After his mile long hike to the center of the carrier, guided by the abundant crewmbers both on and off duty, Donovan was just a bit out of breath. He wasn't really out of shape, it was just that he hadn't really done any endurance exercises in the past few months.
He couldn't really bla himself for it, there was no place to run in his cabin, but it made him just a little self conscious nonetheless. Seeing as he wanted to give a good impression (he was being given a gift) he stopped to catch his breath a bit before heading through the airlock.
In all honesty, the airlock was more of a redundancy asure than anything else thanks to the existence of an atmospheric containnt field enclosing the entirety of the hangar, but these doors would keep the main cabin pressurized in the event of a failure.
Before the discovery of this field, the hangars of carriers were actually vacuums, the sa as space. That isn't to say they were open to space, but it would be a tragic waste to lose precious air every ti the bay doors were opened.
This also ant there was a ti when engineers were forced to do maintenance in thick-skinned spacesuits without being able to hear what was going on around them.
It should co as no surprise that fatal accidents were very common back then, there were three carriers that Don could rember that were destroyed not by enemy fire, but because of so fuck-up in the handling of ammunition inside the ship.
In all but one, the exact causes are not known owing to the propensity of thermonuclear warheads to destroy evidence and send what little remains in the aftermath flying into the void of space at a significant clip.
Ever since the introduction of these fields, there has only been one such accident. Oddly enough, it wasn't the result of ordinance detonating, but a corvette that was admitted for ergency repairs that had it's reactor go supercritical as a result of a Skinnik hack. It was lucky that ship cores are not ant to detonate, and was therefore a weaker explosion in comparison, but it did little to aliorate the fact that a carrier was almost lost to it. Since then, all craft stored inside of carriers have used conventional fuel and batteries to function.
Taking this into mind, Don was going to have to ask ARC to be careful with their own reactor. Its output far outstrips that of a re corvette's, more on the level of a light cruiser if he had to take a guess. The potential damage of a reactor with that output blowing up was not sothing he wanted to think about.
Which is why when he thought about it, he got pissed off at sothing.
"Those fuckers put
at the front for a reason! If that thing goes off inside the main hangar not even the blowout plates won't be enough to save the carrier!"
In all honesty, even the block of concrete probably wouldn't be enough to save the carrier from annihilation, but Don was too far gone in his righteous indignation to consider that. It remained a fact that this was also a decision on the part of the reason he wasn't posted in the comfort of the primary hangar.
A whole fifteen minutes later, he regained his cool. Only doing so as a result of rembering his purpose for being here, he cald himself and pushed the button to open the airlock doors.
He was greeted not by the humdrum of working n and the whirring, banging, and buzzing of tools, but by the relative silence of a dimly-lit cavern. It was anticlimactic in comparison to the hissing and beeping of the airlock, but completely expected.
This was no longer the ti of the air-patrol rotations of terrestrial wars.
Rarely were deployable craft let outside the safety of the hangar, these ships themselves being functionally little more than missiles that required a human to operate. Outside of combat preparations and damage assessnts, there was little need to perform maintenance, countless automated programs both in the carrier and the craft would be able to give a warning if sothing fell into decay.
Hell, if it weren't for the threat of Skinnik, the task of operating these ships would no doubt fall to the hands of computers. Oh what a different way to fight war that would be.
That is, if there would be war anyway. If everything could be relegated to the efficiency of drones, most of the outstanding issues between the inner and outer ring would be solved.
The outer ring would no longer have to worry quite as much about food, especially if there was nobody required to grow it.
The inner ring would no longer have as much to worry about in terms of mineral production, though they might still have to trade for so of the rarer stuff.
Oh if only so programr hadn't made the catastrophic mistake of allowing an AI to hate humans. Don was certain there was more to it than that, but he couldn't be asked to care at this point, the damage was already done. As a result, he stood here staring at the craft colored in the rainbow the this carrier followed, stacked on the walls and hung from the ceiling.
All of this space wasted to guarantee human operability. It really was sothing he could only scoff at.
"Yo Don!" A familiar voice from the relative darkness. "What took you so long?" Blue Squadron leader, Captain Thompson. His duty uniform was the sa bright blue as his strike craft. It was tradition that pilots wore sothing related to the the of their wing na, but usually it just amounted to sothing painted on their flight suit or a charm attached to their helt.
For reference, the instructor wing at the academy, the "Continents
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