[b][i]ED Explorer, Terminus system[/i][/b]

“I think we’re done!” Casei hollered form the bay she was occupying, shutting down the paintbrush and looking over her work. Since the formation of the alliance, the OEP on the Explorer has grown a few heads, mostly Narix pilots and engineers. It was then that the two groups started an unofficial arms’n’tech race, each using the combined technological base to develop prototypes of each class of strikecraft, interceptor, superiority and heavy fighters, as well as tactical and strategic bombers. And Casei and her engineers have just finished work on the last one.

Walking out of the walled off rack, she looked on the visualizations of the Faira designs and couldn’t wait to see what the pilots could do with them.

“Almost done.” Lindus hollered over the paintbrush. “And finished.” he came out of his evil genius’ workshop. “Might have to refill your paint stores, there’s a reason we’re not allowed to customize our ships too much.”

Since the alliance was formed, tensions dissipated and tech sharing fully started, the Explorer’s hangars looked someone let children run a candy factory, much to the dismay of the engineers swamped by requests and wishes of the pilots. Now, he stood among five strike craft, weird bastard children of Narix and Faira, all five of them. He’s just finished painting the heavy fighter.

“Well, shall we go all at once, or one by one to get the tension up? Should there be betting?” Casei grinned wildly.

“What have you to bet? Last I checked, you still don’t have a currency of your own, your food’s bloody awful, and I still don’t understand your playing cards.” Lindus returned fire with a toothy grin of his own. “Unless the Meteors come equipped with a stash of edible livestock no one told me about?”

“You can take me to see your home and I’ll whack a few of the colossal monsters you eat for you!” Casei challenged. “So, shall we ascend the weight scale then?”

“What’s colossal about waist height? But now that you bring up home, I do need a new fence around a property I bought last year. It’s just 900 meters of corrugated steel and razor wire. Sure, interceptors first. It’s your ship, let’s see what you’ve come up with.”

Smirking and tapping the controls on the first rack, the door slid to the floor and a hydraulic arm extended forward a craft that would have been a bit similar to the standard Faira fighter drone, only a bit elongated and with a bit more armor on. “Yeah, this one is a win for you in sophistication no doubt, I don’t even need to see it, but this thing costs nothing to build, can be built in two hours from raw material, and what better way to escort a large ship and shoot down bombs than having many, many of them?” Casei explained her thinking behind the design. The entire thing was compactly packed, and yet still modular enough to be serviced by the support ships. It had fixed mounts, but was agile enough to target even the smallest and dodgiest of missiles.

“And you expect me to cry out in joy at the mention of the ship being buildable in two hours and its strength being numerical superiority?” Iris half chuckled. “While I see the point, your description of the ship certainly doesn’t inspire confidence. Perhaps this role would be best left to the drones?”

“I’ll be honest, I have an AI capsule in it rather than the cockpit variant.” Casei smirked knowingly.

“We’ve come up with this.” the rack opened, revealing a small fighter with a joined wing at the back. “Wing is there for mounting ordnance and heat radiation. Big engine in the back for accelerating, RCS in every direction for maneuvering, translation and precise movement, such as docking. Cockpit in the middle, with the front housing most avionics as well as four fixed weapon hardpoints, accessed by these hinged panels.” He pointed out a marked panel beside two large holes near the nose. “Life support is integrated into the pounchout capsule, main drive and power core are joined in a sort of a power pack. Little back heavy.” he finished.

“It looks like… a sports shuttle.” Casei smirked, “Don’t get me wrong, I want one, just not for getting shot at. The wing doesn’t seem to be too structurally sound under fire though.”

“In a way, it is. We built it for speed and maneuverability. The wing lived through some small calibre fire, AP munitions and two or three plasma bolts from your drones, but disintegrated when hit with a 75 mm. No wonder, those are meant for bombers and turrets.”

“We tried to go for internal hardpoints, but we’re still getting our bearings straight with your reactors, they take up more space than we’re used to.” one of the Narix engineers explained, “Also, heat management was a problem, hence the wing. Hardpoints were an afterthought and could be changed.”

“I solved the heat by using a small reactor and a large battery.” Casei smirked at the cheekiness of her solution, “I thought, Interceptor’s combat deployment is only about thirty minutes anyway, but even then, it can last on the battery for forty. And then, the battery is a module like all other subsystems. Just dock with the mothership or a support ship, swap in ten seconds, go go go.”

The engineer nudged Iris in the ribs. “There’s a method to her madness.” the Narix shared a chuckle. “It would reduce mass a bit as well, but the drive is still a beast, even at half burn. Perhaps we can try that with the next prototype and see where that takes us. Shall we move on?”

