Zepplin Manufacturers
12-02-2004, 22:44
-Z.M.I. Public Press Release-
[video sequence start]
A man in a heavy black suit approaches a lectern. The floor of the stage he appears to be on, is made from metal plates. He pauses then in a lilting eastern European accent speaks “Today and through out this week Z.M.I. Will be live testing our latest Tycho defence systems. All vessels are warned to stay away as these live fire trials will be using weaponry designed to destroy or incapacitate spacecraft of all sizes and classes”. The man and the lectern disappear. They were no more than holograms created by the Tycho nodal A.I. Tike. The white back round vanished to see the Tycho crater rims jagged mountain sides. The view panned slowly to face something. Something huge. It was a defence tower. A stacked array of weaponry,shields, sensors and combat drone launch bays in tiers stretching 2 kilometers straight into the lunar sky. Why stack all of this in one place? Why in an age of accurate long range fire support build such a target? The answer was simple. Gravity. Only certain points on the crater rim could be seen as geologically stable enough to support the massive gravity effectors the tower housed. Should the buffers which usually kept confined the awfull power the effector could unleash ever fail even for an instant the resulting shock wave would be similar to a lunar seismic event. The voice of the A.I. spoke again “Any person or drone found within the restricted zones around our defence facilities will be terminated”.
[video sequence stop]
Tike CNC Module: telemetry extract [edited for presentation to the board]
Twelve stealth combat suits dived from boulder. A few miles back in a depression under the massed defenses of the tower a set of one man lunar fitters lay. There fuel cells drained. Tike's voice Droned in the board room “this simulation is designed to show the effects of close combat on conventional special forces when faced with combat drones in a vacuum” The board could now see that the suits were moving with occupants, mercenaries letting the suits carry them. The suit servos were far more powerfull than even a genetically enhanced super soldier but the scum of the space war's were just lazy. Slung over the suits backs where the long shape of high powered gauss rifles and inset into the amour plates the camouflaged mini point defence nodes were outlined by imposed data readouts. The attack was brutal and swift. A seeming cloud of insects swarmed from the shadow of one of the boulders strewn about the landscape. These were aphid class scout drones. Here on Luna there wings were absorbing solar power. There tiny insect like white forms now cracked and fell to the ground as the combat suits point defence blasted them out of the air. The mercenaries began to fumble for there gauss rifles. That was the last mistake some of them would ever make, as the amour segments containing the point defence nodes moved their coverage became less than total. Even as the suits point defence arrays tried to network together to fight of this threat 3 of the mercenaries simply dropped as the aphids drilled into the suits and either delivered there neuro toxin load, or if there was enough of them detonating there power cores in sequence as the 2nd mercenary to drop found out, this can be in the confined space of body amour quite devastating. The last of the aphids were blasted out of the airless sky and now the mercenaries were jogging there gauss rifles drawn. They were from the outer colonies, as far as they new the aphids were just some form of lethal vermin.
The Chimera combat class drone was an ugly mechanical crab. A crab however that was both smart and heavily armed. It tracked the death signals of the aphids. Homing in on its targets. When it was within 200 meters of the mercenaries it attacked. Its back plate swung in two and a set smart grenades ripple fired, then under the radiation of the mercenaries point defence blasting the grenades the Chimera ripped forward, its sets of anti personnel UV lasers cutting of limbs, its own arms shredding and throwing the mercenaries to there deaths. By the time there were only four mercenaries left one of them managed to get a bead on it with his gauss rifle. He pulled the trigger. The Chimera shuddered as three of its limbs were blasted off, but it still came forward. The mercenary took better aim and pulled the trigger again. This blast blew the chimera to metallic bits.
The last four mercenaries began to retreat towards there fitters. Then it came. The spider class medium assault drone. It scuttled. Then jumped hundreds of feet into the night sky of Luna, dozens of gauss guns and three 20mm gauss cannon fired. The group of mercenaries ran as the lunar dust around them was thrown up. The spider activated its small set of gravatic's and hit the lunar dust. Its two ton bulk throwing up a huge cloud. In the 20th century a spider drone could have taken on any tank in the world. In the late 21st a few of the rail gun using tanks may have had a chance. But these were mercenaries wearing combat suits in the 24th century. They stood there ground gauss rifles flaming. It wasn't enough. The spider drones gravatic's were now really kicking in and the gauss shots flew wild. At the same time the mercenaries wrecklessly activated there own gravatic's. There mini warping of space time could now be detected for miles. The spider and the mercenaries closed. The mercenaries drew mono molecular blades, there 3 meter long molecule thin edges shining eerily, and began to circle the mechanical beast. The spider seemed to consider its options. In reality it had mearly been Tike considering the most artistic method of execution. The spiders main gauss cannons at this range couldn't miss and the mercenaries gravatic's would run out of fuel mass far quicker than the spiders reactor. The spider acted. Three spinning blades seemed to hover out of the spiders main body. And silently hover forward. They were smart blades. Molecule cutting fields glowing on there edges suspended by there own gravatic's. Just like the aphids the more blades in the air the more effective they were as there propulsion fields could interact. Truth be told the quickest way of killing the mercenaries would have been to simply have the blades bury themselves in the unfortunate men of fortune. Instead the blades skimmed in loops the mercenaries desperately trying to parry them. All the while the spider seemingly watching in hunger. The blades became faster and faster. In the end to fast even for the enhanced reaction speed of the mercenaries combat suits. There were three red bloody explosions on screen before it went dark.
