Starship Engineer

Chapter 91

While the entire crew was busy around me, I was spending my time working out and in VR. My workouts were all individual in the gym, and I found out that having my body active allowed me to focus better. When I went into VR, I worked on simulations with Julie to add weapons to the Void Phoenix. We had a myriad of weapons to choose from, most substandard, so we needed to be flexible in their placement to get them upgraded at a later point.

There were three major problems with adding weapons. The first was space was limited, and adding them half-hazard would ruin the ship’s aesthetics. We also had to hide the weapon additions behind our alien hull to hide them from scanners. Since we planned to change the outer hull enough to hide the Void Phoenix’s appearance, I was open to adding defense and weapons.

The second point was the power systems to operate weapons. We had some military upgrades on the station we could swap out, which would increase our power output, but the work to do so was going to be very tedious.

The third point was wiring the terminals on the bridge to control and utilize the weapons. This was a huge project as it required tie-ins with sensors and comms. Our sensors might even be upgraded with the large alien modules Haily was working on and make any work at this point mute.

Over the first week at the station, we had tried a dozen things in VR and every one ended in a roadblock to my engineer’s mind. Then Julie suggested something that I liked a lot. Instead of altering the Void Phoneix, was to add a detachable hull. So, in essence, we would finish the new hull refurbishing with the alien plating and then add large hollow modules to change our appearance. The sensors couldn’t be covered, but we could add all new temporary emitters to the fake hull. There were definitely enough spare parts in the station for this course of action.

We started doing mock-ups, and I finally decided on the Norwegian Cape Hauler hull. It hadn’t been manufactured in about 200 years but was a large, egg-shaped interstellar transport. Since the ship model was so old and rare out here in the rim, the few inconsistencies in shape and size shouldn’t be noticed. We could also plead that our Norwegian Hauler had been through a bunch of upgrades to explain its increased speed and odd shape. Julie was already drawing up new registration papers. The new ship moniker would be the Portly Viking. She said it was a good name for a transport ship. The only issue I could foresee is our available cargo was only about 25% of an actual Norwegian Hauler. A true hauler was primarily a shell with an engine strapped to it.

I was going to have to power up the fabricators on the station and get my alien hull fabricators to coat the faux hull in a thin layer as well.

The easiest defensive measure was to incorporate decoy drones. The drones could be stored in a tube located aft and launched through a fast retracting trap door. They emitted a strong electronic and thermal signal to match the ship and could be controlled for about 60 minutes at full burn before running out of fuel. The station had 78 of these drones in its stores. Each tube we planned to install could hold four drones. I planned to take sixteen, putting eight in the tubes on ready and eight more in storage. The tubes were fourteen meters long and two meters in diameter and would need to be fabricated. Finding space for two tubes, both aft, one port side, and one starboard wasn’t difficult. The hidden doors to launch them would be between primary forward thrust engines.

Nero would have a bit of work moving a few lines and running control cables to the bridge but nothing challenging as the tubes would be installed in rarely used engineering access corridors. Most of the maintenance in this part of the ship was completed by bots, and we had other, granted more tedious, ways of accessing the spaces.

The remaining 62 drones we were not taking were going to be used for target practice by Zoe and Elias. I had granted them a few chances to fly the fighters during our stay. Zoe had convinced me that VR was not the best way to train and that getting the actual fighters into space would help find maintenance issues. Having them destroy the drones was a bit of a waste, but I figured they deserved a little fun since their actions had saved the ship from serious damage.

For defensive weapons, I wanted to add six anti-missile grazer turrets. They were for cruisers to be used as anti-missile defenses. They could even damage fighters if their tracking software was good enough. Since the ship’s passenger complement was reduced, I planned to remove six escape pods and install them as pop-up turrets. There would be three starboards and three port. These grazers would be mounted in areas of the hull not covered by the faux hull disguise. Powering the grazers was a huge issue. I found space to install one medium generator port and one starboard. To increase the rate of fire, the turrets would be tied to draw from the main reactor as well if needed.

