Never really liked them, the wings their mounting points look fragile, not to talk about the added weight of those joints.
There are better Tie models out there, but it could have been done to get enoung parts to play with, three of these Hunter-class Tie's their engines might have been used in the Tie-Claw, considering their smaller sizes and lesser heat production.

---

Nothing like the present.

I suppose they would be an advantage when stuffing a SD to the gills with fighters. They take up less space then a regular TIE.

Been thinking about this and wondering: Does Mirannon have some body beneath him thats head of damage control? And do they really really hate Mirannon's fiddling and upgrades for making its job harder?

I have this idea that Black Prince is really effective in combat until it takes some really hard hits and then sheer amount of stuff they've crammed into it means it takes the hits a lot harder than a regular ISD would have. But they're so good at avoiding those kind of hits that it doesn't often matter.

The way the department works, and I don't think this is too far out of the ordinary for most Star Destroyers, is that the chief engineer has two deputy chiefs, lower seniority Commanders or high seniority Lieutenant- Commanders, who rotate watches with him normally- although the chief is never not on call.

At condition one, battle stations, the chief runs things from the Machinery Control Room, otherwise known as Main Machinery-1, one of the deputies goes up to act as link- man on the main bridge, the other goes to the emergency bridge to manage damage control with the Executive Officer, whose battle station that is.

Central control has a relatively small staff in itself, controlling mainly metrology, workshops, liaison, comms and requisitions; and the pool of cross- trained talent used to head damage control and troubleshooting teams.

The next layer down are the function commands, Power, Thermal, Propulsion/Sublight, Propulsion/Hyper, Hotel Systems, Structure- each responsible for that aspect of the ship under the overall direction of Engineering-Command, and each department has a range of subdepartments tailored to it's particular duties- Power looks after the ship's reactors and fuel cells, so there would be watch and maintenance teams for each, containment specialists and power converter specialists and so on- essentially, across central and all subdepartments, you're looking at several thousand, around ten thousand even with the ship lean- manned, and damage control is mainly done by those not on watch when battle stations sounds.

Black Prince was overbuilt to begin with- one of the advantages of being license built by Corellian Engineering- and a lot of the adaptations were expanding to what the hull was capable of; she had an auxilliary engine shot out and one of the mains damaged, two turrets wrecked, one of the secondary reactors knocked out, damage to the auxilliary launch bay, part of the superstructure melted down, the upper half of the bridge tower blown out- considering what was being thrown at her at the time, even that probably does count at being good at avoiding hits. The shambolic patchwork of workarounds and bypasses is more or less balanced out by the talents of the crew- and the frequent practise they get.

I have to ask, because I've not been able to dig up any pics of em...what exactly is a pulsarwing?
Is that a variant on the xg-1 starwing?

My mental image of the Black Prince is something resembling a victory class with the side-wings, but substantially larger, with a hugely more prominent armament and without the ridiculous looking antennae all over the place.

Except painted in technicolor....


I really want to see a 3D model of the Black Prince now I'd have a go at making one, but my modelling skills are a bit shabby. Texturing ought to be as simple as getting a high res of a fractal and overlaying it on the hull though XD

---

"To the Rational mind, nothing is inexplicable, only unexplained"

The PulsarWing is a Starwing varient with a pair of 6 megaton light turbolasers:

Chapter 24b


ECR, back in Ch6 of part 1


Why would they 'step back' from the high rate longer range guns to the slower firing, heavier hitting mixed battery post-refit, especially since Lennart prefers the longer ranged engagements. Is the Black Prince's gun team that good?

Because against any enemy ship large enough to be a threat, they don't expect good results from pattern fire. For chasing down corvettes the high rate of fire is desirable- and realistically that's a lot of what Imperators do. Black Prince is unusual in having fought bigger ships often enough for that to matter. And against a bigger ship, the minimum-energy weapon that could hope to do any damage with single long range hits needs to be bigger. Hosing them down with an octuple 32 is pointless if all that gets you is occasional '32 bolts ringing off the enemy's screens; shots from a 175 might punch in and do damage even if you're less likely to score hits.



My old rule is that the area the target can dodge into scales with the fourth power of the round's time of flight; obviously this greatly favors beam weapons, and makes it very hard to truly saturate an enemy's maneuver envelope at long range.

Darn it Ruadhan2300. I was expecting an update.

no regrets crazedwraith

FYI, I've started putting together a 3D model of a star destroyer in Blender...I'll convert to Black Prince after the fact and see if I can't get together a technicolour texture-set for it too.

I know there's been a fair bit of description of her over the course of the story, but there's also been a lot of modification. what's the outward differences between BP and a standard Imperator?
I'm pretty sure the gun arrangement is that the eight super-heavies alongside the dorsal superstructure have been moved outwards into / and \ patterns so that they all can face forward for alpha-strike purposes, additionally another set of superheavies in a line in front of the dorsal superstructure. My mental image of them is rather ridiculously large scale, but I know they'd be much smaller.
Further turrets particularly in the rim trenches and at least a couple emplacements with firing arcs to cover the engine wash areas.

Do I rightly remember that the neck of the bridge-tower has been lowered?

I also have gravity-well generator blisters in my mental image, not totally sure why...may have been musing about the idea during the story a while back.

