ACS:
ACS rifles, like the grav-pistol in Hymn, can easily hit targets 2 km distant. Now the rifle isn’t attached to the arm?He waited until the two suits were in position and had lined up the distant targets. At the base of the hill, about two thousand meters away, was a cluster of concrete stumps that revealed little more than that there had once been buildings there. It was around those ruins that most of the God Kings were clumped but even two thousand meters was was a simple shot with AID targeting systems. He checked that they had designated their targets then lined up on his first and snuggled the rifle, unnecessarily, into his shoulder.
ACS uses a lot of automatic targeting, the user can designate target priorities. ACS sensors can detect the precise power levels of a tenar.“Missed the power box, huh?" Duncan said. "Your targeting systems won't pull those up. You have to specifically designate it."
"How do you do that?" Race asked as a storm of 3mm rounds slammed into the concrete behind which he was sheltering.
"Here, I'll show you," Duncan replied, activating a command so that Race could watch as he brought up the menu.
"Uh, if you could just tell me, sir?" Race said, sliding backwards down the hill and scrabbling sideways. "We're kind of busy."
"First you bring up the menu for secondary targeting parameter," Duncan replied, ignoring the private's response and a series of HVMs that hammered below his position. "Then choose 'power systems.' Once you have that you can see that the gun targeting karat automatically starts prioritizing not just the God Kings but the power crystals in their storage compartment under the God Kings. Then you just stroke the firing button," he finished, sending a needle burst of teardrops through the power system of an approaching Kessentai and detonating the God King's saucer. "You'll notice that it gives a pop-up reading of power levels as well, and if you have the time you can use those to fire on the better-charged saucers, giving you more bang for your buck."
That’s not ominous at all."Hmmph," O'Neal grunted, looking at the terawatt laser. The weapons had been common in the early days of the war but had been dropped out of service within the first couple of years. They were, however, remarkable anti-lander systems, at least against Lampreys and unsuspecting C-Decs. So it would probably work in this instance. "And why were you keeping it a secret?"
-snip
"Oh, it's okay," Mike waved. "Do you know why these were removed from service?" he asked.
"No, sir," Tommy said. "It never made any sense to me."
"Well, it won't affect anything in this battle," the battalion commander replied. "I'll just head back to the battalion hole. Good luck, Lieutenant. Good shooting."
-snip-
Mike slithered into the hole that had been dug out for the battalion headquarters just as the first lander crested the ridge.
"Why isn't he having his suits rearm?" Stewart snapped.
"Oh, he's got a better idea," Mike said with a chuckle. "I had a terawatt laser in the cache."
"And he's going to use it?" the battalion S-2 said.
"Looks like it. Should be fun to watch. Preferably from a safe distance."
So, the retired laser system is, in fact, a perfectly valid anti-lander platform, in skilled hands capable of one-shoting a C-Dec as well as any SheVa. Perfect. Terawatt laser easily breaches Posleen ship armor. And Terawatt lasers are used by Posleen ships as secondary weapons.Tommy crouched behind the laser and targeted the first C-Dec cresting the ridge. This was going to be tight.
The holographic sight showed interior and exterior targets as well as the antimatter containment system. Tommy deliberately avoided that, firing the beam along a vector to penetrate on a weak point and enter the battlecruiser's engine room.
The weapon spat a beam of coherent purple light just as the C-Dec opened fire with the first weapon that bore, an anti-ship plasma weapon. The ship's fire missed the battalion, striking north of it on the graded roadbed laid down by the Posleen and digging out a crater the size of a house.
The weapon was a poorly controlled nuclear reaction that was captured between massive electromagnetic fields and converted to pure photons. The beam itself was rated in gigajoules per second and cut through the heavy armor of the Posleen ship like tissue paper. It lanced through interior bulkheads and into the engineering compartment, destroying the antigravity system and removing power to most of the external weaponry. Denied its antigravity support, the cruiser lurched and dropped through the air.
