Chronicles of Sol: The Fall-Chapter 250 - Two Hundred Eight Limping into Dock

June 30th, 008 SDE:

Countryman set down his log, after nearly 120 days of sustained high-speed flight, they were on final approach to Anchorage, where they could make repairs. The Deep Storm had certainly done a number on them just as they were leaving. Sixty-nine hull breaches, fourteen collapsed bulkheads, the loss of almost three hundred square meters of hull plating in less than a minute, and multiple systems knocked offline.

They'd been on their way out with a full cargo load, when the storm tore into them with a Hyperspatial Eddy and not just one either. Seventeen had erupted practically on top of them, with another thirty as near misses. Naturally, they'd been unable to recover the material that had been sheared off the hull. That was a fair chunk of plating they would have to outright replace, a trend he wasn't happy about.

Losses aside, the trip as a whole had been successful. They were making great strides on their sensor project to the point they were ready to install the new array on the Enterprise. Not only that, but Vera had been making a lot of progress with her reactor shielding project. The fusion version was ready to be implemented now, but the antimatter version needed testing. Conducting said test wasn't going to be easy, they were going to need a test bed able to fit an AM reactor module, they weren't exactly small, the one on the Enterprise was 150 meters long, three decks high, and almost 75 meters wide. Of course there was more to a reactor module than just the reactor itself. Reactors required a whole host of sensors, containment systems, fuel injectors, cooling systems, and more.

Putting aside thoughts on testing, he slipped out of his office chair and headed into the corridor. Traffic was light as usual with only the guards in sight, few people were ever in this section. It was close to the bridge and access was controlled via the lift. People rarely had cause to visit this area, besides being part of the command deck it was technically restricted.

Countryman didn't stay, and headed for the bridge. Passing through the blast door he was greeted almost immediately by his First Officer, Commander Greyman. "Sir, I was just about to call you, we are getting ready to dock at Anchorage."

"Excellent, do Reynolds and Drakes have anything to report?"

"Reynolds told me it's been pretty quiet, aside from a couple of Raider incursions. Our Drifter neighbors have had more excitement, actually."

Countryman took his chair, "Anything to note about those incursions?"

"Our patrols took care of both of them. One of them was a lost Raider transport, returning from a raid in Drifter space. We kept the transport but returned the stolen cargo to the Drifters. They were quite grateful, Reynolds was able to get a supply of titanium from them, almost two thousand tons."

For a moment he was silent as he took that into account, "Tell me how large is this transport?"

"Seven hundred meters long, with a span of three hundred seventy, and twenty-three decks."

"Perfect, Vera and Ruri will make great use of their new science ship."

"Science ship!? What in the galaxy for? We've got plenty of cargo shuttles, they've worked well as off-ship labs before." 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

"As useful as the Arctic Shuttles are, they aren't big enough for this. Vera's made some proposals for upgrades to our antimatter reactor. Now I've got plans for a small-scale test, but we are going to need an at-scale test of the reactor design.

"That would be quite the expense," commented Greyman.

"Yes, but afterward we can use the transport as a test bed for high-energy physics experiments."

"I'm not sure I understand the point of that sir."

Countryman turned to his console, "It took us months to reach the deep storm, and months to get back, if we could find a method of traveling faster in the storm, it would speed up our ability to chart it. With the new sensors, we will have a wealth of new information to study, but we are still going to need to chart the storm, identify patterns, and learn what makes it tick. Besides, we might need to make another foray into the deep storm."

"Did we not previously reject a hyperdrive re..."

"We did, but while we might not know a thing about hyperdrive, we do have a headstart in warp drive technology. Right now we can't use it due to being in hyperspace, but that doesn't mean it won't function here, we just need to figure out how."

Greyman nodded, "I guess there isn't a reason not to look into it, but we only have two warp engines, and no way to make more. How do you propose we conduct this experiment?"

"I'm aware of the supply issues, but they won't be a problem. Our first drives weren't that practical but they also didn't make use of certain rare metaphasic materials like Zytherium Crystals."

"You want to start the program over from scratch?"

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"Pretty much," said Countryman.

Misaki suddenly interjected, "We are in position to dock."

"Excellent! Eri, take us in."

Richards watched the light on the airlock, after a moment it turned blue. She opened the hatch and stepped outside onto the gangplank. Quick effective strides gave her some distance, before she turned around to get a view of the ship. They'd been limping since they went through that natural minefield. She just hoped Ruri's new sensors would let them see one of those coming before it hits. Something that would save her a lot of effort on repairs in the future.

