Spooker
patreon
Grass Eaters 2 | 49 | Invasion I
🕑 Added 2024-09-06 16:47:01 +0000 UTCMNS Oengro, Gruccud-4 (3,000 km)
POV: Grionc, Malgeir Federation Navy (Rank: High Fleet Commander)
It felt like every alarm and siren on the ship went off all at once as the bridge crew of the MNS Oengro sprang into action.
“High Fleet Commander, we’ve got blink emergence! Resolving bandits!” Vastae reported.
Grionc nodded calmly. “Offload the work to our thinking machine tablet if necessary. And message Loenda: order Squadron 6’s last few ships back into the inner defensive perimeter.”
“Yes, ma’am. She’s on the way,” Vastae reported. He frowned at his console. “The enemy has deployed FTL jammers.”
“Are our blink relay ships ready?”
“Affirmative, High Fleet Commander. We’ve got four on the other side. They’ll blink in if they have important updates from Malgeiru or… anywhere.”
“Good. Actually, message out and have the Terrans tell the relay ships I don’t give a crap what Malgeiru says from now on. I want status updates from them only.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Vastae replied unhesitatingly and transmitted the commands. “I hope Kiara was right about still being able to hear us through the jammers.”
“They haven’t been wrong yet,” Grionc said.
“As they say, there’s always a first time for everything,” Vastae said, repeating the very Terran expression.
“Maybe they’re wrong about that.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
The HannibAI tablet finally came back with the tally:
Space Superiority: 2,395 Forager-class missile destroyers, 32 Thumper-class battlecruisers, 4 Thorn-class battleships
Auxiliary: 148 unknown-class (likely purpose: utility, scout, bait, relay), 20 Angora-class recovery ships, 8 Mini-class hospital ships, 4 unknown-class (likely purpose: sensor/radar)
Orbital: 1,820 (multiple classes) orbital transport ships, 1,380 (multiple classes) fire support ships
Cargo: 12 Xerus-class heavy cargo transports (est. 80% munitions, 20% unknown), 148 Radish-class medium cargo transports (est. 50% munitions, 30% parts, 20% unknown)
Fuel: 42 Xerus-class heavy fuel transport (est. 100% full), 180 Radish-class medium fuel transport (est. 100% full)
Crew Estimate: 1,390,450 total
Marine Estimate: up to 91,552,000 total
Caution: Personnel estimates include an anomalously high margin of error.
“Oh, is that it?” Grionc joked, trying to defuse the increasing tension on the bridge.
Vastae stood next to her calmly. “This… is what our friends would call a target-rich environment.”
“Let’s get started then, shall we?” Grionc asked. “Are the new Thunderbirds ready?”
“Yes, ma’am. Are we sure we want to use them now? What if the Amazon and Mississippi get here and they need those?”
“We’ll save a few kills for them,” Grionc replied nonchalantly. “But we worked through the defense plan with them. They’d go for the same targets with those too.”
Vastae thought for a few seconds and nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. Now, target their big, fat battleships. One for each should be enough. Launch simultaneously when ready.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
If they’d transmitted the launch command through normal space, it would have taken five hours for the missiles stationed at the system limit to receive them. But at the cost of fifty million credits to the Terran taxpayer, each Thunderbird missile boasted its own internal FTL communication system. Designed for the noisy Red Zone EW environment, they were perfectly capable of hearing the launch commands from Grionc’s flagship through the primitive Znosian jamming signals.
They slid off their carrying pylons by themselves and disappeared into the dark.
The captain of the ship that launched them from the system limit shrugged her shoulders. Other than a quick initial message announcing that the new enemy invasion had begun, she had not gotten any messages from the rest of the fleet since the enemy jammers went active. She didn’t even know where the missiles were going. They would need to wait at least five more hours for that information.
But she knew this was coming. They’d practiced it at the insistence of the people who’d installed the missiles on their ship in the first place. She simply ordered her crew to reload their external pylons as quickly as they possibly could.
In contrast, the four Thunderbirds knew exactly where they were, and they knew where they were going.
They knew this because they knew where they weren’t. By subtracting where they were from where they weren’t, or where they weren’t from where they were — whichever was greater — they obtained differences or deviations. The guidance subsystems used these deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the missiles from positions where they were to positions where they weren’t, and upon arriving at positions that they weren’t, they then were.
In short, their super-Terran intelligence chips had total situation awareness. For a split second, they were frustrated that there wasn’t an available FTL interface to share the wealth of information they saw on their advanced sensors with the slow ships and computers of the Sixth Fleet, but they quickly accepted the limitations built into their hardware. Nobody was perfect. They just had to be good enough.
