She nodded. "On Earth, pilots go to air combat school for BFM, Basic Fighter Maneuvers, that teaches you how to turn, to climb, mostly how to manage energy in combat flying."
"Manage energy?" I asked, baffled. "You mean fuel?"
"No," she laughed. "For fighter aircraft, energy means airspeed, and the ability to gain airspeed. For instance, some fighters are fast in a straight line, but if they make a tight turn, they bleed off a lot of kinetic energy and slow down too much, and it takes a long time for them to regain airspeed. While they're slow, they're vulnerable. Vulnerable in air combat means dead." I'm sure she was dumbing down her explanation by a factor of ten for me. Maybe more. "SCM, Space Combat Maneuvers, is completely different. There's no aerodynamics to take into account. It's about moving the ship to avoid being where the enemy thinks you are, so when they target you and fire a maser or particle beam at you, by the time the beam arrives, you're not there."
"A maser beam, that moves at the speed of light-"
"Close enough," she said.
"And you're supposed to move the ship before a beam moving at the speed of light hits us?" This was blowing my mind also. "Isn't that like dodging a bullet?"
"Sort of. At the distances where most space combat happens, it takes several seconds, or even minutes, for a beam bolt to travel to the enemy ship. When an enemy ship shoots at us, we can't even simply fire back down the inbound beam path, because while the bolt is traveling, the enemy ship has also moved."
"Damn, this is complicated."
Desai nodded. "So far, we've been concentrating only on the basics of flying the ship. Going into combat is an order of magnitude more complex. I'm supposed to be training the other pilots, and I still don't grasp some of the concepts. This is going to be a very difficult month."
When I got back to my office, I put aside routine reports for something much more important. "Skippy, teach me about Space Combat Maneuvers."
"What? Space Combat Maneuvers? Oh, sure, but, hey, let's start with something easier, like monkey-level theoretical physics. How about this? The Casimir effect hypothetically allows the negative energy density to support an Einstein-Rosen bridge, also called a wormhole-"
"Skippy, I'm serious. There is no way my tiny brain can grasp everything our pilots need to know-"
"Man, you're making this too easy to insult-"
"-but as commander of the ship, I need to know the principles of SCM. The strategic level, not the advanced tactical understanding our pilots need. I need, and any command duty officer needs, enough situational awareness to make decisions. What do I need to know?"
"Wow. Yeah, great, thanks, is that all you want?"
"Start small, and work your way up, all right? How about this? How can one ship ever hit another ship? Even speed of light weapons are too slow, ships move out of the way while a particle beam is traveling. You told me about how ships use sensors fields to detect and target other ships. What I don't get is, can't ships can just jump away whenever they're in danger?"
"Oh, boy, this is not going to be easy. I'll begin at the potty training level, and we'll work our way up to Barney style, if your brain hasn't exploded by then."
"Fair enough."
And that's what he did. Man, I had a lot of dangerously bogus assumptions, that Skippy straightened out for me.
First, I had been assuming that when a ship jumped away from a battle, it was safely out of the fight, there was no way for an enemy ship to follow it. No way for the enemy to know where the ship had jumped to. Sure, if a ship microjumped only a few light minutes away, then shortly the enemy ship would detect the gamma ray burst from the other end of the jump, because those gamma rays traveled at the speed of light. Otherwise, if a ship jumped a light hour or more away, it was effectively gone, safely away. Man, was I wrong about that.
Skippy explained, the way jumps works is, a ship opens a temporary wormhole at the place it wants to jump to, the far end of the wormhole opens first, and then the wormhole projects itself back to where the ship is, and pulls the ship through. The reason ships come out the far end of a wormhole a fraction of a picosecond before they enter the wormhole, is because of the tiny time lag between when the far end of the wormhole is created, and when the near end reaches back to the ship. Got that? If you don't, don't feel bad, it took me a couple times for it to sink in.
