Maxim #39

[Kazinsal]

11 August 825
"The underground will rise and save this world -- we'll all stand proud."

---

Harold phoned me up this morning and said to dig out the Metropolis blueprints. I spent the next five minutes getting his assurances that he wasn't going to ask me to build a new barely-flying Vespuccian monolith in memory of JP. It was a project that was part business and part gift; a gift to an organization that I did not ever expect we would be working with, let alone customizing and developing blueprints for. And certainly not a Spyglass.

Three months ago we had sent off the construction and maintenance log of the Metropolis and some -- sigh -- napkin blueprints to a representative of the Alster Union named Lukas Mohr after having heard their group had obtained and were working on repairing a Mark I Spyglass that had been... fixed up by the Junkers at some point during its lifetime. It had a Mark I core and array, but it was in disrepair and was thoroughly electromagnetically loud. So much so that they named it Sirene. While usually I'd be opposed to handing over any data regarding the Spyglass-class dreadnoughts and especially that regarding the Metropolis herself, the Unioners already had a Spyglass-class dreadnought and a somewhat-working array, so really, we'd be giving them the reverse of the disassembly procedure, not a "DIY Vespucci Triumvirate Dreadnought" manual.

I must admit, though, hearing the Alster Union, the shipwrights who built the might of the pre-GMG Empire of Rheinland, say they liked my work? That felt pretty god damned good.

Anyways, it seems we're going to be taking on some refugees from the Union, since saying the Bering situation is "not good" would be like saying the Battle of Freeport One was "a bit of an influence on the Raiders". They're people of similar mind to us. Pride in their craft. Surrounded by hostility, but ever strong. Together to the last.

We'll be adding five hundred souls to the Natio's citizenry, most of whom are trained maintenance technicians, aerospace engineers, and shipwrights. We'll finally be able to start putting together ships more complex than a Raven or a Dromedary, and next time we have a cruiser fall apart on us because we've done horribly out-of-spec things to it, we can fix it ourselves instead of having to phone up the Hessians. Harold wants me to start refreshing the blueprints we have, starting with the Metropolis so we can do a customized ship blueprint for the Sirene. It'll only be accurate up to what we know about it, but it'll have the complete data we have on the Mark I Spyglass-class Dreadnought's construction and layout. Which, considering we helped build the things back in the day as part of the good ol' Vespucci Triumvirate, we can safely say is enough to keep a Mark I in working order without revealing too much about how to put one together from scratch.

I mean, we can't just give them the whole stack and how it works. It's a god damned Spyglass, after all. Some secrets are better left kept.

---

"They'll say my mission saved the world -- and I stood proud."

[Kazinsal]

17 August 825
"Somewhere, like a scene from a memory, there's a picture worth a thousand words."

---

The original Huginn blueprints are unsalvageable.

I hadn't looked at them in some years; they seemed irrelevant. We had stripped the Black Cloud II down to the bare essentials needed to convert all the combat operations sectors and negative space inside the ship into living space for two thousand people, and at that point we were fairly certain in our belief that we would never be able to put the ship back into service as an interdiction cruiser. Maybe a glorified weapons platform, albeit a fragile one.

And yet, here we are, having put the thing back together again with the help of the Red Hessian Army, but we haven't got a damn clue how they wired things back in where. We're seeing an average of 98 percent power output under normal conditions, but as soon as we start testing the LIMELIGHT package, output drops to around 86 percent. Some plugs must be wired up wrong, and I bet I know why.

The LIMELIGHT-YYZ package is, as best described by the internal Aquila documentation, "cruiser-scale, superior to Spyglass-R despite the smaller size." This is not a particularly difficult achievement, as "Spyglass-R" was the original Mark I Spyglass array core installed in the Metropolis, which I still believe lost a significant chunk of its potential lifespan when we had to work the EWAR on overdrive to get the remainder of the First Vagrant Fleet out of the Omega-3 system after the Battle of Freeport One. That was a case that I don't think was intended by the designers of the original Spyglass array, and while it's not particularly the focus of the LIMELIGHT series, we can definitely put out a significant pulse. The greatest advancement is the early-warning functionality provided by a combination of a LIMELIGHT-YYZ package and several LIMELIGHT-TCE packages deployed throughout a zone of interest. I'm looking forward to getting the software for that up and running.

Look at me. I'm getting away from myself again.

When the LIMELIGHT package's core shifts into active mode and the amplifier array spins up, the immediate load is significant enough to reduce shield output by about a tenth for about 70 milliseconds. My thinking is that the "repaired" energy conversion controllers are taking that load shift as a potential overdraw, and that 14 percent of missing power output is due to a step-down in energy converter output. The rate of fusion slows at the request of the energy conversion controllers, until the load is completely removed from the system, at which point the reactor power output goes back up to full.

This leaves us with two potentials: Either the controllers are too sensitive, or the new core really isn't putting out the power needed to sustain through the passive-to-active transition's load spike. I don't like the latter, but I'm not willing to risk assuming the former presently. I'll be doing testing on the latter with load emulators using the shields as an energy sink; acceptance test plans are to be completed within the next two weeks.