Impact of C-Dec on ground 15 meters away enough to knock ACS into the air. Which is only a mild annoyance to the suits. Of course, a C-Dec is a dodecahedron with each facet roughly 500 meters across…The cruiser staggered and then started to drop, fast, and he knew there was nothing he could do.
The ship fell straight down at thirty two feet per second per second and impacted on the top of the ridgeline, only fifteen meters from his position and, fortunately, on the Posleen side of the ridge. Then it started to roll.
The impact of the multiton ship had flipped all three suits into the air and they fell back with a couple of bounces. But Duncan was up on the ridge again almost immediately. This he wanted to see.
I actually had to look up how to calculate a dodecahedron’s volume, but I don’t think I can do it with the formula given. I figure each face to be a pentagon 403,119 square meters in area. So I should be able to figure it as twelve pyramids, using the face as the base, but what how to find what to plug in for height?
Same Terawatt laser easily kills a Lamprey.Tommy swung the laser onto the leftmost Lamprey, which was a tad higher and had a better shot at the battalion. It had already opened fire with one of the heavy lasers on one of its five facets and the line of fire was wiggling randomly across the ground but in the general direction of the battalion command post.
In this case Sunday didn't target quite so carefully; the ship was farther away and if the antimatter containment system detonated it wouldn't disturb things quite as much.
The purple laser flashed out again, digging into the side of the ship in a flash of silver fire and penetrating deep into its vitals. The shot missed the containment system but cut the feeds from it to the engine. Once again the ship stopped and dropped like a stone. Some of the Posleen in both ships would be alive but they were relatively unimportant compared to stopping the ships themselves.
2 Lampreys and a C-Dec, in case anyone’s counting. That right there gives the laser a better success rate than the PDFs, and an entire company of Reapers. Actually that sets it on a plateau of anti-lander achievement somewhere below Bun-Bun but a bit above every other SheVa we’ve seen. Why the hell were these things not mass-produced and generally deployed?"Shit," Tommy muttered, as he targeted the third ship. This ship had learned from its predecessors and tried to jink aside, spreading the fire. The terawatt laser was not, however, like the lighter grav-guns. They had only a fraction of the power available to the laser. It scythed into the third ship, clawing through crew quarters and the command bridge. For that matter, the ship pilot had not had significant training in flight at such low levels. The Posleen ships, by and large, managed their operations on automatic, so manual flight was something for which very few Posleen were trained or prepared. And it was evident in this case as the ship, accelerating sideways to avoid the laser, slammed into Black Rock Mountain and bounced backwards, hard, into the very laser it was trying to avoid.
In this case it was unclear if it was the laser fire or the sudden impact, but the third ship stopped, droppped and rolled down the hill and impacted with the C-Dec, where the two of them almost entirely blocked the narrow pass.
Oh. That’s why. Nevermind then. I still see it as being useful enough to justify the risk, see how much better it worked than the Reaper weapons? But probably a weapon for specialists, rather than every grunt who can pass basic.The "little problem" with the terawatt laser had been discovered within a year of its actual fielding in combat. The weapon was, as previously noted, a poorly contained nuclear explosion. Anti-hydrogen was injected, in carefully measured doses, into a lasing chamber filled with argon gas. The anti-hydrogen, opposite of real matter, impacted with argon and immediately converted itself and some of the argon into pure energy.
This energy release was captured by other argon atoms and when they released the energy it was as photons of light. These photons were then captured and held until a peak pressure was reached when they were released.
All of this happened in a bare nanosecond, managed by vibrating magnetic fields that drew their power from the same reaction.
The same laser, to an extent, was used shipboard and in space fighters. In both cases it was a regarded with awe and respect, for the barely chained sun at its heart was as much a danger to the ship as to the enemy. And so, in the case of the ships and the fighters, massive secondary fields ensured that the slightest slip on the part of the primary fields meant that the system simply got out of alignment for a moment. Perhaps the weapon would "hiccup." But that was all.
