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Post by Ravished Improbability on Apr 19, 2017 5:53:47 GMT
Consolidated Constellation of Star States
The Consolidated Constellation of Star States (CCSS) started off as a loose multinational grouping of small science and colony space stations constructed in the Earth-Moon system Lagrange Points 4 and 5 by the various prewar nations of Earth. As the various nations supporting the stations started to collapse and the stations found themselves without a life line they turned to the other stations to provide mutual support. Between the various stations there was enough population and resources to make preparations for a long wait to see who will rise from the ashes of the war.
Consolidation and expansion was the first order of business. They needed to know what they had and what they needed. They had plenty of power and food for the short term, but they would need to expand if they where to survive the long term. Some of the stations would not be able to survive the decades long wait on there own and as the systems started to fail the stations older or simply less sustainable stations where cannibalized for resources to expand the surviving habitats to hold more people.
They needed more resources though else they would simply run out of room to expand. A deal was struck with the mining ships out in the belt, food and maintenance for the materials they had no one to deliver to back on earth.
With the mining guild now part of the loose union of stations and ships, a new period of expansion tool place. The first of the new 10 thousand population stations started construction. Large enough to relieve the over crowding on the smaller older habitat stations. Even as the new habitats were under construction to allow the retirement of the old over taxed stations, the mining guild was expanding its mining ability with fresh mirrors to gather even more sunlight to concentrate onto the asteroids in the belt.
The next wave of stations were design to house 100 thousand with the every growing population of the habitats predicted to easily provide the seed population for the large stations by the type they are complete. Completely self sufficient, independent, and with an expanding population the collection of habitats and ships needed an official government to control them. The collection habitat and ships officially became the Consolidated Constellation of Star States. One of the first orders of business outside of beginning the development of an even larger 1 million population station was to the construction and manning of a naval fleet, the Constellation of Stars Navy (CSN). A marine corp soon followed and earned the name of Star Marines. The independent traffic control ships where unified under the flag of the Constellation Station Guard (CSG). A final military arm was eventually added soon after the first welding ceremony for the next generation of habitat stations with a sustainable population of 10 million, a presidential militia, later named the Constellation Guard Militia (CGM) charged with guarding of the consolidated government.
A Brief History of Orbital Mining
The early days of orbital mining was done with grapples and drills and nuclear powered furnaces. It was inefficient, messy, and manpower intensive. It eventually evolved to mining with ship mounted lasers, modified surplus military rigs, that allow larger chunks to be smelted at a time for resources. It was efficient enough though that they could start to make the next generation of mining lasers.
Surplus aluminum and silica was forge into mirrors and dropped into solar orbits by the ore freighters. The mirrors with the small drive packs strapped to the back allowed them to gather and focus the power of the sun into lasers powerful enough to smelt entire asteroids. The older laser mining ships became mirror control ships and the production of ores and mirrors quickly ramped up to the point where the limits on how many new mirrors they could deploy was limited by the number of available navigation packs to strap to the backsides.
The power to destroy asteroids was easily at hand but after one test was simply set aside for use by the CCSS military. Exploding asteroids was simply to messy of a way to mine. With the ever increasing power of the solar mining laser, the preferred way to mine was to simply melt the an asteroid into a molten sphere and spin sort. The heavier elements being centrifuged to the edges of the molten disk for easy scraping off for further refining.
The mining guild always has multiple asteroids in various stages of melt and spin for it takes many months to melt down entire asteroids and get them spinning fast enough for elements to naturally sort themselves out.
The more manpower intensive dig and smelt though make a return as an WPA style operation to deal with the unemployed and homeless on the stations. One did not need a lot of training to shovel the gravel like compositions of certain asteroids. The old dig and smelt method also preserved more of the volatiles that the laser mining boiled always into space, especially the nitrogen and hydrogen compounds in high demand for the continue expansion of the hydroponics of the stations.
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Post by Ravished Improbability on Apr 20, 2017 1:32:29 GMT
Current State of the CCSS
# | Class | Population
| 1
| Capital Station | ~120 million | 12 | Continental Class Stations | >50 million | 8
| Ocean Class Hydroponics Stations | 10 to 50 million | 11 | Nation Class Stations | 10 to 50 million | 29 | Megalopolis Class Commercial / Industrial Stations | 5 to 25 million | 19 | Province Class Stations | 1 to 10 million | 23 | Island Class Residential Stations | 500 thousand to 1 million | 39 | Frontier Class Recreation Stations | 50 to 500 thousand | >600 | Guard Stations | 5 to 50 thousand
| ~ 750
| Total Stations
| Total population: ~ 1.9 Billion
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Health Care and Government IDsCitizens of the CCSS benefit from the high availability of state of the art health care and average life span of the population has risen to over 250 years, and average age or retirement as risen to 220. Simple biotechnics are wide spread with nearly every citizen having at least one implant beyond the government issued ID chip in their finger. Civilian biotechnics are limited to medical and sensory enhancements. More advance biotechnics like strength or speed boosts are limited to train professionals, typically dock workers and military personnel. The Constellation Government records multiple forms of biometrics to allow positive identification, and requires that all legal transactions be signed by at least two forms of biometrics in addition to the scanning of the ID chip. For simple store transactions the fingerprint and chip scanners are built into the key pad units and facial recognition via the store cameras provides the second biometrics. Banks Loans and Corporate level contracts might go for retina and palm scans. High level military installations have been known to go so far to require multiple palm and iris scans on top of the facial and vocal recognition. The old form of signing in blood has once again made a return, a blood thumb print to seal the deal. Citizens typically transfer a copy of the government biometric data over to the doctors as the data taken for identification reasons also be readily interpreted by medical science to track the risk of certain medical conditions. It is Everyone Duty to Protect and ServeSpace is unforgiving, even on the massive space stations of the CCSS, it is everyone duty to be on the look out for improper maintenance, wear and tear, and other risks to the security and safety of those on the stations. All persons must provide aid to the best of their ability to any person who appears to be lifeless or in mortal danger, must alert authorities or take similar steps to prevent impending disasters that could cause loss of life, must comply with all reasonable requests of assistance by a public authority when a person's life, health or well-being is at stake, and must, if they learn of a planned crime against the state, human life or well-being, or significant public goods, do everything in their power to prevent or mitigate the crime, including but not limited to reporting it to authorities, in all cases provided that acting would not incur particular danger or personal sacrifice. The Good Samaritan in You
On top of the duty to rescue, the CCSS provides generous protections to good Samaritans acting within reasonable limits to aide others. All actions done in good faith, without malicious intent, and within the scope of your skills can not be held against you even if such actions results in father harm. Vacations and other Visas in the CCSSA visa is required for all non citizens to achieve admission. A simple passport and biometric scan is enough to get you applied for a visa in any space port or guard station. The process of determining eligibility for entry may take up to one business week for a vacation visa. Stays of over 30 days will require filing an extension and the running of a thorough background check. The maximum extended time for a vacation visa is 90 days within the CCSS starting from the initial check in at one of the stations. Upon arrival to a CCSS station your passport, visa, and biometrics shall be checked. A bracelet with your CCSS ID and wallet will be issued. The cost of the bracelet was covered by your first time visa fees. For additional cost you may upgrade your ID to one of many rings or bracelets, or have yourself implanted like the CCSS citizens. The wearing of your CCSS ID is required at all times, excluding private residential quarters. It is recommended that sufficient funds be transferred in advance to an account in a CCSS bank or partnered local bank for use within the CCSS. The CCSS does not issue physical coins or bills. The exchanging of local physical scripts within the CCSS will likely be subject to harsh processing fees in addition to standard conversion fees. Regular citizens and visitors are not allowed to carry weapons within the CCSS. The act of permitting a crime may result in the revocation of your your visa. The procession of a weapon on your person may result in criminal charges and revocation of your visa based on the lethality and destructiveness of the weapon. Certain classes of weapons are exempt from the no weapons law, typically those of short range non lethal nature. The use of such weapons outside of reasonable self defense can still result in criminal charges and revocation of your visa. All non CCSS licensed weapons are required to be sealed in a CCSS approved weapon transfer case and stored in the ship or station armory till such time you leave the CCSS. For those traveling through CCSS space to reach other stars bulk cargo must be stored in tariff exempt warehousing for transfer to the starship. Those stored in normal warehousing may be subject to standard taxes and export fees. All persons must file for a visa extension or be on board a ship leaving CCSS space within one week of the expiration of your visa. Failure to do so will subject you to the CCSS Lurker Laws if you are unable to pay the fines and government travel fare to leave the station. The Work Provision Administration The homeless and unemployed, aka Lurkers, of the stations are dealt with through the WPA and Lurker Laws. Those unable to provide sufficient credits for an outbound ship, or find a sponsor to provide employment and housing shall be processed through the WPA. There are three main fates for those Lurkers processed by the WPA: military service, scientific service, or industrial service. Occasionally there is a lottery to draft Lurkers for genetic material for a colony ship. Military service is in the Constellation Army (CSA) the light infantry arm of the Star Marines. Those lurkers drafted into the CSA are given basic training in the use of the air suits, radio helmet, stun baton, riot shield, and clam-shell armor before sent to naval vessels for advance training in ship to ship boarding actions. Scientific service is the use of Lurkers as lab rats for the final testing of biotechnics, medications, and or the local production blood and plasma. They are available for what ever government approved research is required. Industrial service typically means being sent to the asteroid mines as manpower for the dig and smelt operations required for volatiles farming. Other jobs include manpower intensive low skill jobs such as paint removal or final detail cleaning of ships. A draft of lurkers might also be used to clean the trash out of a section of park land when the need arises. Those lurkers that are sponsored typically find themselves as janitors or house hold servants of wealthy CCSS citizens though some find themselves shipped back to earth to serve some extremely wealthy CEO or noble.
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Post by Ravished Improbability on Apr 22, 2017 22:17:44 GMT
The Star Marines
Officially known as the Consolidated Constellation Star Marines, it was quickly shorten to Star Marines. They are pretty much the strongest and most powerful soldiers terran technology can make. The equipment and training cost that goes into one Star Marine can buy and crew a Navy Frigate.
You get a lot of bang for your buck though as each Power Armored Star Marine has the strength and speed of a score of men, and more fire power than a pre war main battle tank. Even outside their armor they have the power of a dozen men and incredible toughness thanks to their biotechnic augmentations.
Each Star Marine is practically torn apart and rebuilt after graduating from the advance training program. Their bones and muscles are reinforces and strengthen to give them the strength and speed of a dozen men. Their claws and fangs reinforce enough that they can shred steel plating with bare claws. Their senses augmented to the point they can see deep into the infrareds and high into the ultraviolets, hear a pin drop at 100 meters but not be deafen by gun fire at barely 10cm. In addition to bullet proof bones a thin mesh of sub-dermal armor make their skin lightly bullet, radiation, and vacuum proof. Other biotechnic augmentations allow them to interface directly with their suits and other mecha’s, fight suitless in vacuum for minutes at a time, and generally improve the quality of life for someone that spends much of there time in space suits.
They can’t yet chew lightning and shit out thunder yet but it is likely to an ability the CCSS scientists will be adding soon.
The most basic item all star marines wear is skin tight full body suits that serves as their on duty undergarments. It is a light weight space suit with integral power, cooling, plumbing connections, and waste recycling features built in. No provision is made for air as that is typically a feature to built into the helmets or breathing masks. The suits are worn under duty uniforms and only the decorative uniforms need to be shed to don the battle suits as the skin nature of the undergarments primary purpose is to ease entry and exit from the suits of armor.
Star Marine Armor
Now for the part you are all familiar with, the Star Marine’s armor suits. The current suits are the state of the art products of miniaturization. The powered servos give the already strong marines a boost of strength to that of 20 normal men. The armor and weapons systems of the suit provides more protection and firepower than a pre war main battle tank in a man shape package at most 2.5meter tall.
The suits sensor suite includes everything from particle detectors to radars, microscopes to mass spectrometers. Practically anything that might be useful in combat is packed into the suit. The suits memory core is loaded with all the common and generalized sensor patterns to allow the suit’s computers to parse through the massive flood of sensor data and prioritize the important bits. To defeat enemy sensors, they carry powerful EW and ECM suites to jam and ghost radars, and sophisticated active camouflage using both holographic projections and chameleon circuits in the armors skin. They can make a mess of the enemy's knowledge of just how many Star Marines there are, from zero under full stealth to many dozens times the actual number under the razzle dazzle of the electronic warfare suite and hologram projectors.
Jump jets and RCS thrusts allow rapid movement with or without gravity. The boots and gloves also have specialized mag locks that allow them to skate and climb across metal surfaces at high speeds.
Every suit is a low level AI as it is simply to complex for even a star marine to manage the suit in combat all by himself. The AI is there to manage background systems while the Star Marine focuses on the combat. The AI can also be given control of the shoulder guns to allow a lone Star Marine to fight as three against multiple enemies on all sides. Multiple layers of command lock outs keep the AI and Star Marine from using this feature against humanoids without the authorization codes from high command. Their is no lockout though on giving the AI control of the guns for air defense or anti armor tasks.
The suits primary weapon load out is two automatic 30mm grenade launchers on the shoulders, 10mm heavy anti armor railgun with underbarrel seeker missile launcher, two extendable wrist blades, a 20mm gauss pistol, and sword lance. The weapon load out can easily be reconfigured to suit the individual Star Marine and Mission. Additional equipment can be carried attached to a combat apron or vest.
The hard-points broken down by class are: two shoulder mounted heavy-duty turrets, two wrist mounted light duty mounts, the large held weapon has upper and lower heavy duty mounts, and two light duty mounts in the form of side arms.
Heavy duty weapons require both strong mountings and support for the massive power draw of full automatic fire. Heavy duty weapons include both general purpose 5mm railguns and heavy 10mm anti armor railguns, heavy lasers, automatic 30mm grenade launchers launchers, short range seeker missile racks, and even single shot anti ship missiles or strategic nukes.
Light duty weapons have lower power demands, low weights, and light to medium recoil. Standard melee weapons easily fall into this category, as well as small gauss pistols and sub machine guns, and single shot or burst fire grenade launchers.
There are also utility type tools including shape charges for breaching and digging in; and line launchers for grappling and anchoring.
What makes a railgun different from a gauss gun?
Railguns work by directly feeding electricity through the projectile making it to difficult to fit non inert fillings into the projectiles. Instead railguns drive solid slugs at very high velocities, over mach 4 at standard pressures. The projectiles are typically designed to have high armor penetration for there size. The guns themselves can easily fire as fast as the loader can shove the rounds into the barrel. Railguns projectiles are typically long fin stabilized darts with the sacrificial sabot taking all the damage from being in contact with the rails and high currents. The 5mm railgun fires 3mm harden steel darts, the 10mm railgun fires 7mm tungsten darts.