The final defensive measure I wanted to add was upgrading the shielding to the alien shields, but that would take time. We already had standard shields, which was rare for a civilian ship. The alien technology would not only increase our shield power but also reduce the power requirements to maintain the shields.

I also had access to dozens of subspace disruptors on the station in storage. Although I didn’t foresee a use for them, they were very expensive hardware, so we stored all 49 in the Void Phoenix’s cargo hold.

For offensive weapons, the easiest thing to add would be missiles. The quality of the Union missiles was quite low among the human civilizations, but they were all I had access to. They came in two varieties dumb and smart. Dumb missiles, once they were fired, locked onto a target and made minor adjustments to pursue the assigned target. Smart missiles could be sent new commands from the ship and had enhanced evasive ability. Dumb missiles usually had poor evasive abilities. Union manufactured three sizes of missiles.

The smallest missile was good against fighters and gunships. The medium-sized dumb missiles were for corvettes and frigates. The large missiles were for destroyers and larger class ships. The smallest dumb missiles were 2 meters long and half a meter in diameter. The medium was five meters long and over a meter in diameter. The large, capital missiles, were 16 meters long and two meters in diameter. Due to the size of Void Phoenix, the only missiles I could reasonably carry were the smallest version. I didn’t want to incorporate all the infrastructure and tie ins on the bridge stations required for the smart missiles, so I was going dumb.

So how many small dumb missiles would I carry, and where was the launcher going to be located? I decided on a single, dual launcher. I was going to mount it aft at the rear of the cargo bay. I planned to make a small room with racks for missiles. Racks for 16 missiles plus two in the dual launcher…that was my capacity. I tasked Gabby with permanently converting two stevedore bots from the station to be stationed in this room. I would seal off the room behind the alien paneling so it would not be hidden completely from sensors. Offensive weapons were illegal in most human space civilizations, so I did my best to hide our capabilities.

So far, all of these weapons would be usable with the Norweigon Hauler disguise installed and would be concealed from scans. The controls for the small dumb missiles were going to take a lot of programming and control setup on a bridge terminal. It may take longer than our stay at the dark station, but it would happen.

That was my defensive compliment and I was now considering offensive weapons. In the converted fighter bays, we found small rails guns, heavy lasers, heavy grazers, and even two heavy plasma throwers. The plasma throwers were useless to me as they were anti-boarding weapons. They created a short-range splatter arc to damage incoming boarding shuttles. They were too large and inefficient for my needs.

Rail guns were illegal in most sensible systems. Large rail guns could do significant damage to planets and create hazards in space lanes. The rail guns I had access to were small, firing eight-centimeter projectiles. They were short-range weapons, and I didn’t want to carry a large stockpile of munitions. So that left me with either heavy lasers or grazers. The grazers were more energy intensive but had a better range. Union grazers were also the best variant of weapons produced in our region of space. Another reason to choose the grazer is that the Union’s lasers were inferior.

So I decided on two medium grazers used on large Union destroyers. A destroyer would have eight to twelve of these weapons, and I planned to build an exterior emplacement on the Void Phoenix. The best iteration Julie and I came up with was installing the two grazer emplacements forward, which made them look like eyes on the sleek body of the ship. I planned to store the grazers in the cargo hold for now and just work on getting the control lines to the bridge. I had no feasible power source for the grazers yet, and they would be under the faux hull anyway, so they couldn’t be deployed unless we dropped our disguise. They would draw on the ship’s main power core, basically taking all the power for sustained firing. I had enough small defensive weapons planned, so these two grazers were going to be my hammer. They should be effective against ships up to frigate size if they could penetrate shields.

The timeline for the actual installation was a long way off. For now, I just took the best two grazers and disassembled two others for the parts I could not fabricate.

So focusing on defense was my job. The entire ship was going to be abuzz with lots of changes.