It was very early the next morning when Max got the official ssage from the Research and Developnt team that the upgrade for the cha was ready to be put into production. The existing vent nacelles for the crystal-based energy cores would be upgraded to vectored thrusters, mostly unsuitable to use on the surface but capable of extrely agile maneuvering in space when coupled with a shield modification to reduce the inertial mass of the cha itself, similar to the effect of a warp field, but on a much less extre level.
The existing repair hangars could produce the thruster units, and the whole upgrade process would take less than a man-hour per cha. Overall, it was an upgrade without any downside that Max could see other than the power usage of the thrusters themselves.
Nico had also sent along the details for two forms of upgraded munitions to be used during space combat, one for Super Heavy cha and a handheld weapon for the standard pattern Crusader Class Chassis.
Both fired solid projectiles at hypersonic velocities that used an antimatter fusion reaction both as additional thrust and as their primary damage output.
The shells designed for the Thunder Guns were truly terrifying, containing over a kilogram of antimatter, with an output yield of over sixty gatons, by standard human asurent. Not that any planet Max knew of had used TNT in millennia, but it was still the standard by which explosions were asured.
The Thunder Gun projectiles could achieve one-quarter of the speed of light, fast enough to catch most fleeing ships and enough that even if the antimatter explosion sohow failed to trigger, such as in instances where an enemy defensive asure disabled or contained it, the shell itself would do devastating damage to whatever it collided with.
The Alliance was sure to be horrified at this increase in firepower, but for space-based combat, such weapons were essential to actually managing to damage battleships with their imnsely powerful shielding and defensive weapons.
She hadn't neglected the new ship itself, and an eyes-only note attached to his copy of the data included sixteen Antimatter Torpedo tubes which would fire Warp Capable projectiles, with outputs ten tis that of the Thunder Guns.
If that sort of firepower were turned on a planet, Orbital Lances would be rendered obsolete. The fact that she intended to turn Orbital Lances into a secondary weapon on her new mothership was enough to send Max to the Replicator for sothing stronger than juice to go with his breakfast.
For a ship that size, it only made sense that the weapons would be scaled up, but to go to this extent was way more than he had expected. With so quick calculations, a single Super Heavy cha equipped with antimatter munitions would be capable of taking out a Cruiser Class vessel in a straight fight, assuming that it was using current shield technology and weapons.
She had also attached an addendum to the addendum like she was writing it as she went and didn't prepare her thoughts at all.
[I also made one for Cleansing Light. A handheld replacent for the Orbital Lance Cannon. Three tis the yield of the Thunder guns, with a ten-round per second maximum fire rate and hundred-round capacity. Who knows, you might have the urge to shoot soone eventually.]
That was incredibly Nico of her, so Max searched her thoughts to see what she was up to right now and found her in his cha bay, working on Cleansing Light. The new thruster system was more mobile than the existing thrusters that it used, and Cleansing Light was Warp Capable, so the drives could be used much more effectively than a standard shield to offset the cha's mass and increase mobility.
She had also added an anti-missile defence system, a new setting for the Disruptors that should destabilize incoming antimatter shells and missiles, causing them to detonate early or vaporize in instances where the lasers were insufficient for the task. It hadn't been fully tested yet, since she only ca up with the idea on her way to the hangar, but she was fairly sure it would work.
Fairly sure wasn't really a statent that he wanted in the developnt process of safety equipnt, but they couldn't exactly test it outside of a simulator, so he would have to find out the hard way if he really could stop the incoming attacks.
Their new world ship should be capable of the sa thing, stopping solid projectiles with disintegrator pulses, giving it a defensive military capability on par with the Alliance Envoys' vessel, which Max assud was good enough to be considered state of the art.
[Commander, did you see that Thruster upgrade that Research just sent out? Are we expecting to be attacked by a new enemy force in the near future?] Lucci asked from her new office aboard the Cruiser that she had taken over.
The identifier line only had her na on it, and Max wondered when she would officially na her vessel, but that was less important than the upgrade work that needed to be done before the next ti the cha needed to be used.
[You never know what we will co across. As Klinger pointed out, our new mothership will be a huge floating act of aggression in the eyes of a lot of species, so we should be prepared to have it attacked at any point, including during construction.
I don't have a tiline on completion yet, Nico is still busy with other matters, and the Innu are so full of Caffeine that I'm not willingly looking into their minds right now.]
The holographic image of Lucci burst into laughter, and she muted her microphone for a few seconds while she got herself under control.
[You have it hard, don't you? I don't even want to contemplate ninety percent of what people are thinking about, but you must have heard it all by now. We will get the cha upgraded as soon as possible, and we've already made a stock of the new munitions because I couldn't resist getting my hands on so of them.
We will have to take a good look into both human and Alliance Warti laws before we deploy them, though. In space, I'm pretty sure there isn't an issue, but in orbit or in a planet's atmosphere, that level of antimatter reaction is most likely a war cri of so sort. There are a number of restrictions on the types of weapons that can be deployed against a planetary population.
It's not like we never had more destructive weapons after all. The legends of the pre-founding era were full of horrific weapons, and now it seems increasingly likely that they were actually built back in a ti when humans weren't constantly focused on the most efficient military production that they could manage.]
She had a very good point. Too much of human history was lost and forgotten long before he was born, so it was possible that all of their developnts had been achieved before but either abandoned or had their production thods lost to ti due to various factors over the millennia.
Even among the Kepler equipnt, much of the older gear was better than the standard issue units, like Stalwart's shields. Sitting in orbit over a Relic world, with ruins of a species that he had never heard of, that lived right there in the sa Galaxy that Humanity currently occupied, was giving him a sense that he was a frog in a well, feeling much more powerful and important than he really was.
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