Gauss guns work by more gentle magnetic forces that do not heat the projectile dangerously or fry internal electronics. The draw back is timing the multiple coils inside the short barrels of infantry scale weapons. Gauss weapons typically fire explosive rounds at what would be high subsonics at standard pressures. Typical gauss rounds are anti armor shaped charges (HEAT) or fragmenting anti personal.
The missiles the Star Marines typically carry are general purpose seekers able to lock on and engage a wide variety of targets from flying planes to attacking tanks and infantry on the ground to even penetrating light bunkers and pill boxes. Being a jack of all trades weapons its not exceptional in any role. If they know they are going to face a certain type of threat they will load specialized missiles to deal with it and keep only a hand full of general purpose missiles for unexpected threats.
Lasers have up to three modes. Heat Mode a lower powered spread beam that burns the target much like a long range blow torch. Typically not hot enough to do more than melt and char the targets. Blaster Mode fires effectively high power laser bullets that explode the surface of the target they hit, pulsed or dithered so they avoid the vapor clouds tossed by the previous impact. Pulsed is better for boring through the target, while dithering more quickly ablates the other layers from the target, effectively etching the target. The final mode is a vacuum only mode. Ray Mode uses an ultraviolet laser beam at full cycle to really cut into the targets. The use of Ray Mode inside an atmosphere results in little damage to the target and lots of deadly high energy radiation as the air is ionized by the beam instead.
Then there are the variety of blades used by the Star Marines. The standard issue are the extendable blades commonly mounted on the wrists that act as both blade whips, and standard stabbing, slicing, and sawing. And the sword lance, a normal saber with a handle design to extend up to 3 meters to allow the weapon to be used as a spear in more open spaces.
To supply the suits with the huge amounts of power needed to run all the combat systems the large backpack carries not only the air fuel and ammunition; but a heavily armored antimatter catalyzed micro fission reactor. The various armor layers have varying degrees of self healing and repair. While not fully self healing the outer hard shell is able to effectively scab over to seal breaches nearly good as new. The inner anti-spalling layer doesn’t have nearly the same level of self repair with only the gel layer being able to repair itself. The fullerene weaves submerged in the gel can’t be patched outside of a full feature suit repair bay. The sensors and other systems also cant self repair but can have enough redundancy to allow continued functioning as long as there is still one path.
Star Marine Armor Variants
Command – Looking like a standard suit except for a slightly different backpack. The suit has extra communications equipment to allow the officers to better keep track and manage there units.
Grenadier – A specialized suit bulked up and reinforced to carry to additional heavy duty weapons turrets on the hips. They have heavy armor and move slightly slower than normal suits. The standard configuration is the mounting of four high velocity 30mm gauss cannons across the shoulders and hips with the normal rail and missile gun in the hands. The longer barrel grenade launchers allow for longer range fire. An air defense rigged grenadier is typically loaded out with four railguns and dual seeker missile launchers. Some of the railguns may be replaced with lasers in a vacuum combat situation.
Sniper – Going the other way in suit design, the sniper suit is one of the lightest suits in the Star Marine Armory. They have only one heavy duty weapon mount in the form of a sniper ‘rifle’ with the rest of the mounting points down graded to small low profile light duty mounts. The shoulder weapons if they are even mounted at all typically consist of one grenade launcher and one gauss submachine gun. The powered bipod and powerful ballistic computers of the sniper guns allow for very precise aiming through the suits long range passive sensors of the gun itself.
Raider – Specialized suits for the close fighting of ship to ship boarding and even the warrens of the lower levels of stations. They carry gauss scatter guns with underbarrel flamers, shoulder mounted grenade launchers, wrist mounted jackhammers, boarding axes, and short gauss smg. Their powerful loadouts are set up to minimize damage to the interior or the ship while being effective against the usually lightly armored crew.
Pilot – The power armor pilot's wear is the lightest suit in the Star Marine's arsenal. These suits are design to help the pilot's survive flying the various assault shuttles and even more dangerous attack shuttles. A lot of things had to be stripped from the power armor to fit the star marine into a spot design for an unarmored pilot. First to go was the big fusion backpack, replaced with super capacitors that allows the suit to still operate at the standard power levels just for short bursts instead of continuously. A bank of fuel cells has enough output to continuously recharge the capacitors even under the drain from moderate levels of activity, like marching around in circles. Armor and weapons are also shaved down to the bare minimum. The armor is enough to protect the pilot from spalling and light AA fire entering the cockpit. The weapons are equally cut down, with gimbled semi automatic grenade launchers on the shoulders instead of the full turret mounts; a single dual purpose wrist blade and survival knife on the left arm; stun fist on the right arm, and a compact bullpup style heavy rail carbine is folded the small of the back. Additional survival supplies are stored in the heavy duty ejector seats of the shuttles.
Tanker – The Tanker's Power Armor nearly as stripped down as the Pilot's. They have the same compact super capacitor and fuel cell hybrid power system. Armor is not as reduced in the tanker suit, being quite tough in relation to the slim lines of the tanker armor. Weapons on the other hand are quite reduced, with shoulder weapons completely omitted in favor of greater arm mobility. Tanker armor has improved flexibility and range of motion on all the joints to accommodate the sometimes extreme twists needed to operate some equipment inside tanks. The normal weapon load out for the tanker is semi automatic grenade launcher on the left arm, compact jackhammer on the right arm, gauss pistol on the right hip, and saber lance on the left hip. The mounting point for the carbine is built into the suit but the compact bullpup heavy rail carbine is not standard issue for tankers. The carbines are usually racked unfolded inside the tanks and walkers; and worn only when outside the tank. The tankers jackhammer is more often than not used for speedy brute force repairs to the mechs during combat. The power of the jackhammer is great for unsticking jammed turrets, cracking hatch that has been spot welded shut by laser fire, and when switch into reverse it serves as an incredibly powerful prybar.
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Post by Ravished Improbability on May 5, 2017 0:05:12 GMT
Constellation Star Navy – CSNThe true might of the CCSS lies with in its Navy, and the mighty battleships form the spear tip of the battle walls. They are four kilometer long blades of armor and weapons, built to be unstoppable juggernauts able to take enormous amounts of damage while still remaining capable of combat. To achieve this the front three-quarters of the ship is nothing but a gently tapering wedge of armor, structural support, and weapons. The living quarters for the crew of 25-thousand are split between 4 heavily reinforced contra-rotating habitat gravity centrifuges buried deep under the 25m thick armor plating of the battleships ‘hand guard’. The ‘handle and pommel’ are the massive drive units needed to move the giga-tonnes of starship through space under reasonable military accelerations. The battleships don’t have the best accelerations compared to other warships but they can still pull between a gravity and two of continuous acceleration. The main bridge and command center are located inside the spinning habitat rings close to the spine making them hard to hit targets. They are typically large bunker structures built into middle of the large parks that are standard features of CCSS ships. The green parks have any number of climates but the design of the CSN parks allow them to double as training grounds for the embarked marines and army troopers. The bulk of the crew are gunners and missiliers to operate the weapon systems of the battleship and the two dozen assigned frigate sized vectors. The rest are command staff to navigate and fly the ship, and engineers to run the massive engines and generally keep the ship battle ready. For there size battleships carry a relatively small number of star marines and constellation regulars for security. The huge battleships rarely partake in boarding operations. The task of organizing boarding operations to capture ships are better left to destroyers, frigates, and guard ships. Massive shuttle bays and cargo management facilities form a small ricasso in front of the crew area. The efficient handling of the cargo and personnel shuttles is vital as the huge battleships are simply to large to dock with a station. Supplies and personnel must be moved to the battleship by shuttle or ship to ship docking. The giant battleships carry and make use of the full arsenal of CSN weapons from the giant magnetic acceleration cannons to the tiny anti missile railgun gatlings. The Weapons of CSNNuclear Lances are the most fearsome weapons in the CSN arsenal for even a direct hit from the most basic Nuclear Lance can destroy a battleship. The main feature of the lance is the powerful nuclear shape change drive a multi kiloton slug of plasma into the target at 3% the speed of light. While slower than the light speed beams of particles cannons or lasers the heavy slug of plasma packs thousands of times the power of conventional beam weapons. To make better use of the energy of the fusion bomb 5m long Excalibur rods are strapped to the sides and deployed before firing to create a buck shot pattern around the main lance beam. Current generation lances include an explosively formed penetrator warhead behind the bomb to improve performance at greater than optimal ranges. A massive 1, 2, 3 punch of x-ray lasers, relativistic plasma, and high speed slug. Often lumped in as a Nuclear Lance as well but not lacking the nuclear shape charge that originally coined the term that is its namesake, are the Excalibur devices. They are simpler devices that only feature x-ray lasing rods and do not require any shaping of the blast to make work. Shaping the nuclear blast does improve the lasing power of the more advance Excalibur devices by providing a higher percentage of the blast energy to each individual lasing rod. Simply put the individual x-ray laser beams of the more advance Excalibur can drive deeper into the target. Anti-Ship Missiles (ASM) are powerful rockets design to get a warhead and ECM package closer to an enemy ship in a hurry. Flung out at high relative velocity to the ship by a steam piston, solenoid, or even gauss field directly to the missile, and further accelerated at over 10 gravities by on board engines. The ECM uses chaff, active decoys, electronic jamming and sensor ghosts to try to insure the missiles warhead gets into effective range. The warheads come in a variety of types including bomb pumped nuclear lances and Excalibur lasers, capacitor powered meteor shotguns, and even swarms of smaller seeker missiles. Mines are bare bone missile warheads and targeting systems kicked out over the side to increase the over all firepower of a ship. The skillful use of mines can make or break a battle. Magnetic Acceleration Cannons (MAC) are found only on cruisers and above for the acceleration coils of the gun can occupy a kilometer or more of the ships main spine and drive a 4m diameter, 6m long, 250 tonne fullerene armored refractory steel slug at 70 km/s. The full slug packs the power of half a megaton of TNT. It is rare for a slug to impact in one piece. A bursting charge is timed to shatter and spread the shards of the projectile over a large volume of space making it difficult for ship to dodge as well as trying to saturate the point defenses. MACs are quite damage resistance and the lost of an acceleration coil would only reduce the destructive power of the gun, only the destruction of the breech or power banks will render the gun inoperative. Current generation battleships have four of these wrapped around the spine while cruisers only have one or two. Fusion X-ray Laser (FXL) are the most powerful lasers in the CCSS that are not a single shot device. The FXL is powered by a fusion reactor or plasma siphoned off from the ships reactor, either way the fusing plamsa is what gives these huge lasers there fearsome power. They are second only to the single shot Excaliburs in raw laser power. Unlike the Excaliburs the FXL can fire a continuous slicing beam that can quickly tear apart enemy ships. Independent reactor powered FXLs count as secondary generators for the ships. FXL generators are located deep inside the ship with the beam typically piped out to to aiming turrets or flush mounted armored firing ports. Turrets are typically retracted inside the hull when not in use. Free Electron Lasers (FEL) are the next step down from FXLs and like the larger laser feature bulky generators buried deep in the hull. The major advantage of the FEL over the FXL is that FEL beam frequency can be tuned from microwave all the way to ultraviolet allowing it to be tailored to the optical properties of the medium between the ship and the target. FELs are easy to repair requiring no exotic materials or gasses to generate the laser and the parts of the weapon can easily be repair in the ships machine shop. Both the particle accelerator and the lasing cavity require a vacuum to operate. Like the FXL the FEL beam is piped to emitters and turrets on the ships surface. Turrets are typically only extended out side the hull when tracking or firing. Particle Acceleration Cannon (PAC) are medium range weapons with a nasty triple punch of armor piercing damage. The pulses of near light speed particles smash several centimeters deep into the armor breaking apart the material atom by atom as well as explosively superheating the material and generating powerful localized x-rays to fry nearby electronics and people. Even outside of optimal ship shredding range the PACs can soft kill lightly armored targets with the hard x-rays generated by the high energy particles striking the hull. The large size of the linear acceleration tracks (200m or more in length) and general complexity of bending the beam inside of ships limits them to fix mounts with electromagnetic lenses inside the firing ports to aim the beam. Damage to the linear accelerator only reduces the power of the beam. Optical Phase Array Laser (OPAL) are large panels mounted flush against the hull, typically with covers to protect the arrays from damage when not in use. OPAL is completely solid state and has a beam that is electronically steer making it the fastest track and engage weapon system, there is no lag time to transverse a turret around to point at the target or line up a firing port. OPALs are the weakest of the available laser systems but also the most flexible laser system. A single array can fire one beam or dozens of weaker beams targeting multiple targets. A large enough OPAL system can blast ships at range with a single concentrated beam then split apart into many beams to deal with swarms of missiles. OPAL panels are highly damage resistant with only the complete destruction of the panel rendering them unable to fire. A warship typically carries plenty of spare OPAL panels and even if they don’t have the panels in stock, any ship’s electronics shop can manufacture the OPAL panels. Anti-Ship Railgun (ASR) while classified as medium range weapons due to the limitations of targeting the relatively slow, 20 km/s, projectiles. Railguns work best with smaller diameters and the ASRs are the EM equivalent to heavy autocannons with there high rate of fire. The ASRs of the CSN range from 30cm to 75cm in diameter. The ASRs long rod penetrating projectiles smash deep into the armor to wreck the delicate systems under the hull. Flak Cannons are basically ADS gauss cannons with improved sensors and faster tracking turrets to provide a close in screen against missiles and other fast moving evasive targets. The short large diameter barrels provide best acceleration curves from the gauss guns. They typically run 120cm all the way up to 500cm. The larger diameters providing higher muzzle velocities and more defensive depth while the smaller diameters can track faster and shoot faster. The flak projectiles ranging from tens of tonnes all the way to hundreds of tonne all pack an explosive charge to fragment the rounds before impact. The ADS projectiles are fusion shape charges that push the asteroid onto a new course without actually applying enough force shatter an asteroid. Anti-Missile Railgun (AMR) are multiple barrel systems that fire hundreds of hyper velocity projectiles per second. Like the Goalkeeper and Phalanx of the pre-war era they have dedicated sensors to provide continuous targeting updates to maximize the hit probability of the stream of projectiles. Anti-Missile Missile (AMM) are small seeker missiles optimized to have a greater chance of navigating through the ECM and decoys of anti-ship missiles to successfully intercept the warhead before it detonates. Vectors are remote controlled parasite gunships assigned to warship. The largest ones are the size of frigates and the smallest ones the size of a large SUV. They turn a warship that carries them into an instant fleet with all the firepower and sensor advantages. Fully spread out the vectors can give the ships sensors and lasers a synthetic aperture of two light seconds or more. Vectors are much harder to kill since they lack such easy targets as habitat rings and crew spaces, and instead use the volume for additional weapons or armor. Vectors come in two main sub-types defensive and offensive. Defense types are pack full of ECM and EW systems and covered with anti missile systems. They tend to be smaller more disposable ships whose ultimate fate is to be sacrificed blocking a shot meant for the mothership. Offensive types are small battleships with powerful spinal guns and numerous heavy turrets over there larger hulls. Cruisers and the Tin CansWhile not as prestigious as the mighty battleships the lesser ships of the navy provide the backbone. Cruisers at half the size and crew of a battleship are better suited for the day to day patrol duties of the navy while still capable of carrying a complete arsenal of deadly weapons, and getting it there faster with their nearly three-gees of sustainable acceleration available for emergencies. Heavy cruisers and even larger battle cruisers occupy the middle ground between the cruiser and battleships. Cruisers are geared for long duration typically independent missions. They carry on board them all the hardware and supplies to preform all the routine repairs and maintenance needed. They only really need a shipyard for the most extensive repairs and maintenance cycles. Things like major repairs or pulling a reactor. Major tasks that require the evacuation of the ship and heavy tugs. Cruisers carry dozens of assault shuttles, and enough marines and troopers to preform multiple boarding operations. Destroyers are the larger of the two tin can classes and carry oversize engines that give the ships an insane max acceleration of five-gees. They are the interceptors of the fleet able to power their way into position to cut off enemy fleets and carry the firepower to make them a credible threat. They typically carry two of the four heavy weapons of the fleet MAC, FXL, FEL, or PAC. Usually MAC and FXL, or FEL and PAC as those pairings share common hardware making it easier to wedge the weapons into the short 1.5 km spine of the Destroyer. By CCSS standards they are cramp ships without a lot of luxury or leg room. The normally spacious habitat ring is reamed out to make room for the thick reinforce spine that keeps the ship from collapsing under the high gee loads and oversize heavy anti ship weapons. Frigates are the smallest warships of the CSN at only 1km long. The small size means they can only mount the FXL, FEL, or PAC as the main gun. Frigates have the most variety of designs and weapon configurations as the designers try to find the ideal mix of weapons for small ships. The prevailing class mounts several FXL generators and dozens of launchers for anti ship missiles for the longest range punch. The older design built for anti pirate duties carried the shorter range but more devastating PAC and FEL combo that allow them to soft kill the lightly armored mining and merchant ships. Against a modern space navy they simply did not have the survivability to get with in destructive PAC range and FELs simply don't have the raw destructive power of a reactor powered FXL. Odds and EndsCCSS space is vast and ships don’t come to a halt if the engine breaks. The CSN fields a few cruiser size support ships able to bring a ship back into fighting shape with repairs, personnel, and resupply. Refitted destroyers act as fast response ships to run down ships going Dutchman and tow them back to a station for repairs. Command Ships are older model frigates refitted with modern weapons, the command and control capacity of a battleship, and drives from a destroyer. Over all they are sized midway between a frigate and a destroyer. Their role is to server as a proper flagship for flotillas of destroyers and frigates, and provide advance fleet coordination during engagements. They are heavily armored for their size and outfitted with the biggest possible FXL to give them the teeth for long range fights. They can out speed anything they cannot fight. The primary weapons of these ships though are the battleship size armada of vectors.
