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featherwinglove
Midshipman
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Feb 28, 2011 1:05 pm
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A world has been kicking around in my head where Dahak would be classified as an N-class "mercury", but of course, this world's physics are incompatible with Dahak's. The largest ship I have in this world so far is an intergalactic ark with masses 720kSM loaded / 600kSM operational empty. kSM stands for kilo-solarmass (i.e.: fully loaded, seven hundred twenty thousand times the mass of the sun.) It has a diameter of 1.5AU, a steady cruising speed (i.e. antimatter production balanced) of 4200c, and capable of running 6000c at flank speed. Its population (only about 10% of which is actually "crew" serving the vessel's operating functions and public services) is about 10^30 members. It is designed to take on fully industrialized galaxies. Originally, it was designed as a flying factory and functions mostly around fleet support, but the target enemy galaxy (some 600 million light years from its port) had shielding that was detected early during this vessel's construction.
A previous vessel of considerably different design was much further along when these galactic shields were discovered. It was 600/480kSM in mass, 2AU long and 1AU in diameter being mostly cylindrical (the larger one is a truncated cone about equal in length and diameter at 1.5AU.) The second vessel, originally similar to the first in design was modified when its "factory spine" was barely operational. Its design was completely changed to focus on quasar blasters (weapons comparable to jets from quasars like M87 Virgo, but laced with directional annihilation bombs massing about 150Tt each (teratonnes). The first vessel was nearly complete, and had quasar blasters designed for fighting other arks, not galactic shields (at the time it was conceived, the largest ark combatants massed 60-80kSM and the first could easily take on its own mass in them.) The first vessel was stuck with its quasar blasters as launched, and modified its magazines, turret traverse gear and logistics systems en route to its target so that the turrets could be locked to a near axial position and the quasar blasters fired continuously. The second vessel's quasar blasters came in two sets, one that was fixed and the other, smaller set was turreted. The large, fixed set sees more use since the huge fleet "jams" (i.e.: uses force beams to prevent an enemy from travelling FTL) an enemy ark far enough away that they can aim the whole ship and fire the fixed array. The enemy ark rarely gets away after that first hit. The big arks are always in a hurry to rush off to their next galaxy are enemy ark target trying to get to the galaxy they are protecting. They usually leave a fleet behind to mop up the wounded enemy after doing enough damage to the arks to immobilize them.
An immobilized ark can still be a major pain, since with its onboard industrial capability, it is able to rebuild its engines and re-engineer the remaining engines into a configuration that allows it to FTL, usually at some considerable speed. Such a ship must retain its industry and power systems (invariably buried deep in the core and distributed in several other major nodes), restore its defenses (which, in the best case scenario, are deliberately shut down to play possum), and then mobilize the hull (or what's left of it, not always in one piece.) The remaining fleet is there specifically to defeat such efforts. The result can be a regional war, often hundreds of thousands of light-years out in intergalactic space where the injured ark is the only piece of real estate anyone is interested in, that will last thousands of years.
It would really stink to live one's entire life in an ark siege out in the intergalactic boonies, with far more significant action elsewhere in the universe, and unable to participate, or even to learn much about those. Wouldn't it suck to live your whole life where the closest thing to a fresh air outdoor environment (such as the environmental deck of an ark) is a memory, or a generations-old video album (or the unpressurized skeleton of an environmental deck on a disabled ark?) Wouldn't it be an interesting novel to raise a family in a gluon steel box, hoping that _maybe_ they'll get the warp drive working again during the lifetime of your children? The sort of injustice-triggered indignant hatred I get thinking about this sort of situation is what often makes me read the next chapter in a novel, as it did with Empire From the Ashes.
Terry
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