Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 1
Posted: 2010-10-20 09:37pm
Central Information Control, USS Directrix
Hawk's Nest System
0951 Hours, June 7, 3400
Rear Admiral Ananya Hazarika frowned, blinked, and tried to ignore the ringing in her ears. Directrix had taken half a dozen hits since the battle began. Some had stopped in the armor belt, and nothing had penetrated the core hull, but she wasn't in top form at the moment and she knew it. The short-range beam duel had left at least twenty dead and dozens wounded, not counting light injuries that didn't impair duties. It would have been worse if most of the crew stations hadn't been in the core hull; the bulk of the damage had been dealt to surface features and weapons that operated largely under control from deeper inside.
But still, it hadn't been for nothing. The pirate ships were out of the way, with the last survivors of the stealth group fleeing into hyperspace. She still didn't understand what had happened there- what had made the pirate flagship blow up, which seemed to have provoked the others into their final banzai charge. But at the moment, there were other things to worry about: the station defenses, a boarding action, and hopefully a clean sweep of the system to conclude what had been all too expensive a battle.
They needed a plan. It was time to call Commodore Liggs. Liggs' eyes were wandering a bit, but he looked surprisingly fresh for the beating his ship had just taken.
She spoke first. "Commodore..." and it came out slurred. My God, I'm in worse shape than I thought. She blinked, then drew herself up and tried again as the Centralist replied. "Yes, Admiral?"
Forcing the words out to keep them organized, she continued. "I think we need to consider the assault on the station." There was an alarm from the tracking plots along the starboard bulkhead.
"Ma'am! Picking up mass driver fire from the station!" Then Liggs barked an order into his own command console, one that he'd apparently sent to everyone, her included.
"All craft, take evasive action! Release any life pods not already aboard!" What the hell is he- No, wait, that made sense; they wouldn't be targets at this range; the ships were.
The Umerian ships were already sidestepping on their own initiative; she'd given them clearance to go all the way up to maximum evasive burns in an attempt to throw off the pirates' targeting earlier, and she hadn't taken it back. Within a few seconds, the main computer banks had analyzed the energy signature from their firing. Dangerous weapons, arguably low end capital-class, but at this distance, she knew her ships would be safe within the first five seconds.
Liggs ordered the ships to pull away from the station, just in case; Hazarika had Farbanti and Cairo drop IFF beacons in the vicinity of the lifepods, then followed suit. After the withdrawal, the station stopped even bothering to try to hit them. It was certainly possible to score hits on a maneuvering starship at those ranges, with a weapon they couldn't track well in flight, but it was little more than a waste of ammunition to try unless someone's helmsman did something truly stupid.
Knowing her ships could still slip out of the way of incoming was a relief. She'd been worried about damage to secondary engines during the beam duel. Even with redundancy in auxiliary drive, there were limits to how much fire a ship could soak up before her maneuverability started to suffer badly.
She screened Liggs again; by now, the germ of an idea was coming together for her, though she doubted he'd think of it himself. His ships weren't hybrid beam/missile units; hers were.
"So, Commodore, what do you have in mind?"
The Centralist cleared his throat. "I believe we can take down the platforms, going by my reading of their shield strength; hopefully clearing a path for close-in suppression of any defenses mounted directly on the station. It will most likely require a prolonged siege, using our mobility and more numerous beam weapons to wear down their shields. Unless you have something else in mind?"
"Oh, I do, Commodore, I do. Normally I would be very much in favor of a protracted, mobile bombardment operation,-" It's our standard tactics, after all- "but I'm thinking of something more... direct, aggressive, and uncompromising? Something I've been meaning to try... you'll like it." She grinned.
Liggs raised an eyebrow; she could guess what he was thinking: What, a Umerian not wanting to tap-dance?
"I'm thinking in terms of a massed projectile-missile attack to overload their point defense and get some anticapital torpedoes through. You're the one with the mass drivers; do your guns have variable speed settings?"
Now the commodore was grinning too. "Why yes, Admiral, as a matter of fact we do..."