Extract from Defence tower fire control test.
This was a CnC room far less luxurious then the one the board members sat in. Its displays however were alive. This was the core of a defence tower inplacement. 3 kilometers down below the actual bulk of the tower. A voice came over the video feed. Okay gentle persons today we will be showing just what this baby can do for the board themselves... so I want things to go perfectly is that understood? There was a low chorus of replies, techs of any era never liked corporate politiking. The techs under sub commander Laslow Granger where hardly different. They stared intently into there holographic' while manipulating data directly threw there neural feeds and the near godlike power of Tikes processing and logic energy based nodes.
First set of targets on the scope sir one heavy low level assault frigate and gunboat escorts. Granger grinned. “Very well light em up”. “Yes sir first salvo of grand slam counter ship missiles prepping for launch, prepped, salvo on your command” answered one of the techs. “Salvo at 20,000 kilometers” Granger said with almost glee. Salvo in Three.. on the outskirts of the tower hatches blasted open.
Two.. Energy crackled out of what were now seen to be launch tubes. Rows of them.
One.. The energy discharged hurling the 12 ton bulk of the grand slam gravitic missiles into space. At three kilometers up there drives kicked in hurling them forward at tens of thousands of gravities. The frigate was of Foe_Hamerian design. It had been stripped of its tech. However now the worst case scenario was in place. The Frigate had been reconfigured and retrofitted as nothing more than a point defence platform. The gunboats were carrying all the heavy weapons. None the less the entire group of ships was slowly making its way along the lunar surface at low height to avoid Tycho's main defenses.. this tactic had failed.
These ships were A.I. drones. There star drives ripped out and replaced with nothing but banked shield generators. They were also far to close to the lunar surface to use the towers main gravatic weaponry to crack there shields. They threw up lunar regolith in huge sprays from the drive fields. The missiles came over the horizon. Point defenses and main guns began to track. Ships gravatic's would be useless against targets going that fast and power was already being diverted to the guns. The flotilla filled space with energy fire. It didn't help the tower had salvoed an entire missile bank. 300 anti capital ship missiles were coming towards them. 47 of the missiles were turned to charred shrapnel and molten metal. The rest.. hit. 58 just bounced of the shields of the ships there sensor heads networking back the data of the shields modulations to there sisters. The rest of the missiles penetrated and detonated. 120 were “conventional” hard thermonuclear warheads. The rest were multi megaton bomb pumped X ray lasers, and all had ultra high density penetrator heads. The playback was already massively slowed down, now it turned into the shaded graphics of the close gravatic sensors as electromagnetic radiation from the blast slagged the “normal” sensors. The ships one by one turned into piles of radioactive scrap. The frigate however still plowed on. Its shields had held. However it had been hit by the thermal plumes of the missiles its hull was scorched. It came on. Now knowing it was spotted it ascended believing as any one who didn't know better that the worst had been already hurled at it.
Granger smile could hardly have been wider. He would now get to test his new toy. It didn't matter that the defence tower had another 19 fully loaded missile banks. It didn't matter that the frigate was in range of the heavy hellbore plasma cannons. The second it ascended more than 500 meters from lunar surface and came over the horizon the gravity effector that was the towers main weapon came in to safe range. It didn't fire per say. Rather the combined power of the towers internal banks of fusion reactors and its link to the rest of the Z.M.I. Power network (the tower had its own reactors for survivability just in case someone managed to crack the lunar surface)poured there energy directly into it where it was converted to stress on space time. This ...stress simply gravity was created not within a ships drive, or a shield, This was gravity used as a weapon.
If the entire array had been used the ship would have been detected the second it hit lunar space. However this test was for a worse case scenario, Simulating the towers suffering battle damage or in some cases having to engage near Luna small ships and capital ships at long range. This was such a test. The towers main armament was in theory now bearing on capital ships leaving only the smallest set of effectors for combating the frigate. They were quite enough. In .4 of a second of the effector coming online the frigates drive and shield had been overpowered. In .9 of second the frigate was a contracting ball of superheated metal. In 1 second it was an expanding ball of gas.
