The total weight of the nukes itself was close to 4 thousand tons. Nearly 20% of the entire weight of the ship was just nuclear missiles! Two hundred of those missiles however were special. They were almost the same size as the other missiles, so they could fit into the pneumatic ejection system, but these 200 missiles were far heavier.
These heavier missiles were 10 megaton in yield, unlike the other missiles which were the standard 2.1 megaton that USC had standardized as their nuclear munitions. The rocket fuel tanks of these ships were a lot smaller to keep the size the same, but the rockets were almost four times as powerful as those of normal missiles, burning through the rocket fuel 4 times faster.
Needless to say, these missiles did not have great range, although they had fairly good acceleration. If things went according to plan however, these missiles would not need to go very far on their own rocket power, so this lack of fuel should not be a problem.
There was another thing about these missiles, which not just made them heavier, but also incredibly expensive. Built inside each of the missiles was a second generation of miniaturized and specialized targeting quantum computers. These quantum computers were far less complex in architecture, being specialized. They were capable of running fewer variety of algorithms compared to the larger and more general purpose quantum computers onboard the ships.
Yet each of these miniaturized quantum computers cost more than the large Q-computers onboard the ship. It was basically the price of miniaturization and an entirely new manufacturing process. It had added millions of dollars to the cost of an otherwise cheap missile. Thermonuclear missiles were a 150 year old technology. The miniaturized Q-Computer targeting system on board the missile was state-of-the art.
As has been the case all throughout human history, many technological advances have been fuelled by the demands of the military. It was no different at the end of the 21st century. The Q-Computer was pushed primarily by USC initially for its targeting systems. These first generation Q-Computers, made possible by mastering the Shaitan manufacturing system were large and bulky, installable only in a ship and they consumed a lot of power.
The civilian world had eventually reaped benefits with some of the largest scientific institutions and banks now having Q-Computer installations for some of the most challenging computations. The cost of these first generation Q-Computers had started coming down, but for the USC there was still a fundamental problem with the Q-Computers.
They were too bulky and power hogs to be installed inside a missile, which is where they were critically needed. The compromise with the first generation had been to send the computation to the missiles from the ships via laser. This was not a satisfactory or even a practical solution all the time. The communication round trip from the ship took too much time to make them much faster than a silicon computer, and the ships had to put themselves in danger by staying close to the missiles to reduce the communication round trip time.
These 200 missile were the first human missile with a Q-computer targeting system built into them. That computational speed would be required for the missiles’ upcoming task. What the captains would have rued if they had known, was that in the 9 years since these first missiles had been produced, the cost of second generation Q-computers had crashed from a few million dollars to just a hundred thousand dollars. Now every new USC missile produced in the last few months came with a Q-computer targeting system.
At the precisely computed time, the computers of the Redeemer and Genghis Khan started releasing the 200 ‘special’ missiles each from their weapons hold. The missiles were released gently with very little velocity. As a result they did not drift very far from the ships, continuing on the same course besides the ships. It was now time for the two ships to split up, literally in this case.
The Redeemer turned 90° to face the north of the solar plane, while Genghis Khan turned 90° south. Then the two ships diverted all their power to their emergency acceleration and split up on either sides. The emergency acceleration was another innovation on the Avenger class ships made possible due to the fact that each ship had far more power relative to their weight compared to a Nautilus class ship. The Avenger was only twice the tonnage of Nautilus, but had eight fusion engines compared to a single one on Nautilus.
The emergency acceleration of the Avenger class ships had done away with chemical rockets. The amount of rocket fuel required to move such a large ship made it impractical to carry that kind of a weight all the way to Alpha Shaitan. Equally problematic was the fact that once exhausted, there would be no way to refill the rocket fuel on a campaign like this, so the ships would be left without any emergency acceleration. Instead the emergency acceleration of the Avenger class ships ran on water! Plain old H2O, one of the most abundant molecules in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud.