Command Bridge, FF-6900 Series Frigate USS Farbanti
1002 Hours
To all familiar with her record, USS Farbanti was known by some variation on the theme of "a strange ship, but a lucky one." No one knew exactly what peculiar dynamic kept the ship intact and allowed her an unusual string of successes for one of the smallest, lightest-armed ships in the Umerian Space Security Force. She had the same crew complement as any other frigate of her series, staffed according to the same regs. She had the equipment as any other frigate of her series, give or take the occasional unofficial item. She had, in theory, the same tactical programming (though inspection of her records would reveal that the ship's main computers had never been fully reinitialized since installation over a quarter century ago).
SpaceSec command had largely given up trying to find any kind of pattern behind Farbanti's track record of improbable events. Every bell curve needed an outlier or two, after all, and with this outlier it was hard to tell whether there was a method to the madness or a madness to the method.
The crew had their own ideas about what made her special, of course. The most common one in the lower decks involved the now-legendary Space Gribbly Incident of 3378. The wardroom mostly preferred various hypotheses about the ship's tactical computers having been uplifted to a buggy kind of sentience by extradimensional CIs with a mothering instinct. A few promoted a truly unusual theory: the power of genius loci. Perhaps, they claimed, the ship operated under the protective hand of the country whose capital she was named for- an echo of ancient Shroomanticism lingering over the frigate like some benevolent yet utterly insane ancestral spirit.
These prophets of lunacy were, of course, laughed at...
Commander Brogo Sallix grunted; the corner of his mouth was twisted into a lopsided grin that stood out against his emerald-green face. If Farbanti was an unusual ship, he was an equally unusual captain. There weren't a lot of Vinaran males in SpaceSec, especially not the officer corps. Too many of his people tried to batter their way into a job, and that didn't work in the fleet. Force and toughness, or even their mental counterparts force of will and determination, weren't enough. You had to have flexibility, and the men of Vinar were mostly bad at that.
He'd decided years ago to be one of the exceptions.
But today, Rear Admiral Hazarika had settled on a plan amusingly familiar and almost uncomfortably natural for the hulking Vinaran: Charge!
Some time since the last survey, "Hawk's Nest Station" had acquired a trio of defense platforms, floating several dozen kilometers from the station itself. Main armament looked to be hypervelocity mass drivers with a throw weight normally only seen on light capital ships. No sign of missiles or beams, point defense impossible to guess, but long range probing fire from the squadrons' energy weapons indicated some very hard driven shields.
The platforms would probably be about as hard to kill as small battlecruisers... but they couldn't dodge at all. In an extreme range gunnery duel, that would give the Coalition forces a major advantage- they could, in theory, cruise along at ranges barely practical for the defense stations' guns, sidestepping the pirates' shells while shooting back at fixed targets. Eventually, shots would start wearing down or leaking through the forts' shielding, reducing the defenses.
It could be done, had been done thousands of times over the past centuries of spacegoing warfare. Indeed, it was more or less the standard doctrine for besieging fixed installations, and as long as the combined tonnage of the attacking fleet was broadly in line with that of the defenses, it usually worked.
But the plan was not without risk and cost. Fleet supply ships were already on the way to replenish their fuel and (for the Centralists) ammunition after the battle, but a prolonged siege might well see the Coalition ships shooting themselves dry two or three times over in order to kill the platforms. It would take time, too, and involve trawling their ships out where the pirates could take a great many shots at them. The enemy would probably get lucky and land a few more hits- and those high speed coilgun rounds were no joke.
That was where the charge came in.
The five surviving Umerian ships, damage be damned, had lined up and started a high-acceleration run almost straight towards the pirate base. It was still a Umerian attack run; the ships might be blasting toward their target in one dimension, but they continued to bob and weave in the other two. Still, though, they were starting to get very close.
The Centralists were doing their part from farther back. They'd started firing mass driver rounds almost two minutes ago and were still at it, slowly ramping up the speed with which the shells left the tubes. Their combined firepower was lower than it would have been without the battle damage, even ignoring the destruction or disabling of three of their ship. Even so, Brogo was glad that Farbanti was several degrees out of their line of fire.