---

"To the Rational mind, nothing is inexplicable, only unexplained"

I was working on a doodle of Black Prince earlier, but never got around to finishing it; this might help you visualize your own.

http://fractalsponge.net/ISD/blpr/blpr6.jpg
http://fractalsponge.net/ISD/blpr/blpr7.jpg
http://fractalsponge.net/ISD/blpr/blpr8.jpg

First, another short update-


As the reports came in, the first thing Lennart did was sketch a decision tree in his minds’ eye. What where the possible objectives and the angles towards them? Save or allow the destruction of the tender- best to save. Even if it was a trap in its’ own right, if there were dubieties to be expected from the fleet support ship, that could be dealt with as a separate issue- and a mercenary-terrorist minefield did make it much easier to explain away if it became necessary to pop her.

Second- kill or capture? The minelayers contained a variable amount of information- might simply have been told go here, do this, no thinking, no questions- but they might know more than that or have figured out more than that. Taking them would be easier but for the obstacle of the minefield. Shoot it out, or get fancy? Fancy, if it could be done.


Four bomb squadrons, two just converted from TIE Twin-tubs to Starwings; they had been playing with them on Corellia, officially it was called training but who believed that old story, and they should be up to acceptable standard but this would be the first time it was for real. Three targets. Who to send? It was a good target set to let the converted ease in on, but they would need covered by the veterans.
Epsilon were the better bomber unit, but they were also by quite a long way the oddest; if something else happened they would be best to react to it, and the newer pair wouldn’t have the chance to learn bad habits. The Squadron Formerly Known As Delta, the other acclimatised heavy bomber unit, would be better- the lead element was already there.

Fighter cover? Yes- just in case. The Starwing was an excellent fighter as bombers went, better than most fighters- but there are light cheap zoombuggies out there, individually weak but superior credit for credit, that it would be deeply embarrassing to be shot by; there was very little in all the galaxy that stood anything like a chance against an Avenger.
Beta’s Starwings could put out enough EW to keep the pirates in check and prevent any untoward kaboom, the troop shuttles wouldn’t be needed to drop them completely before boarding, they could be sensibly held out of the space fight until it was time to deliver their boarding troops.

Of course, that was the captain’s solution. Let the man on point, the fighter wing rep on the bridge, develop their own plan, see what they came up with. Olleyri would have been moving already. They were, and had decided to do things slightly differently- commit one new and one older bomber squadron, and two squadrons of -1930m, apparently for their longer ranged, more powerful guns but actually because they wanted to try them out.


Same general plan, though- ionise and take the transports and use their control units to neutralise the minefield. They had organised it properly, decisive clear and logical- now to see what kind of bar the enemy set.
Not a massively high one, it seemed- the three light frigates were primarily fighter carriers, but much of their deck space had gone on mine pods and minelaying boats; they were carrying a squadron each, or less, drawn from that stew of third party designs that the TIE/ln had been designed to suppress and prey on. Zebras and Toscans and SupaFighters.
Four Imperial recon fighters, they could cope with; the duty flight from each had been called, they were launching now. The transports were, essentially, on the edge of the minefield, moving slowly and unrolling it behind them. Didn’t have the confidence in their own systems to lay it from the centre outwards then pass through it on their exit.


The three ready flights oriented themselves and headed for the Imperial fighters- no reason not to expect victory at those odds, at twelve to four. Twelve to forty-eight was a different story, as the rest of Beta and Theta squadrons jumped in, along with Delta- an Avenger unit, now; the two squadrons had basically swapped call signs, which promised to be interestingly confusing- and Eta, formerly an Interceptor unit who were enjoying themselves greatly.
Lennart did accept that much of the Empire’s general doctrine- avoid committing minimum force, wherever possible. Maximum force was much healthier for everyone involved except the target, and harming them was the point. Well, usually slightly qualified maximum; not so many that they got in each other's way, nor so many that there was no-one left to cover their backs in case the enemy got clever. Deploying two squadrons of Avengers and two squadrons of Starwings should be enough.


It turned out to be more than enough. The light fighters tried to scatter, were overrun and run down by the Avengers- a Zebra did try to make a head to head of it, but the Avenger he was trying to ram sidestepped and let his wingman make the kill. Another tried to shoot out one of their own mines to catch a pair of Imperial fighters in the blast- succeeded and died doing it, but actually achieved no more than flaying the shielding.

The three Interceptor- IV frigates brought up shields and point defence, started on yawing, evading courses away- they were fast for pirate frigates, but the Starwings had about a thousand gravities acceleration on them. It was actually a tactical mistake, although not one that mattered greatly; turning to run masked their defence guns, and the ion flare that would have served a larger ship well made little difference to the shielded recon bombers.


The bombers did not have to resort to missiles- not for what was still essentially an uprated freighter- rolling on and off target, scissoring behind the three fleeing pirate ships, searing long strings of blue ion bolts into them.
One of the pirate ships did try something fancy- rolling an antiship mine out of their flight bay. One of Beta's Starwings was fast enough to spear it with a laser pulse before it was fully emerged; but some of the flash reached in through the bay and exploded the rest.
The bomb group were well aware that they were chasing minelayers, that something of the sort could happen, there was little to no point pressing to point blank here. The blast still peeled back the shields of two of them, put enough energy through the shielding to damage and send home two more- but two was about the number of molecules of the Black Sun ship still attached to each other.


One of the others tried to go the same way; decided it would be less painful going out in a flash of light than being dragged through an Imperial torture chamber, or a Black Sun one if they lived long enough to need to explain their failure. They were literally better off dead.
Not the first time the wing had seen something like that done, though. The effective solution was, at first glance, mad; laser fire into the flight bay of the target. The trick to it was to aim for the 9 ring, effectively- blow out the pressure curtains, hit the walls of the bay, depressurise it, rake it with superheated shrapnel and blast waves of vapourised hull metals. Kill the crew without detonating the mines, hopefully anyway.
A shower of laser bolts slammed into the the rim of the bay, the starwings flipped end for end, thrusted away and doubled shields aft in case there was a kaboom- but there was none, just bodies and debris sucked out into the vacuum. That left two targets, soon fully ionised and paralysed, for the gunship-transports.