From an engineering standpoint, the problem of emergency acceleration was a problem of energy storage. It was all about storing as much energy as possible safely, and with the lowest mass and volume possible. When required, the system should be able to release that energy as rapidly as possible without blowing up the ship, and use that energy as efficiently as possible to produce momentum, rather than lose it as heat.
That in essence is the problem statement for emergency acceleration. Chemical rockets did that job reasonably well, but had the limitation of renewability. The Avenger class ships stored the energy of the 8 fusion reactors for emergency acceleration. The chemical battery used was the simplest one possible – H2O. Hydrogen atoms bond with Oxygen very strongly to form water. The strength of the bond is one of the reasons why water is so stable and found in abundance in the known universe.
It takes a lot of energy to separate out the Hydrogen and Oxygen molecules from water. However if one were to put in that energy and separate out the two elements of water then the two gases, Hydrogen and Oxygen, taken together form a battery. For whenever the two are combined again, they would release all the energy put in separating them, and form water again.
The system had the additional advantage that the Oxygen tanks for the emergency acceleration also acted as an emergency oxygen supply for the ship. However the biggest advantage was that ships could simply stop near one of the billions of comets and planetoids in the area and scoop up as much ice as was needed to replenish the water store.
The Redeemer and Genghis Khan’s emergency system now pumped the stored oxygen it had generated in the last few days into a special reactor lined with heat resistant ceramics that could take the 2700°C temperature that is released when Hydrogen and Oxygen combine explosively.
Four part of Hydrogen were added for every part of Oxygen, although in theory the ratio should have been 2:1. The extra hydrogen dampened the chemical process ensuring controlled combustion. Extra hydrogen is freely available, since the Harvester discards 99% of the Hydrogen collected as non-Deuterium. The extra Hydrogen also give mass and volume to the mixture, which is expelled out as an explosive jet that propels the ship forward.
The resulting jet propulsion was as good as a rocket fuel thruster. There was however no constraints on the use of this fuel, since more of it could be made inside the ship as long as there was enough water. So eight emergency acceleration reaction chambers could fire together to give an Avenger class ship far more acceleration than would have been designed if they had been running on rocket fuel.
Unfortunately the added thrust of the emergency thrusters was still not enough for a large mass like an Avenger class ship compared to a Shaitan missile. The Shaitan missile had much higher acceleration. That was the reason that the Redeemer and the Genghis Khan had to make the pre-emptive split maneuver. The same laws of physics that the humans intended to use against the Shaitans were equally applicable to the humans, so pre-emptive measures had to be taken.
On the other side of the battlefield, Avenger and Kali were playing a high stakes poker game. Their only defense being stealth. If the Shaitans discovered either of the two ships before time, then the ships wou
ld be in serious trouble. The only reason the two ships were taking the chance was to increase the element of surprise. The opening round of the battle was the best chance for the humans to inflict maximum damage on the Shaitan fleet.
Admiral Dar’s plans were never known to play safe or do things in half measures. This plan had the Admiral’s fingerprints marked all over it. It was aggressive, audacious and went for broke. If the Redeemer and Genghis Khan had gone north and south respectively on the plane of approach, Avenger and Kali were slowly drifting east and west respectively for some time now, but using only their docking thrusters.
The docking thrusters, as the name suggested were used to dock the ship with very minute and precision jets of compressed steam. These steam jets were minute and relatively cold compared to engine thrust, which do not register on any scanner more than a 20-30 Km. away. These thrusters cannot move a ship very far or very fast, but keep the docking thrusters on for a few hours and it would generate enough velocity to move the ships a few thousand kilometers.
A few thousand kilometers was nothing in space, but it was enough separation from the waiting Shaitan fleet as long as the Avenger and Kali were not discovered earlier than expected. The Avenger and Kali were waiting to observe the response of the Shaitan fleet to the split of the Redeemer and Genghis Khan, before they made their next move. The Avenger and Kali had predefined moves depending on how the Shaitan fleet responded.