They were getting close to the release point, though. The bridge crew knew what needed to be done, and he'd gone over their fire plan already. All he needed was to say the word.
As the last second ticked off the chronometer on his display, he said it. "Go!"
Farbanti throttled engines down to 20%, then yawed ninety degrees to starboard, slewing about one axis and rolling clockwise, turning her ventral hull to bear. The ship shuddered as the remaining VLS cells for Farbanti's Mark Five point defense missiles dumped at maximum rate of fire, then bucked as the aft torpedo tubes slung three pairs of Mark Four 'Cantaloupe' torpedoes from the ready magazines. Yawing again, this time in a plane perpendicular to the line of flight, the Umerian frigate threw an identical salvo of six from the bow tubes. Pivoting on ACS, the missiles oriented towards their target and lit off their drives.
Reloading the ready magazines would take minutes. That torpedo salvo had been the frigate's best shot: four jammer-decoys and eight greencaps. Her electron beams snarled out as she completed the roll and lay broadside-on to the pirate base, but that was almost an afterthought, more on general principles than anything else.
A round from one of the fortress guns came uncomfortably close- less than two ship-lengths- as the helmsman raised the sublight drive to war emergency power and started clawing away from the head-on intercept course Farbanti had been on before... leaving twelve Mark Fours and a swarm of hundreds of Mark Fives in her wake, all burning towards the defense platforms.
The other ships of the Umerian contingent did the same: the frigates firing identical twelve-torpedo salvoes. Directrix, likewise, was down to twelve after the loss of half her forward torpedo tubes; Artemisia could still manage a full salvo of eighteen.
The other half of Admiral Hazarika's plan would never have worked against a moving target. But by throwing solid shot at varying speeds, the Centralists had massed fire from their relatively limited number of mass drivers into a single barrage that all converged on the same point in space at the same, pre-computed moment. The Umerian missile attack bored in towards the pirate forts and ran headlong into their point defense... just as the long range time-on-target barrage from the Centrality ships caught up with it.
From the point of view of the automated forts, the combined attacks merged into one: hundreds of incoming dumb-fire kinetic projectiles, hundreds more small guided missiles, and at the back of the oncoming attack wave, just under eighty larger guided missiles. Granted, some of the slugs were off-target, either because of damaged Centralist fire control or Boskonian jamming systems installed on the gun platforms they had so generously provided the late Warlord. Granted, that same jamming was also at least somewhat effective against the missiles. Even so, it was a formidable point defense problem.
The platforms' main armament was little help: the hypervelocity guns had a slow cycling time, and cones of shrapnel from their flak shells were narrow compared to those produced by the slower, heavier rounds used by the Centralists. The secondary armament of autolasers and quick-firing gatling weapons were more useful... but both weapons suffered from range limitations, and neither was particularly effective against solid shot or the armored nosecones of the Umerian torpedoes.
Much of the enemy point defense was smart enough to prioritize on the faster-moving shells in the mass driver barrage, and the larger missiles in the rear of the salvo. But the sheer volume of contacts in the way made targeting them difficult, especially since the Umerians had seeded their missile strike with short-lived high power jamming devices.
The gun platforms took a great many hits.
Aside from a few of the higher-velocity rounds from Loyalist, the mass driver barrage accomplished little on its own. The platforms' shields were rated to stand up to fire from cruiser-weight energy weapons, and the lighter destroyer and frigates of the Centralist force had trouble penetrating. To make matters worse, most of the shells had been deliberately fired at greatly reduced speed in order to achieve time-on-target effects. However, the metal hailstorm did accomplish one critical task: it thinned out the overall strength of the targets' defenses with dozens of pinpoint strikes dispersed across the surface.
The followup barrage of Umerian Mark Fives were even less effective. These were not tylium-enhanced weapons, and the unmodified Mark Five's fission charge had proven ineffective against targets much softer than these. At best, the sleet of tungsten plasma managed a slight erosion of the pirate forts' shielding, much less than the Centralist guns.