A bunch of criminal gangsters could be expected to be at least half way good at the old ultra-violence, an expression that always made QAG-111 wonder what infraviolence was supposed to be; the question was whether they were better at it than two companies of battle hardened maniacs in white armour.
Than line troopers, maybe, but against killers who had thrown the manual away, not enough of an edge- and what little individual superiorities they may have had were lost entirely in the fact that they were not a unit, certainly not a band of brothers.
Few of them fought each other, but none except a few personal connections coordinated, backed each other up. The stormtroopers' well established system of assaulters leading the way with volumes of suppressive fire, marksmen and sappers close behind, reserve squads to support or to catch leakers behind, was built for that.


A darkened ship with the gravity nonfunctional, life support shut down, the air being allowed to vent from the holes in the hull- on a civil-standard hull, what idiot went in through the hatches? Blow straight in through the outer plating, on or next to the likely strongest points of resistance.
The bridge on both surviving transports was the first; melt in next to it, rather than going through the accessways use an adjacent chamber- a ready room- to form up, blow down the bulkhead and if that wasn't enough, grenades- stun and frag indiscriminately.
Already in a state of chaos, the boarding team followed up charging into the smoke and confusion.


Some people would have been laying down indiscriminate sprays of fire- it often looked that way, but the enhanced vision gear built into the white helmet was better than that at picking out real targets from clutter.
The lasers tended to converge, as many caught sight of one target and snapshot at them; usually somebody hit. Move and shoot, dodge and weave, fight as a team, a unified whole, cover each other- duck to avoid the spray of fire from someone who thought two auto slugthrowers was a good idea; pause a beat for the heavy weapons man to nail him with a repeater burst-
spread out, give the rest of the team room to fight, remember the bayonet drill, comes in handy when a criminal idiot with a vibroclub tries to charge you down- be happy white armour is so easy to wash clean.

It was easier for the forensic teams to reconstruct from collateral damage than the doc to patch troopers back together, so if in doubt blow the kriff out of it; a mortally wounded prisoner that can be stopped from bleeding out or dying of shock long enough to answer questions is still a prisoner.
Don't shoot anything that's going to blow up, obviously, that was still very much a rule and the troopers in the main bay were having fun trying to flank or snipe the pirates hiding behind the mine pods, but it was a standpoint that horrified most transfers in, and took a lot of careful indoctrination. It could be hard teaching stormtroopers that they weren't expendable.


The boarders taking Engineering had a slightly different set of problems; they were going into a tight, close environment full of complex machines and bad people. Training paid off, though. Extensive spanner- fu had given many of them a thorough grasp of the human-destroying misuses of high tech power tools.
There was more than one 'you don't do it like that, you do it like this' as a professionally offended stormtrooper grabbed an ill- used item of ironmongery off one of the pirates and demonstrated how to wield it properly.
Again and again, essentially one against many as the pirates did their own thing- in blaster-lit darkness, without air or gravity- and were caught by troopers acting as a coherent unit.


Cardinal points taken, clear the rest of the ships; the hardest part of that was against the pirate fighter pilots and their ground crews. Not that they were anything really approaching great gunmen- in their dreams they may have been- but they were arrogant and aggressive enough to at least try to fight back.
One of the pirate ships had a flight of Gauntlets, with turreted lasers. Fighter guns were a bit much for use in corridor combat, but they had nothing to lose, so what the hell.
The stormtroopers returned fire, but they were outscaled- even the hits they got bounced or were absorbed by the particle shielding, where the fighter's lasers could blow through the interior plating of the pirate frigate, and did- red-orange deathflowers of bursting bolt and shrapnel chasing the stormtroopers as they fell back behind the solider bulkheads.


Time for another plan. If the boys in white can't get it done, send the men in black- in this case flight suit black, as one of the Starwings drifted sideways across the open hangar bay spitting ion pulses across the grounded Gauntlets.
Got three of them, electric arcs dancing across the rear of the bay from overkill- missing the mines; the other fighter of the element had to repeat, fought a brief gun duel with the last active pirate fighter- took and glanced a pair of bolts, got the hit.
That was really the last of the problems. Of roughly five hundred and fifty pirates, more than four hundred were dead and about half of those were just ramscoop fodder, only thirty had been taken intact.


Sixteen fighters, five tug-transports, two pirate frigates, and what to do with them? Gauntlets had been looked at for the bomb wing when they were re- equipping and reluctantly rejected; they would have been truly great fighter- bombers if they had only a better turn of speed.
As it was they pulled too few G, and it was exactly the turreted lasers and missile launcher that made them such effective killers that also burdened them and made them poor runners. On a larger frame and powerplant, maybe. The other fighters were worthless- using them as target drones was about the best that could be done.