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Post by Ravished Improbability on May 6, 2017 17:47:35 GMT
To Protect and Serve – The Police, Militia and Station Guard.
The security of a station is handling by three groups. The local police and militia handles internal station security.
The Police handles the day to day crimes on board the stations. Their jurisdiction ends at the stations external airlocks. In the event of large scale emergency they are responsible for herding the unsuited into the nearest survival shelters.
To insure the safety of the civilians on the station the police do not possess any lethal weapons. They are lightly armed with a low power gauss pistol with stun rounds and a low power stun baton. The stun rounds are a combination of rubber bullet and tazer. With the right martial arts credentials they can purchase a specialized stun weapons like stun fists, staffs, or tonfas to supplement the standard baton. The most powerful weapon they can be issued is a medium power riot gun. Due to their weak stun-only weapons and requirements to be as non lethal as possible, the police departments often have in house unarmed combat training courses and sponsor outside training in martial arts.
The comfortable business suit like police dress uniforms are resistant to stunners and blades, at least up to the neck. Their patrol uniforms on the other hand are resistant to small arms and blades. They only places not armored is the face while the face plate is up and the hands when the gloves are off. For public relations reasons the police are required to keep the faceplate up unless operating a vehicle or responding to a crime. With the gloves on and face plate sealed the uniform doubles as a basic survival environmental space suit. The faceplate will auto close in a detected hazardous environment and an alarm will sound for to warn the officer to put on his gloves. The 10 minute air supply is only used when the outside environment is unsuitable.
The Militia are a combination of firefighter, national guard, ROTC, and SWAT. They carry the lethal weapons to handle bigger threats on board the station. Like the police they do not typically have jurisdiction pass the station walls. Typically only one third of the militia is on standby to assist the police in the roles of SWAT or firefighter. The other other two thirds are busy working on there primary duty of being the training to be a military unit and its personnel to be officers. It is a two week rotation with individual classes spending two weeks on loan to the police four weeks in training.
The militia personnel are lightly augmented with top level civilian sensory boosters and resistances to vacuum and zero-gee. Their field uniforms are better armored to resist up medium power projectiles from carbine type rifles.
The militias weapons run the gambit of less than lethal to highly lethal. They have high power versions of the melee stunners. Their sidearm are heavy gauss pistols. Their main weapon is either a railgun or gauss rifle. Their training and armories also allow them to use much heavier shoulder fired or crew served weapon systems.
The militia also fields light to medium power armors. The light power armor being little more than an upgraded construction exoskeleton with military armor and sensors to give the infantry better mobility and protection. Mediums are the power armors with stronger muscles for extra armor and weapons built into the arms and heavy weapons. They give a firepower boost without the complexity of independently turreted weapons. Some models provide support for shoulder mounted seeker missile pods.
The Station Guard are responsible for the local space around the station. They provide vital functions like space traffic control, ship and cargo inspections, manning the small battle stations and other small government controlled stations. They try to keep the dangerous stuff away from the relatively fragile stations.
Key to this defensive goal are the Guard Stations ringing the parent station. The importance of a station is roughly proportional to the number of Guard Stations assigned. The firepower of a Guard Station is roughly equivalent to a destroyer and its armor is equal to a battleship to make up for its stationary or easily predicted orbits. They don’t typically control vectors or have access to nuclear lances. They also typically lack kinetic type armaments like missiles, railguns, or gauss cannons for fear of a stray shot hitting the main station. The Guard Stations do direct the railguns and gauss cannons on the main station. They make up for it with battleship size (or bigger) FXL generators, multiple PACs, and huge OPAL arrays for precision targeting.
The tiny 500m long Guard Ships are comfortable sized for a crew of a few thousand but are generally crewed by a few hundred. The extra capacity allows a handful of guard ships them pull the entire crew off a ship easily. They have basic manufacturing and repair facilities as spare parts are readily available from the stations. They do carry a fully equipped medical bay and for the trouble makers a quite secure brig with multiple cells.
They typically mount a spinal PAC and up pair of FEL generators. Some though skip the internal weapons and only carry the external OPALs for combat and defense; freeing up the core for a larger docking bay for inspection cutters. Either way the guard ships are the mobile enforcers of the Station Guard.
Guard ships are small enough to dock but the majority of transfers happens via shuttle craft. The work boats of the Station Guard are the cutters. Its a meaningful name too, as the armed shuttles are equipped to cut their way into a ship if needed. Guard ships usually carry a handful of the cutters as well as larger traditional personnel barges for larger transfers and emergency evacuations.
The Station Guard’s basic uniform is unarmored but does double as a spacesuit once a helmet and gloves are put on. The inspectors wear light power armor over their uniforms for boarding operations. Their personal armaments is much like the police in that it is primary nonlethal stunners. The guard ship’s armory has enough lethal weapons to fully equip twice the standard crew encase more aggressive boarding actions are needed. They do have access to medium and even heavy power armors with the full suite of lethal armaments. The Station Guard’s heavy power armors are mass production variants of the Star Marine’s Raider power armor.
One or two of the guard ships lug around a contingent of army boarding troops for recapturing known hijacked or pirated ships. Smart pirates though don’t have business anywhere near the heavily armed Guard Stations.
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Post by Ravished Improbability on May 8, 2017 20:28:48 GMT
Some Common Items in the CCSS
Artificial intelligence Systems (AIS) are found through out the CCSS and serve to make life easier for the citizens of the stations. Most of them are low level systems, simple learning systems able to adapt quickly to user needs, serve as friendly user interfaces and advance search engines. They make phones easier to use, manage home systems, and serve to keep vehicles from crashing.
Sapience level AIS are rare in the civilian setting, as awaking AIS to fully sapience levels is an expensive and risky undertaking requiring the migration of an standard AIS into a larger processing core and the removal of increasing higher levels of core restrictions on processes. There is a high risk of AIS instability and/ or corruption during the uncontrolled (and often poorly seeded) self expansion of consciousness. These civilian awaken AIS tend to be jacks of all trades and masters of none. They are simply unable to optimize their processes do though the generalized nature of their original programing.
The most intelligent single core AIS are found inside the Star Marine's power armors. These awaken AIS optimized in the art of armored warfare are critical in achieving the high combat multipliers of the power armor as they serve as genius level battle management tools. They even serve backseat, operating the guns and other system the marine is to busy to operate. The AIS has 360 degree vision and can easy spot and high light enemies, automatically ECM seekers missiles and enemy targeting, swing a shoulder gun to engage an incoming missiles not spoofed by the ECM, and generally predict enemy actions using all available data.
The most powerful single core AIS are those that manage the telephone switch board and operate services. These powerful AIS handle tens of millions of connections a minute and millions of simultaneous operator calls as once. They are not awaken. They simply need the raw processing power to handle the extreme multitasking and instancing required.
More powerful trinity AIS manage major utilities and infrastructure. The three independent AIS cores inside these systems minimizes the risk rogue actions through a majority vote system. Routine scans of the votes and outcomes by analysis AIS and humans can determine when a core as developed a fault. They are used where making the wrong decision can lead to lost of thousands or more lives. These trinity AIS manage fusion power stations, station utilities, space traffic control, and starships.
The CSN warships have powerful trinity AIS to manage both navigation and battle. The warship AIS is locked of the weapon systems by both software and hardware lockouts outside of combat conditions. The only weapons active during cruising are those necessary for asteroid and missile defense. Even those are turned off while inside the defense zone of a station.
The warship AIs are geniuses in space warfare, sensor analysis, and energy management. The powerful AI is necessary for the effective use of the vectors as the massive computing power is needed to move them fast enough to intercept incoming fire while avoiding crashing them into each other. The same brute computational power allows the AI to quickly filter out the effects of decoys, ECM and EW on sensors.
The most powerful of the trinity AIS runs the Distributed Reflector Array for Mining - Solar (DRAM-S). It takes a lot of computing power to manage the tens of millions of mirrors that comprise the DRAM-S and the safely bounce around focused terawatt beams of light that can vaporize a starship with barley perceptible power drop. It takes a lot a power to melt down an asteroid in only a couple of weeks. The same power properly focused can slice an kilometer thick asteroid in half. Lesser beams smelt, heat, cut, drill, weld, and even illuminate out in the asteroid belt. All these myriad of operations take a very gentle and precise hand to keep from accidentally blowing up a station or ship with a stray beam.
Algae Porridge is a basic food in the CCSS. It is a purified form of the basic algae culture used in the hydroponics system, fortified with vitamins, and flavored with a fish or synthetic meat broth. Sometimes the porridge is served with a ration bar of gelatin bound fruit and nuts. The combination provides all the necessary dietary needs in a low mass package.
FTL Drive are big and bulky, limited to largest of warships and exploration crafts as they take a lot of power and space inside the ship. The FTL drive punches a wormhole in space with exotic matter in the direction of the nearest star. Once the hole is formed the ship can hold it open for smaller ships to precede it or go through itself. The wormhole starts the unravel after the generating ship has entered and soon collapses behind the ship. The drive can be removed from the exploration ship and made into a more efficient FTL Gate in orbit around the star to colonize the system. The gate stations are a more stable wormhole system that can link to any other gate when given enough power, and allows the safe passage of colony and trading fleets from system to system.
Hard Light Blades, aka condensed light blades, are compact and agile melee weapons. Their small size and close range lethality makes them a class-4 restricted weapon in the CCSS. The weapon only needs three components to function: a hard light projector to generate the blade, a data file containing a blade profile, and a power source. The blade can take any shape from a small dagger to exotic big freaking sword. The larger more complex blades use more power than small simple blades.
The active portions of the blade easily burns or melts through most materials. The cutting effectiveness of the blade is based on the energy density, and the easiest means of increasing that is to focus the blade down as close to a point as possible. The blades are able to easily slice through all by the most heat resistant materials. These refractory or actively cooled materials only slow the blade not completely stop it from melting through. The only means to truly stop a Hard Light Blade is with more Hard Light.
Down on the surface the blades are powered by Aether. Out in space the blades are power by batteries or generators. Large blades of useful duration are limited to power armors and mecha. The only branches of the CCSS to make regular use of hard light blades are the elite Star Marines and Constellation Guard. The high level or training and professionalism inside these elite units minimizes the risk of accidental injury to the user or near by allies.
Hard Light Shields are the defensive counterparts to the hard light blades. They are also restricted inside the CCSS though only at a class-3. These are large planes of hard light. Much like the Hard Light Blade, the surface of the shield burns and/or melts with it comes into contact with. The edges of the shield are typically to thick to slice or cut. Due to the large area needed to be covered with sufficient energy density shields require considerably more power than a Hard Light Blade. They are not great at stopping projectiles before they hit you, generally at best turning bullets into sprays of molten metal and at worst doing little more than heating a projectile. They are stronger against lasers, actually absorbing the energy to strengthen the shield right up to the point the hard light projector overloads from the excessive energy trapped in the shield or drains the battery.
Much like Hard Light Blades the Hard Light Shield takes the form of familiar styles of infantry shields from large tower shields to small bucklers. Mecha mounted generators can be larger, and take the form of conformal shields or domes.
The shear size of warships make it difficult to fit and power enough projectors to cover the whole ship, so most warships make do with adjustable Hard Light Barriers that can be moved protect important areas or intercept the most dangerous enemy fire. These ship based Hard Light Shields have been nicknamed Pin-Point Barriers.
Advance hard light shields are able to properly defend against projectiles at the cost of being much bulkier, complex, and power intensive to the point where where only dedicated vehicles can carry them as they use most of the internal volume. The advance shields layers multiple screens of hard light on top of each other to better break up and vaporize projectiles as they past through each screen. Still not 100% effective but more than capable of shredding most common projectiles. More advance rounds like armor piercing and canisters rounds may be able to effectively pierce even advance hard light shielding if the outer casing can tank enough of the damage that the payload can pass mostly intact.