The surviving Mark Fours, on the other hand, were an entirely different matter. The Mark Four Cantaloupe was an ICBM-sized big brother to the fighter-weight Marx Six Galia, using a far heavier warhead with even tighter focusing from a specially designed boron thin-lens. The resulting blast was both more energetic and better focused, producing a shaped charge weapon suitable for use against capital ships. Even beyond that standard, Admiral Hazarika had ordered her ships to fire their entire complement of 'greencap' enhanced-yield versions of the Mark Four for this attack.
Just over forty of the torpedoes made it through the combination of jamming and point defense, covered by the specialized ECM variants mixed in with the torpedo attack. By the time they reached attack range, most of the barrage had already hit. Sensors dazzled by shield scatter and rocked by the few rounds that made it through to crater the stations' armor cleared just in time to see the enemy heavy missiles flying past the station for the last milliseconds of their flight. Few of them had time to register the warheads initiating.
The boron plasma jets carved through the station's weakened shields almost effortlessly. The armor belt was a more noticeable but little more effective barrier. Internal cofferdamming rated against cruiser-strength weapons served more to broaden the zone of effect of the torpedo blasts, deflecting a portion of the blasts' energy sideways through the hull.
The wide plumes of high-temperature gas that burst out the opposite side of the forts contained very little of the original boron. Contrary to popular belief, the Cantaloupe was not designed to overpenetrate the size of the pirate gun platforms. That would be wasteful. Instead, they were a medley, a mixture of whatever chemical odds and ends happened to be in the path of the blast, and which had been carried along for the ride. The total kinetic energy of the exit plumes was low, no more than a few percent of that originally carried in the jets. Indeed, many of the torpedoes didn't create an exit wound at all. Just as planned by Dr. Martin and the Bureau of Armaments.
The effects on the gun platforms was crippling. Each of the three forts took more than a dozen torpedo hits. While the sheer size of the facilities guaranteed that portions of the exterior would be outside the direct zones of effect, shock waves and spalling effectively destroyed surface features at great distances from the point of impact.
The pirate forts were well and truly neutralized. As the Umerian ships crabbed sideways and shot past the Hawk's Nest installation, they saw that only the central station remained: a vast agglomeration of shipyards and basing facilities, great in scale... but largely unarmed.
Hawk's Nest System
0951 Hours, June 7, 3400
Rear Admiral Ananya Hazarika frowned, blinked, and tried to ignore the ringing in her ears. Directrix had taken half a dozen hits since the battle began. Some had stopped in the armor belt, and nothing had penetrated the core hull, but she wasn't in top form at the moment and she knew it. The short-range beam duel had left at least twenty dead and dozens wounded, not counting light injuries that didn't impair duties. It would have been worse if most of the crew stations hadn't been in the core hull; the bulk of the damage had been dealt to surface features and weapons that operated largely under control from deeper inside.
But still, it hadn't been for nothing. The pirate ships were out of the way, with the last survivors of the stealth group fleeing into hyperspace. She still didn't understand what had happened there- what had made the pirate flagship blow up, which seemed to have provoked the others into their final banzai charge. But at the moment, there were other things to worry about: the station defenses, a boarding action, and hopefully a clean sweep of the system to conclude what had been all too expensive a battle.
They needed a plan. It was time to call Commodore Liggs. Liggs' eyes were wandering a bit, but he looked surprisingly fresh for the beating his ship had just taken.
She spoke first. "Commodore..." and it came out slurred. My God, I'm in worse shape than I thought. She blinked, then drew herself up and tried again as the Centralist replied. "Yes, Admiral?"
Forcing the words out to keep them organized, she continued. "I think we need to consider the assault on the station." There was an alarm from the tracking plots along the starboard bulkhead.
"Ma'am! Picking up mass driver fire from the station!" Then Liggs barked an order into his own command console, one that he'd apparently sent to everyone, her included.
"All craft, take evasive action! Release any life pods not already aboard!" What the hell is he- No, wait, that made sense; they wouldn't be targets at this range; the ships were.
The Umerian ships were already sidestepping on their own initiative; she'd given them clearance to go all the way up to maximum evasive burns in an attempt to throw off the pirates' targeting earlier, and she hadn't taken it back. Within a few seconds, the main computer banks had analyzed the energy signature from their firing. Dangerous weapons, arguably low end capital-class, but at this distance, she knew her ships would be safe within the first five seconds.
