[NGTM-1R]

Stuff from a campaign concept I'm toying with. Couple short (very short) stories for now. They were actually written in reverse order of appearance.

Come As You Are
No one was quite sure where they had come from, what with monitoring the supposedly collapsed jump nodes being a very low priority. They did not have the low-frequency emissions of Shivan engines, the rapid pulse rate of Terran sensors, the distinctive cometlike infrared albedo of Vasudan hulls. They were carefully monitored because experience had suggested to the Terran race that the universe was full of either difficult types or outright bastards, but left alone for the same reason. If they wanted to establish first contact, they could do it on their own terms.

First contact, as it turned out, involved the vaporizing of an Elysium transport full of civilians from ten klicks out and moving in towards the Lunar Orbital Shipyard. And because they were being watched, the destroyer Ares saw this and brought her main battery online at thirty kilometers out. The Bringer of War was not tolerating random violence today and expressed its displeasure by a thirty ton chunk of nickel-iron accelerated to relativistic velocity. The intruders found this argument very compelling, having had one of their cruisers gutted, and paused to rethink things.

They launched fighters and approached again. Ares and her cruiser screen were having none of this. They launched their own fighters and Ares fired a warning shot across the bow of the largest enemy ship. That provoked the now positively hostile intruders to open fire on the fighter screen and advance to engage the heavy ships.

It wasn’t much of a battle. They advanced directly into the guns of a Mars-class destroyer and three Diana-class railgun cruisers. The resulting hail of nickel-iron slugs destroyed both the overgrown cruisers in the formation and the others only escaped into subspace by the skin of their teeth. The screen’s Mod Leviathan and Mod Fenris ships never had a chance to engage.

But Sol was once again at war, only four years after being cut off.

Bringer of Mercy
They did not come silently in the night.

They visited Luna first, but there met Ares and her attendant cruisers. Ares made it very clear that their sort wasn’t welcome there, so they left again as quickly as they could. They visited L5, Home Station, and found it much more congenial to death and destruction, so they started spreading it. It fell to the Orion, the Trafalgar, to go Home’s rescue. The battle was brief; they weren’t willing to face a destroyer again after dealing with Ares the first time, not realizing that Trafalgar wasn’t quite the same calibur of destroyer.

The Orion was the harbinger of war to those it passed. It always would be, so long as they were planetbound. But here, today, as Trafalgar closed the crippled station and her cruiser escorts took up defensive posistions, the Orion would have a chance to show that it was not merely an engine of destruction. Home Station’s reactors were down, leaking dangerous radiation. Without power, no life support and no way to lock off dangerous fires consuming the station’s oxygen or leaking precious atmosphere. Many of her inhabitants were injured. The station’s hydroponics section was gone, blown clean off, and her supplies of fresh water mostly missing as well.

An Orion-class destroyer is a city of ten thousand in the sky, and brings with it all the services of a city whose work begins only when the shooting stops. Trafalgar’s damage-control teams deployed to fight the fires, groping through smoke-filled compartments to lock them off from the station’s air supply or extingush them manually if that wasn’t possible. They brought sealant gels and specialized motion detectors to locate and end the slow atmosphere leaks, field generators to limit the spread of radiation.

Her emergency medical staff accompanied the damage control crews, stabilizing the wounded where they had fallen, sometimes leaving one member behind to monitor them if they were in particularly bad condition and couldn’t be placed in a stasis bag, and setting radio beacons coded by urgency for followup teams from the regular crew to recover the wounded. The other medical types set up a receiving area for triage and treatment, well aware that the destroyer’s four surgical theaters and five hundred sickbay beds were going to be massively overwhelmed. It would be three days and four thousand nine hundred thirty-six people treated before any of them slept again. They lost only twelve patients, all of whom weren’t brought to surgery by a followup team in time. No one died after coming aboard Trafalgar.
 
Trafalgar’s engineers lead the damage-control teams in their struggle to the station’s damaged reactors, and directed their manual scramming. They worked to bring power to the station again, using their own destroyer’s massive engines, running casualty power lines over to the station, splicing it into the powergrid, hunting down damage and circuit breakers. They made plans to repair the station reactors, starting with the least-damaged Number 12. The galley staff made preparations to handle another forty-five thousand meals a day. Life Support worked out water rationing procedures to allow the destroyer to supply fresh water for the crew and the station’s inhabitants. The marine complement set themselves up to direct civilian traffic aboard the destroyer and ensure the maintance of law and order aboard the station.