Capt. Brogan had to grudgingly admit that the Shaitan Admiral responded with the best possible move. The Redeemer and Genghis Khan were trying to use their great speed to their advantage, against a stationary Shaitan fleet. They had released their missile payload in passive mode, depending on their momentum to take the missiles close to the Shaitan fleet at great speed.
The missiles close in on the Shaitan fleet undetected at a great speed, until it was too late by the time they were detected. The missiles would fire up as late as possible to do minor course correction and ensure it hit the Shaitan ships. The 200 ‘special’ missiles fired from each of the ship would have very little time to do course correction due to their great speed, which is where 4 times the thrust of normal missiles would become necessary.
Even then, the targeting of an object as small as a Shaitan warship when travelling at 1% the speed of light was no trivial matter, and the missiles were expected to be far less accurate, which is why they had 10 megaton yield, to compensate for the less accurate targeting. Since the Redeemer and Genghis Khan would be equally vulnerable to Shaitan missile due to their great speed, if they passed the Shaitan fleet close by, the two ships had split in opposite direction early enough.
That way the Shaitan missiles would not have time to reach either of the human ships before they passed the Shaitan fleet. Once past the fleet, Shaitan missiles had no hope of catching up due to the great speed of the ships. Splitting up would also force the Shaitan fleet to choose which ship it wanted to follow, or split itself up. That was the theory and the plan of attack of the Redeemer and Genghis Khan.
Unfortunately the Shaitan admiral was good, as noted by Capt. Brogan. Although, there was no way that the Shaitan warships could detect the advancing missiles released by the Redeemer and Genghis Khan at the moment, the Shaitan admiral had guessed it. He had come to the most logical conclusion about what the two human ships were up to. Capt. Brogan looked up at the Flag Bridge where Admiral Dar was seated and gave a look of admiration. Admiral Dar acknowledged his own admiration for the Shaitan Admiral with a nod.
The Shaitan fleet went into emergency acceleration a few moments after the Redeemer and Genghis Khan split. The Shaitan fleet did not split themselves, neither did they attempt to intercept any of the two ships. The Shaitans had calculated correctly that neither their ships nor their missiles had a chance to intercept either the Redeemer or Genghis Khan before they passed the Shaitan fleet. None of the Shaitan ships bothered to even launch a missile towards the two human ships.
Instead the Shaitan fleet took a 90° turn to the plane of approach to try and put as much distance as possible between the approaching free floating missiles and themselves. Since the Redeemer and Genghis Khan had split in the North-South axis, in order to avoid any more high speed missiles from them, the Shaitan fleet moved west on the plane of approach. The Shaitan fleet, which was still unaware of the Avenger and Kali, took the direction, which would take them fairly close to one of the stealthily approaching human ships – Kali, exactly as had been hoped.
The missiles released by the Redeemer and Genghis Khan woke up immediately as soon as the Shaitan fleet went into emergency acceleration, to adjust their trajectory and match that of the Shaitan fleet trying to move away from their path. There was no point in those missiles trying to be stealthy any longer, for the Shaitans had guessed their presence. The earlier the missiles adjusted their trajectory, the better their chance of hitting their target.
Since the Shaitans had caught on the game fairly early, the missiles would be stretched on their fuel to sustain the amount of course correction they had to make, especially given the truncated rocket fuel capacity of these ‘special’ missiles. Even if all the missiles managed to reach the Shaitan ships, 400 missiles against the point defense system of 8 Shaitan warships working in tandem would pose no danger to the Shaitans ships.
That was just 50 missiles for each of the Shaitan warships to kill. Even when taken by surprise, the Shaitan warships had managed to kill 110-115 missiles per ship with their point defense system in the last battle. With ample warning, a Shaitan warship could most probably kill as many 140-145 missiles per ship.