Liggs ordered the ships to pull away from the station, just in case; Hazarika had Farbanti and Cairo drop IFF beacons in the vicinity of the lifepods, then followed suit. After the withdrawal, the station stopped even bothering to try to hit them. It was certainly possible to score hits on a maneuvering starship at those ranges, with a weapon they couldn't track well in flight, but it was little more than a waste of ammunition to try unless someone's helmsman did something truly stupid.
Knowing her ships could still slip out of the way of incoming was a relief. She'd been worried about damage to secondary engines during the beam duel. Even with redundancy in auxiliary drive, there were limits to how much fire a ship could soak up before her maneuverability started to suffer badly.
She screened Liggs again; by now, the germ of an idea was coming together for her, though she doubted he'd think of it himself. His ships weren't hybrid beam/missile units; hers were.
"So, Commodore, what do you have in mind?"
The Centralist cleared his throat. "I believe we can take down the platforms, going by my reading of their shield strength; hopefully clearing a path for close-in suppression of any defenses mounted directly on the station. It will most likely require a prolonged siege, using our mobility and more numerous beam weapons to wear down their shields. Unless you have something else in mind?"
"Oh, I do, Commodore, I do. Normally I would be very much in favor of a protracted, mobile bombardment operation,-" It's our standard tactics, after all- "but I'm thinking of something more... direct, aggressive, and uncompromising? Something I've been meaning to try... you'll like it." She grinned.
Liggs raised an eyebrow; she could guess what he was thinking: What, a Umerian not wanting to tap-dance?
"I'm thinking in terms of a massed projectile-missile attack to overload their point defense and get some anticapital torpedoes through. You're the one with the mass drivers; do your guns have variable speed settings?"
Now the commodore was grinning too. "Why yes, Admiral, as a matter of fact we do..."
Command Bridge, FF-6900 Series Frigate USS Farbanti
1002 Hours
To all familiar with her record, USS Farbanti was known by some variation on the theme of "a strange ship, but a lucky one." No one knew exactly what peculiar dynamic kept the ship intact and allowed her an unusual string of successes for one of the smallest, lightest-armed ships in the Umerian Space Security Force. She had the same crew complement as any other frigate of her series, staffed according to the same regs. She had the equipment as any other frigate of her series, give or take the occasional unofficial item. She had, in theory, the same tactical programming (though inspection of her records would reveal that the ship's main computers had never been fully reinitialized since installation over a quarter century ago).
SpaceSec command had largely given up trying to find any kind of pattern behind Farbanti's track record of improbable events. Every bell curve needed an outlier or two, after all, and with this outlier it was hard to tell whether there was a method to the madness or a madness to the method.
The crew had their own ideas about what made her special, of course. The most common one in the lower decks involved the now-legendary Space Gribbly Incident of 3378. The wardroom mostly preferred various hypotheses about the ship's tactical computers having been uplifted to a buggy kind of sentience by extradimensional CIs with a mothering instinct. A few promoted a truly unusual theory: the power of genius loci. Perhaps, they claimed, the ship operated under the protective hand of the country whose capital she was named for- an echo of ancient Shroomanticism lingering over the frigate like some benevolent yet utterly insane ancestral spirit.
These prophets of lunacy were, of course, laughed at...
Commander Brogo Sallix grunted; the corner of his mouth was twisted into a lopsided grin that stood out against his emerald-green face. If Farbanti was an unusual ship, he was an equally unusual captain. There weren't a lot of Vinaran males in SpaceSec, especially not the officer corps. Too many of his people tried to batter their way into a job, and that didn't work in the fleet. Force and toughness, or even their mental counterparts force of will and determination, weren't enough. You had to have flexibility, and the men of Vinar were mostly bad at that.
He'd decided years ago to be one of the exceptions.
But today, Rear Admiral Hazarika had settled on a plan amusingly familiar and almost uncomfortably natural for the hulking Vinaran: Charge!