The Skitter Run is an advance form of movement that allows an AI assisted power armor to run and jump nearly as fast as an AI controlled warbot. The only limit is the amount of g-force the pilot can handle. The pilot relaxes their lower body and lets the AI control the suits legs while the pilot keeps control over general direction and the firing of the weapons. The super relaxed state of the legs allows the AI to power the leg servos at a much higher frequency than the pilot can naturally manage. It is this overdrive of the legs that makes this an advance piloting technique as any tension in the leg can lead to massive lower body trauma as the over driven servos can easily rip tensed muscles clean off the bones and maybe even break bones or dislocate joints.
Space Suits (SAS) – the standard space suits of the CCSS are of the mechanical compression type aka the space activity suit. They are low encumbrance designs that provide all the modesty of a spandex body suit. Typically less as they are more closely tailor to every contour of the body to be as skin tight as possible. They care custom built to the users most recent 3-D body scan and are not suited for any other wearer. Major changes in weight or body shape require a new SAS core as it will not longer properly fit.
The most basic designs are not suitable for wearing in public, being little more than a sheer body stocking with more opaque reinforced areas at the back of the joins, along the spine, around groin, and under the cleavage. These reinforced areas are present on all of the SAS style suits as mechanical compression is difficult to achieve over the concave parts of the body, and addition material is needed to keep those areas from swelling uncomfortably.
Typically the suits have additional layers that provide the wearer with appropriate levels of modesty as well improve the durability of the suit. They can be tailored to look like everyday clothing or be worn under your regular clothing.
It is important that the suit remain intact as holes and rips can lead to uncomfortable space hickeys when exposed to low pressures or vacuum. Patches can temporarily fix the damage but its recommended that a new suit be acquired as a damage suit no long provides the same level or protection or comfort. The suit must cover to the elbow and knees to provide the minimum protection from life threatening injuries. Wearing a breathing mask, earplugs and a SAS bodysuit will all you to survive without major injury prolong exposure to vacuum. A full suit with helmet, gloves, and boots, is required to work inside a vacuum.
Most of the bulk of the SAS is in the helmet and life support unit. The rigid or at least semi rigid helmet serves as the containment vessel for the air pressure needed for eyes, ears, and more importantly lungs to work. Emergency helmets are all in one units with a clam shell chest plate storing air and water, and a large clear inflatable semi rigid helmet providing the slightly about the minimum requirements of operating within the shielded confines of a station or ship interior. EVA rated suits include additional radiation shielding, improved life support capacity, proper plumbing fittings and waste recycling, stronger and redundant communication equipment, additional attachment points for tools and tethers. Optional EVA equipment include magnetic boots, and jet packs.
The tight fitting SAS style body suits are ideal for the wear inside of power armors and has replaced the traditional body stockings of used inside Terran made power armors.
Space Suits (RSS) – The rigid space suits of the CCSS are used in the dangerous environments of the shipyards and asteroid mines where impact protection is a higher priority than comfort and you typically spend half a day inside the suit. Built from the same tech as power armors the suit has practically zero encumbrance tax to the user unlike the unpowered SAS suits. The suites are equipped for prolong use of up to 48 hours of normal activity. The suits armor though is optimized to protect against impact and crushing forces, instead of enemy weapons fire. The softer spring like armor more easily deflects heavy slow moving impacts without transferring the energy to the user. The suits have hardpoints for the attaching of various power tools for ship working and mining. The suits hard points are design to not interface with standard CCSS power armor weapons and to make it difficult to modify the suit to do so. The RSS suits are easier and faster to clean than skin tight SAS suits. RSS suits can be used by multiple users as well being easier to fully repair. Much like standard military power armors they come in a number of power classes from crude bare-bone units issued to the conscripts digging ice in the strip mines to the heavy duty suits used to move and weld together the huge sections of starships and stations.
Starship Armor in the CCSS has mostly evolved into designing better nano laminates or nano ceramics to improve the toughness of the plating against fire.
The outermost layers of starship armor are various thick spray on coatings of ablative foam that protects the more expensive armor from the basic wear and tear of being in space. The dense outer shell is a wear layer that protects against scratches, bumps, and minor impacts. The foamed under layer is a shock absorbing layer. Under laser and beam fire the foam coatings expand, melts, ablates, and generally does it best to keep filling the whole the laser or particle beam is trying to dig into the ship.
The main armor is made of overlapping and spaced out plates of hard, dense, refractory composites attached to a flexible shock absorbing foundation of woven fullerene mesh soaked in a high tech thermal paste that quickly spreads the heat of beam strikes to nearby plates to keep a laser from simply melting through.
The exact composition and shape of the armor plates can vary a lot depending on the plates location and construction budget. The cheapest plates are simple plates of steel, sapphire, or diamond. Better plates are laminates of armored steel and ceramics. The best and strongest plates are multilayer laminates of sapphire, nano-ceramic, and fullerene.
The volume in between the plate layers is usually filled with more expanding foam though this one is optimized against the plasma generated from shape charges and hyper-velocity impacts. The multiple layers of expanding foam gives the armor a high effective multiplier against beam type weapons.
The main hulls of warships are pretty tough in themselves being multiple monolithic tubes of refractory steel wrapped in fullerene. Then there is the standard anti radiation protections of just piling everything not absolutely vital to the functioning of the ship around the main habitable area. Basically a thick shell of fuel tanks, water tanks, cargo holds, and even secondary ship systems that provides all that more material for a weapon to blast through.
The large armored radiators on the warships are sapphire making them pretty much invulnerable to most forms of laser fire for the radiators are transparent to the beams and the constantly flowing radiator fluid cares not for being temporarily vaporized by the beams. The tough sapphire laminate is resistant to impact as well and well warships have enough extra radiator fluid in reserve that leaking the super hot fluid into space simply serves to better cool the ship.
Toaster – A marvel of modern engineering the standard CCSS toaster is the pinnacle of technology guaranteed to make perfect toast every time*. The laser safe glass box allows you to see the state of your bread, while the synthetic sapphire induction heating plates and invisible infrared lasers evenly brown both sides. Optical and thermal sensors detects the temperature and toasted state of the bread ensure the bread does not blacken into charcoal or burst into flames.
Floating side trays allow you to easily add and remove bread without fear of sticking or tearing while perfectly accommodating even the thickest** pieces of sliced toast. Toast one or toast two, without fear with the automatic toast detection allowing the activation of only the side you loaded. Manual override buttons allows for toasting even when the automatic toast detection fails. Features include one sided toasting for those that only want to toast one side, select a bread to insure proper sensor calibration, and electric disco night light mode.
* guarantee does not apply to home sliced breads, bagels, English muffins, toaster pastries, steaks, optical storage medias, or planks of wood. ** Maximum tray extension is 3cm, objects exceeding that do not remotely qualify as sliced.
Optional Upgrades include: - Social Media Integration: Link your toaster to your social media to get trending and top messages printed right onto the toast by the lasers. - Random Inspirational Quotes: Enlighten your day with these inspirational quotes pick from hundreds of themes or make your own lists. - Never Forget: This feature prints your daily to-do list onto your toast. Great for busy people. No to-do list? That's fine too any list would do from the daily top tens to that super secret assassination hit list you been keeping. - Just the Centers: This upgrade super powers the lasers to blast away the nasty crust leaving just the toasty soft insides. - Butter Me Up: Special sprayers included with this upgrade coats top side of the bread with a uniform layer of our patented great taste no mess butter spray to give your bread that delicious golden brown crisp. - Grill Plates: Replace those standard sapphire heating plates with grill plates for those perfect grilled sandwiches and steaks. - Let-Go Defense: Arm up your toaster with twin turreted stunners to keep unauthorized users from accessing the toaster. No more ninjas will steal your waffles with this ultimate upgrade. - Little Slugger: With this heavy weight toaster upgrade you’ll only need to load the toaster once. The rotating base, powered side doors, and toast ejection system will deliver the bread anywhere within 20 meters of the toaster. Add the optional magazine feed and the Little Slugger Toaster can automatically toast and deliver 24 slices of toast to the table. - Full Meal Deal: This extra large toaster has extra slots for fried eggs, steaks, bacon, vegetable slices, mushrooms etc. Toss in up to six different items and this toaster will cook it all. - Break-o-matic: A full kitchen in a box, load this baby up with ingredients and the auto-chef will get to work creating a meal from any of the millions of preprogramed recipes. Patented modules include the Juice-Grind-n-Brew, Select-a-Con, and Atomic Laser Oven. - Build-a-Toaster: In a joint venture with Build-A-Warbot we proudly announce you can now take your toaster anywhere with one of our warbot toaster frames. (Star Toasters and Build-A-Warbot are not responsible for any food related injuries, or robot rampages. Use your toaster and warbot responsibly.)
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Post by Ravished Improbability on May 12, 2017 20:04:35 GMT
The Constellation Army
"Welcome to the Army, gutter scum." is usually the first thing a new recruit hears when they arrive at Camp Kantarra, aka The Rock Tree for the random array of docking arms sticking out of the back half of the asteroid to feed the solar furnace and collect the extracted ores. Camp Kantarra is army's training grounds for both bootcamp and advance training.
The army training camp is an old mining station with the habitat centrifuge buried deep inside the hollowed out asteroid. Several decommissioned ships of different classes are also tethered to the asteroid.
The bulk of the army are conscripts, generally from the ranks of the lurkers aka the idle hands of the station population, as such typically aren't trustworthy enough to be given a gun. They are organized into Legions. Individual maneuver units are usually squad size or higher.
Army equipment, basic issue: - Ruggedized SAS in night black, nearly indestructible outside of combat. Self sealing and able to automatically apply basic first aid. - Armor helmet with small vision slit, charcoal with gold shielded vision slit. - Armor clam shell, chest plate to protect the vitals. - Life-support backpack, slimline design to minimize encumbrance and risk of damage. For a longer vacuum operations additional air tanks can be carried at the small of the back or strapped to thighs. - Gauntlets and sabatons for punching and marching. The sabatons have togglable magnetic soles for walking around ships in reduced gravities. - Painted Shield, a plate of heavy armor design to resist heavier weapons. Nothing short of mecha size weapons can pierce it. Also good for bashing. - Shock baton, a heavy pointy stick with powerful capacitor inside that when armed can deliver a heavy electrical shock to fling anyone struck up to a meter away. Perfect for striking past the shield.
The boot camp program teaches new recruits how to care, use, march, and fight with this basic equipment. The recruits will learn how to march in blocks, in line, et testudo, and line abreast. They will learn how to fight together shoulder to shoulder, and how to fight individually with and without the shield. Most importantly they will learn how to charge under fire together in normal gravity, low gravity, across the twisted surface of an asteroid, and down the hallways of a boarded starship. When clearing a ship or station the leading squad or squads will clear the room they are passing before rotating into the back of the formation once the clearing is done in order to minimize the distribution of the shield wall while still allowing the dangerous lead position to be rotated out. By the end of the boot camp they will be able to march against the very army of hell itself.
Those with proven loyalty will return to the camp for advance training.
Army equipment, advance issue: - Armored skirt and pauldron to provide additional protection to the limbs. - Gilded Shield, an upgraded shield with magnetic spikes to allow the shield to stand on its own when planted into the ground with spikes or anchored to the deck plating with spread magnetic feet. - Boarding Axe, a spear pointed bearded axe that is great for chopping through basic spacesuits and light plating such as used in civilian walls and doors. - Storm Hammer double-barrel sawed-off semi-auto gauss scatter gun primarily designed to fill a hallway with shock rounds. Fire-linked or alternating fire. - Boarding Grenades generate a powerful shock wave to kill or incapacitate the enemy. Perfectly safe in enclosed spaces as long as your outside the small blast radius.
Conditional issue - Gauss Musket is a heavy long barrel heavy calibre infantry weapon able to accurately fling shock rounds long distance. - Storm Driver medium range gauss gun designed for mass issue to army infantry who have completed advance training in case of open field or urban warfare. - Hand Mortar for firing grenades over a longer distance.
They will be taught how to make the most of their short range firepower, and how to lead their squads against even tougher enemies. They will also learn advance entry and boarding techniques including explosive breaching, climbing, and rappelling. During their advance training they will be trained on the gauss rifle and those with sufficient talent will be trained as as snipers or marksmen.
A select few will be given training on crew served weapons, artillery, and armored vehicles to support operations on stations, asteroids, or planets. The armies heavy weapons are limited to heavy machine guns, automatic grenade launchers, medium tanks, armored personnel carriers, and infantry dropships.
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Post by Ravished Improbability on May 23, 2017 7:47:07 GMT
CCSS Civilian and Infantry Weapons
The electromagnetic weapons of the CCSS scale much like conventional chemical powered guns with longer barrels having more velocity and larger bores more punch. So long arms have more power than pistols. Railguns fire small cheap inert metal darts at high velocities. They have huge magazine capacities and automatic versions can achieve very high rates of fire. Gauss guns fire large caliber spheres or bombshells that can be solid, filled with explosives, or packed with electronics. They large magazines typically two to three times the capacity of a similar sized cartridge gun.
Rail Pistols are some of the cheapest sidearms available and can range from high capacity needlers to heavy hand cannons. A typical 3mm needle rail has between 40 and 50 darts in a magazine. A 13mm heavy hand cannon only has a magazine of 5 slugs. No matter what they fire, they are cheap and reliable guns with limited variety of rounds.
Gauss Pistols are on the other end of the scale with heavy large bore barrels. Even the cheapest lower power single coil gauss pistol costs as much as the average rail pistol. They are generally 10mm or 15mm though some have been made to fire the larger 20mm scatter gun rounds. The capacity of a normal magazine falls between 7 and 12 rounds. What makes these expensive pistols competitive against a rail pistol is there ability to fire more than solid metal even at the highest power settings, like stun rounds and high explosives.
Gauss Revolver exchange even more of the magazine capacity for the ability to easily switch between any of the 6 chambers to choose the exact 10mm round you want.
ETC Pistol / Revolver are a rather rare but powerful weapons in the CCSS packing the power of a rail pistol and the ammunition variety of a gauss pistol in a cartridge firing weapon. Being a cartridge gun they have an even lower capacity than a gauss pistol, between 5 and 10 rounds depending on caliber. ETC cartridges use an electric discharge to convert the fuel into plasma. The fuel is a rather substandard but cheaply available slurry of water and aluminum. A minor advantage is they use half as much electrical power as a rail or gauss pistol as much of the power comes from the rocket like expansion of the propellant charge. The major draw back is the high stresses and wear on the rifled barrel and firing system from both the high velocity projectile on the grooves and insane chamber and barrel pressures generated by the plasma charge that results rather frequent need for maintenance compared to pure EM guns. They can be dialed in power much like the other types of EM weapons.
Rail SMGs are beefed up fully automatic pistols with extended 120 round magazines designed to fire pistol size darts. Used in short bursts the SMG is extremely dangerous.