A destroyer could never fully reverse its name and create on the same scale as it could destroy. But it could, at the least, preserve.

[General Battuta]

Hasn't exactly presented a compelling threat or any narrative tension. Feels a bit like an excuse to play Humans Are Special.

[headdie]

first story
Good
The opening creates mystery.

Suggestions
what did the ships look like?
drama could be introduced by introducing dialogue, maybe one side tried to get the other to identify themselves and increasing alarm as attempts fail.
did anything glow, pulse or thrum as the railguns fired e.g. "The Bringer of War was not tolerating random violence today and expressed its displeasure by launching a thirty ton chunk of nickel-iron accelerated to relativistic velocity from its main gun causing decks the vibrate throughout the ship".

Second story
Good
Atmosphere was better written into the story..
I like the last line it has a nice philosophical tone to it.

Suggestions
when describing the missing modules like the hydroponics maybe stating that it was blasted off in the fiery inferno of a capital beam cannon or missile.
To improve the atmosphere suggest the attack was sudden or was expected and dreaded.
excerpts from communication between containment workers or medical teams.

[General Battuta]

Mrm, dunno if I'd agree with that critique. Particularly on the Web, spare prose is better than detail-heavy stuff. Adjectives are bloat, adverbs are a waste.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

[NGTM-1R]

Hasn't exactly presented a compelling threat or any narrative tension. Feels a bit like an excuse to play Humans Are Special.

There's a reason why our unnamed opponents are sort of blundering into this. They're not meeting who they expected to meet.


Headdie: actually, if you want to know what they look like, this is fairly well planned-out in my head. The Diana-class cruisers are, for example, the Ticonderoga you can get off FSmods. The Mars-class is a particular modified Orion with twin flight decks and a spinal mount that I'm not sure is publically released. (Not the one with the gatling gun, though, that's just silly.) Also to be honest, I usually operate on the theory that FS spacecraft are not noisy in combat, or otherwise generally noticeable to the crew except for being at general quarters, unless taking damage. As for the stylistic stuff...meh.


Learning Curve
The Unknowns, as they had been officially dubbed, didn’t make any moves after that for three weeks. First Fleet started bringing the full fighter force out of war reserve status, reactivated the military portions of the Lunar and Martian shipyards, and stepped up patrols. Unescorted civilian shipping was cancelled. Minor concerns in the Kupier and Asteroid belts made themselves scarce. Sol held its breath.

It wasn’t to last. They were older than Terrans reckoned, stronger. They were simply comparing notes to the situation from last time, noticing differences, trying to account for them. In the end, their rationalizations would be flimsy by Terran standards, but apparently enough to satisfy them. They had come seeking war and war there would be. Sol would burn. Or so they proposed.

First Fleet identified both nodes exiting from Sol as hostile entry points, a situation which disturbed both civilian authorities and the Admiral deeply. Worse yet, efforts to recon the other end of the nodes failed. Terran subspace drives were still apparently not capable of passage through the nodes. This was to be a war with out possiblity of effective counterattack. Everyone knew that greatly decreased the possiblity of success.

The First Battle of Mars opened in what old hands of the Terran-Vasudan war thought an entirely too predictable fashion: an enemy destroyer arrived and immediately set about blowing apart any Diana-class cruisers in range before they could bring their spinal-mount railguns to bear. Scharnhorst escaped with her life by being out of range, but Duke of York was too close. The enemy wielded powerful magnetically bottled plasma streamer weapons, sharp constrast to the self-cohesive plasma technology Terran ships used. When the defensive batteries of the Martian Yards tried to respond, they discovered another unpleasant fact: the enemy’s ability to manipulate magnetic fields over long distances could also interfere with the firing of their railguns. At a stroke the most powerful weapons in the defending arsenal were useless.

Mod Fenris and Mod Leviathan ships scrambled to form up and engage, while all available fightercraft across the system were commited to deal with a number of enemy fighters estimated at over five hundred. Arriving via subspace jump from their home port at Europa came First Cruiser Squadron of four pre-Great War Jormungands, old but still dangerous as they pressed their attack against the enemy destroyer with their twin fusion mortars. A seemingly inexhaustible supply of enemy fightercraft threw themselves into fray, overwhelming Terran fighter defenses and forcing them to fall back on the cruiser screens. The new xaser “beamers” on the Mod Fenris and Mod Leviathan proved their worth despite their short range.