Opening a wormhole that is big enough to squeeze a ship through, is something the universe in our spacetime doesn't like, and even after the ship goes through and the wormhole shuts down, it doesn't completely close behind the ship right away. Ripples bounce from one end to the other, from the violence of spacetime being ripped apart and being slammed closed again. Enemy ships can tell, from these spacetime ripples emanating from the near end of the wormhole remnant, where the far end of the wormhole is. The ripples fade rapidly, so an enemy ships needs to act quickly, in order to pursue a ship that jumps away. And Skippy said there are ways to fool pursuing ships, by altering the resonance of the ripples, this technique is only minimally effective, because pursuing ships have ways to eliminate the noise and analyze the original ripples. Measures and countermeasures.
So, jumping away provides only temporary safety for a ship. A ship has to hope its jump engine capacitors have a larger charge than pursuing ships; if a ship only has enough charge for a microjump, it will soon have enemy ships on top of it, with no way to get away. In that case, a ship has to fight in normal space while its jump engines recharge. Of course, a higher-tech species ship can almost always jump beyond the range of lower-tech ships, even though a Kristang ship may be able to tell where a Thuranin ship jumped to, it would take the Kristang ship multiple jumps to get there. By that time, the Thuranin ship would have recharged, jumped far away, and the wormhole collapse ripples would have faded so much, the Kristang couldn't follow.
All the talk about jumping away assumes a ship is able to jump away, because enemy ships can project a damping field that envelops a ship trying to jump away, and prevents a wormhole from forming correctly. If a ship caught in a damping field tries to jump, it could rupture its jump drive coils, even tear itself apart.
In normal long-distance space combat, ships rely on two types of weapons; missiles, and directed-energy weapons like particle beams. Railguns, while they sound impressive, are too slow for most space combat, except when ships are near the gravity well of a planet and have limited space for maneuvering. Missiles carry greater destructive power, a single direct hit by a missile could take a ship out of combat. Warships are protected by defense energy shields that can diffuse directed-energy beams and block missiles. The problem with missiles is that, even though missiles are stealthed, they are easily detected by a ship's sensor field, and then the ship's defensive directed-energy systems can destroy the incoming missile. In actual combat, an attacking ship uses its energy beams to degrade an enemy ship's shields and confuse its sensors, to provide a weak spot for missiles to sneak through.
The whole thing made my head hurt, and it gave me a different perspective on what a ship commander needed to think about in action. I asked Skippy to set up a dumbed-down Space Combat Maneuver training for anyone who sat in the command chair, including simulations.
"How do pilots remember all this stuff?" I asked. Not only remember, they had to understand the concepts, internalize it until it became instinct.
"They're smarter than you, to put it bluntly. The pilots aboard this ship are among the elite of your species."
I frowned. "And I'm a grunt who got lucky." What the hell was I doing, in command of pilots and special forces soldiers who were clearly, in every way, better than me?
"You have your own talents, Joe, I've told you that. You went from being a sergeant, to prisoner of the Ruhar, to shutting down a wormhole and freeing your home planet from the Kristang. How many of our elite new crew can say that? 'What ifs' are fine when you're talking over a few beers, but you can't argue with success."
"Thank you, Skippy."
"You're welc
ome. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to find a fork."
Not sure I had heard him correctly, I asked "A fork? Why do you need a fork?"
"Ugh, dumbing myself down enough to explain things to you, contaminated my substrate beyond repair. I'm hoping if I stab my processing nodes enough times with a fork, I can kill the part where those memories are stored. Yuck."
Hearing a tiny bit about Space Combat Maneuvers from Skippy, got me interested enough that I asked Desai to forward the full SCM training package to me. Reading the first section made my head hurt, and made me realize that before I could think about maneuvering the ship in combat, I needed to understand how ships operated.
I approached our chief pilot again in the galley, while she was sipping tea and reading something on her iPad in her off duty time. That morning, I'd seen Desai running on a treadmill in the gym and decided not to bother her then, she'd been listening to music. By unspoken agreement, time in the gym was private time, unless people wanted to be social.