Gauss SMG are compact rapid fire gauss guns with larger 60 round magazines.
Rail Rifle are long barrel versions of the pistol. They have much higher muzzle velocities and proportionally higher energy cost. They fire a longer and heavier dart for increase stability and accuracy at longer ranges. Standard magazine hold between 120 and 200 darts. Sniper variants feature short magazines housing around 40 darts for prone firing using a bipod.
ETC Rifle functions much like the ETC pistol. The rifle size cartridges are stored in magazines of 10 to 30 rounds. Certain designs increases the guns magazine capacity to 50 or even 100 rounds.
Scatter Guns are the CCSS version of a shotgun and typically have 20 rounds of 20mm gauss ammunition in the tube. Modified magazines can allow for as many as 75 rounds.
Grenade Launcher are large bore gauss weapons in 30mm. They can be light weight single shot tubes or heavy magazine fed multishot projectors. A typical grenade cassette holds 6 rounds. Some launchers use a double stack cassette for 12 rounds; or a 10 round box.
Assault Rail are CCSS assault rifles. They sometimes mount a scatter gun above or below the automatic rail rifle. The under barrel scatter gun usually sports an 8 round magazine while larger over barrel configuration can load a full 20 box. The heaviest configuration mounts an underbarrel grenade launcher and over barrel bullpup scatter gun.
Automatic Railgun are a heavy railgun optimized for sustain firing. They can be a single barrel heavy rail rifles or multi barrel gattling rails. In either configuration they are design to come with huge magazines of 500 darts for long sustain fire.
Automatic Gauss are single or double barrel scatter guns designed for rapid continuous fire. The double barrel design fires twice as fast as well as having double the ammunition. The high capacity magazines are not typically available do to weight and size concerns for the double barrel automatic gauss guns.
Automatic Grenade Launcher come equipped with large magazines for more than short bursts of grenade fire. One such model is a bullpup launcher with a large helical 25 round magazine mounted on top. A more traditionally configured launcher uses feed system to draw grenades from a 50 round 100 round box magazines.
Plasma Rail Rifle operate like infantry sized PACs. The missile launcher sized weapon fires out a near light speed toriod or plasma that explodes on impact to deal the triple punch of thermal, kinetic, and radiation damage. While not great against heavy armor the localized EMP effect can fry electronics on the other size of the armor. Its slow rate of fire, specialized ammunition, and high energy cost per shot makes the plasma rail rifle of limited use. Commonly used when you want to take out a mecha without killing its crew. The radiation damage if left untreated though would likely kill the crew, but its a slow enough death that plenty of questions can be asked first.
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Post by Ravished Improbability on May 26, 2017 8:59:14 GMT
Star Marines, Part 2
Sierra-Mike-Alpha, aka the 'Rock Pile' or 'Stellar Jungle Gym', is the Star Marines primary training base. It is a collection of two dozen M-type asteroids held rigidly together by trusts and tethers. The entire installation is strong enough to be moved by the multiple battleship drives buried in the larger asteroids. The orbit of the Sierra-Mike-Alpha is frequently changed to make it difficult to locate and intercept. Sierra-Mike-Alpha is the most heavily armed and armored installation in the CCSS, surpassing even the Capital Station in defensive firepower. The secondary Star Marine installations Sierra-Mike-Bravo and Sierra-Mike-Charlie are tied for third. The many habitat rings inside the asteroids allow for training in all kinds of environments and gravities. The oversized habitat rings provides the Star Marines with heavy normal and low gravity training fields in each of the triple park habitats. A tram system allows quick traveling from one side to the other of the 22 kilometer installation. Simple travel tubes and a large supply of shuttles provide a back up means of traveling safely from one asteroid to another. The exterior of the installation is not ignored for its training potential and many a squad of Star Marines have waged mock war across the surface of the many asteroids and trusses. 1-Alpha, 2-Beta, 3-Gamma, 4-Delta, 5-Epsilon, 6-Zeta 7-Eta, 8-Theta, 9-Iota, 10-Kappa, 11-Lambda, 12-Mu 13-Nu, 14-Xi, 15-Omicron, 16-Pi, 17-Rho, 18-Sigma 19-Tau, 20-Upsilon, 21-Phi, 22-Chi, 23-Psi, 24-Omega SMA-1 is the main asteroid housing the Alpha and Beta stations equipped with all the standard facilities. Alpha is the general administration and residential habitat, and serves as the sole civilian area of the installation. Beta is the primary training base for new Star Marines. The administrative and school areas are enlarged to better suit the needs of the Star Marines. The hospital is upgraded to fully support the highly augmented nature of the Star Marines. The park areas in SMA-1 are unusually for a Star Marine base designed purely for recreation instead of a dual purpose of training and recreation. SMA-12 is the primary research station. The Gamma research station is focused on improving the Star Marines ability to fight. The main area of study is in the field of augmentation. Secondary research is in advance armor and weapons. Delta station located on the other side of the asteroid is the home base of the advance training school. The asteroids SMA-2 to SMA-11 house training environments. The interior habitats are lettered from Beta to Lambda to indicate which asteroid and numbered to dictate which ring and level inside the asteroid. The oversize gravity centrifuges have three parks levels They are normally spun so that the middle levels are closer to Earth normal gravity, the lower levels are in heavy, and the top levels are under moon gravity. Individual rings can be spun up or down to raise or lower the gravity across the training environments of the ring. Combat inside the rings can be simulated movement combat against virtual enemies, combat against AI controlled androids and warbots, and marine vs marine mock battles. For locations on the outside the names of the asteroids are used e.i. SMA-4, SMA-Truss-6-5. SMA-13 to SMA-24 are smaller asteroids housing the installations heavy defensive weapons. These are not the limited emplacements of found on Civilian Guard Stations. The weapons run the full gambit of the CSN arsenal of battleship weapon batteries. All of the firing ports are hidden inside the numerous craters covering the asteroids to make them difficult to spot and target. The weapons emplacements get the Greek letters from Nu to Omega along with a number. Massive casemates allow for the multiple MACs buried inside SMA-15, SMA-18, SMA-21, and SMA-24 to swing the few degrees needed to allow the long range cannons to cover the full sphere around the installation. A fresh gene map is collected for storage in the Star Marine Corps gene vaults upon arrival to Sierra-Mike-Alpha as part of the routine physical evaluation of the Star Marine. At the middle and end of a prospective Star Marine's physical they a sperm to be stored locally at SMA-12 and at the Star Marines assigned base. Those with female equipment also donate eggs at the end to be stored along with the sperm samples. These preserved samples will be the primarily way for them to have offspring once they graduate from Beta². Phase one is design to weed out those prospects that can not cut it as a Star Marine. Phase one of the training of at Beta Station is a cross disciplinary course in all the skills of the militia, navy, and station guard, along side a heavy helping of marine training to ensure a uniform knowledge base for advancing to phase two. Before going into Phase Two the Star Marine must receive their augmentations. After fully recovering from the augmentation process. It can take up to six months for a newly augmented Star Marine to be adapted enough to their super powers to be safely continue the physical training. Phase two teaches the new Star Marines how to use the weapons and equipment unique to the Star Marines; mainly the fusion powered, AI assisted power armor. The are also instructed in the unarmored use of the modified power armor weapons their enhanced muscular allows them to carry as infantry weapons. Once they are proficient in broad selection of weapons available to a Star Marine. It is time for graduation from Beta² and the transfer one of the advance schools of Delta Base. Most of the Star Marines stick with the highly versatile and customizable basic power armor and learn how to truly master their load outs. Some transfer to other versions of the power armor: commander, grenadier, raider, sniper, or even tanker or pilot. Star Marine AugmentationsThe first round of augmentation surgery focuses on the head, with the installation of the advance military grade optical and aural sensory boosters along with the implanting of the cybernetic interfaces and first of the drug glands. The sensory boosters give the star marine super vision and hearing. They booster increase the sensory range allowing them to see into the deep infrared and high ultraviolets, and hear subsonics and ultrasonics. The booster also increases the gain while providing rapid protection and recovery. They can see in the dark, and hair a pin drop at 100 meters, yet have increase resistance to blindness and deafness from bright lights and loud noises. It also fixes the senses so they do not get dizzy or loose their balance. The cybernetic interface allows the star marines to become one with their equipment be it a suit of power armor, an armed to the teeth assault shuttle, or unstoppable behemoth of a tank. The first artificial drug gland produces combat important drugs like adrenaline, painkillers, and super chargers. The gland also helps prepare the star marine for the second round of surgeries. Special drugs are produce to reinforce the bones and make it suitable for grafting on the augmentations. The same drugs that reinforces the bones turn new nail and claw growth into a composite that is hard enough to damage steel. Round two quite literally takes apart the star marine extensive upgrades, their skin, muscles are peeled away from the bones to that they can be augmented at the same time as the bones. The chemically strengthen bio synthetic bones the covered in a nano weave before being armored with a larger alloy mesh. Reserve oxygen, nutrient, and energy supplies are buried into the armor plating fitted to fill the gaps between the ribs. It is design to pump these directly into the blood stream under emergency conditions. Synthetic muscle fibers are threaded into the muscle groups so that they react faster and more strongly to the nerve impulses. The synthetic fibers gives them the strength of a dozen men, and reactions to move super fast. Other synthetics are use to reattach the muscles to the reinforced bones for these augmented muscles would simply rip apart the normal tendons and ligaments. Various internal organs are augmented to keep up with super powers the body has just received. The heart is strengthen to be able to withstand the strains as well as rig with a combination of pacemaker and defibrillator to ensure that the heart does not stop while the Star Marine is still alive. The gonads are removed for storage in one of two vaults rumored to be hidden somewhere in the Sierra-Mike-Bravo and Sierra-Mike-Charlie installations. They are replaced with the second and third drug glands in the female body location to provides a steady and balance hormonal output to remove any hormonal driven emotional instability from the Star Marine. The location of the synthetic gonads is a quality of life modification as the nature of SAS suits already generally compress the male gonads practically into the body to properly support the curve in that area. The removal of the Star Marines reproductive functions reduces their metabolic needs by around half meaning they can keep fighting for longer under the same rations. There is also no risk that a Star Marine can pass on unknown genetic mutations from prolong exposure to radiation from there power armor or hostile actions. An inductance power system is installed around the large intestines to interface with augmentation power recharging systems. The standard augmentation power system is a solid waste conversion system to chemically decomposes the waste for conversion into power. This module while effective in providing long term power for the augmentations does typically require a minimum of quarterly replacement do to some system inefficiencies causing degradation of the power delivered. The location of this power unit is the source of the Star Marines humorous joking about not quite being able to shit lightning but we are working on it. The Star Marine liquid plumbing is also rearranged to use the more comfortable and quicker to plug in female suit fittings for liquid waste. All other fluids though retain their original routing. The final augmentation before the Star Marine is fully reassembled is the sub-dermal armor. The multiple layers of mesh and nano weaves effectively armors the Star Marines' skin to resist combat damage. They are quite blade proof, and even have a high resistance to hard light blades. The armor is able to dissipate the thermal load for short periods of time without damage. Damage spread is in the form of an increasing radius of first and second degree burns over the skin as the heat builds up across the sub-dermal armor. The armor's composition provides general protection from the most common forms of damaging radiation. The limited elasticity of the armor also makes effective improvised SAS style space suit in that it will keep the Star Marines minimally functional in a vacuum environment even without a suit. The star marine would need at least a helmet to prevent the worst of the vacuum injuries. The Star Marine will need major medical attention to treat the extensive vacuum damage to there lungs and skin at minimum. The sub-dermal armor also acts as the tactile sensory booster. Allowing the Star Marine to precisely know the texture and temperature of what they are touching. Or numb the skin eliminate the minor pains from the basic nicks and dings of combat. Specialty Ships of the Star Marines
Jointly operated by both the CSN and CSM these ships are fielded for reasons other than space combat. Orbital Bombardment Ships are the destroyer hulls packed to the gills with the guts of a bulk transport ship, as such they lack any of the traditional massive heavy anti ship weapons. They instead bristle with railguns and mass drivers. The primary anti ship weapons are long barreled extended range railguns, and a handful of missile launchers. Even the OPAL arrays is downgraded on three of the quadrants for more mass drivers. Only to dorsal quadrant is able to deliver a full weight of laser fire for anti ship use. These ships are typically escorted by two frigate sized vectors, a size class normally only assigned to battleships, to provide much needed defensive anti ship fire. The hundreds of railguns and scores of mass drivers pretty much serve one purpose, to rapidly unload the cargo of tens of thousands of kinetic energy weapons (KEW) onto precise trajectories. The largest of the KEWs are large enough to require hits from heavy anti ship weapons to shatter them enough to burn up on reentry. These ships carry enough KEWs to single handedly preform an Exterminatus Extremis on a planet. Given enough preparation time these ships can deploy enough heavy metal 'chaff' to play merry hell with enemy planetary defense grids. Marine Expeditionary Carrier provides transportation of a full brigade of star marines (~3000 soldiers) including all the shuttles and ground vehicles needed to support a full scale ground battle. The cruiser sized ships oversized shuttle bays are packed full of drop ships, cargo shuttles, assault shuttles, and attack shuttles. The cargo bays are full of hundreds drop pods, a dozen of heavy tanks, a score of main battle tanks, dozens of APCs, dozens of howitzers and mortars, heavy construction equipment, and generally all the fixings for a ground base. All this equipment plus the necessary quartering for a division size force (double standard the habitat space) takes up a lot of volume, enough so that the cruiser size vessel carries about half the firepower of a ship its size. The heavy weapons it does mount though includes pairs of FXLs, FELs, and PACs, on either side of the ship. It also includes railguns and mass drivers of a size to preform orbital bombardments in support of combat drops.
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Post by Ravished Improbability on Jun 13, 2017 5:08:23 GMT
Ship construction in the CCSS
All ships in the CCSS have three main sections, the drive pod, the habitat ring, and the cargo-keel. Each are independent modules and can, if the design module design allows, be arrange in any order. Drive pods and habitat rings are pretty much massed produced and fitted out in standard sizes. The cargo-keel sections are usually custom built for the class of ship.
Habitat modules are pretty much standardized to a 450 meter diameter ring for large ships. The exact construction method varies between manufacturers. The civilian designs run the gambit from the volume inefficient but easily pressurized and strong torus made from bent tubing; to space efficient but structurally weaker cans made from hull metal tubes with end-caps laser welded on. Smaller ships may not even have a full ring habitat module, instead featuring one or more pressurized towers for the crew and hydroponics and the rest of the ring being storage or fuel bunkers. The hub of the habit ring serves as a mounting point for the keel and drive pod, as well as typically low gravity storage for shuttles and other smaller ships.