“Enter, number two. Dedicated space superiority fighter is a new thing to us, so don’t spare any criticisms.” The fighter was larger, with a small profile from the front and sides and boasted four full engines, two facing back and two forward. “More power for the reverse thrusters granting it better maneuverability along the Y axis as well as shorter braking distance. Cockpit roughly between the reverse thrusters, followed by the reactor and engine assemblies. Again, liftless wings to aid in cooling it down, with a variable tilt so it doesn’t take up as much space when stored. Three pivoting primary hardpoints, one internal missile bay on the bottom. As with the previous ship, life support is part of the punchout capsule as they share the same module. Avionics in the front, fuel wherever we could fit it, granting it long flight time. Missile bay can be removed and replaced with additional fuel or a sensor pod for recon.”

“Superiority is the middle way to go, something you would give a rookie to learn, and something a veteran would pick if intel was hazy. I would have put a dual secondary weapons system on it myself, this means that if you want a sensor pod, you can’t get missiles. I don’t know how to feel about that. How did you solve maneuverability, and how many degrees of freedom does it have?” the faira engineer inquired.

“The ship carries its own sensor suite, the additional pod is a poor man’s AWACS or long-range recon. With the pod, it can also function as a dedicated electronic warfare ship. Also, none of your current fighters have missiles, so I’d still call it an upgrade. It can move in six directions and rotate along three axes using maneuvering thrusters, is that what you’re asking?”

“Yes, full range then, good. How fast can it accelerate with the thrusters, is it docking speed, or can it be used, say, to dodge?” The Faira asked, hinting a little at what her design would contain. She spared the remark about an upgrade no thought, they were told to build the best machine they could come up with, and so she did.

“Dodge what and at what range? Nothing with a pilot in it is outmaneuvering a missile. Main drives are of course enough to get you out of trouble, the maneuvering thrusters will do about 4 m/s2.”

“Dodge what you have that will leave you the smallest reaction time at optimal range. My turn.” the Faira grinned, revealing their fighter. It was a slim thing still, albeit larger in height than the Narix counterpart. The cockpit was sunk back, with four engine pods in a plus arrangement extended forward, each sporting a ball mounted thruster that could point in any direction. On the X-line of symmetry were four smaller missile banks, with the guns mounted on the same planes but closer to the center axis. “My thinking was, if you can accelerate the same amount in any direction, you could dodge most incoming fire without needing to turn so much that you would lose target lock. That reacquisition could cost you up to three seconds. Other than that, we went for maneuverability over integrity still, focusing mainly on primary gun fire.”

“What was it you’ve said on day one? Something about thrust vectoring being unnecessary?” Lindus said, pointing at the thrusters. “Easier to hit, too. Heat management and ordnance?”

“It is unnecessary when coupled with other means of reorientation. This design relies on the thrust vectoring to do everything. Ordnance is tailored to anti-fighter role, but secondaries can catch an interceptor after some training and primaries have enough punch to kill a heavy. Heat management has been balanced carefully though, we’ll have to see how an actual flight test will do. Might need to enlarge the sinks a little, they are on the back.” Casei pointed to two fins sticking out of the rear. “There is a LN2 tank for short bursts of overcooling.”

“Like the armament. The nozzles may be a little problematic for deck crews, but we’ll see. Move on to your heavy fighter?”

Casei looked at her engineers proudly and with a big shit eating grin, and the engineers grinned right back. “Oh well…” The door slid down and revealed what initially looked like an enlarged version of the interceptor in general shape. On second look, one would notice two small scale torpedo banks on the rear, albeit they looked like they were facing sideways rather than forward. There was one smaller bank under the nose for conventional rockets, and the thing had eight primary mounts, four on the sides of the nose, and four in two pivoting pods to the side. The thing was clad in heavy armor on top of a shield, that when looking on the number of emitters was geared to be very powerful in the front quadrant. The most bizzare thing was a large superstructure underslung under the fighter. All in all, the thing looked hideous, but menacing.

“What?” someone uttered.

“There’s a lot of stuff going on here. And what’s the scaffolding beneath it? An OTH radar?”

“Show them!”

Casei was happy to oblige. Tapping the controls, the fighter came to life. The superstructure beneath unfolded into a set of reverse-bent legs, the pivoting pods extended out a little and the torpedo tubes hinged to face forward, turning the fighter into a mech. Before she said anything, Casei wanted to see the look on the Narix faces.

“Someone get a dictionary and explain what a fighter is. Of what use is this going to be, really? It’s complicated and serves little purpose than perhaps a tech demonstrator. Even if you get it planetside, these vehicles are horribly unstable, we’ve tried. As for space, just dead mass.”