On the ground-mount version, however, these secondary systems were unavailable. And thus, when in a brief moment of chaos the power levels in the lasing cavity peaked over the maximum rated, or posssible, containment levels of the magnetic fields, the highly excited argon, and a bit of still unconverted anti-hydrogen, escaped the confinement. And proceeded to destroy the weapon. Letting all the rest of the highly excited argon out in a manner that was quite catastrophic.
One second Tommy was firing the laser and the next moment he was flying through the air. Well, not "flying" so much as hurtling uncontrollably. Once again his sensors were overwelmed but what he managed to read in the maelstrom and under the G forces that were slipping through the compensators indicated that the external temperature, while dropping rapidly, was pretty similar to that found in the photosphere of a star.
Now the armor resists Posleen blades, where before it didn’t. Not that it makes a huge difference to the story, an ACS trooper who gets stormed is still going to die in a messy and painful manner, it’s just another little inconsistency that bugs me.The Posleen in the front rank weren't even firing anymore, just hurtling forward, their blades raised. The monomolecular edge could not penetrate the Indowy-forged armor with one strike, but as chop after chop descended on it the armor eventually gave way and the human within was hacked to death.
Mike gets nuked. Again. While in the air. Again. He’s thrown several miles by the force of the blast. Again. Why do we care again? But this time he survives a 100 KT Area Denial weapon, granted in his one-off super suit.Unlike Sunday, Mike had been out of the hole in the Posleen mass when the SheVa antimatter went off and there wasn't much he could do. So for the second time in his life he ended up in the path of a nuclear explosion. This time, at least, he had a moment's warning and instead of trying to grab dirt, which was probably futile, he hopped upward and tucked into a ball wondering where he'd land.
The blast-front picked him up and lofted him south and upward. He felt a brief glance off of something very hard; it bruised him despite the undergel and hard-driven inertial compensators. But after that there was, as such, nothing but air.
His sensors were still off-line but he eventually sensed that the blast-front was reducing and he tracked out into what would have been a free-fall position if he was, in fact, free-falling. He got some control over the inertials and used it to stabilize his flight. But since his externals were still reading over a thousand degrees centigrade, getting any coherent data on his location was quite impossible.
Finally the immense power of the nuclear explosion began to dissipate and the return wave came in, catching him and tossing him back, but not as far.
In all he was airborne, or nuke-borne as the case might be, for less than fifteen seconds. It only felt like an eternity. And then he saw open air.
Posleen:
Be vewwy, vewwy quiet. We’re hunting wabbits. Is it wrong of me to be sort of rooting for the Posleen by this point? They’re just so much more entertaining than the human characters.He stepped off of his tenar and walked down the lines of his oolt, checking the oolt'os' weapons. All of them had the skills to handle the devices, but they had only recently been upgraded and he wished to ensure that all was well. Instead of the shotguns and light railguns they had sported only a day before, each of the oolt'os was armed with a plasma cannon or hypervelocity missile launcher. He had been surprised at the apparent generosity of the warleaders, but when he was told the reason it made sense.
Funny mental image of a group of tightly packed Posleen trying to pull an ‘about face!’ Posleen somewhat slower to react to flank attacks than us.Posleen had as much trouble with a flank attack as humans. The oolt'os could care less; they shot where they were told to shoot. But the Kessentai were as susceptible to surprise as humans, perhaps more so. And physically moving the aim-point of the oolt'os was more difficult than moving that of humans; when packed groups of oolt'os tried to turn, simultaneously, they actually tended to fall over.
The point at which Posleen typically give up."I know," the commander replied. "It's just so . . . so asinine. Eventually they'll force their way through. But we've killed, how many? A hundred thousand? Two hundred thousand? A million? And they just keep coming."
"They always do," Stewart pointed out, turning his suit to face the commander.
"Almost always," Mike replied. "This time I'm really surprised. Generally even the Posleen give up after a few million dead on one patch of ground."