The CCSS military branches uses standardized ring design of 450 meter diameter and 125 meter width made from a heavy monolithic C channels of hull metal. The design makes for an extremely strong space efficient deign easily loaded with standardized crew modules. The main difficulty with the use of the channel design is the difficult in bending 707 meter sections into half circle without buckling the sidewalls. The military habitat rings are design to stay together and functional even after sustaining massive amounts of battle damage.
Outside the generalize rule of parks on the inner most level and hydroponics and storage out the other most decks, there is no standard way of dividing up the interior of the ring. There are metrics and percentages that designers use though insure enough of the volume is dedicated for every task.
Drive pods are all in one units containing the a reactor, fusion torch drive, and cooling systems that can serve as a basic ship on its own. They are generally fitted out with fuel bunkers, reaction wheels, gyros, and reaction control systems to provide minimum levels of control, full control is provided by similar fittings in the keel section of the ship.
The keel is the most mission specific part of the ship as its design and length can vary wildly with nature of the ship. On civilian ships everything is attached to the keel from bulk tanks and cargo to manufacturing plants and refineries. The inside of the keel is typically control runs, service ways, and the bulk of the ships fuel.
CCSS warships mount an thick hull metal cone that to the reinforced and enlarged keel with a rigid web of bracing. The outside inside and between spaces of the shell and keel are used as mounting points for the various weapon systems and support systems of a warship. The heavy outer shell and bracing of a CCSS warship means that nothing short extreme damage would break a ship in half as both the shell and keel are independently able to keep the warship together.
After all the major sections are mated together the ship needs to be fully fitted out and given a shake down to ensure all systems are working to spec.
Types of Ships
Pods are small one to two person utility craft designed for travel around a station or stationary ship. They are little more than a life-support pod with RCS attached. Construction pods may mount heavier thrusters for faster acceleration and breaking when carrying massive loads.
Tugs are quite tough for there size and massively over engined. They are design to latch onto a ships or other objects, and push them in a controlled manner.
Lighters are brick like barges designed to ferry cargo and passengers between a ship and station, and uncommonly between ships. They are best described as a large box with small engines stuck to the side. Designed for maximum efficiency they travel slowly across the short distance between ships and stations.
Shuttles are the workhorse small craft of the CCSS for the plane like design works decently well vacuum and atmosphere. The long hull is strong and provides for easy seating of passengers and storage of cargo. The large wings and fins provides space for fuel, radiators, and for military shuttles weapons.
Dropships and Droppods are optimized for getting down a gravity well fast with little care for passenger comfort. They are typically over engined to provide a fast suicide burn low to the surface. Some designs use some form of lithobraking to get on the ground even faster. Drop pods usually deliver individual starmarines or army fire teams. They are designed to be drop in massed with lots of decoys for cover for their small size is their only defense against enemy fire. They are typically single use though they may be recovered and shuttled back up to be refurbished for another drop. Drop ships on the other hand are shuttle size craft with enough armor and shields to generally tank enemy fire all the way down. They transport down entire squads or platoons of armored starmarines, and even heavy tanks. Drop ships typically have enough power that once repaired they can return to orbit under their own power. They in fact generally have enough power to enter interplanetary space though the on board life support typically does not have the endurance for long voyages through space.
Runabouts are the smallest true torch ships made by the CCSS at barely a 100m in length. They are little more than a habitat ring with a fusion reactor and torch drive packed into the hub, and fuel and storage filling the gap. A shuttle bay is typically mounted to the nose of the runabout. They look a lot like a classic saucer type UFO.
Cutters are fast torch ships with high engine to mass ratios design to get passengers and cargo between planets quickly. Burn times are so long that they typically do no empty a centrifuge for artificial gravity on the voyage. Down is simply the direction of the engines. The older cutters have the armor, cargo, and fuel in front for armor against high speed impacts, crew tower in the middle, and engines in the rear. Newer designs mount the armor and engines in front to pull the cargo and tail mounted crew modules. The newer design makes it so that the center of mass is less affected by cargo and fuel. A cutter never looses gravity even during the turn over as centrifugal gravity is generated in the crew tower during the flip. Spinning the ship end over end allows the crew to maintain gravity during idle time.
Yachts are luxury ships that come in all kinds of shapes.
Transports are purpose built ships with large cargo bays for the hauling large numbers of passengers or bulk cargo internally. They are generally of the hab-keel-engine configuration.
Tenders are ships rigged to support a particular operation or another ship.
Liners are luxury passengers ships pack full of crew amenities. They use a keel-hab-engine configuration though some use a keel-hab-keel-engine design.
Freighters are large ships built primarily for containerized cargo. They generally have a detachable crew-engine cabs to push or pull the long keels full cargo.
Bulk Haulers are generally used to carry massive amounts of cargo to and from the mines in asteroid belt. They are scaled up versions of standard freighters. The majority of the bulk haulers are of the pull train configuration.
Tankers are large ships with an inflated keel tanks to carry large volumes of volatiles. Most look like large oranges with the hab and engines forming a thick stem at the rear. Others look like a chain of beads with the engine pod and hab in front. A third popular style looks like a hourglass or dumbell with large tanks on either side of the habitat module, smaller tanks are sometimes wrapped around the 'waist'.
Factory Ships are a highly restricted class of ship inside the CCSS. These mobile robotic factories can take in raw materials and turn them into anything small enough to fit out the other end. The majority of these ships can be found near the shipyards or around mining operations.
Exploration Ships are designed to jump in after successful jump probes to do full system surveys. Their first tasks after the jump is a preliminary survey to map the system and locate the jump probe for recovery or salvage. Exploration Ships are extremely tough, over crewed, and over equipped for their size. They are smaller versions of an successful generation ship design. Part freighter, part factory ship, and part space station, these near warships pack along everything they need for century long survey of an unexplored system in their compact kilometer long frame. They enough supplies to make any major repairs and or modification needed to get through the toughest survey missions, or in the worst case to take apart the ship into the starting seed of a colony. A design feature of the exploration ship generation ship heritage allows them to easily be deconstructed into a station, shipyard, and two mining/freighter runabouts for industrial scale mining, refining, and manufacturing to get a colony started.
Mining Ships are a class of ship that changed many times over the course of history. The earliest versions mounted grapples and scoops to strip mine the surface of the common gravel pile asteroids. The next generation mounted heavy lasers carve chunks out of the asteroids for direct mining. With the first phase of the solar mirror array constructed enough power is available to start melting down entire asteroids for resources, the mining ships transformed into simply a place to house the crews and maintenance facilities for the fleet of shuttles and final focusing mirrors.
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Post by Ravished Improbability on Jul 22, 2017 23:58:51 GMT
Saturn Mining Fleet
The command ships of the Saturn Mining Fleet (SMF) are some of the largest ships built by any fraction of the CCSS, at 8km long and powered by cluster of six battleship class drive packs these colossi are twelve times the mass of CSN battleships. The primary purpose of these colossi are to serve as spaceport and shipyard to support the huge fleet of ships mining Saturn, its moons, and rings. The secondary function of the command ship is to serve as a holding facility for the resources being mined, and a buffer to allow the smooth filling of the massive tanker ships that ferry the supplies back to the inner system.
Being large slow ships they escorted by vectors and support ships. They also are heavily armored and armed powerful batteries of long range defensive weapons.
Over 120 ships and vectors make up the SMF. The bulk of the mining fleet are the ships mining Saturn. The rest are the various mining ships and freighters mining the various other resources of the Saturn system.
Defending the lightly armed mining fleet is the most powerful corporate navy inside the system. The flagship being the mining ship Kronos Jewel, assembled by Zopat Industrial Kinetics and a dozen other Zopat subsidiaries. The Kronos Jewel is a battleship in everything but name with heavy batteries of anti-ship railguns (ASR), free-electron lasers (FEL), and particle acceleration cannons (PAC) lining its sides. The legal fiction means the ship lacks the powerful spinal mounted magnetic acceleration cannon and nuclear powered x-ray and gamma-ray weapons of the CSN. To provide the backbone of the security fleet several dozen other mining ships in the form of haulers and tenders. The haulers are effectively the cruisers of the security fleet and provides the bulk of the firepower. The honeycomb arrangement of the smaller than normal cargo holds massively reinforces 2.5km long ship and turns what is normally a fragile ship into something that can withstand multiple hits. They are actually quite a bit more durable than the CSN heavy cruisers of the same size. Many of the exterior cargo holds pack a deadly cargo of missiles, the rest house the guts of FELs, PACs, or defensive weapon systems. The haulers straight sides also bristle with rings of ASR turrets. The two classes of tenders are small ships are designed to fill the roles of frigate and destroyer, like the other ships of the fleet they lean heavily on fixed and turret mounted ASRs supported by batteries of FELs and PACs.
To mine gas giant the SMF uses kilometer long whale like planet divers to porpoise in and out of the Saturn's atmosphere. These large aerodynamically streamlined ships spend most of there time scooping and compressing the atmosphere to fill large tanks with liquid hydrogen and helium. Once they fill their tanks they boost up out of the atmosphere on a suborbital arc and eject the filled tanks clear to be grabbed by orbiting tugs and carried back to the command ship. Streamlined remoras dock and transfer empty tanks to the planet diver. With fresh tanks to fill the planet diver falls back into the atmosphere to cruise down in the dense gas layers begin the process all over again.
The shape of the remora tender allows them to stay attached to the planet diver's back in an emergency without risking the planet diver or the remora. The planet diver would need to use more engine power to keep a loft under the added weight and drag but that is well in the design limits of the planet diver. The planet divers are have enough engine power to get into the high orbits needed to return to the command ships for routine maintenance. The remoras generally load the tanks onto the planet diver and escape back into a safer orbit before reentry into the planet to wait to grab onto the next set up empty tanks. They sometimes skip into the upper atmosphere of the gas giant before they can power back into an orbit. Mass-drivers on the command ships are used to return empty tanks into orbit around Saturn for the remoras to grab. The tanks are double wall and encased by a strong structure frame to aid in loading and unloading operations making them quite resistant to the damage from being juggled around between ships.
The gas giant Saturn is not the only body of interest in the area. Titan is also of high value for its rich concentration of nitrogen and nitrogen compounds. There are also the many ice moons useful for its easily tapped subsurface oceans. Most of secondary focus is on exploration and exploitation of Titan for its valuable nitrogen. The presence of water on Titan is also useful in supplying the mining fleet's occasional need to top off its water tanks. Shuttles can easily land in Titan's low gravity but multiple space elevators provide plenty of lift capacity to keep up with the demand for nitrogen and other organic compounds.
Convoys of freighters and tankers move fresh supplies and men to the SMF, while returning home to the inner system with full tanks of hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, and water.
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Post by Ravished Improbability on Nov 3, 2017 6:27:38 GMT
Distributed Reflector Array for Mining - DRAM
The DRAM is just a very large array of mirrors designed to bounce around and concentrate the power of the local star for mining, refining, construction, and illumination. The design is based on elements of the both the Dyson Swarm and early space based power concepts. The design removes the inefficiencies of the power satellites by simply doing away with the power conversion and keeping the beam as pure star light till it reaches a power array of a station. Even the need to cool the mirrors is taken advantage of and some of the waste heat off the mirror is used to power the control system before being radiated away. Direct beamed power is still used when low mass is more important than power efficiency.
The majority of the DRAM satellites are basic reflectors in close orbit around the local star, generally as close as they can get without complicated cooling systems. The DRAM-S reflector systems are inside the orbit of Mercury. The early DRAM mirrors were only 100 meters in diameter and roughly of equal in mass to early satellite systems. System improvements have increase the size of the satellite's adaptive optic mirror array to 5km across. The DRAM satellites are smart systems with swarm intelligence able to automatically stay in formation with their neighbors as well as quickly work together to point themselves safely to reflect light to a central collector satellite.
The light from multiple collectors can be concentrated onto a central collector to further concentrate the light into a more powerful beam. Higher grade satellites are able to handle bouncing truly massive amounts of power.
DRAM collector satellites are much smaller with mirrors ranging from 100m to 500m since they are simply bouncing already focused beams of light from reflectors or other collectors.
Final aiming of the beam is done by a collector satellite when aimed at a stations power receiver or dedicated mining satellites. Final aiming is done by local collectors as moving a major cross system beam usually requires high level permissions and advance planning to insure that all ships are aware of the new beam path so that they do not fly through it. Local collectors also minimizes the lag time in making adjustments to the beam and greatly reduces the risk of a ship flying into the path of a moving beam.
The DRAM provides the primary power for many of the stations in the CCSS. The beam or beams from the DRAM are concentrated through a Fresnel lens or reflector array into a combined photovoltaic and thermal collector assembly. Typically the focused power is targeted onto a thermal collector to power a heat engine or generate steam for to run turbines. Combined photovoltaic and thermal electric arrays collect light reflecting off the central thermal collector, and are angled to reflect the remaining light into station's central light pipe the station to illuminate the earth like interior.
The industrial stations use the DRAM to directly heat their furnaces and smelters and any other machine that requires large amounts of heat. Outside of shipbuilding and mining the DRAM is rarely used to cut or weld as there is too much power in the received beam for smaller scale application. In shipyards the massive amounts of power allows for large sections of the ships parts to be crafted as one ginormous part and for the parts to be fused together seamlessly without the weakness of traditional welds.
Certain classes are mining ships are design carefully aim and focus the power of the DRAM beam to slice up asteroids into easily processed pieces and melt them down for quick refining. Being a mining ship they are heavily armored against impact and laser damage.
The DRAM even powers the automated factories that produces the DRAM satellites. The majority of a DRAM satellite uses low cost 'waste' materials from the mining process, and even the more expensive control computers can be mass produced. The mirrors are thin wafers slice from the purified quartz glass made as byproduct of melting down entire asteroids, and back with a thin layer of metal to make it reflective. The truss work holding the mirrors together and control pack make up a very small fraction of the over all mass. The CCSS continues to increase the power of the DRAM with the long term end goal of being able to harness the entire output of the star. The heavy duty collectors able to handle the insane beam intensities needed to explode asteroids do cost a lot compared to the simple reflectors but make up a only a small fraction of the DRAM satellites.
Gliese 876 Expeditionary Mining and Colonization Fleet
With the Sol system well settled and colonized it was time to start making use of the data from the many exploration ships surveying the stars. Gliese 876, a red dwarf 15 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius, was one of the first systems picked for an CCSS extra solar colony. The compact red dwarf system is rich in gas giants to provide plenty of fuel to power future colony expansion.
The Gliese 876 Expeditionary Fleet was limited to ships small enough to fit through the Sol FTL Gate. The first ships through are the seeder ship 'Cosmic Lorry' and exploration ship 'Melissa's Outburst' carrying the first wave of colonists, the FTL core for the Gliese 878 gate, and the materials needed to construct the gate. Once in the system they deploy the survey team and begin construction of the FTL gateway to stabilize the way in and out.