Some time since the last survey, "Hawk's Nest Station" had acquired a trio of defense platforms, floating several dozen kilometers from the station itself. Main armament looked to be hypervelocity mass drivers with a throw weight normally only seen on light capital ships. No sign of missiles or beams, point defense impossible to guess, but long range probing fire from the squadrons' energy weapons indicated some very hard driven shields.
The platforms would probably be about as hard to kill as small battlecruisers... but they couldn't dodge at all. In an extreme range gunnery duel, that would give the Coalition forces a major advantage- they could, in theory, cruise along at ranges barely practical for the defense stations' guns, sidestepping the pirates' shells while shooting back at fixed targets. Eventually, shots would start wearing down or leaking through the forts' shielding, reducing the defenses.
It could be done, had been done thousands of times over the past centuries of spacegoing warfare. Indeed, it was more or less the standard doctrine for besieging fixed installations, and as long as the combined tonnage of the attacking fleet was broadly in line with that of the defenses, it usually worked.
But the plan was not without risk and cost. Fleet supply ships were already on the way to replenish their fuel and (for the Centralists) ammunition after the battle, but a prolonged siege might well see the Coalition ships shooting themselves dry two or three times over in order to kill the platforms. It would take time, too, and involve trawling their ships out where the pirates could take a great many shots at them. The enemy would probably get lucky and land a few more hits- and those high speed coilgun rounds were no joke.
That was where the charge came in.
The five surviving Umerian ships, damage be damned, had lined up and started a high-acceleration run almost straight towards the pirate base. It was still a Umerian attack run; the ships might be blasting toward their target in one dimension, but they continued to bob and weave in the other two. Still, though, they were starting to get very close.
The Centralists were doing their part from farther back. They'd started firing mass driver rounds almost two minutes ago and were still at it, slowly ramping up the speed with which the shells left the tubes. Their combined firepower was lower than it would have been without the battle damage, even ignoring the destruction or disabling of three of their ship. Even so, Brogo was glad that Farbanti was several degrees out of their line of fire.
They were getting close to the release point, though. The bridge crew knew what needed to be done, and he'd gone over their fire plan already. All he needed was to say the word.
As the last second ticked off the chronometer on his display, he said it. "Go!"
Farbanti throttled engines down to 20%, then yawed ninety degrees to starboard, slewing about one axis and rolling clockwise, turning her ventral hull to bear. The ship shuddered as the remaining VLS cells for Farbanti's Mark Five point defense missiles dumped at maximum rate of fire, then bucked as the aft torpedo tubes slung three pairs of Mark Four 'Cantaloupe' torpedoes from the ready magazines. Yawing again, this time in a plane perpendicular to the line of flight, the Umerian frigate threw an identical salvo of six from the bow tubes. Pivoting on ACS, the missiles oriented towards their target and lit off their drives.
Reloading the ready magazines would take minutes. That torpedo salvo had been the frigate's best shot: four jammer-decoys and eight greencaps. Her electron beams snarled out as she completed the roll and lay broadside-on to the pirate base, but that was almost an afterthought, more on general principles than anything else.
A round from one of the fortress guns came uncomfortably close- less than two ship-lengths- as the helmsman raised the sublight drive to war emergency power and started clawing away from the head-on intercept course Farbanti had been on before... leaving twelve Mark Fours and a swarm of hundreds of Mark Fives in her wake, all burning towards the defense platforms.
The other ships of the Umerian contingent did the same: the frigates firing identical twelve-torpedo salvoes. Directrix, likewise, was down to twelve after the loss of half her forward torpedo tubes; Artemisia could still manage a full salvo of eighteen.
The other half of Admiral Hazarika's plan would never have worked against a moving target. But by throwing solid shot at varying speeds, the Centralists had massed fire from their relatively limited number of mass drivers into a single barrage that all converged on the same point in space at the same, pre-computed moment. The Umerian missile attack bored in towards the pirate forts and ran headlong into their point defense... just as the long range time-on-target barrage from the Centrality ships caught up with it.