The actual number of Posleen Mike’s battalion has killed so far."How many have we lost?" Tulo'stenaloor snarled. "Four million here and in the valley?"
"Four point three as of last count," the essthree replied.
Posleen using engineering in battle."Apparently good sense is contagious," he muttered; the Posleen were building a road.
It wasn't much of a road and they weren't going it very well. But they were clearing away rubble and digging into the hillside, cutting a serpentine path up the hills that, otherwise, were impossible for them to scale. They had barely started, though, so there was plenty of time to deal with it.
Some Posleen normals can be used as skilled labor, depending on their bloodline and thus genetic memory. Stone-working Posleen can make a ‘thousand-year road.’It would have gone faster with human equipment, much less Posleen, but there was none locally—any that had existed had been destroyed by the recent blasts—and even if there were, there was not one of the local Kessentai who had the skills to use it. So they had to make the road the old fashioned, and slow, way. Fortunately there were some of the oolt'os who had that as a skill and they were leading the way, skillfully using the rubble from the hill to reinforce the low places and create a narrow path.
Given time, and a few skilled stone-worker oolt'os, they could create a road that would last for a thousand revolutions of the sun. But that would be unnecessary. All that the local force needed was enough breadth to run their oolt up the hill and then take the humans from the rear.
Construction of an underground factory in enemy territory. Perhaps to make reloads? More skilled labor from the Posleen.Orostan looked over at the Kenellai that was running the resupply effort. "How is the work progressing?"
"The tunnels will be completed soon, oolt'ondai. After that perhaps twelve hours to complete the basic factory."
"Too long," he growled, looking around at the massed oolt'os and Kessentai. "We'll be out of ammunition and thresh by then."
Interesting that the tenar and ACS use similar power storage, yet the ACS are not an explosion risk. Probably just one area where the Galactics are a trifle more advanced. Still relatively consistent yields for tenar explosions.The saucer-shaped craft of the Posleen God Kings used a crystal matrix power storage system that was highly efficient; it was, in fact, virtually identical to the system used in armored combat suits. But while it was capable of storing enormous power in a very small space, that power was also barely controlled; if the crystalline matrix was disturbed it started a chain-reaction uncontrolled energy release. Which is another way of saying "massive explosion." In the case of Panoratar's half-charged system, it was the equivalent of a couple of hundred pounds of TNT. And then there was the shrapnel from the disintegrating tenar.
The blast slapped outwards and smashed the surrounding God Kings, along with all their most elite normals, to the ground, killing most of them and rendering all the tenar out of commission.
There are differences in the individual hardware used by some Posleen."This is a widely gathered force," he pointed out, bringing up the bows of the tenar in high relief. "Note the rounding. We've got two that are almost pointed, one that is rounded almost into a semicircle and one that is halfway in between. This sort of difference has been noted before in the saucers, called tenar by the Posleen, and in weapons design up to the design of the landers. There seem to be four or five broad styles."
Poole ducked down below the concrete and scuttled sideways again, trying not to giggle hysterically at the lecture. "You know, sir, this is just the right time for a lecture on distinctive Posleen styles in saucer design."
"What causes the style difference?" Race asked with a laugh.
"Nobody really knows," Duncan said. "But it's interesting to note that while our enemy seems like formless waves of one-ness, they do have some individual and group differences. Probably it's the difference between Ford and Chevy, but they do have differences. At least the leadership, the Kessentai."
Posleen more resistant to temperature extremes than humans, and actually need to eat less often. Of course, since their idea of logistics is basically to save a bit for later, in a carry-on bag, they still don’t do well in locations without a lot of forage.The moon had set and the night would have been pitch black to humans. It was quite dark to the host as well, but their eyes expanded to drink in what light there was from the stars glittering overhead. The skies had cleared and the temperatures dropped, but as with most physical conditions that was of little interest to the Po'oslena'ar; they could survive temperatures that would kill an unprotected human.