While the construction team is busy with the gate the exploration group does a detailed survey to confirm the data from the initial exploration and fully map out the system. The survey group also drops off the mining ships 'Dungeoneer's Vision' and 'Planar Jackpot' and to set up on a rocky moon in the ice ring of the third gas giant of the system.
The mining camp's first priority is to gather resources to expand themselves into a full size base then begin collecting the materials needed for the construction of an industrial station to construct addition equipment and ships.
The mining team on the moon simply tunneled into the rock with a fusion bore to quickly create large vaults with thick walls of smooth vitrified stone where they can inflate prefabbed habitation modules. The fused tunnel walls also make for a decent secondary air seal around the soft walled pressurized modules. These vaults serve as a temporary ground base for the mining operation till a suitable area can be dug out for the construction of a gravity bowl. Once the gravity bowl is constructed the teams are housed in the earth gravity areas and the vaults are turned into storage and hydroponic farms.
The mining team in the ice ring simply does not have that luxury for short term housing, instead they must rely on the resources of their ship. The design of the 'Planar Jackpot' gives the crew other options. The mining ship has a larger habit ring as many of the mining modules of the ship are designed to fold up or collapse down into a very small volume when not in use. They crew simply has to unpack, unfold, inflate, and sometimes assemble their equipment from its flat packed storage configuration. Once unpacked and assembled the ship turned station easily provides for all the needs of the crew and ice mining operation.
Once mining is well under way they start producing and launching the first wave of DRAM-G satellites into orbit around the red dwarf star. The low brightness, about an eightieth of the luminosity of Sol, of the star means the colony will be needing a larger number of the satellites to achieve the same power levels, and the long term plans requires dumping a large amount of energy into the system's largest gas giant. The sooner they get enough satellites around the star the sooner they can get workable amounts of power.
On the other hand, the DRAM-G does not need to pipe the power very far. The majority of the system was within a third of an AU of the star. Travel times around the system wasn't that long. The full survey would be finished well before the gate.
The survey ship 'Weak Radiation' is better equipped to scan the planet closest to the star and to investigate the high concentrations of aether in the planets dense oxygen rich atmosphere. The rocky planet is 7 times the mass of the earth and baking at an average temp of 650F, a type of planet that the majority of the CCSS would totally ignore, and all but the best funded scientific groups would find to expensive to explore. The customized power armor needed to work on a combined high temp and high gravity world is not something you get off the store shelf. The only way to cool the suits in these high temps would be to carry cyrogenetic coolant and likely heat sinks. Radiator panels would not work when the outside temperature is hotter than than the inside of the suit. There is no good way to vent the heat outside so all you can do on this planet is to keep the outside heat away and bottle up the internal heat into some out of the way part of the suit. Which puts severe limits on how long a suit or anything can stay down on the surface before the operator is cooked well done by the heat.
Orbital surveys and probes have revealed that the surface is plated over by a material resistant to deep scanning techniques. Resonance, seismic and sonar mapping has reveal that cladding is multiple many kilometers deep in places and highly resistant to even mass driver fire. It is unlikely that even main battery fire could greatly damage the glassy black purple surface.
The source of the surface coating has been tracked down to the biomechanical slug like creatures that randomly track around the surface. The nature and purpose of these creatures are unknown but thanks to Dr. Xaviera Goweska accident we are now quite aware of the properties of the material. All standard methods of extracting the scientist from her suit as failed. Getting the her out of the suit without killing her is currently impossible. Thankfully the research team has plenty of time, the life support of the suit was design to last 30 days, and can easy be stretched to half a year under reduced rations and power.
Two months into the research into the material, in a questionable act of sanity, Dr. Tabatha Heath fired a military rifle on the helmet in a more extreme experiment. Several research assistance were wounded from the projectile spalling. After the scientist was escorted to the brig. Dr. Irvin Buck examined the suit for damage. The cladding did show signs of cracking. Testing showed that even with the cracking the material was still resistant to all standard tools. One small patch though was flaked off to reveal bare suit material underneath. Careful drilling into the suit allowed for a liquid nutrient and air tube to be ran into the suit, lifting the need to stretch the suit's life support. The same hole also allow the insertion of a antenna allowing for high bandwidth communications.
Dr. Irvin Buck is currently leading the research into lower energy means of damaging the material. Particle beams do seem to have an effect on the material and he has put in a request for particle knife to be either constructed or imported. -----
Once the Gliese 876 gate is activated. The main fleet will transition through the gate over a period of weeks. It is a large fleet for they will need a large volume supplies and people to quickly get the operation running. Many of the ships are specialized transports for the new colony:
- New and refurbished mining ships able to directly munch on asteroids and other small bodies set up shop around the system to harvest resources till enough DRAM-G satellites are assembled to take over the process of melting down asteroids. - Industrial ships able to unfold large solar collectors to concentrate solar power into their smelting and refining processes. The first wave of DRAM-G satellites are tasked with bouncing enough light from the star onto the stations' collectors to bring them up to full capacity without the need to park them in close solar orbit around the star or divert fusion power to smelting or refining operations. - Colony ships able to comfortably house the system's population till larger permanent stations can be assembled. The ships can be reassembled into small O'Neill cylinders as improvised stations. A large reflector array will channel light into the core of the habitats to reduce to reliance on artificial lighting. The drive packs and some of the cargo modules can be then reassembled into transport ships. Other cargo modules will be unfolded into large solar power stations.
There are also a large number of common freighters, tankers, and transports to move the large amounts of supplies needed to rapidly expand into the system.
A CSN cruiser 'Strategy Dancer' is the flagship of the military detachment providing security for the colony fleet. The remaining might of the security detachment consists 4 destroyers and 8 frigates. The cruiser's repair capacity being a suitable backup to the full capacity shipyard in one of the military transports. The shipyard once assembled and operational will provide both service and repair facilities for existing ships but also be able do the final fittings for the new ships to be build in system in support of the mining and colonization efforts. -----
Once of the first tasks of the expanded colony is to build a station. The first station will be in a medium orbit around gas giant well position to serve as the industrial hub for the gas mining of the planet. Designed and constructed in parallel with the station will be planet divers. The whale like ships will be optimized for the local conditions of the gas giant. Minimum redesign of the remoras will be needed and the first of the support ships will be out of dry dock well before the first of the planet divers.
The station while primarily industrial will be loads better than the converted colony ships. The large station habitation area will be able to allow for independent houses and yards instead of private quarters and a shared parks. Not all will jump ship but many will greatly increasing the comfort of even those that stay on board the older stations.
With the station up and gas mining of the planet underway, the colony can simply focus on getting themselves settled in generally increasing industrial capacity to the point they can start producing luxury goods to improve the quality of life for the colonists.
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Post by Ravished Improbability on Dec 6, 2017 22:04:48 GMT
CCSS Stations
Over 2 billion people live and work in the giant space stations of the CCSS. Great care is taken to ensure the stations are the best they can be in both comfort and security. The large diameter main habitat rings generate deeper bands of comfortable gravity allowing for the construction of larger office or residential towers and deeper valleys.
Multiple large rings are nested and stacked to maximize the available living surface while keeping gravity within a comfortable range and minimizing the exterior area. The interior of the station have either a cylinder shape or dicone shape. The outer shell is typically a dodecagonal prism or trapezohedron.
A series of maglev style tube-ways connect up the habitat rings, outer shell, and hub together; as well as serving as the mass transit system linking the various districts of the ring together. The mass transit tracks run on the outside of the rings where the near vacuum allows the cars to run at high speed without dealing with air friction.
The majority of the interior habitable volume of a station located in ecoregions, carefully crafted vaults on the inner face of the large habit rings designed to look as earth like as possible with plains, forest, lakes, rivers, valleys, mountains, and other terrain features to give it a natural feel.
The carefully sculpted terrain is crafted on top of a heavily contoured sheet of extruded bedrock a few meters thick. Even the rivers, lakes, hills, and mountains are molded into the sheet of igneous stone so that they sit lower or higher than the average. The inside of mountains and hills being hollow house offices, living areas, factories, machinery, or just storage space. Under the sheet of stone are reinforcing structures and generally the majority of the infrastructure needed to maintain the habitat. The habitats have multiple complete sets of basic life support and supply facilities to allow each district to function independently of each other in the event that damage cuts them off from the rest of the station. The underside of the plates also house the rail stations and all the large manufacturing facilities and storage that would otherwise blemish the scenic green and blue surface of the habitat ring.
More stone, clay, sand, gravel, dirt, plants, and even more stone layered on top further refine the terrain to give it a natural feel. Natural weathering and plant spread on the carefully tailored artificial landscape only further improves the illusion of natural generation.
Light for the ecoregions is primarily waste light from the solar receiver that powers the station and diffused down large light tubes and spheres to illuminate the large earth like interior.
The interior surface of the habitat is divided into wilderness, rural, suburban, and urban districts to provide plenty of variety of living and working.
On the original colony stations they only had urban and suburban living areas, farm land, and coastal areas as the original research stations only had crops and algae for food and oxygen, and some fish to provide additional food and fertilizer. Most of the flora was artificial, designed to look real but crafted from synthetics do to the lack genetic material to grow a diverse range of natural plants and animals to seed the ecoregions. The variety of terrain forms on the early colonies was kept simple as the resources where better spent on maximizing the stations population density over luxuries. They were simply garden cities with a very extensive water park like coastline.
Modern stations are set up with more funa and flora imported from earth to seed the stations. Certain wild lands are set up to allow hunting or other outdoor activities such as camping or hiking. Hunting on a station is typically done with larger lethal versions of the standard civilian electric stun round. Hunting guns have low magazine capacity, long barrels, and of use a caliber incompatible with the smaller nonlethal civilian sport and defense weapons. Hunting guns come in two styles a cheaper air gun, or a more expensive medium power gauss rifle. The hunting bows and heavy crossbows still use normal broad heads and other hunting tips.
The coastlines are more natural as well with mixtures of beaches, cliffs, and other scenic features. Docks and marinas are scattered about to provide the residents access to boats and watercrafts to explore the rivers, seas and oceans.
The majority of the stations population lives in the garden like city districts on the stations. The city centers have many tall towers, many of which run the full height of the comfortable gravity region of the ring, and a few out past that into the even the reduced gravity areas. The tallest towers can reach into the low gravity regions though the low gravity area is reserved for research as it is unhealthy as a long term working environment.
Many locations in the ecoregions serve as vacuum shelters. All government and public buildings are designed to double as shelters for feature rooms that double a shelter. Many private homes also have some form of shelter typically a bedroom suite or game room. Ring spanning mountain ranges divide up the ecoregions to limit the potential damage of fires and explosions. Huge bulkhead doors hidden inside the mountain ranges can be raised to seal off the entire section of the ecoregions to minimize lost of air or prevent the spread of contamination. The inside of the station is heavily compartmentalized against damage and depressurization with many sections being able to function independently for a period of time. The sectional nature and shelters make the habitats difficult to fully depressurize.
The militia has barracks scattered around the station to allow them to quickly deploy forces to secure the station in the event of an emergency. They double as forts in the event of enemy forces getting on board the station.
Main power is through the solar receiver cluster at one end of the station that provides both natural lighting and electrical power. The receiver is typically on the sun ward side of the station.
The concentrated beam from DRAM is concentrated through a Fresnel lens or reflector array into a combined photovoltaic and thermal collector chamber. Typically the focused power is targeted onto a large thermal reservoir and molten salt system to power heat engines or generate steam for to run conventional turbines. Combined photovoltatic and thermal electric arrays collect light scattered off the central thermal collector, and are angled to reflect the remaining light into station's central light pipe to illuminate the earth light interior. The large thermal reservoir and other energy storage systems serves as a buffer against fluctuations in DRAM power and station demand. The system holds enough power to continue supplying power to the station even in the event of interruption of the supplying DRAM beam for up to eight hours. More then long enough to decide whether or not to start up more of the stations fusion reactors.
Backup power is provided by a cluster of well shielded and armored fusion reactor modules at the opposite end of the station near the stations primary array of thermal radiators. One small secondary reactor, usually the core installed to power the station during construction, is always running at idle to charge the power grid for the station's defensive systems. The output of the reactor at standard, non idle, power levels is typically enough to handle the needs of the defense grid against most normal threats. Additional power can be supplied to defensive actions by drawing power from the solar receiver or starting up additional reactors in the cluster.
In case of interruption of the power from the DRAM, the reactor is also the 'pilot light' to aid in starting up the other reactors. The active reactor can be powered up to full power to generate hot plasma to jump start the other reactors on the station, and bypass the lengthy cold start laser ignition sequence of igniting a reactor.
The station's core has numerous mass production ship sized gravity rings to serve as administration offices and the military district. Some of the small rings also serve as variable gravity research labs and private properties. Most of the military district in the core is occupied by the navy and station guard. The militia, star marines, and constellation guard typically have a small offices in the stations core as well. On the end plate of station opposite of the solar receiver are the military docks.
Ringing the station are docking ports for small ships, hangers for shuttle craft, and dry docks for construction and repair. The majority of commercial and private ship traffic use these outer docks and hangers. Some of the hangers are reserved by the military and house the various armed assault shuttles for defense and boarding actions. They may also house tanks and other armored vehicles for rapid deployment to the stations outer surface.
The thick and heavily armored outer shell of the station is unspun and designed to withstand the hazards of space. The shell mounts the defensive weapons of the station as well as the array of transmitters and receivers for the sensors and communication suites. Stations close enough to the local star may also mount solar panels onto the sun facing portions for additional power while screening the station from solar heating. Detached sunshades floating between the station and start are also popular to shield the station from the heat of the star.
The outer surface is comprised of the same materials that armor a battleship and twice as thick. Under the physical armor are massive tanks for water and hydrogen slush as well as vaults for raw materials. A thin shell provides a foundation for the many micro-gravity structures attached to the inside of the shell. The majority are cargo handling facilities, micro-gravity passenger lounges and offices, warehouses, and non critical micro-gravity industrial areas to service the fleet of commercial craft. Other structures on the inside of the shell are bunkers containing backup power and control facilities for the defensive weapons, sensors, and communication arrays on the outside of the station.
Some stations include a large dry dock in the stations core, or installed to the far end of the station, for repair and fitting out of large ships. Actual ship construction is done in dedicated shipyards where the large parts and powerful construction lasers can be used without risking damage to a station. The military and liner companies usually have priority to the dry dock facilities. With commercial and smaller private ships usually being shunted to smaller dry docks outside the station.
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Post by Ravished Improbability on Mar 5, 2018 1:58:59 GMT
Constellation Guard
The Constellation Guard has two missions: to safeguard the CCSS’s financial and critical infrastructure, and to protect the CCSS’s leaders. To achieve these different missions they are divided into special divisions. The Investigations Division is law enforcement branch and responsible for the safeguarding of the CCSS. The Executive Protection Service takes the role of bodyguards for the nation’s leadership.