In the meantime, I've been redrafting and reconfirming the accuracy of the Metropolis blueprints. While they're not perfectly accurate for the Mark I Spyglass, they're close enough to maintain one. Here's hoping the Unioners are still fans of my work.

---

"Metropolis watches and thoughtfully smiles; she's taken you to your home."

[Kazinsal]

25 August 825
"Every time I try to leave it behind me, I see something that reminds me of you."

---

Harold put his stamp of approval on the CSB for the Sirene and sent it off to the Unioners today. And yet, even though I know I've done my job to the best of my abilities, and have put together a blueprint that they could use to tear the ship apart and put it back together in an even more secure manner, I feel sad. Not for any moral or political reasons, but ones of a more personal nature. Of my own failures.

Some nights I dream of the day we scuttled the Metropolis. It was only a few years after we began rebuilding the outer shell of the ship around the Mark I Spyglass internals that we sent her into the Kansas sun, ensuring that the still-classified technologies composing a Spyglass dreadnought would burn up, never to be plundered and cloned for immoral acts of war or pseudo-corporate profiteering. That day I failed as an engineer, as a shipwright, as an officer. Nearly three billion credits and six months in open space went into the reconstruction of the home of the Vagrant Raiders, and several dozen lives were lost to accidents over the course of its gestation. And something I did was wrong. That ship should have lasted another decade without regular maintenance. It broke its back after three years.

I can't sleep again after the dream. The recollection of the Metropolis' mid-section joints cracking and the rear of the ship flexing just barely thirty metres behind the CIC hurts too much. Later in the day, I tell myself that it'll be fine, and that I know I don't have myself to blame. The blind jump after the Zwickau massacre inflicted severe strain on the dreadnought's superstructure. It was Rheinland's fault. Bastards. They broke that poor old ship so hard I couldn't fix her. After all those years, I just... failed.

Sirene.

The Unioners have a great many gifts. They have a Mark I, and the means to maintain it. And now they have the blueprints needed to exact any severe repairs or restorations. May whatever deities they ascribe their strengths to grant them and their Spyglass a stronger, more permanent presence than ours did. If not for their people, then to keep it alive. To give it a place in the universe where it can continue to exist as a testament to the will of the oppressed, the strength of the people, and the legacy of the golden age of the Western Independent Worlds. The Vespucci Triumvirate is long divided, but by the efforts of the Unioners, its greatest achievement will last.

God, maybe I should just talk to a therapist. Do we have any of those?

---

"People always turn away from the eyes of a stranger, afraid to know what lies behind the stare."

[Kazinsal]

14 September 825
"From the point of ignition, to the final drive, the point of the journey is not to arrive."

---

We received three Pitbull-class transports from the Junkers overnight and, frankly, I'm afraid we're going to have to scrap half of the mechanical involved and scrub the other half down to the metal and repaint both inside and out.

God bless the Junkers for their resourcefulness, but at the end of the day the layers of paint on top of that ingenuity can be peeled away to reveal the ball of duct tape and assorted bodges strapped to an already questionable piece of equipment. The Pitbull is a fine bulk mover, albeit one with a mediocre weapons capacitor and piss-poor arcs, but the reactor was designed to be cheap, not safe or efficient. It's an old-school deuterium–tritium fusion plant catalysed by MOX decay, which makes it hilariously inexpensive to fill the tanks for at the cost of putting out 80% of its reaction as very energetic, very angry neutrons. The result is that over the lifespan of these ships, which we can't be certain about because there's no paper trail on them going back more than four years, neutron activation has turned the innards of the reactor into a functioning but highly radioactive mess that's about as safe to be near as a barrel of dimethylmercury.

To be completely honest, dear diary, I don't even want to turn these things on. We need a drop-in replacement, or the parts to reliably adapt a similar-sized reactor-engine combination that we can source somewhere to the Pitbull with a minimum of additional hackery. Problem is, getting something like that tends to be an expensive endeavour; these ships are mostly engine and cargo storage, with a little crew cabin bolted on top. We need to get these things running deuterium–helium-3, and that's going to require a whole new plant that wasn't designed for these ships.

The Unioners would potentially be a contact, but the mess in Bering is getting out of hand and I'm not convinced they wouldn't just try to switch over to harder reactor guts, a bigger neutron shield, and Thorium–MOX catalysts instead of the Bretonian gunk.

Actually, there's an idea. Bering. Atacama. Gaians. Despite their past association with the Corsairs, we seem to be getting on with them fairly well, and if anyone would know how to retrofit aneutronic fusion plants into ships, it'd be them. I should check the Commission databases for any inroads we might have there...

---

"Alternating currents force a show of hands; rational responses force a change of plans."

[Kazinsal]

13 October 825
"From my brother's blood machine to yours, man your battlestations; we'll have you home pretty soon."

---

We uncorked the champagne for OCS Black Cloud II tonight. It took three weeks of tuning to bring the primary fusion plant up to native standards of efficiency, but she's ready to go now. The work the Hessians did to put her back together and light the grid up was absolutely fantastic; bringing the power output up was the hard part. Aquila had to source new rectifying antennas for the travelling-wave converters, since the old ones from the original core were losing about twenty percent of the expected-usable fusion energy as waste heat. We're still running a bit rich to meet 100% output, but we can run the Huginn's LIMELIGHT array just fine now.