(so what do you think :twisted: ?)
http://www.n00bstories.com/image.fetch.php?id=1165828058
[video sequence start]
A man in a heavy black suit approaches a lectern. The floor of the stage he appears to be on, is made from metal plates. He pauses then in a lilting eastern European accent speaks “Today and through out this week Z.M.I. Will be live testing our latest Tycho defence systems. All vessels are warned to stay away as these live fire trials will be using weaponry designed to destroy or incapacitate spacecraft of all sizes and classes”. The man and the lectern disappear. They were no more than holograms created by the Tycho nodal A.I. Tike. The white back round vanished to see the Tycho crater rims jagged mountain sides. The view panned slowly to face something. Something huge. It was a defence tower. A stacked array of weaponry,shields, sensors and combat drone launch bays in tiers stretching 2 kilometers straight into the lunar sky. Why stack all of this in one place? Why in an age of accurate long range fire support build such a target? The answer was simple. Gravity. Only certain points on the crater rim could be seen as geologically stable enough to support the massive gravity effectors the tower housed. Should the buffers which usually kept confined the awfull power the effector could unleash ever fail even for an instant the resulting shock wave would be similar to a lunar seismic event. The voice of the A.I. spoke again “Any person or drone found within the restricted zones around our defence facilities will be terminated”.
[video sequence stop]
Tike CNC Module: telemetry extract [edited for presentation to the board]
Twelve stealth combat suits dived from boulder. A few miles back in a depression under the massed defenses of the tower a set of one man lunar fitters lay. There fuel cells drained. Tike's voice Droned in the board room “this simulation is designed to show the effects of close combat on conventional special forces when faced with combat drones in a vacuum” The board could now see that the suits were moving with occupants, mercenaries letting the suits carry them. The suit servos were far more powerfull than even a genetically enhanced super soldier but the scum of the space war's were just lazy. Slung over the suits backs where the long shape of high powered gauss rifles and inset into the amour plates the camouflaged mini point defence nodes were outlined by imposed data readouts. The attack was brutal and swift. A seeming cloud of insects swarmed from the shadow of one of the boulders strewn about the landscape. These were aphid class scout drones. Here on Luna there wings were absorbing solar power. There tiny insect like white forms now cracked and fell to the ground as the combat suits point defence blasted them out of the air. The mercenaries began to fumble for there gauss rifles. That was the last mistake some of them would ever make, as the amour segments containing the point defence nodes moved their coverage became less than total. Even as the suits point defence arrays tried to network together to fight of this threat 3 of the mercenaries simply dropped as the aphids drilled into the suits and either delivered there neuro toxin load, or if there was enough of them detonating there power cores in sequence as the 2nd mercenary to drop found out, this can be in the confined space of body amour quite devastating. The last of the aphids were blasted out of the airless sky and now the mercenaries were jogging there gauss rifles drawn. They were from the outer colonies, as far as they new the aphids were just some form of lethal vermin.
The Chimera combat class drone was an ugly mechanical crab. A crab however that was both smart and heavily armed. It tracked the death signals of the aphids. Homing in on its targets. When it was within 200 meters of the mercenaries it attacked. Its back plate swung in two and a set smart grenades ripple fired, then under the radiation of the mercenaries point defence blasting the grenades the Chimera ripped forward, its sets of anti personnel UV lasers cutting of limbs, its own arms shredding and throwing the mercenaries to there deaths. By the time there were only four mercenaries left one of them managed to get a bead on it with his gauss rifle. He pulled the trigger. The Chimera shuddered as three of its limbs were blasted off, but it still came forward. The mercenary took better aim and pulled the trigger again. This blast blew the chimera to metallic bits.
The last four mercenaries began to retreat towards there fitters. Then it came. The spider class medium assault drone. It scuttled. Then jumped hundreds of feet into the night sky of Luna, dozens of gauss guns and three 20mm gauss cannon fired. The group of mercenaries ran as the lunar dust around them was thrown up. The spider activated its small set of gravatic's and hit the lunar dust. Its two ton bulk throwing up a huge cloud. In the 20th century a spider drone could have taken on any tank in the world. In the late 21st a few of the rail gun using tanks may have had a chance. But these were mercenaries wearing combat suits in the 24th century. They stood there ground gauss rifles flaming. It wasn't enough. The spider drones gravatic's were now really kicking in and the gauss shots flew wild. At the same time the mercenaries wrecklessly activated there own gravatic's. There mini warping of space time could now be detected for miles. The spider and the mercenaries closed. The mercenaries drew mono molecular blades, there 3 meter long molecule thin edges shining eerily, and began to circle the mechanical beast. The spider seemed to consider its options. In reality it had mearly been Tike considering the most artistic method of execution. The spiders main gauss cannons at this range couldn't miss and the mercenaries gravatic's would run out of fuel mass far quicker than the spiders reactor. The spider acted. Three spinning blades seemed to hover out of the spiders main body. And silently hover forward. They were smart blades. Molecule cutting fields glowing on there edges suspended by there own gravatic's. Just like the aphids the more blades in the air the more effective they were as there propulsion fields could interact. Truth be told the quickest way of killing the mercenaries would have been to simply have the blades bury themselves in the unfortunate men of fortune. Instead the blades skimmed in loops the mercenaries desperately trying to parry them. All the while the spider seemingly watching in hunger. The blades became faster and faster. In the end to fast even for the enhanced reaction speed of the mercenaries combat suits. There were three red bloody explosions on screen before it went dark.