The First Battle of Mars was judged a tactical loss for Sol, but a strategic draw. Terran losses totalled three precious cruisers and forty-nine fighters. Their enemies suffered an unknown number of fighter casualities but believed to be at least triple, and one cruiser lost. The Mars Yards remained intact.

[Mefustae]

I like this.

Short, to the point, and leaves you wanting more.

[General Battuta]

I don't know, it's like mankind is one giant Mary Sue. I really did like the Night's Dawn/David Drake/Halo approach where the inexorable bad guys really get some stuff done.

[NGTM-1R]

Yea of little faith.

Feelers
After the First Battle of Mars, early engagements were tentative and never involved more than a few cruisers, although the unknowns, dubbied “Fishies” by the rank and file for their aquatic-esque designs, tended to throw in many fighters for even the smallest battle. The Fishies could disrupt the firing of Terran railguns at a range of about twenty kilometers, but at the cost of being unable to fire their own heavy weapons when they closed. They could either drop the jamming and open fire, a situation likely to result in the destruction or crippling of both sides, or attempt a battle of manuver, trying to set up a situation where they could escape the arc of the railguns before dropping jamming, something their ships were not suited to. Terran commanders dubbed the phenomenon “suicide pact.”

The Mod Fenris and Mod Leviathan ships with their fusion mortars became the weapon of decision, displacing the Dianas from their customary role. They also proved to be vastly better at surviving amid the swarms of fighters the Fishies customarily threw into battle. The Dianas were the controlling influence, as most Fishie ships demonstrated massive firepower advantages over the Mod Fenris and Mod Leviathans. But their role was passive, a meance-in-being. They were a threat, not a promise.

Week five saw the first of the newly reactived bomber fleet commited to battle. Results were good at first, as the Fishies tended to throw all their fighters at Terran warships to make up for their main batteries being neutralized. Three Fishie cruisers were lost to cannily employed bomber wings brought into the action after the Fishie fighter screen was commited to offensive action. But the Fishies adapted within the week, simply adding in twice as many fighters.

The loss of the Mod Leviathan Black Prince and two wings of bombers during the evacuation of a Kuiper Belt installation to start week six set a new and worrying trend. Fishie fighter losses in the war so far were halfway to quadruple digits already, yet their fighter force showed no signs of strain. Fishie fighter recon and isolated assaults by fighter-only forces were in fact on the upswing.

Mars and Ares were the only weapons in the Terran arsenal to which the Fishies had no direct answer, with their ability to fire accurately from a range greater than the Fishies could jam their railguns. But they were always being shadowed and rarely had a chance to get off more than a couple of shots before a Fishie ship arrived in range to jam their weapons too. With their reliance on 0.5 meter railguns for antifighter protection, they were even more vunerable to the hordes of hostile fightercraft. The only good news was that the Fishies did not appear to field bombers.

People began to realize that the war was not going well.

[headdie]

I like

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Damn, where do they keep getting all these fighters... They're worse than the Shivans!?

[headdie]

Damn, where do they keep getting all these fighters... They're worse than the Shivans!?

plenty to shoot at at least lol

[NGTM-1R]

Retrenchment
The first capture operation against a Fishie warship was an unmitigated disaster. It turned out that they were, in fact, “fishy”, being aquatic creatures, and their ships could be flooded. Very little else was learned, because the operation was interrupted by a vessel which exceeded superdestroyer size. Dubbed “Kraken”, it proceeded to Europa, and shrugging off all attacks directed at it, started to destroy surface installations. At great cost to fighter wings assigned to cover, an attack was pressed home against it by four wings of Ursa bombers. The successful destruction of the vessel’s orbit-to-surface weapons bought time to allow evacuation of Europa.

The existence of the Kraken, like that of the Lucifer, provoked a panic. The Outer Colonies were evacuated. The inner-system node was mined, an operation that the Fishies didn’t interfere with for no discernable reason. Confirmation that the Kraken was exiting the system prompted plans for a massive, do-or-die operation to mine the outer system node as well.

First Fleet waited for the next offensive throughout week ten while the mines for the operation were assembled. Week eleven opened with a massive fightercraft assault on Luna’s colonies. Every fighter and bomber that could be found was thrown into the defense, and Mars and Ares with their battlegroups tried to interdict the flow of enemy fightercraft to the surface. This single engagement saw the destruction of over a thousand Fishie fighters, but the defense was not wholly successful. Tycho City was mostly leveled, and millions were killed. It ended after 20 hours, when all Fishie fightercraft which were still active spontanously shut down and crashed.