Snow was bad not so much for the cold or the way it slowed them but because it meant little to forage. Away from their bases the Po'oslena'ar generally depended upon forage for food. They were designed for pure efficiency and could move for days on the food that a human would need for one. Eventually this caught up with them and they would have to feed, but in the meantime they would keep going.
His oolt had not properly fed in two days and it would probably be another day before he let them rummage in their food bags. They had been given a few scraps of flesh from the human thresh and more lately from the battles over the mountains, but it was not enough to build them back up. With luck the coming battle would go to them and then there would be much thresh upon which to feed.
In space, a 100 KT explosion is nothing to the Posleen, in atmosphere it’s a different story.The area effect round tracked straight and true to a point two thousand meters above an imaginary line between the C-Decs and then detonated.
The ships were interstellar battle cruisers as well as transports for the Posleen. And under normal circumstances a 100 KT round detonating 2000 meters away would have been shrugged off. In vacuum. Between planets.
In this case, however, it was not in vacuum and it was not between planets except by the widest description thereof. And all of the differences came into play.
The shock wave from the explosion slapped downward, hurling the ships aside. If the violent acceleration from the nuclear-driven hurricane of wind were not enough to defeat them, the sudden stop as they slammed into the unyielding ground did the trick. Subjected to forces they were not designed to withstand, the two ships hit the ground, crunched, bounced, and rolled to a stop, one just east of the Cullasaja Bridge and the other on top of the West Franklin Wal-Mart.
Other/Misc:
A little love for the Abrams. Posleen ships laugh at 120mm AT rounds."For what we are about to receive . . ." Glennis muttered as she hit the seat switch and dropped into the belly of the tank. The vehicle shuddered and the temperature jumped noticeably as a plasma round glanced off the front glacis plate. A moment later an HVM round ripped her hatch cover away into the night and filled the interior with reflected searing white light and heat. But by then the gunner had slewed the main gun on target and opened up with main and coaxial.
The Abrams Main Battle Tank was originally designed for the sole purpose of killing other tanks, almost assuredly Soviet and ex-Soviet designs. It had advanced composite armor, a quick-firing, stabilized 120mm main gun, sophisticated targeting systems, nuclear, biological and chemical protection and an amazing turn of speed supplied by its Lycomings jet-turbine engine. Furthermore, on battlefields across the globe, it had proven itself the finest machine in the world for that task, able to both out-fight and outmaneuver any other tank on the planet, seventy plus tons of fast-rolling incredibly deadly meanness. But with the coming of the Posleen, changes in design were inevitable; the Posleen didn't really have anything worth hitting with a 120mm depleted uranium dart. Or, if they did, it was too large to care about being scratched by an Abrams.
The heavily armored Abrams loaded down with machine guns and canister for the cannon. Seriously, there are 8 machine guns on the thing.However, the base tank was the finest piece of war machinery ever designed and it seemed a shame to simply throw all that engineering away. At first, when they turned out to be highly vulnerable to plasma and even 3mm railgun fire, the tanks seemed doomed. But technology came to their aid in the form of new, and lighter, armor materials. The M-1A4's turret and primary frontal armor was a layer of battle-steel, room-temperature superconductor, nano-tube composite and synthetic sapphire threading. The combination meant that frontally it could shed off the fire of anything but a direct and unlucky HVM hit.
From the side it was not so well armored but if the Posleen were on your flank you were screwing up anyway.
To reduce the possibility of being flanked, and to deal with the main problem of the Posleen, the fact that there were just way too many of them, the gunnery of the tanks was modified. On either side of the turret "add-on" weapons were installed. These were 25mm cannons like the main gun of a Bradley, but where a Bradley had one gun the Abrams were mounted with first two, one on either side, then four and finally eight. The .50 caliber TC gun was replaced with a 7.62 Gatling gun capable of hurling 8000 rounds a minute and the "coaxial" 7.62 machine gun mounted alongside the main gun was switched out for another. Even excepting their main gun, the "A4" Abrams could hurl an amazing mass of lead.