Extract from Defence tower fire control test.
This was a CnC room far less luxurious then the one the board members sat in. Its displays however were alive. This was the core of a defence tower inplacement. 3 kilometers down below the actual bulk of the tower. A voice came over the video feed. Okay gentle persons today we will be showing just what this baby can do for the board themselves... so I want things to go perfectly is that understood? There was a low chorus of replies, techs of any era never liked corporate politiking. The techs under sub commander Laslow Granger where hardly different. They stared intently into there holographic' while manipulating data directly threw there neural feeds and the near godlike power of Tikes processing and logic energy based nodes.
First set of targets on the scope sir one heavy low level assault frigate and gunboat escorts. Granger grinned. “Very well light em up”. “Yes sir first salvo of grand slam counter ship missiles prepping for launch, prepped, salvo on your command” answered one of the techs. “Salvo at 20,000 kilometers” Granger said with almost glee. Salvo in Three.. on the outskirts of the tower hatches blasted open.
Two.. Energy crackled out of what were now seen to be launch tubes. Rows of them.
One.. The energy discharged hurling the 12 ton bulk of the grand slam gravitic missiles into space. At three kilometers up there drives kicked in hurling them forward at tens of thousands of gravities. The frigate was of Foe_Hamerian design. It had been stripped of its tech. However now the worst case scenario was in place. The Frigate had been reconfigured and retrofitted as nothing more than a point defence platform. The gunboats were carrying all the heavy weapons. None the less the entire group of ships was slowly making its way along the lunar surface at low height to avoid Tycho's main defenses.. this tactic had failed.
These ships were A.I. drones. There star drives ripped out and replaced with nothing but banked shield generators. They were also far to close to the lunar surface to use the towers main gravatic weaponry to crack there shields. They threw up lunar regolith in huge sprays from the drive fields. The missiles came over the horizon. Point defenses and main guns began to track. Ships gravatic's would be useless against targets going that fast and power was already being diverted to the guns. The flotilla filled space with energy fire. It didn't help the tower had salvoed an entire missile bank. 300 anti capital ship missiles were coming towards them. 47 of the missiles were turned to charred shrapnel and molten metal. The rest.. hit. 58 just bounced of the shields of the ships there sensor heads networking back the data of the shields modulations to there sisters. The rest of the missiles penetrated and detonated. 120 were “conventional” hard thermonuclear warheads. The rest were multi megaton bomb pumped X ray lasers, and all had ultra high density penetrator heads. The playback was already massively slowed down, now it turned into the shaded graphics of the close gravatic sensors as electromagnetic radiation from the blast slagged the “normal” sensors. The ships one by one turned into piles of radioactive scrap. The frigate however still plowed on. Its shields had held. However it had been hit by the thermal plumes of the missiles its hull was scorched. It came on. Now knowing it was spotted it ascended believing as any one who didn't know better that the worst had been already hurled at it.
Granger smile could hardly have been wider. He would now get to test his new toy. It didn't matter that the defence tower had another 19 fully loaded missile banks. It didn't matter that the frigate was in range of the heavy hellbore plasma cannons. The second it ascended more than 500 meters from lunar surface and came over the horizon the gravity effector that was the towers main weapon came in to safe range. It didn't fire per say. Rather the combined power of the towers internal banks of fusion reactors and its link to the rest of the Z.M.I. Power network (the tower had its own reactors for survivability just in case someone managed to crack the lunar surface)poured there energy directly into it where it was converted to stress on space time. This ...stress simply gravity was created not within a ships drive, or a shield, This was gravity used as a weapon.
If the entire array had been used the ship would have been detected the second it hit lunar space. However this test was for a worse case scenario, Simulating the towers suffering battle damage or in some cases having to engage near Luna small ships and capital ships at long range. This was such a test. The towers main armament was in theory now bearing on capital ships leaving only the smallest set of effectors for combating the frigate. They were quite enough. In .4 of a second of the effector coming online the frigates drive and shield had been overpowered. In .9 of second the frigate was a contracting ball of superheated metal. In 1 second it was an expanding ball of gas.
(so what do you think :twisted: ?)
http://www.n00bstories.com/image.fetch.php?id=1165828058