The Battle of Luna proved what a number of people had already suspected: Fishie fighters were unmanned, drones capable of being remote controlled but usually operating autonomously. This explained a great deal about the cavalier way they were used. Worse yet, the whole battle had been unnecessary. While it was going on, Fishie ships were withdrawing through the outer-system node. The Battle of Luna ended when the last Fishie ship exited Sol.

The outer-system node was promptly mined as well to prevent a return. For the next six months, in the midst of the largest military buildup ever authorized, nothing happened. A mine-clearance warhead was detonated at the outer-system node by parties unknown then, prompting another brief panic before it was remined.

It has been two decades. Sol goes about its business, rather more heavily armed than before. Waiting.

(And now you have to wait six months or more to find out if I ever build the campaign. Mwhahahaha. )

[Mongoose]

Bastard.

[Droid803]

Fishies?
Vasudans wuv fishies.

[NGTM-1R]

Fishies?
Vasudans wuv fishies.

That was actually why I chose that moniker, I admit.

[NGTM-1R]

Eh, screw it. Introductions to First Fleet.

Old Warriors
Surigao was a venerable ship, as were most of her class, the Jormungands. Thirty-eight years of active service to the GTA had seen her fight many enemies on many fronts. On her hull were painted the silhouettes of seven cruisers and more than a hundred fightercraft, most of them types that had not lasted in service as long as she. In a sense she had been denied her glories; she had seen only two years of frontline action. In another, she had served far better than most of her descendants. Two of the cruiser silhouettes were Shivan, an achievement not many of those upstart Fenris- or Leviathan-class ships could claim. Oh, sure, there were probably Dianas that could. They were like that, with their flashy heavy railguns and their assault specialization.

Let them be that way, then. Surigao was a cruiser’s cruiser. Do everything, assault, defense, escort. And do it well. The old hull was still more solid than her younger kin. Her weapons were young and strong, new xaser beamers to replace the old plasma emitters, new more powerful warheads for her fusion mortars. She was a dignified old lady, and more than a match for any of those young whippersnappers if handled well.

When the call came again, she would be ready.


Equipment Briefing: Jormungand-class Cruiser
   The Jormungands are old, but solid, designs. They are durable and possess decent speed, twin fusion mortars forward, and a higher number of plasma emitters. However their hullform and internal arrangement was complex for the time, making them slow to build and difficult to repair, and they were expensive. Produced in their greatest numbers during the first three years of the Terran-Vasudan War, their design was modified and simplified for the Diana-class, and that design further simplified into the cheap, quick-building Fenris and Leviathan classes, making the Jormungands the ancestors of all existing Terran cruisers.
   The Jormungands compiled distingushed war records, but had mostly been removed from frontline service by the sixth year of the Terran-Vasudan War. Their superior combat capablities were considered too valuable to simply throw away, however, so they were withdrawn to protect important rear areas. Twelve were stationed in Ross 128 and ten in Sol when the Great War broke out. Two of the Ross 128 cruisers survived to return to Sol, but both were later lost in the Fishie Incursion.
   Currently six of these ships remain in active service. They have been upgraded with xaser beamers and enhanced warheads for their fusion mortars. They are deployed outsystem, covering the routes to and between the outer colonies, assisted by frequently-rotated Mod Fenris and Mod Leviathan ships. Four are homeported at Europa, two are based at Titan. Four others are maintained on Mars as war reserves.

[NGTM-1R]

Hunter
Nagara and her sistership Helena were rivals. Apparently someone in the naming commission found it amusing to name pairs of Diana-class ships after historical ships that had fought each other. Their commissioning plaques of course bore the images and brief histories of the previous ships that had borne their names. A Fenris or a Leviathan, so far out of touch with its seagoing ancestors, might have a nature determined by the strongest personalities aboard. A destroyer, with so many crew and so many tasks, would always be a ship of its institutions and not one of personality. But a Diana, as purveyor of second most powerful “naval artillery” ever created, had a link somewhat more tangible. It was inevitable they would be rivals.

So Helena and Jintsu competed on everything. Not just exercise combat, the two had been completed after the Fishie Incursion, but readiness, damage-control drills, drive and railgun performance specs. It spilled over in a couple port-time brawls once before being clamped down on, like most paired Dianas. But like most, it was not clamped down too hard. They needed to keep their edge.