The main gun, however, remained a problem. It seemed a shame to pull the weapon, since it was about as good as it got from a cannon perspective. Finally, it was decided to leave the cannon in place and simply change the ammo mix. The ammo bin still carried a few "silver bullets" for old time's sake, but the majority of the rounds stored in an A4 were canister.
Unlike the complex depleted uranium or High Explosive Anti-Tank rounds, canister was simplicity in itself; in effect it was a giant shotgun shell. Each round held 2000 flechettes packed in ahead of a powerful firing charge.
The Wall. Some of those less secure areas sound, well, pretty insecure.The Long Wall had been laboriously constructed in the years between the first scattered landings and the last major wave. It traveled, more or less, the entire length of the eastern Continental Divide but in this little patch of hell it was a shambles. At passes and other areas that might be struck by heavy Posleen attacks it was built up into modern fortresses of concrete and steel bristling with weaponry. Everywhere else along its length it was about twenty feet high and made out of reinforced concrete with a reinforcing "foot" on the inner side. And, despite the protests of environmentalists, it had no openings. On the inside of the wall was a road, a track really, that had been carved across the entire eastern U.S. Along this wall, when there wasn't a murthering great battle going on, patrols would crawl along, looking over the wall from time to time to make sure the Posleen weren't sneaking up the far side.
Galactic regen can repair massive radiation damage."Yes, ma'am, it is," he said, holding out two gel-caps. "Rad-Off. It's not going to keep you alive, but it will stretch things out."
Glennis smiled tightly, her jaw working at the words. "Is anything going to keep me alive?"
"If we can get you air evac to a Galactic regen tank," Kilzer said. "I'm not an expert in this sort of thing, but from these readings I'd say in a couple more hours the damage will be pretty irreversible. And the nearest regen tank I know of is in Asheville, which, under current conditions, would take about three hours to reach."
The cavalry arrives, orbital supremacy is quickly established, Posleen ships on the ground are found and wiped out by KE impactors from orbit, and the ACS sent off-world handles the mopping up. Think how many lives could have been spared if they’d made it a year ago, or just a week.In the distance a wave of fire seemed to leap from the ground as fireball after fireball erupted into the sky. It was clear that kinetic energy weapons were taking out every single Posleen ship and settlement for as far as the eye could see. And undoubtedly beyond. Around the whole globe.
Mike looked up and half shook his head as a line of shuttlecraft, seeming half air and half matter, dropped out of the sky. Troopers began spouting from the sides, dropping on pillars of fire then assembling at impossible speed. Their suits, like the ships, seemed only half there, as if one with the land and sky. And on his sensors they didn't appear at all. The air was filled with music and he shook his head and laughed hysterically again as the strains of "Ride of the Valkyries" poured through the air.
Galacitc regen again, can save one from most anything short of immediate death, regrow limbs etc."You don't need that," Wendy said, looking at the tank and suddenly seeing it as old technology. It was practically magic to most people, able to regrow limbs and heal almost any wound short of death.
SheVa:
One of the SheVa crew has a plasma gun. No explanation, no other mention, just ‘yeah this guy got out of the tank and stared down a God-king, by the way he had a plasma gun.’The giant tank, it must be one of the SheVa guns she had seen on TV, ground up to within a few dozen yards of the Posleen and then just stopped. It sat there for what seemed like forever and then a door opened in the base, flooding white light down onto the ground. An elevator dropped out of the door and all the way to the ground then opened and a single human stepped out. He was wearing a trenchcoat and sunglasses and had a plasma rifle cradled in his arms, muzzle down.
SheVa collapsing a mountain, in lieu of going over or around."O ye of little faith," Kilzer said. He had a multicolored three-dimensional view of the terrain up on his display and now tapped a control to bring sections of it up on Pruitt's targeting system. "Okay, Pruitt, load up a penetrator."
Pruitt looked at the screen and shuddered. "You're joking, right?"