“Oh, believe me, we simulated against everything you have, and against everything we have come up with, and this thing always came on top if used properly. We’ve designed a special missile for the pods, we’re calling it the longbow. It outranges anything you supplied twice. In the initial salvo, one wing of these can wipe out two squadrons or disarm an unshielded cruiser. The two pods act as turrets in fighter mode, giving you more survivability if you are outnumbered and your two is busy. Finally, eight primary mounts will strip off an Ancient fighter’s shield in one or two hits.” Casei boasted, “And trust me, I’ve seen your exo suits before you met us. No wonder you couldn’t hack it. Watch.” she said as she climbed into the cockpit, running the mech mode strikecraft around at reasonable speed, making it jump off of a few walls and jet over a distance quickly. “Couple this with a re-entry level frontal quadrant shield, and you have something that can fight on the frontline in any area, and all of them at once. Situation on the ground going bad? Nevermind, just reroute some fighters form the orbit to support the troops. They can even do their own CAS if piloted by a psychokinetic trained for it.”

“And they’re done for once something hits a leg. Or you run into bad terrain. That’s the reason we didn’t field any walkers in the end, even the quadrupedal ones, along with the aforementioned complexity. Plus they make a big target for any schmuck with a PAVS, although the shield changes that to some extent. At least this seems to be easy to control.”

“And by your own admission, they require a special type of missile you have to supply or produce on-site. Removing that missile also removes one of the apparent major selling points. Its simulated effectivity also depends on your use of our equipment, specifically your correct use of it. And on the subject of reentry-level shield - can it then get back up on its own and have enough fuel left to still be useful?”

“As for rerouting fighters from orbit, normal fighters can do that as well, and...” the engineer paused, “...who was it that said something along the lines of ‘I wouldn’t bother with atmospheric capability’?” He snapped his fingers. “Right, you.” The engineer was not fond of agreeing upon design guidelines and than breaking them without changing the specs. “Even the Halberd, the space superiority ship, could be easily modified to fly in the atmosphere, just switch the liftless wings for ones producing lift, add control surfaces and modify the flight control software that is already in place to aid with stability. Same goes for both of our bombers.”

“Well, the [i]Positron[/i] actually isn’t atmosphere capable, it wouldn’t turn, just fly straight, preferably straight up. As for hitting legs, you can make the same argument for tank tracks or just about anything really. If you hit something enough times it will fail. Missiles we didn’T use previously because it wasn’t cost effective, but with mining operations beginning in earnest in Opportunity, that ban has been lifted. Or should be, any day now. And regarding the fuel, while in atmo, it can plasmatize the atmosphere, see the intakes here, so the return to orbit is actually quite efficient on planets we would be likely to deploy it to.” Casei explained, berthing the fighter, “Speaking of bombers… your heavy first.”

“You got me with plasmathising the atmosphere. The biggest difference between tracks and legs are: one - tracks are smaller and two - the tank will not fall down, maiming the pilot. Right, heavy.”

“Enter, the Flail.” The open rack revealed the ugliest thing that, to Narix knowledge, ever left a production line. Words failed to describe the general shape, with six primary hardpoints and three secondary bays and four primary engines. “Two secondary banks up top, one bottom. Four main drives, two reverse thrusters and enough armor to put the Guardian to shame. Excess power allows for a shield, meant to boost the front for attacks or back for running. Follows the same internal layout as the previous ones. No atmosphere for this one, no matter how hard you try. Translation along Y and Z axes facilitated by thrusters, although it is a bit sluggish. Rotation is handled by gyros.”

“Hm… okay.” Casei passed it off. ‘Bland’ was what she said, and everybody knew it. “Now, we didn’t have any prior experience with bombers, so bear with us.” she said, revealing the first of the Faira strikecraft. There was a long, thin, and distinctly secondary deficient thing to be called a bomber by the Narix frame of mind. In the rear though were powerful engines, and the thing had a hard-built massive hypervelocity kinetic cannon, and a snub-nosed version of it mounted in a turret. “It doesn’t carry many torpedoes, but is extremely fast. Armed with a variety we developed for attacking systems of a capital ship, and a cannon that could punch through the lilith’s armor and completely wreck it with one mag, we feel it fits the role, what do you think?”

“Hard to hit and hard hitting. I’ll have eight.” one bomber pilot commented. “Just one pilot?”

“How does that keep the temperature down? Small core and batteries again?”