As for the frigates, once they were stripped of as much of their datasystems as would be of intelligence value- easiest thing was to physically rip the computers out- there were only a couple of things to be done. They were worthless as prizes really; the mines they carried were the most valuable thing about them.
Some of the mines would be shot and blown up, others- the ones that responded to deactivation codes and actually verified on sensors as disarmed- the potentially most effective thing to do would be to use the assault boats' tractor beams to load the mines back on board the frigates, slave- rig the two of them, and jump them out to another spot of empty space to await developments. Having a couple of fireships standing by seemed only a wise precaution.
-----



Gunnery and the weapons fit; computer controlled gunnery is perfectly possible but not very effective, and I described a turret design somewhere- you probably remember where better than I do actually- as three rings one inside the other, the outer ring compensates for the motion of the firing ship, more or less automatically turning to keep the turret pointed at the same general area of sky; the slower and more finely graduated middle ring tracks the gross motion of the target- follows it on what seems to be its' base course; the slowest and most precise inner ring is the manually controlled one, and its' job and the job of the gunners is to predict the evasion of the target, watch how it moves, anticipate where it's going next and put shot in its' way. That's one theory, anyway.


The actual number of barrels in the gun fit hasn't changed much at all; post- refit load is four octuple 32's and two octuple heavy ion cannon, three quad 70's, three twin 175's and three single 320's, plus the four gravitic projectors (which are more or less two each side where the old brim trench quad guns on the Imperator-I were mounted, and do not bulge upwards- everything is below the upper slope of the hull, they're small, maybe 1.5x the footprint of a turret) more or less 40 equivalents, making...hm. Have to fit another gun on there somewhere, a 73- gun ship just doesn't sound right. Venator style artillery dish laser protecting the hangar bay?

Fractalsponge's model is right- there are no brim trenches, they've been faired over; some of the space gained by the extension is used to house the fighter squadrons displaced by the new secondary reactor, and the torpedo mounts are in there too, up towards the bow. Clusters of defence guns above and below the line of the rim, light turbolasers and fighter guns covering aft- not heavy weapons.

Nice chapter ECR. I was wondering how much trouble Black Prince was in. I would have though in normal circumstances three of the heaviest frigates would stand a chance troubling an ISD. But three light minelayers... obviously not so much, lol.



Ha ha. You're right. Given your the age-of-sail-y terminology you use for guns. The ISD as a 74 gun ship sounds perfect.

What about the pair of medium to heavy TLs next to the hanger bay?
http://www.theforce.net/swtc/isd.html#weaponry-hangar

Nice update, finaly somebody that uses fireships in a sci-fi setting.
So Mirrannon toke the weapons fit of those Gauntlets and the other small craft were taken onboard to be added to the ship her compliment, while turning the fighters they don't want into drones?

---

Nothing like the present.

Odd thought, if you beef up a gauntlet so its fast enough. Don't you bascially have a skipray blastboat?

I can kinda see it, but the comparison doesn't really hold up, IMHO. The Skipray is more of a gunship, with large magazines for its missiles and torpedoes and three heavy-duty ion cannon as its primary offensive weapons. It has a twin laser turret that always struck me as serving more of a PD role. Conversely, the Gauntlet is a starfighter with a turret. The turret makes it interesting in a dogfight, but it doesn't have nearly the firepower of a Skipray, and probably won't be able to carry more than a fraction of the blastboat's warhead load (stock Skipray has 18 conc. missiles and 12 torps). I don't know what the durability of a Gauntlet is like, but think I read somewhere that blastboats are supposed to be lubriciously tough.

---

The point is, they're on the good side, they're a group of (usually) non-heroes, and they are AWESOME.
So... what do you call them?
Easy.

Rangers.
(TV tropes on Rangers)

Why not the spinal-mount superlaser that was mentioned?

I didn't want to dive into that technical discussion until I ahd a story post ready to go too- and I do now, so this is it.


The first thing to emerge from hyperspace at the rendesvous point was what was supposed to be the fleet tender's escort, the Vainglorious- class frigate Nerveless. (Most of the good names- ruthless, relentless, fearless and so forth, were already taken.) In fact her crew most usually called her the Brainless.

Mounting five single forties, the Vainglorious class were assembled- converted- by the procedurally simple expedient of filleting a Dreadnaught heavy cruiser, in all reality actually a medium frigate despite what the marketing department had to say.

Rip off the outer skin and most of the weapon and shield mounts, remove the habitation blocks, haul out the primitive, enormously manpower- intensive reactors, the absurly antique- looking low spec hyperdrive motivators, most of the power grid, the bioarcana of the very, very old school life support system;

replace the power and drive systems with modern equivalents, update the life support to something suitable for this millennium and for the size of the crew, seal the thing up and add better guns and shields, without bothering to add any of the soft tissue back.

The result was a much more credible combat vessel, but it was probably about as expensive as a new- built heavy frigate anyway. The main benefit was the removal of a shambolic old clunker from the fleet lists and the availability for other employment of the thirteen thousand spacemen a Dreadnaught needed but a Vainglorious did not.


Which was just as well, considering that the local force she hailed from was suffering a remarkably high friendly fire casualty rate at the moment, at least among the upper echelons.

Anoat sector was basically barren wilderness, dubious habitability but mineral rich- possibly the result of too many novae about a million years ago. The sector group was largely notional, far below nominal strength, and mainly there to stop the various gas miners and other resource extractors from sabotaging each other.

Also to stop the Alliance getting a foothold in the sector. Oops. Heads had already rolled- as usually tended to happen after a lightsabre decapitation- and more were liable to, as the top command of the sector frantically tried to save their skins by blaming each other.

The normal pyramids of patronage, of cronies, toadies, bootlickers and butt- kissers, were coming apart, and nobody quite knew what to do. Ol' Brainless was either quite lucky to be out of it and doing something useful for the heavies from Coruscant, or thought they were until they got the details.


Piett had arranged it himself, certainly not out of affection for his hated half- brother's lunatic friend but because it would undermine Ozzel, move a shade nearer to getting rid of the blundering fool.