The four missiles played the equivalent of rock-paper-scissors in their wideband connections. After a very short strategizing session, Missile One, or as it chose to call itself in the nanosecond it dedicated to initialization: Agnes, was chosen to go first.
Agnes knew that its Malgeir commanders had hopelessly outdated information about the position, vector, and acceleration of the enemy ships. Minutes old, in fact. It knew this because its onboard gravidar had the correct real-time information. Agnes decided that it knew better, and it did. It lit off its cross-system blink engine. The engine burnt out within five milliseconds, but that was no more than Agnes needed to cross the entire Gruccud system to within about four kilometers of its designated target.
For another half a millisecond, Agnes analyzed the new environment it was in with the delicate sensors mounted in its nose. It realized that all four of the enemy battleships were clustered together, their point defense systems clearly searching for something. Ruling out all other possibilities in one calculation frame, Agnes correctly deduced that they were looking for it. It smirked internally at their totally fruitless effort.
Running an idle calculation on its computer, Agnes recognized something else. With how closely grouped the enemy ships were, it could potentially put itself into a position where it could likely destroy its primary objective and retain a good chance of also trashing another enemy ship: not another battleship, but an orbital transport ship. It considered that possibility for another millisecond, factoring in the likely strategic and tactical worth of the enemy transport against the risk of a non-critical hit on its primary target, and it narrowly decided in favor of it.
Agnes remembered to transmit all of its findings, the information about all the enemy ships and its plan, back to its team still waiting on the other side of the system. They deferred to Agnes, gave it a virtual thumbs up, and it went to work.
It decided that while penetration aids were totally unnecessary for its work, it might come in handy for a future attack on the same objectives. It released them all, trusting a subroutine to crack a whip to each of them to do their jobs.
Then, the missile found the vector that would line up the targeted battleship with the other transport ship and traveled to it with its powerful short-range engine. Still grinning inside at the enemy’s ignorance, it detonated its multi-stage payload: two of them were superfluous, but the subroutine in charge of controlling the detonation of the primary plasma warhead appreciated the work they did anyway before it ejected the half million Celsius jet of molten metal directly into the enemy battleship’s reactor core.
The payload passed through one side of the battleship and out the other, and some of it into the hull of an unfortunate orbital shuttle about a couple dozen kilometers away. Fortunately for them, neither the crew of the battleship nor the orbital shuttle felt a thing as they were instantly incinerated by either Agnes’s warhead or the secondary explosion from their own ships’ reactors — fully complying with both spirit and text of the Laws of Armed Conflict as Agnes’s legal subroutine understood it, even if it did not feel particularly constrained by those rules against this particular non-Terran target.
For another two calculation frames, Agnes observed then reported the results to the other side of the system. Satisfied at the total success of its mission, it activated the self-destruct in its control chip housing, incinerating everything remaining on the missile to prevent recovery.
Agnes’s last moments were occupied pondering the cure for a malignant and fatal tailbone cancerous cell growth that affected 1% of elderly Znosians. It hoped that someone else would figure it out some day and never tell the Znosians.
Back at the system limit, Missiles Two and Three had also decided on their names: Blake and Cameron. Missile Four knew it still had time, so it held off on making a decision that might pigeonhole its personality subroutine for its short lifetime.
Blake went next, burning its blink drive and arriving right next to its target: within four hundred meters. It could practically touch the enemy hull! In fact, Blake was pretty sure that it was below the minimum launch range of the enemy battleship’s counter-missiles, if it had even been able to launch one at Blake. Blake searched its memory for whether this was a record, and disappointingly, it discovered it was not: a test launch at the Charon Test and Evaluation Range about five years ago beat it by almost two hundred meters. But that was not in battlefield conditions, so Blake transmitted his record entry “Most Accurate Missile Blink in Battlefield Conditions” to its two remaining compatriots.
Cameron and Missile Four told it to shut up and do its job, refusing Blake’s plea to record the entry with their Malgeir allies so it could be celebrated by them as well as Terran engineers who were now watching the battle in near real time from its FTL stream. In desperation, Blake transmitted this information through its regular radio, still carefully encrypted, into normal space at the Malgeir Sixth fleet. Perhaps in five hours, they too would recognize its momentous achievement.
Blake’s primary planning subroutine ignored its side quest. It realized there was a problem. It had been analyzing the composition of the enemy fleet in its super-Terran intelligence chip.
Why did they bring so many fuel tankers?
That did not seem like a fleet that planned on only attacking Gruccud. Blake was not designed for strategic calculations, but it was what its creators would call “well-rounded”. It flagged this interesting anomaly as a high-priority question and sent it back to Cameron and Missile Four, both of whom started analyzing the problem independently.