“One pilot, one turret aiming AI. Cue the booing.” Casei snorted. “And no, actually. The drive is laced with cooling lines that use phase-changing coolant, and it recuperates part of the heat in a turbine. Then, there is again a phase changing heat capacitor for afterburner, which can either be cooled down over time, or simply ejected. We do not expect the heat to build up too much though. This thing is equipped with two jump capacitors, eliminating the need for a recharge. You jump in, gauge the situation, perform the attack run if you deem it possible, and jump out. You will need to rearm anyway, might as well land on the destroyer for that and let another wing take their shot.”

“Jokes on you, because we messed with AIs as well.” the rack opened, revealing the Narix light bomber. The craft had a twin-tailed hull, again featuring liftless surfaces to radiate heat and main drives in two directions. “And this thing looks like it may come to a relative halt within our lifetime, too. Single primary hardpoint, two revolving torpedo bays, two turrets, one dorsal, one ventral, usually controlled by an AI. Again shielded and relatively easy to refit for atmosphere. Two crewmen, both have full control over the ship and the turrets, allowing them to spread workload. One flies the ship, the other manages shields and countermeasures, leaving the AI to man the guns. No jump drive, sadly, didn’t fit even with a single crew setup. Wings fold backwards to save space in hangars. Turret weapons interchangable, of course.”

“It looks fightery still.” Casei noted, “I am not sure how I feel about tactical bomber that is not jump capable. They need to be highly mobile in my head to be deployed quickly when a tactical advantage presents itself. Alright, go with the big beast.”

“This one has eaten too much, so it got a little fat.” The rack opened, light falling upon the smooth hull with two massive engines in the back. "Flying wing design, two crew members, subspace motivators, three safe jumps, four seconds charging time, 20, 50 and 80 seconds for complete cooldown respectively. Possibly could jump four, even five times, but we won’t know what sort of damage that will do until we find a pilot braindead enough to try. We expect melting components and cables, leading to loss of systems and power spikes. Four revolving banks, 12 torpedoes each, two turrets at the wingtips, again AI controlled, 220 degrees pivot main drives, that’s 110 up and 110 down. Maneuvering with gyros. Ship this size, shield goes without saying."

“You were saying about vectored thrust?” Casei smirked. “Well, the design is pretty i’ll give you that, but I like this better.” she said and revealed her own brainchild. It was a conventional Faira layout of a hull with rear engine pylons, and around it were wrapped modular torpedo bays. The bomber had no primary guns, but four defensive turrets facing each to one side, and one in the rear. “The beauty is not with any aspect of the craft you would usually consider, but with it’s fire control system. This thing is capable of swarm-firing all of it’S ordnance within two seconds, guiding it up to five targets in a full sphere around it. We have even designed special munitions taking advantage of the feature, having smaller, more numerous torpedos where they arrive time on target in groups aimed to the same spot. That way, you basically intercept a fraction of a single big warhead if you only shoot down some of them, and the sheer number should in theory overwhelm the point defenses and escorting fighters.”

“Unless the defense system works on a canister-shell basis, in which case anything short of a plasma or laser-based weapon will fail. Also, why is the craft responsible for guiding the munitions? Wouldn’t it be better to have the craft designate a target and feed it into the torpedo’s guidance system, therefore allowing for as many targets as you have ordnance left?”

“Frankly, the size of the warhead. By removing an internal guidance system form the torpedoes and deleagating them to the fighter, we have made half sized torpedoes with three quarters of the punch. We calculated that none of the nightmare ships we encountered so far save for the superdestroyer could survive an attack by a wing of these, with no losses on the bombers’ part because they deploy all of their munitions quickly and jump out as soon as the salvo hits. Of course, they have to stay to guide the missiles through, but considering a conventionally firing torpedoes would only fire four at a time from this thing, then they would have to  wait for several dozens of seconds for another to fire, the total deployment time is still lower.” the engineer explained the theory.

“In theory, nice, but have taken fighters and AA fire into account? And with every lost bomber, that’s a lot of ordnance that is not going to hit the targets. Perhaps they could cooperate with larger ships or even fighters to designate their targets? It’s not going to save the pilots, but it’s a step to ensure a hit.”

“We have. Just like the Positron, the forward shield is augmented, and the same energy allocation macro as we use on the Comet class frigates have been added to the systems, allowing for quick power reallocation in need, only with this thing not being underpowered in the first place. Furthermore, with the high volume of fire, even counting on interception because of longer flight time, enough ordnance should make it through, if we are talking about Nightmare ships. Against yours, well, I do not want to guess which of the missiles would be more agile, but I imagine the defending one would be at advantage. And our PDS is laser based, so depending on the ship and the number of it’s turrets.”

“Well, cards are on the table. Someone put the pilots on a leash. Do we torment the poor souls further and go get some rest, or do we move straight to test flights?”