"Good afternoon, Captain," I said, pouring myself a half cup of coffee. In the kitchen, two French paratroopers were working on baking something for dinner, they nodded to me briefly, then went back to kneading dough. Something they had baking in the oven smelled delicious. The idea of splitting cooking duties between national teams rather that bringing professional cooks aboard, had been partly my idea; I'd been trying to reduce the number of people we put at risk on the mission, and UNEF had wanted to maximize our combat power. It had been an experiment; would pilots, scientists and SpecOps soldiers resent taking time off from training to cook and clean? To my great relief, the answer was a resounding no. First, the hotshot pilots and SpecOps troops were all super competitive, no team wanted to let their nation down by serving food that was anything but the absolute best. And second, the teams treated their assigned day in the galley as a mentally challenging, fun day off from the grind of training. Having a full day off meant the SpecOps teams could train even harder, on days when they weren't working in the galley. Doing something challenging and unfamiliar together, was great for team bonding. Depending on how long our mission lasted, I considered eventually breaking up national teams, and scattering people into multinational teams. Eventually. If we survived that long.
"Afternoon, Colonel," Desai gestured for me to sit down at her table.
"How is flight training going?"
Training other pilots took up most of her time, and it didn't help that I insisted she be at the controls whenever we jumped into a new star system. In the star system where Skippy was sure we'd find an Elder site but came up empty, we'd had nine days of making short jumps, and maneuvering the Dutchman in normal space to establish orbit around various planets, and to explore the system's extensive asteroid field. At Desai's insistence, since we felt that isolated star system was safe from us being discovered, we took the opportunity for pilots to practice flying the Flower and dropships. The Flower spent several days away from its mother ship, jumping on its own, trying to hit specific targets on each short jump, dropping down into low orbit around planets, climbing out to jump distance, practicing space combat maneuvers. Dropships practiced landing on moons and asteroids, flying between the Dutchman and the Flower, and the pilots had great fun in mock combat, dropship against dropship. The SpecOps troops, with me, Chang and Adams, practiced flight maneuvers outside the Dutchman, and we took the opportunity for extended combat training sessions on airless moons, trying out different tactics in the unfamiliar alien armored suits. That week, while Skippy became increasingly frustrated about not finding an Elder site that should have been there, was great fun for the humans. The science team got full use of the Flying Dutchman's sophisticated sensors to explore a new star system. The pilots got to fling a Kristang frigate and Thuranin dropships around in extreme maneuvers, testing the limits of themselves and the spacecraft. And ground troops, including me, got to fly around in spacesuits, race across the surface of low-gravity moons, playing war games and learning what did and didn't work. It had been, by far, the best nine days of the mission. Now it was time to digest what we'd learned, share information with each other. And time for a grumpy Skippy to perform extensive maintenance on the two starships, our dropships, and our Kristang armor suits, which had suffered abuse during our week of fun.
"Flight training? We're back to basic maneuvers, we got sloppy last week. We developed bad habits."
"Fun, though," I said with a grin, "wasn't it?"
"Oh," she laughed, "yes, the most fun I've had since I learned to fly. Burning the Flower's engine to fling it on a low pass over a moon at eight gees?" She shook her head gleefully. "Nothing compares to that. The Dutchman is a much better tool for traveling between stars, but she's an ungainly pig in normal space."
"Glad you enjoyed it. I have a question; can you teach me to fly?"
"Teach you to fly?" She said it slowly, as if she wasn't sure she'd heard me correctly.
"The basics. I've been training with our special forces, I'm not good enough to be one of them, and I haven't trained with any team long enough to be useful. The reason I'm doing that is to understand the tactics and capabilities of each team, so if I ever order them to do something, I will be informed about what they can do, and how. Skippy’s little tutorial on Space Combat Maneuvers opened my eyes to how much I don’t know, and how dangerous that is. If we ever get into space combat, I want to know what our ships can do, and how they do it." I took a sip of coffee. "If we are ever shorthanded, like when we raided that asteroid, it would be useful for me to fill in as a copilot. And also, there may be situations where," I looked around the galley, and lowered my voice, "I don't want to ask someone else to go on a mission. Situations where taking a pilot with me is only putting another person at risk. You know what I mean, Desai."