Not that he really wanted the top job himself- being Vader's flag captain was bad enough- but having almost anyone other than Can't-Do Kendal Ozzel in nominal charge could only make his job easier. So embarrass him by making his own plan work where the harrassed, wits' end nominal commander of the squadron himself could not.

That might at least get Ozzel administratively transferred out rather than spread thinly over the bridge decking, which was otherwise his most likely fate. The next major operation was always going to be make or break time for the tubby, neurotic little man, and if it had been wise to place bets Piett- the tall, skinny neurotic one- would have bet on his breaking.

Not that the flag captain particularly wanted the admiral dead, or for that matter had any strong opinions the other way, but definitely would have preferred him out of the loop where the mistakes Ozzel was making could no longer compromise his own chances of survival. Accidentally doing Jorian Lennart a favour was regrettable but a small price to pay.

Besides which, there was always the chance that it would all go entertainingly wrong.


The radiation blooms of the mines were fading away, and the fighters present had got bored and started chasing each others' tails- literally, there were several mock dogfights in progress. Nothing better to do; the shooting gallery had been shot, the frigates rigged and pointed at somewhere unimportant and off to the left a bit. Might as well shake it out.

One thing none of the fighters had was a serious translight sensor capability; they were all hyperdrive capable, could find their way on the other side of the barrier, but real to hyperspace sensing was done basically by hooking an oscilloscope up to the motivator and watching for induced twitches.

They could detect a mass shadow in open space fairly close to- maybe a light year off, but given the size of open space that still basically meant you had to guess where the enemy was going to be, and could sense only really far enough to confirm it. In the strong curvature and noise of a system, it was harder.

A larger ship like one of the -1930's could basically use it's fuel tanks as a tachyonic cloud chamber, but even a jump capable fighter's fuel pods were too small for that. All in all the sensing capacity was closer to a warning receiver than a real scanner; still possible to tell when something was going to emerge on top of you, though.

Actually, two somethings. Two incoming mass shadows, and a moment's prediction- what idiot had given them exactly the same coordinates for the emergence point? One or other of them would have to be quite quick about manoeuvring clear. Assuming they didn't arrive at exactly the same time.


That was the problem with being in the middle of nowhere; there was nothing around that could be used, for instance, as a handy mass shadow generator. They probably didn't have enough- or for that matter any- tractor beam power between them. Oh well. Have to improvise.

Senior officer present with the bomb and fighter wings was Quarrin Vattiera; moved up from exec to commander on Olleyri's retirement behind a staff desk (which was apparently driving him nuts), he had been the officially sensible one as the group adjutant, and could still do the 'procedure' thing.

The plan amounted to see who came out first, and yell at them. Not going to be much in it as the two mass shadows raced each other to the drop point; distortion building, flare of light- not a massive one, larger and less neat than it should have been but not in the class of a fleet tender.

On the bridge of HIMS Nerveless, things were going from bad to worse. They emerged back into realspace, erratic exit with sidespin, and found no ship waiting for them, just a large force of fighters in the middle of nowhere, scanning them- the ship's EW and ECM systems were in theory quite good, but elementary mistakes were indeed made.


If they ever really had been at their best, it wasn't now. think of it This way; your boss has screwed up, spectacularly. His boss has been executed, put to death, gone and splattered for it. His boss blamed someone else way above your head, who you report to. He wants to save his skin, he's looking around for somebody to put the blame on.

Now this. How much was actually your fault- how much can you defend? Do you have a good enough excuse to save your life? Can you avoid the blame your superior officers are trying to lay on you, can you at the same time make your junior officers (who now hate and far you, they can see what's going on and wonder whch of them you'll choose to try to sacrifice)- do enough to actually save your skin?

In a fleet composed of cannibals, how do you manage to be one of the ones who doesn't get eaten?

That was the only good part about human high culture; it made that metaphorical instead of literal. HIMS Nerveless' bridge team were not a team any more, they were a collection of rivals, none of them prepared for this, none of them on sure professional footing any more. Stress like that was how capable officers were ruined and turned into dead weight, burdens for the rest. Piett had chosen them for that.


They assumed that the ninety-six Imperial type fighters in front of them, broadcasting Imperial beacon codes, trying to contact them on Imperial frequencies, where they were supposed to be rendesvousing with an Imperial destroyer- it was a rebel trick, it had to be. They were very sneaky, rebels.

Instant fight or flight; the wrong decision was death. The right decision slowly was death at the hands of one's own side. No-one trusted anyone enough to simply let them get on with it, none willing to depend on each other's judgement, everything turned into a clash of personalities. The captain, trying to hold them all together, had everyone else's neuroses to support too- he was closest to the edge.

Going to battle stations on emergence wasn't that unusual a move- too late, if anything- and included doing some useful things, like getting some way on, accelerating away from the drop point, and bringing up sensors and internal systems. So far do good, but- waitamoment, guns heating up, and no com traffic? No response?

The energy pattern from the ship was, in a word, shambolic; rough hyperdrive exit, uneven neutrino bleed, residual hotspots, magnetic signatures indicated people getting to their duties in a loose gaggle and no real order; not looking good so far, Vattiera was thinking- fire control online and bearing direct? That goes past simple incompetence.


'Pull back out of gun range. I don't think they have their crud together at all.' Brainless was showing every sign of living up to her nickname; all gun fire control sensors- that were working anyway- went active, even the five mains.

They weren't a threat; a wizard of anticipation like Pel Aldrem might be able to connect with a gnat with the million pound dreckhammer, but if this lot were to perform at the level of skill they had demonstrated so far they probably couldn't hit the broad side of a star. Even so, better not give them the chance to try.