While we've got a full crew complement for her, we had to pull half the engineering staff off of two gunboats to make it work. Since the Lovelace project has gone so well, Harold's asking OIC if we can growpram a second warship AI from the Lovelace dataset. Ada, formally Lovelace Prototype Unit-01, has been doing a reportedly fantastic job as the executor of the Condor-class OXS Be Still, under the supervision of Commander Combs. But a warship of that size is a completely different beast from an operations cruiser like Black Cloud. It's larger, has a much more varied set of weapons and equipment, and carries a lot more cargo and crew.

Harold's asked for them to give her the name Risa, after a friend of his from years ago. They'll be delivering her today to be set up with minimal executorship. Interaction with the crew, basic non-combat problem solving, that kind of thing. We don't have a combat-ready warship AI dataset yet, so it'll be something we have to develop through simulations and any possible active encounters over time. And, if it works, this will solve one of our two largest hurdles for building a flagship; a crew of two to three hundred is a lot more manageable for us to staff a heavy battlecruiser or light battleship than a crew of eight hundred or more.

If 02 could see this now...

---

"The navigator, the pilot, her favourite, the one they call the vision that bears the gift..."

[Kazinsal]

1 November 825
"There’s no telling when the truth is clear, pay it no mind; lines were drawn for us, for all sides."

---

Harold and Rod managed to turn this "declaring war on the Hellfire Legion" thing around somewhat by securing us a new warship hull and a pair of escort subcapitals. Crayter handed over the stripped hull and drive section of a decommissioned Thanatos-class cruiser and a pair of Hydra-class gunboats. The cruiser, the former CFV-109 Styx, has seen its share of conflict in Crayter's hand, but its hull is in excellent condition. The internal structure is a bare minimum right now, the shields are at transit capacity only, and the weapon hardpoints aren't even connected to the magazines and the power grid. Armour reinforcement has been completely stripped out, bolts and all, so we'll have to get our own made up.

We're doing the internal frame and superstructure graphing work while towing it in under partial-assist power -- the engines work, but efficiency is down from what we'd expect and we want to put some time into burn-testing them anyways. The ship has a pretty standard floor layout that's fully intact, and gravity works, so we can get the work done on our way back to the Makassar. Drawing up some internal documentation-grade blueprints will be interesting, that's for sure; none of us have ever been around the inside of a functioning Crayterian warship with free reign to do analyst and engineering work and inspections before.

Turnaround on this beast should be faster than previous engineering projects, since we're starting with what's effectively a 70% functional cruiser to begin with. We'll need to source weapons and plating and fab up some adapters and custom joints, but that's a drop in the hat compared to what the Black Cloud II needed. I'm just glad the Hydras are good to go, turret fitment notwithstanding, but sourcing gunboat class weaponry is something we can do from our own inventory.

---

"In the afterglow, echoes of time unfold..."

[Kazinsal]

14 November 825
"But those days are gone now, changed like a leaf on a tree, blown away forever into the cool autumn breeze."

---

The finishing touches are being put on the Unforgiven. Harold and I had a discussion about the number of capital ships that have cycled through the fleet. There's been at least five cruisers and two battleships now, plus another four ships with capital designations despite not being considered proper capital ships under interstellar law. As part of our establishment of a new, definitive fleet database, Harold and I worked out the chronological order of ships in the Fleet and assigned them formal registry numbers. The newest member of the fleet, OCS-OF-11 Unforgiven, will be the first to launch with the whole designation painted on it. OCS-OF-10 Black Cloud II will have its full ship registration painted on next time the crew cycles off for leave.

I had dinner with Commander Keighley last night. We hadn't spent an evening joking around like we used to back aboard the Metropolis in months. We've gone into different tracks since then, and technically he outranks me, but He's still adjusting to being a warship captain, though I assured him that the position would start to feel more natural as time goes by. God knows I wasn't ready to be the head of research and development for the Vagrant Raiders, or a field agent of the Commission. It just started to come more easily as it became just a part of my everyday routine.

On that note, I'm no longer a field agent. I told Escher that I was going to step back into the role of being a handler for a more suited field operative, Agent Synchronicity. She's young, but she's sneaky, she's clever, and she's a much better pilot than I am. I suppose sending her to Vespucci for one of her first covert operations was probably a bit rough of me, but someone had to do it and I sure as hell wasn't going to fly halfway down the Barrier to do it. I fucked up on the intel, though, that's for sure. I thought Monterrey was a bit further out than I gave her a checkpoint for and she almost ran headfirst into the station's perimeter defenses and had to weave through a dense asteroid patch with IFR mostly off to reduce risk of detection. She took some great photos, though, I have to admit. I should have some of these framed for her as a gift.

This is starting to become less of a work-related log and more of a personal one. It better not turn into me complaining about being old and shit or I'm going to be real disappointed in myself.

---

"The words stuck in my mind. Alive from what I'd heard, I had to seize the day; to home, I returned."