"Nope," Kilzer said, tapping his keyboard again and bringing up a set of fifteen target points on the mountainside. "Okay, it's going to be an expensive road. But we'll have a road. And I won't have to go skiing with you."
Pruitt looked over at the colonel, who had a pensive expression on his face. "Colonel?"
"Is this going to work, Kilzer?" the officer temporized. "The rounds aren't that big . . ."
Kilzer's laugh was deep and infectious. "Oh, Lord, that's a good one, sir!" he chuckled. "You've obviously been in SheVa combat too long, sir. They're TEN KILOTON rounds! That's the equivalent of ten thousand tons of TNT, sir. Twenty million pounds of explosives!"
"Hmm . . ." After a moment Mitchell grinned and chuckled in return. "You're right. My version of what is a 'small' explosion has gotten sort of skewed. Go on."
"Each of them is going to vaporize a big chunk of North Carolina rock, sir," the tech rep pointed out. "And the rock around it is going to settle in rubble. Fifteen shots, by my calculations, will reduce the ridgeline by only two hundred feet or so. But that two hundred feet is going to take out the steepest portions and lay down a ramp—a steep ramp, admittedly—on both sides."
SheVa nukes when fired deep underground vaporize a spherical mass of stone, but tend to look unimpressive from the surface.Each of the previous rounds had, in fact, made a very solid impression. The antimatter explosion had vaporized a sizable chunk of rock, a sphere ranging from fifty to a hundred meters in diameter. But the refractory material above the explosions had managed to survive and each of the explosions was widely enough spaced that there were ersatz "pillars" between the newly wrought, extremely hot, slightly glowing, caves in the pass's heart.
The eleventh round, however, penetrated rock that had already been fractured by previous rounds and the impact of the ten kiloton blast propagated along the lightly supported bridge of rock across the top of the pass. With, literally, earthshattering results.
Well, I suppose any engine that can move a SheVa won’t have any problem yanking an Abrams out from under a few tons of soil.Look, Gl . . . Major, we can get them out. After we finish the shots and open up the pass. As long as we can get a chain around anything, the SheVa will yank them out like a cork."
Reloads. They’ve fired off the ones they got from the destroyed SheVa, so these must have come in the blimp with the CONTAC team."There's more coming from the Asheville reserves," Mitchell said. "We'll have two full loads of penetrator and six area denial after we shoot fifteen."
There’s an aircraft carrier anchor chain on each SheVa to be used as a tow cable, in the event they need to recover another SheVa.He wasn't particularly worried about the chain breaking; it was the same design used to anchor aircraft carriers and had been adapted for SheVa recoveries. An Abrams tank, even covered in rubble, was not even in the same country much less league.
Spares for repairing the armor.Plate patches were not the standard six-inch steel but ranged from one to three inches.
Laser cutting torch.The plate had been cut into a long rectangle, exactly nine point four two three meters in length, by one of the hull-plate cutters. The devices used a chemical-pumped laser that had the ability, among other things, to cut to very precise depths and angles. Which was useful when, for example, a section of hull abutting a nuclear reactor had to be cut away.
After cutting the section of plate, the same vehicle had then opened up a six by six meter hole in the side of the SheVa, then wandered off to find other work. There was plenty to do.
CONTAC safety protocols.He waited while the fire-suppression crew was called in and made notes. The crew consisted of two blower teams and a safety supervisor. Because the SheVa repair brigade often had to operate under pressure and in less than safe conditions they had developed techniques to handle things like welding around explosive materials.
As the laser welders cut through the materials, the fire team took care of secondary effects. The hydraulic fluid had a high vaporization temperature but with enough heat it would first vaporize and then combust. Generally these were small, smoky fires that were easily put out, but a few were larger and more energetic. The CO2 extinguishers, however, were able to handle both types of fire with relative ease.
