. “Eight minutes if you want to fire both. And even if you only use it on one, the charge time is still going to be bumped up to six minutes.”
“Shoot …” Derek sighed. That was up from five minutes, a twenty percent increase, even if they only used the railgun as they had the entire time. Using their personal mana to speed that up would be tricky, not the least of which because the mana capacitor for the Moebius Array wasn’t anywhere near their duty stations in combat. Also, the sheer amount of mana that would require would be a lot for them at their current Levels.
And they wanted to increase the ambient mana absorption… well, that wouldn’t work. At all.
After all, increasing the draw would cause other systems on the ship to start failing as they did not get enough of the ambient mana. Things like the artificial gravity. Or the spatial manipulation that let them store the absurd amounts of supplies needed for an expedition out into the black. Or the whole complex manipulation of the ship’s weight, the exhaust’s weight, and their weight relative to each other to allow modern starships to accelerate without burning ungodly amounts of fuel. And any supernatural reinforcements that weren’t wholly [Skill]-based.
It was the need to power that last bit that prevented starships from having the same kind of absurd enchantments as stationary defenses, or ocean-going warships, had. For example, several of the battleships that had fought the Leviathan, over a hundred years ago, had had shields and even been able to (briefly) fly.
So, what would be more important: the significant utility the change would bring with it, or the increased charge time that might fuck them over in certain situations?
Then again, the increase was comparatively small … Derek wasn’t going to say it’d never matter, that’d be tempting fate, but how likely was it that it’d ever come down to that time specifically?
Far higher than he really felt comfortable with, but at the same time, he also couldn’t really afford to go without the enhancement …
“Thoughts?” he asked.
“How is the area of effect going to be reshaped?” Ye-in asked. “Is it just going to be widened horizontally, or remain as a cylinder, a big one, the enemy might be able to shoot down?”
Derek flinched. That hadn’t even occurred to him. The old version had been “safe” in that respect as it had only been active for a matter of miliseconds at a time, and been narrow enough that the only way an opponent would be able to take advantage of it to fire back at point-blank range was if they actually had a weapon on the other end of the spatial compression, already in position to fire down it, and actually aiming at where they were. Not where they would be in the second it would take for the beam to normally cross the intervening distance, but actually at their present location, an orientation that would only ever do anything if the Moebius Array was active.
Precognition would let the enemy pull it off, but very little else would.
If the new effect was a broad cylinder, though … the likelihood the enemy would be able to exploit that through pure chance was uncomfortably high.
“It’ll be a narrow box, the width of the original effect, stretched down to the electron beam’s emitter,” Karl explained.
“I mean … if we were still running the original reactors, losing the Moebius Array for another minute after firing would be a big problem,” Atticus shrugged. “But with how quickly we’ll be able to fire the main beam now, it should be fine. I say ‘go for it’.”
“Ye-in?” Derek asked. Atticus had just helped him make up his own mind, but this question was sufficiently complex that he wanted more input.
“Works for me,” she said.
“Me too,” Mimi added.
“Alright, in that case, please do the upgrade,” Derek said.
“Should be a fun couple of days,” Karl said with a grin.
“Perfect,” Derek replied. That also gave him enough time to finally reach the second Evolution.