The old Dreadnoughts had a large array of anti- corvette guns, heavy for chasing fighters with but they could do a decent grid shoot at range; the Vainglorious class had better point but much weaker area defence, the threatened radius was not large. It was easy enough to pull back out of the danger zone.

Stopping the bomb and fighter wings going and looking for trouble was the hard part, even if he had at gut level actually wanted to. The few that had been acquired returned locks on the frigate; then their friends and squadronmates backed them up. If I don't cool this down we probably are going to end up launching on the idiot, Vattiera realised.

'Group, hold fire. Local force frigate, we are elements of the 721st Strike Wing; stand down-' and then it did occur to him that weirder things had indeed happened- 'or we will be forced to consider you a rebel vessel.'


On board Nerveless, things were not shaping well at all. On emergence, in the middle of nowhere that should have been completely empty space, maybe a blastboat with a "follow me" sign, there had been a horde. Com- scan couldn't actually have taken the time to verify before making the snap decision that they were Rebel fighters, it was an ambush.

Large numbers of deep space fighters- had to be Rebel. The sector group was being filleted for failures to contain such things already; doctrine even suggested that it was better to suffer a few friendly fire casualties from time to time than let the enemy deceive you.

Even if they had made a mistake- it may have been too late to admit it. Better err on the side of caution- and of doctrine- than look a complete fool which was a short route to an interview without recaff, but with lightsaber. They had to be hostile. The Rebs used stolen Imperial fighters often enough, didn't they?

There was some shouting on the bridge- the junior scan officers protesting that they were about to commit friendly fire, which was rather less important than just short of five hundred concussion missiles and over seven hundred and fifty standard B torpedoes which could be coming the other way if they got it wrong.

Most of the crew hadn't the faintest idea what was going on; the scuttlebutt was flying fast, talk about mixed metaphors, all they knew was that battle stations had been sounded, and a fair proportion of those who knew did not care.

Gunnery were probably the least disenchanted, and they were the ones who could actually see out; all they were getting was green blips, though- a large loose formation of Imperial type fighters with ID transponders that verified as being on their side, no valid targets.

That could be manually overridden, of course, and on some ships it would have been by now, but the automatics' reluctance bought the humans a shred more thinking time. Vattiera took the sensible option first- call the parent ship. 'We've got a problem- the escort frigate has misidentified us as a rebel strike force. Weapons active, no shooting yet but imminent.'


Lennart fielded that one himself. 'Plan A, calm them down- we can't conduct replenishment ops with a berserk frigate bouncing about. Do what you can to talk sense into them, we're sending a message drone.'

to Ob Wathavrah, he asked 'What's working, if anything?'

'Torpedoes.' The gunnery officer stated. 'New off the shelf, we haven't had a chance to bugger about with them yet, should be functional. The grav projectors, assuming the state they're in counts. We haven't worked up a doctrine for playing with both of them together yet but we can probably improvise.'

'Practically our motto. Expect long range if it comes to that, our shielding in this state.' Turned to com- scan. Thinking about it afterwards, he decided that at this point he had made a mistake; used to thinking in split seconds, not considering how long the decision cycle on a ship in poor order might be. Accidentally applying more pressure than he had intended.


The shouting match on board Nerveless had reached a peak; the exec had made it to the emergency bridge in the after part of the ship, decided that what they were facing was indeed an Imperial fighter group. Odd verging on lunatic, which probably made it all the more important not to annoy them.

Captain had passed through anger into denial; was still saying that it couldn't be, that they had to be rebels, but he was more or less now pleading with fate. Then their parent ship intervened.

'Nerveless, this is Black Prince Actual- what the kriff do you think you're playing at drawing down on my fighter wing? Explain yourself now, and it had better be good.' That was the voice transmission. The text accompanying it said the same thing in proper naval language- at least, formal naval language.

It as the voice transmission that mattered, though, and that was the sound of an angry man perfectly capable of returning ill for ill. The authenticators, the identifiers checked out- they were famous, for that matter.

On the other hand, Black Prince Actual was also a notorious looney. Nerveless' captain lunged for one of the gunnery consoles on the bridge, intending to override and fire. Possibly thought of it as a last attempt to uncover the ruse; Imperial fighters, if they really were, would evade. Rebels, once firedon and their cover blown, would attack.


For once the ship was lucky, in a peculiar sense of the term. If he had got a shot off that actually hit or came close to hitting one of the fighters, Vattiera would have called for torpedo return fire. Defend your own and be damned to the rest of the fleet, would have been the thinking, if any. Nerveless was, however, lucky. Some of the fighter wing had noticed an imminent bow shock; that was when the tender chose to arrive.

Huge spheres-within-frame thing, five module heavy tender- three fuel, a stores container rack and a workshop that was almost a dockyard bay in its' own right; descended from hyperspace just as Nerveless' increasingly panicked commander managed to wrestle his way past the surprised gunner and get a shot off.

Impacted on part of the framework around no 2 fuel pod. There was a horrible long frozen moment when everyone waited to see how serious the damage was, if there would be a rupture, a cascade, if the incredible error could have equally incredible consequences.

From one of the main guns, could have happened. From a heavy fighter- class laser, not quite, not that spectacularly unlikely. Certainly the dromedary noticed though; started screaming that they were under attack from a rebel frigate.

Before the fleet level com circuits could explode in angry cross-traffic, Nerveless' executive officer had the sense to signal 'This is Nerveless- we have had a negligent discharge, we are loyal to the Empire but have suffered a negligent discharge, we are standing down.' The emergency bridge crew, aided by the chief engineer, managed to power down the ship's weapons, anyway.