The improvised patch for the damaged shock absorber. Naturally it goes off without a hitch. Besides all the fire that is. And it eventually springs a leak."What Paul proposes," Garcia continued with a glare at the warrant officer, "is to wrap a piece of steel around it with the underside coated by welding explosives then set those off. He intends to do the wrapping by applying C-4 in a pattern to the outer side of the steel and setting that off. As the metal settles in place a detonator will trigger the weld.
"This will do one of two things. It will work, to an extent, giving the gun some shots, I'm not sure how many, or it will totally destroy the shock. It could neither work, nor destroy the shock. But the safe bet is on 'either or.' "
Again, the squirt gun uses about 10,000 gallons a minute, or 167 gallons a second. That would be sprayed out in such a way as to cover a 50 x 100 meter square, and probably extending out wards some ways, the point after all is to fill the air immediately before the SheVa with water. And this will be an effective obstacle to plasma fire?"We've got four minutes of water," Kilzer said. "We found a community water supply but it only had forty thousand gallons. After that's gone, we're open to plasma fire."
40 kph (25 mph) top speed from Bun-Bun with half its reactors dead. Which is actually ¾ the specs.Keeping up was no trouble, however, because with the loss of power from three reactors the SheVa was limited to a maximum speed of about forty kilometers per hour. Keeping out of the spray of mildly radioactive water and mud from its tracks was somewhat more difficult.
Lot of space for storing reload packs for the Metal Storm turrets."Storms are up, the ones that are left." Captain Chan sounded tired over the radio. Her crew had consumed half the IV's in the SheVa and Glenn had had to be evacced. But other than that they were fine. Exhausted, but fine. "Garcia redesigned the reloads so we could have six available each. But we're down to only fifty-three total reloads so I put six on each of the front systems and scattered the rest out. Once those are gone, the nearest are on the road from Knoxville. The long way. We need to shut these guys down soon."
Complaints about the tactical flexibility of the SheVa. SheVa designed to hit ships over 50 km away, well over the horizon even from the top of the turret. Indirect fire at shorter ranges means firing really high and praying for the wind to be going about the right direction and speed."It's got the MetalStorms," Bazzett argued. Both of them were ignoring the fact that at any moment an antimatter round could land on their heads. Part of the reason for the four thousand meters minimum range of the SheVa area effect round was that it was notoriously inaccurate at short ranges. Because it was designed for a fifty-plus kilometer range, firing at short ranges meant firing practically straight up in the air. At that angle, it was practically a matter of luck where it would land.
"Sure, but they're just forty millimeters." Utori snapped his weapon back together and took a drink from his camelbak. "It needs some 105s with some small antimatter rounds. Like . . . I dunno a ten KT round, maybe. That would be enough to clear a hilltop. Not a fucking hundred KT, which requires clearing out the whole damned county."
Discarding armor against fire, even while in secure magazines. Might explain some of the sheer weight of the more traditional SheVa rounds.The 100-kiloton round was heavier than the penetrator. This was due to a carbon-uranium matrix that was designed to armor the potentially dangerous round against stray impacts. The armor, however, fell away after firing, and the round tracked upward and then over at apogee, after which the tracking system lost lock and the round became an unknown actor.
"Eight rounds loaded," Pruitt said. "Six anti-lander and two of the euphemistically entitled 'area of effect.' Also known as God's Lightbulb and The Big One. And behind us there's a string of tacitly avoided and spread-out vehicles filled with more hellfire and destruction just in case four ain't enough. We've got a half a pack of cigarettes, a tank of gas, it's ten miles to the FP and we've got sunglasses on."
These ones just made me laugh. Yeah, in four books there’s maybe half a dozen jokes I actually laughed at, and a single heart wrenching scene between three nameless characters that appear for all of two paragraphs before death. I cared more for those people than I ever did for Mike, his unit, his father or his daughter."Yeah! though I WALK though the valley of the shadow of death, I will FEAR no evil!" Pruitt cried as he cycled the gun to "on" and checked the telltales. The hydraulics were still showing yellow, but what the hell. "For I am the baddest bunny in the valley!"