From the point of view of the automated forts, the combined attacks merged into one: hundreds of incoming dumb-fire kinetic projectiles, hundreds more small guided missiles, and at the back of the oncoming attack wave, just under eighty larger guided missiles. Granted, some of the slugs were off-target, either because of damaged Centralist fire control or Boskonian jamming systems installed on the gun platforms they had so generously provided the late Warlord. Granted, that same jamming was also at least somewhat effective against the missiles. Even so, it was a formidable point defense problem.
The platforms' main armament was little help: the hypervelocity guns had a slow cycling time, and cones of shrapnel from their flak shells were narrow compared to those produced by the slower, heavier rounds used by the Centralists. The secondary armament of autolasers and quick-firing gatling weapons were more useful... but both weapons suffered from range limitations, and neither was particularly effective against solid shot or the armored nosecones of the Umerian torpedoes.
Much of the enemy point defense was smart enough to prioritize on the faster-moving shells in the mass driver barrage, and the larger missiles in the rear of the salvo. But the sheer volume of contacts in the way made targeting them difficult, especially since the Umerians had seeded their missile strike with short-lived high power jamming devices.
The gun platforms took a great many hits.
Aside from a few of the higher-velocity rounds from Loyalist, the mass driver barrage accomplished little on its own. The platforms' shields were rated to stand up to fire from cruiser-weight energy weapons, and the lighter destroyer and frigates of the Centralist force had trouble penetrating. To make matters worse, most of the shells had been deliberately fired at greatly reduced speed in order to achieve time-on-target effects. However, the metal hailstorm did accomplish one critical task: it thinned out the overall strength of the targets' defenses with dozens of pinpoint strikes dispersed across the surface.
The followup barrage of Umerian Mark Fives were even less effective. These were not tylium-enhanced weapons, and the unmodified Mark Five's fission charge had proven ineffective against targets much softer than these. At best, the sleet of tungsten plasma managed a slight erosion of the pirate forts' shielding, much less than the Centralist guns.
The surviving Mark Fours, on the other hand, were an entirely different matter. The Mark Four Cantaloupe was an ICBM-sized big brother to the fighter-weight Marx Six Galia, using a far heavier warhead with even tighter focusing from a specially designed boron thin-lens. The resulting blast was both more energetic and better focused, producing a shaped charge weapon suitable for use against capital ships. Even beyond that standard, Admiral Hazarika had ordered her ships to fire their entire complement of 'greencap' enhanced-yield versions of the Mark Four for this attack.
Just over forty of the torpedoes made it through the combination of jamming and point defense, covered by the specialized ECM variants mixed in with the torpedo attack. By the time they reached attack range, most of the barrage had already hit. Sensors dazzled by shield scatter and rocked by the few rounds that made it through to crater the stations' armor cleared just in time to see the enemy heavy missiles flying past the station for the last milliseconds of their flight. Few of them had time to register the warheads initiating.
The boron plasma jets carved through the station's weakened shields almost effortlessly. The armor belt was a more noticeable but little more effective barrier. Internal cofferdamming rated against cruiser-strength weapons served more to broaden the zone of effect of the torpedo blasts, deflecting a portion of the blasts' energy sideways through the hull.
The wide plumes of high-temperature gas that burst out the opposite side of the forts contained very little of the original boron. Contrary to popular belief, the Cantaloupe was not designed to overpenetrate the size of the pirate gun platforms. That would be wasteful. Instead, they were a medley, a mixture of whatever chemical odds and ends happened to be in the path of the blast, and which had been carried along for the ride. The total kinetic energy of the exit plumes was low, no more than a few percent of that originally carried in the jets. Indeed, many of the torpedoes didn't create an exit wound at all. Just as planned by Dr. Martin and the Bureau of Armaments.
The effects on the gun platforms was crippling. Each of the three forts took more than a dozen torpedo hits. While the sheer size of the facilities guaranteed that portions of the exterior would be outside the direct zones of effect, shock waves and spalling effectively destroyed surface features at great distances from the point of impact.
The pirate forts were well and truly neutralized. As the Umerian ships crabbed sideways and shot past the Hawk's Nest installation, they saw that only the central station remained: a vast agglomeration of shipyards and basing facilities, great in scale... but largely unarmed.