Her gaze quickly took in the damage, the eddy had done a real number. At first glance it looked worse than she'd thought. She gestured at the nearest breach, "Okay people, I want a full damage assessment by the end of the day. Don't dawdle, we don't have forever, we need her shipshape ASAP."

"Aye, ma'am!" was the quick response as her engineers rushed to the hull. She turned to climb the dock scaffold.

The nearest ladder was only a few meters away, so in just a couple of minutes, she was scrambling up to the catwalk. Pulling herself up and over the final rung she stepped onto the steel flooring of the catwalk and turned for another look at the hull. Noticing the jagged edges and tearing as she did so.

Already it was looking pretty bad from a visual inspection, but from experience, she figured she could recover material from the damaged plates. What really hurt was when the plate was shorn away, or worse vaporized. The latter was a real problem that often happened in extended firefights. Plasma rounds and high-energy particle hits were well known for vaporizing metals or leaving them weak and brittle. Basically, after a firefight there often wasn't much left to salvage. Unless you wanted to spend a great deal of time sifting space dust for valuable metals, a time-consuming endeavor at the best of times. Mag Tractors weren't very good for that, and in the storm? Forget about it.

That was a thought though, maybe once they had a few more free labs and research teams, someone could work on a better tractor-beam system. As it was, they used integrated locking beacons on their shuttles and fighters so that the tractor beams could lock on to them. Yet that was the only use they had in the storm. Storm currents made it impossible to hit anything with a mag disk, not reliably anyway. They'd started using old-style grapplers since they were easier to recover after a miss. It made salvage inefficient and difficult.

Making another pass of the damaged area, she was idly taking notes as she considered the challenges. Richards knew she was working on other things, but she wanted tractor beams. Better salvage and mining methods would certainly make her job easier. If they'd been able to recover the plating that would have saved her a few man hours but more importantly it would have been less staining on their budget. That was perhaps her largest concern, most of the materials they needed were in the deep storm. Traveling there was dangerous, and time-consuming.

Richards let out a breath, "I just hope the next trip goes better, this just doesn't play nice with our budget."

Footsteps drew closer, "I have the initial assessment Commander."

She took the pad, "So how bad is it? It looks pretty bad from here."

"Worse than the sensors had indicated, all of the attached plates near the breaches will need to be replaced. Thankfully, Smith has already been producing reserve plating so that will save us quite a bit of time. The modules under the plate however are completely ruined, we are going to have to gut them and rebuild the affected systems from the ground up. Unfortunately that also includes a couple of turrets, I know we thought they were intact, but the storm breached the compartments and corroded the systems."

"How much can we salvage?"

"Most of it can be broken down and recycled."

Richards noted that down, "Get started on that, I 'm going to brief the Captain."

She found the Captain on the bridge, not that there was much to do with the ship in spacedock. He smiled when he saw her, "How do the repairs look?"

"It was a bad hit, but you knew that. I estimate two weeks for the repair."

"Including our sensor refit and the upgrading of armor around key sections?"

"That's going to be a fair bit more involved. The Bridge will be the easy part, once we have the outer plating released we can unclamp the bridge module and suspend it above the hull. That's going to make replacing the module-specific armor and bulkheads much easier. Updating the Fusion plants, and the engine rooms will be much harder. They are located as deep in the ship as possible, which while logical, complicates the process."

Countryman nodded, "So it does, but as I recall warp engineering won't be too hard. While the entire secondary hull was designed to be detached in the event of a catastrophic emergency, there is also a direct access tunnel to the engine room module."

"Yes sir, it's for an emergency jettison of the module, but also for easy upgrades. Well, somewhat easy. I still have to remove armor plating, but it wouldn't be too hard to decouple the module. I can do something similar with the fusion plants."

He smiled, "Yeah I designed them that way, eight tunnels leading to the ventral side of the hull. You'll have to detach the ventral plates and retract the inner belts."

Richards nodded, "Lines up with what I remember, can't say I have ever done that procedure though. My real worry is main engineering."

"I'm sorry I can't suggest a better way, you either rip out half the ship or do the changes in place."

She sighed, "I'm afraid that's why I think this is going to take about two months. Half that being the main engine room."

"How about those sensors?"

"Two weeks, I can do them in line with the hull repairs without adversely affecting the refit schedule."

"Ruri will be happy to hear that," said Countryman, pleased that a full sensor array refit wouldn't take too long to complete. The ship had a lot of sensors that would need updating. Once they did, they would have superior sensor range, better interstellar tracking and resolution, and most importantly the ability to conduct high-resolution scans through hyperspace. In theory they'd even be able to predict an eddy, perhaps avoiding another hit. Now he just had to wait for the new equipment.