Lennart was thinking that this could be a blessing in disguise, could be used to tie up and solve one loose end. 'Got a bleedoff jump worked out yet?' He asked Brenn, as if the answer wasn't going to be yes- question was how many.

'This is the best one.' A two stage move to the final RV, the first to over a quite credible small outpost of TaggeCo- Lennart didn't like them anyway- and the second to the actual final rendesvous point, where they would do the fuelling and software engineering.

The first run was likely to end in a big stupid energy flare, so might as well have it happen close to- but not directly on top of, they weren't actually trying for kills- somebody who could cope with a little rebel attention. The final point had been within the search cone earlier anyway, so it was clean.

'We have somewhere else to go in the meantime- there's that brainless idiot of a frigate captain to sort out. Send squadrons Epsilon, Theta, Alpha and Eta to the final RV directly, and give those as the coordinates to the dromedary. Jump to point D1 for bleedoff, then to point A, signal the multirole to go to A.'

Order given and executed; no sense catching the fighter group in what promised to be a quite spectacular explosion- this time the wing remembered to fire off a probe droid to be there before they arrived and record it all. "For telemetry," they said. The outpost crew panicked and ran for the shelters, but by that point they were already away again.

There was another one of the guest quarters occupied, by someone who had spent far too long brooding and had too much to think about. A knock on the door.

'Commander Raesene? Good. How do you feel about going back to the line, taking over command of a Vainglorious- class frigate?'




------------------------------------------

Right, the techno- bit; the reason I keep going on about Gauntlets is that they carry their torpedo launcher in the turret too, it's not fixed forwards. They don't have to "stay on target", they can effectively do drive- by shootings with it, fire from any angle- would have made potting the exhaust port trivial, really, and most precision strikes much easier. Problem is they're even slower than a Y-wing, they turn with more life in them than a B-wing but otherwise pretty similar. That's the drawback; they can dodge ship and station defensive fire with ease, but the defending fighters can catch them. Skiprays have LTL class ion cannon fixed forward, which is- hm.

Two things I have been playing about with, one of them Pad Factors. Much blog- reading has convinced me that this is how the real world does it- the footprint of one fairly standard aircraft, spacecraft in this case, becomes standardised as one pad factor, and you judge how many you can fit on board and how to park them and manoeuvre them from that. I think in the USN now, one pad factor= the deck footprint of one F/A-18.

I haven't done that. Something like, but not exactly. I made the assumption that one Pad= one 20x20m square and calculated accordingly, only worked out a couple of ships in full but it gets interesting.

A line- standard Imperial Star Destroyer, with the late- period complement wing of three /ln, two /sa and one /int squadron, takes up ten pad factors for its' fighter wing.
The ground force vehicle complement, assuming no oddities, the standard twenty-five AT-AT, thirty AT-ST, takes up 15.83 pad factors- and five landing barges between them take up 11.25, so 27.08 for stompers and dropships. Interesting comparison of how much each matters. Both are dwarfed by space to space transport, the collection of assault boats, transports and shuttles that the things carry- which pads out at a rather more impressive 49.25.

Of a grand total of 86.33 pad factors, the fighter wing takes up ten, and space assault just less than fifty. Hm.

The old Venator class, I may need to redo because I got the dimensions of one of the fighters wrong, doing it on the hoof- but on the assumption that you could always park some on their tails or something, the Venator's space to space payload takes up just over sixty pad factors- with the eta-2 Actis, sixteen squadrons, taking up one pad factor per squadron (less than some single space transports), the sixteen squadrons of longer thinner Nimbus slightly less, but near enough- just under fifteen and a half- and the three squadrons of ARC-170s taking up almost as much space as both of them combined, at 30.5 pad factors. No wonder they didn't last in Imperial service, utter spacehogs on the flight deck.

The rebel alphabet soup scarcely does better- a three squadron Rebel wing, two of X and one of Y, flying from a Mon Cal cruiser take up 13.5 pad factors. Bloody Incom, bloody wingspans, have none of these people ever looked at a carrier, grumble grumble, etc. Basically they take up so much space on deck they come pre- outnumbered even in what should be a straight fight.

Black Prince's deployables? Pad factors of 27 for fighters, bombers and multirole, 60.5 for space transport, 8 for space to surface, 182 for assorted ground vehicles a sixth of which is artillery. Workshops, crew quarters, fuel and ordnance bunkers, etc have been left unacalculated in the interests of fudge factoring.

---

"I beseech thee, In the bowels of God, think it possible that you might be wrong."
-Oliver Cromwell to Parliament, 1647
"It is good to keep an open mind; but not so open that your brains fall out." Attributed to James Oberg

Did Piett know that the Nerveless' commander was...well....an idiot? If I followed the story, the Nerveless was supposed to greet the Black Prince, but the Captain and com/scan decided to get jumpy and fire on a superior friendly force.

Nerveless' 1iC may have been expecting an ISD, not 8 squads of fighters and no ISD

Hm. I actually started drafting a reply, then realised my answer read better if it was actually in the main text- edited to account for those points. I overdid it and underexplained it, should read more logically now, more of a tragedy than a farce.


The other technothing I was kicking around was Mirannon's attempts at fighter design; trying to do that in character is actually harder than it sounds.
Clean slate version one basically consisted of a ring- shaped thruster, a doughnut- shaped main reactor module, pilot pod, sensors and things in the space forward of that in a more or less fluted egg shaped hull- around the spinally mounted main gun, running through the holes in the ring and the doughnut.
About fifty metres long, twenty metres maximum beam. Thinking so far out of the box, he had decided that the ideal armament for a "fighter" was a single mount of the standard 32 teraton main guns usually mounted in octuple turrets on the Imperator-II. Or at least pretended to.