In this battle however, the Shaitan point defense system could not be expected to be as effective due to the extremely high speed of approach of the missiles. The Shaitan laser point defense, which is the only light speed weapon not affected much by speed of incoming missiles, was mostly ineffective due to the human AWPS technology. It killed only about 5% of the missiles on an average.
The plasma cannon being ballistic weapons, would be hopeless as point defense in this battle due to the great speed of the missiles. It would probably not be able to stop a single human missile. The Shaitan antimissiles, which was the only effective point defense that the Shaitans had, would also be relatively ineffective due to the difficulty of targeting such a fast moving incoming missile.
The Shaitans were equally aware of these issues with point defense. They had started pumping out antimissiles out of all of the 16 missiles tubes of each warship the moment their suspicions about the missiles got confirmed, with the missiles firing up. The Shaitans wanted to put out the maximum volume of antimissiles out there, to maximize their chances of intercepting as many of the human missiles as possible.
The difficulties in point defense targeting a missile moving a 1% the speed of light, were also the reasons that the humans could hope that some of the missiles would get through in an otherwise unfavorable ratio. Unfortunately those very reasons also meant that any missile that got through would have an equally difficult time targeting and hitting a Shaitan ship.
The missiles from the Redeemer and Genghis Khan however were just a red herring. The Shaitans had not been expected to be suckered so easily, and they just proved that the humans had not overestimated them. Any missile from the Redeemer or Genghis Khan that might manage to hit a Shaitan ship was just an added bonus. The real strike was coming from behind, with the missiles that were now being released by the Avenger and Kali.
The Avenger and Kali were now minutes away from a distance at which an omnidirectional radar scan would show up their presence on the Shaitan scanners. The Avenger class ships had taken some design lessons from late 20th century US aircraft designers. It was amazing how much modern spaceship designers could learn from pioneering air breathing aircraft designers from over a century ago.
In a testimony to the genius of the designers of original aircraft, the designers of Avenger had copied the designs of US B-2 Stealth bombers’ exterior to lower the radar profile of t
heir ships. This reduced the distance at which a Shaitan could detect a dark Avenger class ship, not running its engines. Human designers knew the exact radar strength of Shaitan warships from captured ships. The Avenger and Kali were now approaching that distance threshold.
The pneumatic ejectors of Avenger and Kali were ejecting the ‘special’ missiles at full force, imparting the missiles with a starting velocity of 30 m/s. This gave the missiles a silent head start, enabling them to open up their thrusters much later. In the case of the missiles ejected by Kali, the missiles were almost on a collision course with the Shaitan fleet even without opening up its thrusters, since the Shaitan fleet was moving in the same direction as Kali.
The computer finished ejecting all the missiles seconds before it was time to fire up the emergency acceleration of the Avenger and Kali and show themselves to the enemy. The timing was controlled by the computer, just like every other maneuver that the human ships had triggered during this opening sequence of the battle. Humans could never have controlled this manually with the precision required, not even tech-heads.
As the emergency engines of the Avenger fired up, giving the crew on the bridge a temporary sensation of mild gravity in an otherwise zero gravity area of the ship, Capt. Brogan could not help but give a small self-indulgent smile inside his helmet. What would he not give to see the non-existent faces of the Shaitans right now, as they would see two human ships appear out of nowhere right on top of their heads with all guns blazing?
Capt. Brogan may not have been able to see the non-existent faces of the Shaitans, but the Shaitan antimissile trajectories told the story of bedlam and confusion in the Shaitan camp. All the antimissiles had been launched facing the missiles approaching from the Redeemer and Genghis Khan. It took over 10 seconds for the Shaitans to retarget the first of those antimissiles to turn around and face the opposite side.
10 seconds during which some of the antimissiles could actually be traced moving aimlessly as the Shaitan captains dithered in confusion. 10 seconds delay, which the Shaitan admiral would come to rue within just a few minutes, because that would be all the time this battle would last.
Retribution (Shaitan Wars) Page 20