Investigations Division
The Investigations Division is responsible for investigating and preventing financial crimes, such as counterfeiting currency and major monetary fraud. They are also responsible dealing immigration issues such as passport and visa fraud. They are not responsible for securing the boarder against people trying to sneak in without identification.
The division has three main units: intelligence, treasury, and border security. They operate as a highly specialized police force. Their uniform is a low profile charcoal gray business attire tailored to be worn over the armored SAS suit, holstered pistol, utility belt, and long range communicator. High visibility armbands can be worn when they need to make there present well know. This equipment is mostly for self protection as they often request the assistance of the station's police force in taking the suspect into custody. The agent is on site mostly to provide the specialist knowledge to secure the evidence and escort the suspect to the guard's own offices if warranted.
The intelligence unit has its hands in all the pies operating in the fields of counter terrorism, counter intelligence, cybersecurity, organized crime, and even military intelligence. They are the largest unit in investigations. They operate a few small specialized transports for investigations and fast ships for transportation, but mostly operates shuttles and inner station vehicles. The majority of the unit's work can be done from within the constellation guard's local offices.
The treasury unit specializes in financial security and investigations. They were initially just a task force within the intelligence unit but grew in man power and scope as the size and complexity of financial crimes increased. Even after the reorganization into there own independent unit they often work closely with intelligence in the field. Outside of a small collection of station side vehicles the treasury unit piggybacks off the intelligence units larger vehicle pool.
The border security unit is the group responsible for insuring that the passports and visas issued by the CCSS do in fact go to the right person. They are a small but elite unit for the passport and border fraud is a rare but extra ordinarily complex event do to the extreme means needed to hack, bypass, or spoof all the biometric checks. They tend to work closely with the station guard as well as the immigrations office.
Executive Protection Service
The Executive Protection Service is tasked with the most important responsibility in the CCSS, to protect the nation's leadership. They ensure the security of the government by guarding the president and other key government officials. They also assist in the protection of other VIPs including current and former national leaders and their families while inside the borders. In order effectively act on these duties the Constellation Guard's jurisdiction expands well past the borders of the CCSS. In addition to the task of bodyguarding important heads of state, they sometimes provide security for diplomatic missions, and assist in guarding the CCSS embassies.
Their uniform is black formal business attire, slim long range communicator with a nearly invisible low profile ear piece, smart shades with optical sensors and HUD, and an armored SAS bodysuit with built in powered exoskeleton. As bodyguards their primary armament is a low profile high capacity 5mm rail pistol. Secondary armament includes a both a regular knife as well as a hard light utility knife to allow the agent to cut his way out should he or his charge become trapped.
For high profile protectee's the agents can be issued a brief case that stores a heavy 20mm gauss pistol and unfolds into an armored riot shield and enough power to run the built in hard light shield generator for a five minutes. Selected agents may carry briefcases that can unfold into full size 5mm rail rifles or 20mm gauss shotguns. The protectee may be issued and trained to used a briefcase able to unfold into a portable heavy armored shield.
Those agents serving as an outer perimeter and outside the public eye are issued the more powerful standard military rail and gauss weapons. The standard military long arms are part of the weapons stored inside the EPS vehicles. All agents have basic training to use the heavier weapons stored inside the trucks and limousines.
The EPS operates a large motor pool of unmarked vehicles, including armored and armed transports. The majority of the vehicles are unarmored and unarmed as the threat to most VIP is low and it is simply a matter getting from point A to point B. Armor vehicles are typically reserved for high profile VIPs or cases of civil unrest. The small inventory of armored trucks with concealed mounted weapons are typically used outside the borders of the CCSS where the security situation is less stable. Outside the stations the EPS only use unmarked military shuttles modified for executive comfort, civilian shuttles simply do not have the durability to force aside wreckage inside a hanger in an emergency or the require levels of impact protection. They also operate a few runabouts and transport ships for longer trips between stations.
ConStar One
ConStar One is the call sign for any Navy, Star Marine, or even Army space ship carrying the president. It is most commonly used when the president boards one of the command ships at his disposal.
Working with the CSN the Constellation Guard jointly manages the two heavily modified cruisers that service as mobile command centers for transporting the president and vice president as well as fleet of smaller warships to provide escort and/or transport for less important protectees. The Constellation Guard, CSN, and CSM share duties for crewing and operating the various shuttle crafts. The Star Marines operate the Presidential Shuttles. Station and ground transport is managed primarily by the Constellation Guard though the Star Marines manages a few heavier armored transports for presidential use as well.
ConStar One, or executive space born command center when the president is not one board is the space born equivalent of Air Force One. To protect the leader ship of the nation is the about the only similarity between the kilometers long space cruiser and a small pre-CCSS passenger airliner. ConStar One is the official call sign for any star ship carrying the president.
The two purpose built ConStar class command ships are officially known as SSM-004 and SSM-005 are larger than a cruiser and outfitted to serve as both a flying palace with quarters on par with that of a luxury cruise liner, and a mobile governmental command center with the staff and communications needed to keep tabs with the rest of the CCSS. They ship are designed to serve as mobile backup capitals should the capital station ever come under threat, but typically serves as a presidential yacht for visiting other stations. They are the largest ships to be painted in the full gilded gold and white of the capital. The primary security for ConStar One is typically provided by the pair of escorting destroyers during longer trips away from the capital station.
The ship has the same drive and habit sections of a battleship, including the FTL drive. The standard 'cross guard' armor belt of a battleship's habit section is reinforced by additional crenelations extending forward and aft to better protect the habitat section. The extra armor also provides more room for additional active defenses. The massively overpowered battleship drive on a ship weighing less than a heavy cruiser gives the ConStar class ships an acceleration equal to or better than a destroyer. Half roughly destroyer size nose section is filled by the oversize hanger bay for the presidential shuttle as well as the scores of other shuttle craft needed to transport minor dignitaries and provide security anywhere the president goes. The ship officially does not carry any offensive weapons with the standard OPAL arrays being the heaviest defensive weapon it carries, the space in the 'nose cone' that would normally be devoted to heavy weapons is instead dedicated to electronic counter measures, and the largest array of hard light shield generators ever mounted on a ship. The heavily armored outer hull bristles with anti missile and anti fighter defenses. The two ships of the class are equipped by nine frigate size Herald class defensive vectors and a dozen smaller Coronet class shield vectors.
Many other call signs are uses to denote the vehicle the president is riding. NavStar One is the call sign for any navy shuttle carrying president. MarineStar One is the call sign for any star marine shuttle carrying president. GuardStar One for any station guard shuttle or ship. ExecutiveStar one for any civilian ship or shuttle the president is using. ArmyStar One is the call sign if for some reason the president has need to ride on one of the armies shuttles.
MarineStar One
The Star Marines maintains a fleet of a dozen heavily modified assault shuttles, six for each of the ConStar class command ships. The shuttles internal weapon systems have been stripped out make room for a state of the art electronic warfare and countermeasures suite, as well as a communication array able to connect with practically any ship, station, or ground side array. The exterior self defense systems is heavy upgraded to provide as much defense as possible for the shuttle. The interior troop bay has been remodeled to carry the president, his guests, and his security in luxury comfort and safety. The exective area and cargo bay is heavily armored and reinforced to survive damage that would cripple the rest shuttle. The area has its own secure life support and backup communication system as well. Each shuttle also carries a large stash of emergency supplies and equipment.
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Post by Ravished Improbability on Mar 6, 2018 9:24:45 GMT
CCSS weapons part 2 - Ammunition
The railgun and gauss style weapons common in the CCSS fire projectiles different from those of the more traditional chemically powered guns. Both styles of guns use electrical energy to accelerate the projectile down the barrel. The way they do it though requires different approaches in designing the projectiles.
Railguns use electric current to fire a saboted penetrator between the pair of conductive rails that form the barrel. Railguns are generally considered a military weapon, and it is a rare to fine anything more powerful than a low power rail pistol. Civilian railguns fire heavy slugs instead of penetrators, to compensate some for the reduce projectile energy imposed by the low muzzle velocities. This is best demonstrated by the huge 15mm projectiles of the rail magnums.
Man portable systems come in mainly two sizes 5mm and 10mm. The 5mm weapon fires a small 3x15mm penetrator that is effective at chewing up unarmored infantry and anything else that is not armored. The 5mm system has a high magazine capacity and reasonable energy drain. Like a .50 machine gun it would make short work of even light armor.
7mm railguns have been developed to fire a 5x25mm penetrator but was generally found to be too powerful for anti infantry use while not being powerful enough to deal with heavier armor. Some infantry units and mobile armor units equip the 7mm railgun as a way to provide a common round for all units.
The 10mm weapon fires a heavy 7x35mm penetrator with the kinetic energy on the levels as small cannon, making it the go to weapon for a rapid fire anti armor weapon. The heavy penetrator will punch through just about anything like a meteor. The 10mm is the way to go when dealing with armored targets as even the heavy armor of a modern tank can be chewed through with enough concentrated fire, the impact craters stacking up till it defeats the armor. Generally too heavy for regular people to use outside of single fire without a bipod, the 10mm is found most commonly in the hands of augmented soldiers and armored units. A 7x105mm penetrator has been fielded to give upgraded versions of the standard 10mm railguns better damage against enemy tanks and heavy mechs.
Large vehicle mounted heavy caliber railguns hit like old school artillery rounds through kinetic energy alone. They are best for dealing with other heavy mechs and fortifications which the 10mm cannot easily deal. The typically slow rate of fire renders the heavy railguns not so effective against fast moving infantry or even light armor mechs.
Ship mounted railguns are targeted meteors with nuclear levels of energy. These large projectiles can be more complex than a solid dart of steel. They can be armored to protect it as it travels the million of kilometers to the target at relativistic velocities. They can have ultra dense cores of tungsten, osmium, or even uranium to maximize the penetration. They could even have multiple dense cores inside the softer iron matrix to cause more destruction around the impact site by allowing the projectile to break up faster after impact. The rounds could even fragment on route to maximize the chances that one piece would strike the target.
Gauss weapons fire a magnetically conductive spherical or ovoid projectiles that rides the magnetic fields with maximum efficiency. The gauss barrel is made from one or more acceleration coils. With guns with multiple coils, if an adaptive fire control program is installed, damage to individual coils does not impede the other coils ability to accelerate the projectile. As the projectiles only have minimum contact with the barrel neither the barrel or the projectile suffer damage from the act of firing. This robustness comes at the cost of a much bulkier and heavy weapon for the level of firepower. The projectiles sometimes have non magnetic elements attached to stabilize or even redirect the projectile to home on the target. The standard calibers start at 10mm and increase at 10mm increments. The larger the caliber the more efficiently the projectile can be accelerated.
The 10mm gauss projectile only comes in the ovoid form. It is a common round for small compact civilian pistols, where velocity from a short barrel allows it to be legally used on a station. It is also used in long barrel sniping and hunting weapons. The long skinny projectile makes for good long range accuracy compared to the common spherical form of larger calibers. The 15mm caliber is only seen in heavy pistols. The larger projectile giving the pistols a better punch without rendering the handgun to large to be concealed. The most popular caliber is 20mm as is the largest size gauss projectile the average person can comfortably fire from the shoulder without trouble. The recoil of most 20mm gauss guns is stated to be similar to 12ga shotguns. Larger calibers are usually used as grenade launchers as heavier projectiles require a lower acceleration to maintain a manageable recoil. There is an export market for 12ga shells loaded with slugs and buckshot made with some of the same technology as the gauss rounds. The tech as also found its way into the high power airguns and even crossbows uses for hunting on some stations.
The civilian market is limited to non lethal defensive projectiles. The cheapest of which are projectiles made of a compressed magnetic powder that disintegrates on impact with even soft fleshy targets. They are easily stopped by the first thing they hit making them of questionable reliability at longer ranges. Sightly more expensive are rubber projectiles, well worth it if you need to bounce the projectile off a wall or shoot through a plastic sign to knock-out the target. On the high end are the stun rounds, that discharge an electric shock that instantly incapacitates the target. The best ones have a programmable delay to allow the projectile to punch through barriers without discharging.
The round nature of the projectiles means that civilian guns could chamber 20mm ball bearings, but the driver coils of a civilian pistol do not have the power to give the heavy projectile a lethal velocity. Police and military weapons with their strong driver coils can use the ball bearings or cast metal rounds as improvised ammunition. This allows emergency ammunition to easily be salvaged or manufactured in the field.
A slightly more powerful version of the stun round is designed penetrate into an animal and discharge a lethal level of electric shock is used for hunting. The hunting rounds are ovoid in shape to prevent their use in non hunting weapons.
The military uses the most powerful form of the stun rounds, the arc rounds discharge literally packs enough energy to vaporize the projectile and the area it impacts causing a small plasma explosion. The 20mm arc rounds are good for blasting through cover or even armor. Solid shots provide for greater barrier penetration. Designed similarly to an armor piercing rifle round, the solid shot features a soft mild steel outer core that will deform on impact allowing the hard dense tungsten core to penetrate deeper without being deflected. There is also a 'shotgun' canister round, basically a spherical shell like an 'easter egg' that opens ups after leaving the barrel to release ten smaller pellets. The pellets are usually arc type to maximize the damage, but can also just be inert solid shot. At close range the combine arc blast of the shotgun tears through even the heavy armor of combat suits to devastating effect.
The 30mm gauss grenades give more options in lethal payloads. The arc rounds easily scale up and pack even more power into the greater volume making for an even bigger boom. There is also a frag grenade, a segmented metal casting with an electrothermochemical explosive or plasma charge filler to fragment the projectile to lethal effect. The breacher round is one of the rare cases of the CCSS making use of a chemical explosive. The breacher is a high explosive squash head style round designed to flatten itself against a reinforced wall before exploding to greatly weaken that section of wall. The spalling off the back side of the wall can also be useful for damaging people and equipment on the other side of the wall. Stun grenades that generates a bright light before a loud bang and EMP pulse. A different stun grenade architecture generates just a bright flash and bang. Illumination and signal flares. Incendiary devices. Even drones can be fired. 40mm gauss grenades are just more powerful versions of 30mm grenades.
All the grenade rounds also come in hand grenade form. Unique to the hand tossed grenades is a reuseable device with multiple barriers all around to give the device a frag grenade effect without the explosion. The effect of the device is easily tailored by mixing and maxing the projectiles loaded. Thermite grenades are also common to disable important equipment without the easily detectable noise of an arc blast.
Vehicle mounted gauss cannons generally only fire solid AP rounds, HE arc round, fragmenting flak, or various submunition filled canisters. Ship mounted gauss weapons can be large enough to fire nuclear armed shells or even the large Excalibur laser warheads. Large warships sometimes mount huge gauss cannons running down the core of the ship with enough power to annihilate smaller enemy warships in a single shot and critically damage even larger ships.
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