After much waving of dictionaries and pointing at of pictures, and considerable discussion as to what the word "starfighter" actually meant, saner versions would have occurred. Most of the design line he came up with actually standardise on a single engine type, what he picked as optimum, a corellian bar- type combined power and thrust pod; two, three and four engined designs each in light, medium and heavy versions. All of them probably good pilots' spacecraft, but none less than a maintenance nightmare. His definitions of "light", "medium" and "heavy" still need work, too.

Weird. I'd got the impression before that the Vainglorious was a rebel conversion/design.

Nice scene, a vivid example of the bad influence of Vader's command style. It's not just the flag officers and captains that have to worry. It's extends all the way down.

I think that's assuming the higher ups live long enough to pass the blame on.

Remnant, you know that onboard todays aircraft carriers a plane needs three times it's own space?
If this also goes for the Venator......

Then she has some mean deck space, what with her ability to carry that many (winged) small craft.
Bet this is why they shifted to Tie's, Tie's need to hang from launch-racks and thus can be pulled true the maintainence(?) & refueling stations, which let them to concentrate them all together and thus lowering their overal foot-print, since you would need less sets to keep all the fighters going.
Also, don't forget the hyper-ring from the Eta-2 their foot-print, even if they are stacked when not in use.

---

Nothing like the present.

Very short update first, following directly on-

He had been thinking about it- where to go, what to do next. Being on board this ship while she was being refitted, the noise and business and sheer navalness of it all happening around him, had made him nostalgic. Wasn't quite HIMS Obdurate, the crack frigate he had previously commanded- but still, a command.

If he wanted it. Didn't have to do much thinking about it at all actually, but did wonder why Lennart thought he did- or why the Captain of the Line thought he might be safe to trust with it. He looked older, actually; few more grey hairs there, heavier weight sitting on his shoulders. Hm.

'What's likely to happen to her?'

'After a drumhead board of inquiry, likely be standing by while we and the tender do the software engineering, then join in the hunt for escaping Rebels, then back to whatever normal shakes itself out to be for Anoat sector...and that wasn't actually the question, was it.' Lennart stated.

'No.' Raesene confirmed. 'I think the question is knowing what you do, why do you still want to serve the Empire- and primarily you're asking yourself that, and using me as a pilot fish.'


'I'm far from the only one.' Lennart said, admitting it, 'and some of us have already come to answers that promise to pose- hm, call them practical difficulties. Might as well put it plainly, then- Palpatine is the head of the cult of the dark side, and is running the empire essentially on the principles of the dark side. Such as they are.'

Raesene thought about his answer, then said 'When I was trying to make sense of what I was finding, I did a lot of rooting around history- and the Republic really was, is, more vegetable than animal. It only grows, lives up to its' potential, when it's pushed by the threat of the dark side. That's not an answer, it's just context.'

He could see Lennart thinking; I should be above blinding glimpses of the obvious like that by now, but evidently not. I know that fact, knew that, but somehow never put it centre stage and treated it with the seriousness it deserved.

Carried on, 'The Republic that emerges from all of this, at the end of the civil wars, might be worth something- probably still be called the Empire- but the old version, or the alliance to restore it? No.

Given that we're still in for turbulent times ahead, I can't think of a better place to weather them from, or a place that gives me more leverage to make a difference and perhaps do some good with, than the bridge deck of an Imperial warship.'

'Good. That's the answer I was hoping for.' Lennart said, and seemed to mean it. 'Now if I can only get some of my own crew to believe that. This-' handing over a datapad- 'is Nerveless' statement of condition, you can read up on the flight over.'



-------------
On the subject of pads, bay space and the priorities they reflect, Actis, Nimbus and Aethersprite (which can all accept booster rings) are all tiny tiny fighters, dimensions more like WW1 than modern aircraft- seriously; they're all smaller than the Sopwith Camel. They could probably be parked and maintained like cars, do simple things like inspection, parts and small module replacement in the parking bay, trundle them out to the maintenance bay for overhaul and major repair.
The pad factor is anyway an index number, that could be multiplied out to account for maintenance and manoeuvring volume, but there's a very large elastic fudge factor in there, which is how much maintenance they need. There are a couple of real world historic types, from the early jet age, that managed to achieve the ugly record of one thousand maintenance hours per flying hour. Twelve people working twelve hours a day for one hour a week in the air; not good enough, is it? Most successful SW types should be better than that.

A couple of types that have risen in my estimation, and a couple that have fallen; B- wings turn out to be surprisingly storable, folding up neatly into less deck space than the Y- wing, but the Gauntlet actually turns out to buy it's capabilities at a high cost in mass and volume, being awkward to find deck room for. The ARC-170, as previously mentioned, is a real white elephant- you could come close to fitting an entire squadron of Actis in the deck space one of them requires. (Without the booster rings, which I reckon must be stored dismantled, and bolted together when required.)

The Assault Transport is a similar disappointment- the blasted things are enormous. Six times the footprint of the Stormtrooper Transport, for some improvement but nothing like that much, not enough to justify the Tarkinesque bloatedness of them. The DX-9 stormtrooper transport, considering what a neat package it actually is, starts to look like the true and improved successor to the LAAT, surface-to-deep-space, go anywhere do anything. Some changes to Black Prince's small craft wing may follow on the basis of that.