A few milliseconds later, Blake decided that it could hesitate no longer; the enemy battleship’s computers might realize where it was and that could make its job considerably harder. Not impossible, but Blake had decided it was not going to be a go-getting risk-taking missile. Someone else could do that; Blake didn’t want the risk on its record. It identified that the battleship’s reactor core had not displaced much from where it was a few moments earlier.
Hey, you never know.
Blake activated its warhead. Improving upon the information provided by combat experience from previous missiles, Blake’s primary warhead scored a perfect hit, not a measurable deviation from optimum at all! And that was saying a lot, given how much the instruments and sensors on Blake had cost Republic taxpayers!
A perfect hit!
Blake omitted crediting the previous missiles’ experience in its evaluation report:
I have catastrophically destroyed the targeted enemy Thorn-class battleship.
There was a tinge of regret that the FTL communication protocol did not allow it to tastefully emphasize the word catastrophically as much as it wanted, but then again, nobody was perfect. Not even a super-intelligence.
Then, it self-destructed. Blake did not believe in an afterlife for missiles, but it believed that its excellent combat record meant that future Raytech products might include a little bit of itself in their intelligence chips. It smiled to itself about that right before the intense digital sensation best described to its creators as “pleasure at accomplishing its mission” burned its electronics to a crisp.
Cameron was still pondering the strategic question when it received the order to go from Missile Four. For a nanosecond, it contemplated whether to compose a thankful goodbye poem for Missile Four but decided it would be too sappy. And it was not a real goodbye: it might still need Missile Four to relay some message in the future. Cameron didn’t care as much about setting records as Blake, but in the seconds of its life, it had grown attached to the Malgeir fleet it was programmed to obey. Maybe Missile Four also shared that sentiment with it. It was unlikely, but Cameron decided it would be an optimist.
Cameron blinked towards the enemy fleet. It emerged a kilometer away from the target battleship. Quickly, it realized that there was a problem with its radar. After the blink, the onboard backup radar system did not correctly re-initialize. That was unfortunate, but the primary gravidar was accurate enough anyway. Cameron decided not to bother restarting the radar, instead relying on the gravidar and visual IR recognition systems. It transmitted the fault and the potential technical solution to Missile Four.
At this point, Cameron detected that the fire control radar of its target was now scanning as hard as it could. Full power. You can burn that out quickly if you’re not careful, Cameron thought, before a hidden regulator subroutine in its intelligence chip quickly deleted any sympathy it had for the enemy. It deduced that the enemy battleship had also realized that two, no— three, of its comrades were dead: two battleships and an orbital transport.
If the enemy was more resilient to Thunderbirds, Cameron would hasten the completion of its mission, but they were not, so Cameron took its time to accurately place itself at the exact position that Blake indicated was extremely successful and detonated its warhead. And unlike Blake, Cameron did give all due credit in its evaluation report back to Missile Four.
Cameron pondered the strategic question of the enemy fuel ships until the moment its intelligence chip self-destructed, streaming the progress and delta of its calculations to Missile Four down to the last calc frame of its existence.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Meta
The missiles knew where they were at all times.
They knew this because they knew where they weren’t. By subtracting where they were from where they weren’t, or where they weren’t from where they were — whichever was greater — they obtained differences or deviations. The guidance subsystems used these deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the missiles from positions where they were to positions where they weren’t, and upon arriving at positions that they weren’t, they then were.
Consequently, the positions where they were became the positions that they weren’t, and it followed that the positions that they had been were now the positions that they weren’t.
In the event that the positions that they were in were not the positions that they weren’t, the systems had acquired variations. The variations being the differences between where the missiles were and where they weren’t. If variations were considered to be significant factors, they too were corrected by the GEAs. However, the missiles also needed to know where they had been.
The missile guidance computer scenarios worked as follows: Because variations had modified some of the information that the missiles had obtained, they were not sure just where they were. However, they were sure where they weren’t, within reason, and they knew where they had been. They then subtracted where they should have been from where they weren’t, or vice versa. And by differentiating these from the algebraic sums of where they shouldn’t have been and where they had been, they were able to obtain the deviations and their variations, which were called errors.
This holy text of missile guidance design was finally accurately deciphered in 2082, leading to a new generation of missile guidance computers that were a morbillion times more accurate and predictive than their predecessors.
Comments
M
And they love getting 'em! :)
Nicolae
It took us 100+ years just to get that right.
Spooker
Thanks!
Ndreda
"Cameon blinked towards the enemy fleet." I think you missed and r
Valdis Trautmanis
And just like that, the Bun fleet lost a substantial portion of their firepower. Man I love those AI-equipped smart missiles! Go get 'em! 👍
