Category: Inventions, innovation, engineering

After the first barrage, I saw the turrets swivel under newly activated AI control, and a torrent of violet plasma flow over the hull and harden against the crushing force of two opposing magnetic fields into a seething conflagration that crackled and sputtered pink fire.

Of the latter, the so-called “plasma window” had previously found use in electron-beam welding applications. Alone, it would stop nothing. But it would (mostly) hold an atmosphere. Great canisters along the ship’s broadside had slid open, exposing their contents to hard vacuum. The precious water within, ordinarily used for remass, was furiously boiling.

The next volley struck then, and even from the emergency redoubt, nestled deep within the ship’s interior, I felt the lurch as the cargo bay was gutted by a spinal-mount ray, even as I saw it burn cruelly in a visiplate.

But the steam and ice had by now fully formed, resublimating and desublimating into each other as crystals danced in the flames, and upon the third volley, their pencil-thin near-IR laser chewed into the mixture, and was absorbed and scattered by it. The hull amidships smoldered worrisomely in a wide circle, but it held.

To sustain one atmosphere in a plasma window requires a bit shy of 20 megawatts per square meter. But you can get away with a thousandth that if you settle for holding less pressure. Even so, banks of hydrogen batteries were rapidly discharging in an internal struggle the ship’s twin reactors would quickly lose. The ad-hoc shields could stay up for less than a minute, perhaps, before waste heat and power requirements forced them to drop.

Excerpt from “Farside Encounter”; collected in the anthology Tall Tales of Trade, _ᙇ49.95

Modern battles are fought at close range—a light-second or so—since lasers are big, heavy, slow, and radiate more than half their power into their parent ships as low-quality waste heat. That’s why every conflict since the 2110s has been fought with missiles and k-slugs.

The danger with missiles is that they’re fast and independently targeted. Try shooting them down with a gun of some type and you have a problem: the missile has traveled literally miles before your bullet gets halfway down the barrel.

Particle beam weaponry was once largely considered to be useless. About the best it can do is barf up some bremsstrahlung secondary radiation. Deliciously lethal, sure, but only in a localized area, and certainly not structurally damaging. The engineer-physicists eventually realized, however, that the particle beam is well-suited to defense. And so, the fan was invented.

The fan makes use of an otherwise annoying property of particle beams. When you deflect a stream of charged particles, you’re accelerating it, but the stream still goes basically the same speed afterward (just in a different direction). That extra energy gets dumped in the form of synchrotron radiation, streaming out tangentially in a flood of hard x-rays. So you get a searing fan of radiation, spreading knifelike in a plane.

Nowadays, when the call goes out for point defense, the ship fires up its spinal-mount linear accelerator. Huge flickering electromagnets in the bow deflect the beam semi-randomly, and a decollaminated blast of bit-flipping, electronics-frying radiation cooks the missiles as they reach the terminal guidance phase.

Small wonder the Jovian Trade Union’s radiation hardening expertise is widely-sought.

During the apex of the second proto-galactic empire, spanning from approx CE 14200 to CE 14500 (before it was subsumed into the current galactic empire), great monuments of engineering were fabricated in a stupendous display of that same society’s decadence.

Annihilator Station—a name chosen, amusingly, by a third grader from the Alnilim system in a contest—provides an illustrative example.

A.S. was envisioned as a defense system for an entire solar system—specifically, the Centauri system containing the Empire’s capital. (No one was quite sure who the enemy was, but this small matter demonstrates the cavalier and bold attitude which characterized the proto-empire at peak.)

In all dimensions, A.S. was enormous. The main structure itself was built around a composite laser, whose primary bore was fully 2,000 km in diameter. The focusing system alone massed as much as Ireland. Since rotating the structure (and so the main beam itself) into an arbitrary alignment could require as long as a month, the main bore could be tapped to power secondary laser batteries—more mobile, practical laser turrets whose diameters ranged from 10 m (at the extreme lower end), up to 100 km (of which there were 10) or 50 km (of which there were 471).

It was literally the case that the combined fleets (at that time) of all interstellar nations, if put side-by-side, top-to-bottom, arranged broadside, could not cover even a tenth of that enormous aperture. The device was therefore capable of obliterating, in a single shot, the sum total of all militaries that at that time existed. For that matter, it could irradiate all of a large moon’s surface simultaneously, or cause a gas giant to combust.

The power requirement was, literally, astronomical. Just to keep the lights and life support on, A.S. burnt a (combined) mass of Plutonium the size of Gibraltar every year. The thing leaked enough air out from between atoms of its 500 m-thick hull that it had to be replenished by regular shipment. Of course, it had non-negligible gravity at its surface, too, and so keeping the lenses free of any stray, diffracting atmosphere provided employment to over 10,000,000.

In the end, the threat A.S. had been built to counter never materialized, and the station was ultimately done in by an equal mixture of logistics and intrigue.

One unfortunate fact of military operation is the necessity of hierarchy—particularly, a chain of command. Therefore, for any operation of any scope, there’s always someone in charge—maybe with advisers, but ultimately still one guy.

In this case, that guy was Grand Admiral Juiykla Hvvghinchych.

The Admiral was fond of booze and women, and, being the direct administrator of the largest military operation in history, found that he could rather simply arrange them, polity be damned. One of his consorts was a woman named Symotrishia Kavan. Ms. Kavan was connected, obliquely, to a curator of the Museum of Gambling, located on the sixth planet of the Centauris. This curator was in direct correspondence with the criminal underground, which of course was sympathetic to piracy.

Piracy, post-21st century, invariably (and necessarily) involved hit-and-run tactics. Commodity pricing on local stargates and reservations booked in advance made effective pursuit by law-enforcement all but impossible—clientele personal information, of course, being thoroughly encrypted.

The looming spectre of A.S. was a threat to piracy. Just aim one of the kilometer-wide auxiliary beams across the stargate. Ain’t nothing getting around, past, or otherwise through, that.

And so it was that the curator was smuggled four antimatter weapons, each in the 80 MT yield range, and Ms. Kavan, ah . . . convinced the good Admiral to allow the personal gift of fine whiskey to pass through customs unexamined.

The devices were detonated in the structural members near the power-generation compartments. Plenty of secondary damage was caused, including a firestorm of venting atmosphere that swept a full eightieth of the station. For her part, Ms. Kavan is believed to have perished in the blast. The Admiral himself committed suicide less than an hour after the incident. The curator was to be held for conspiracy, but died while attempting to escape—his hastily departing yacht disintegrating shortly before max-Q.

Ultimately, the structural damage to A.S. was minor—after all, a few nukes going off inside a structure the size of a small continent could almost be ignored, and the power areas, which suffered a secondary nuclear conflagration, could still be rebuilt rather simply.

Unfortunately for A.S., the bombs were the sociological straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. The workers’ union struck, and—coupled with the already extant logistical nightmare of keeping a billion people in low-G supplied with food, water, entertainment, living quarters, and pay—caused a complete and almost instant collapse of order. The workers refused, in fact, go out to meet the cargo ships that would have brought them food. By the time the prospect of famine was upon them, it was far too late. Even moving a million people per ship was not fast enough. And so, hundreds of millions perished in the steel hallways of the greatest weapon in the galaxy. The government public-relations catastrophe alone caused, indirectly, several genocides, four planetary-scale secessions, and a new religion.

Under the circumstances, A.S. was abandoned to ruin in its own orbit.