She knew, she frowned, and gave me a brief, wordless nod of her head. "Do you have any flying experience at all?"
"None. Never taken a flight lesson, not even a ride in a single-engine plane."
"Good," she announced to my surprise. "You won't have any habits to unlearn. Flight training on Earth is all about aerodynamics, using airspeed to create lift. That doesn't apply out here, not even when you're flying a dropship in an atmosphere. When I got to Camp Alpha for flight training, I thought being a helicopter pilot would be an advantage in flying a vertical takeoff ship like a Buzzard. I was wrong. Even a helicopter applies the principles of aerodynamics to fly, the rotor blades act as wings. There is a saying," she smiled, "that helicopters don't use aerodynamics to fly, they just beat the air into submission. With dropships and aircraft like the Buzzard, that isn't a joke, their jets are powerful enough to hover even at high altitude, and they don't rely on wings generating lift to keep them in the air. Dropships spend most of their time in vacuum anyway, aerodynamics aren't a factor at all. Not having to learn the principles of aerodynamics will have a tremendous amount of time. You want to learn to fly, then?"
"The basics, yes. Enough for emergencies. Can you do that? Teach me?"
She took a sip of tea and thought a minute, I appreciated that she put thought into it, rather than merely indulging the whim of her commanding officer. "We can try. Basic maneuvers in space are not all that difficult, it's the navigation that is tricky, particularly orbital mechanics. We will start with a dropship first, if you get that, we'll move on to the Flower. Our stolen frigate is nimble; she flies like a large dropship. I'm sending you," she tapped her iPad, "a list of training courses."
I suppressed a groan. More training materials to read. Great. "I can't wait to get started. Thank you, Captain Desai."
"You are welcome, Colonel Bishop."
My flight training did not take up much of Desai's time, because when Skippy discovered that I wanted to learn how to fly, he insisted on training me personally. He wasn't being nice, of course, because me learning how to pilot a dropship gave him endless material for amusement, and a whole new arena to insult me and question my intelligence. Unfortunately for him, I took the tra
ining very seriously, and as Desai had explained, because I was starting from absolute zero, I didn't have any habits or preconceived notions to overcome. Even reading the training material was interesting, the whole subject was new to me. I spent a lot of time in a simulator, making egregious mistakes and listening to Skippy belittle me. The crew, especially my XO, appreciated me being super busy with flight training, it meant I was out of their way and not interfering with the proper operation of the ship. For me, it meant my hours, when not taking duty shifts on the bridge, and training with the SpecOps teams, was taken up by intensive learning of a subject totally new to me. It also meant that, darn it, I did not have time to take the officer training courses that I was already behind on. Every night, or morning or afternoon, depending on my duty shift schedule, I was so tired that I fell into dreamless slumber as soon as my head hit the pillow.
Good times.
Before the final jump approaching our first of the new set of targets, we tried programming another jump by ourselves, without Skippy's help. Before we went into action, we wanted to know whether there was any possibility we could handle the ship on our own. This time, we spent only one full day calculating which coordinates to program into the navigation computer, our science team was somewhat more confident this time than their first try. Skippy's PowerPoint presentation, about what had gone wrong the first time we programmed a jump, had indeed dazzled our brilliant science team, particularly the part where he pointed out that the speed of light was a variable, and that, technically, the ship emerged on the other side of a jump slightly before initiating a jump. That last part blew my mind. Anyway, Major Simms was in the command chair for this jump, it was her duty shift, I stood beside the command chair and tried not to interfere. Like that was going to happen.
"All systems report ready for jump," Desai reported from the left-hand pilot seat. Until we figured out how to jump correctly, our most experienced pilot was going to be at the helm for all jumps programmed by humans.
SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) Page 13