They were the tip of the spear, the sharp edge of the sword. The Jormungands and Fenrises and Leviathans would defend and support, the destroyers would lead, but the Dianas would do most of the heavy lifting, killing enemy warships with their railguns as designed. They had worked out a way to nullify the Fishies’ railgun jammers and they were confident in their ships. The railguns had changed little since the days of the Terran-Vasudan War and their time as the bane of Vasudan cruisers. The new xaser beamers to replace the plasma emitters, added after the class proved so vunerable during the Fishie Incursion, would protect them from swarming fightercraft while they brought their railguns to bear. Then it would be all be simple.

For today Helena and Jintsu only played at hunting, firing their big two-meter railguns at fake targets on a practice range, their backstop an uninhabited section of Io. Live targets were hard to come by, for now. But the time would come.

Equipment Briefing: Diana-class Cruiser
   The Diana-class cruisers are the direct descendants of the prewar Jormungands and direct ancestors of the Fenris and Leviathan cruisers. Offensive-oriented stablemates to the all-around Jormungands, they outlasted them in production. The class is built around a pair of heavy two-meter spinal-mount railguns; the long acceleration barrels give the ship its long “snout” and one of its nicknames of “the Anteater”. Heavily compartmented and highly redundant, like the Jormungands, the class is well-suited to its offensive role of engaging enemy capital craft. Until the Vasudans designed the Typhon-class destroyers not a single ship in their arsenal was able to stand up to the Dianas, earning them their other nickname “Giant Slayers” for their ability to go toe to toe with Vasudan destroyers.
   The class was mostly the victims of their own success in that regard. Of the 34 produced, by the time the Great War rolled around only 5 remained because the Vasudans knew just how dangerous they were and took pains to ensure their destruction. They served well in the Great War, doing much to build morale by proving the Shivan’s cruisers were not invincible, and providing the single most spectacular ship-to-ship engagement of the war when the GTC Thunderer faced off with the SD Oni in orbit of Ribos IV. A new production run was near to delivering another ten hulls to GTA service, but did not complete before the node collapse. The Fishie Incursion was their low point; four were lost, and none successfully fulfilled their design role of engaging and destroying an enemy cruiser or destroyer.
   Twenty-four Dianas, the six survivors of the production run that was underway before the Lucifer’s death and another eighteen new construction, currently serve in First Fleet. Like the Jorumgands they have been upgraded with xaser beamers. Ten are based in the Martian shipyards covering the routes from there to the asteroid belt and outer colonies; the rest are homeported at Earth and Luna, covering the routes to the Inner Colonies. None are held as war reserves, but six more hulls are nearing completion.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Pics or it didn't happen

Nice stories, they remind me of (what I think is) real world navy spirit. The rivalry.

[NGTM-1R]

Bastard.

Your six months are over!

It's not happening. Let's move on.

The Second Coming
xxx-Rho-xxx

FROM: CINC-First Fleet
TO: All Forces

Outer system node mine net is down. Fishie incursion, strength unknown, in progress. Readiness Condition One in effect.

All ships report to staging areas.

MESSAGE ENDS.

xxx-Rho-xxx

It began, as it usually does, with little things. A cruiser squadron attacked, a series of fighter engagements. Humanity had determined things would be different this time. So they were. Just not in the ways everyone had expected.

They called it “Operational Contingency Plan Snowbird”. First Fleet came in waves to assault the staging area that was set up at the outer system node, five ships at a time, Dianas all. They fired at maximum range and reentered subspace bound for their own staging point, Base Trojan near Jupiter. Every ten minutes brought a new wave. One could have literally set one’s watch by the constant assault. Their railguns gave them the ability; sustaining charge to the weapons was demanding enough to allow the quick drive recharges at Base Trojan, the capacitors provided the extra power storage to rejump immeditately if they only fired once. It wreaked havoc with the Fishie entry operation.

Fishie ships had always been slow. They depended on precise subspace jump placement and their seven-ten kilometer range for their weapons to come to grips with the enemy. Sol’s ships outreached them, though, and the last twenty years had given them plenty of time to devise a counter to the Fishie railgun-jammer. They did not try to kill ships, but to cripple them. The slow speed of Fishie ships made the mass entry they were attempting a slow operation, and the Dianas made it slower yet, until the area around the node grew clogged with unnavigable ships. Then it was time for the fighters to play their part.

The first fighter clash of the day came between a wing of Apollo Deltas from the 23rd  “Hell and Glory” Space Superiority Squadron and a wing of what were recognized as Piranhas, the best of the Fishie fightercraft from the First Incursion. It was immediately clear something was wrong; the Fishies never sent a single fighter wing against a similar number of hostile ships. Worse yet, the engagment was drawn; 2 victories for the First Fleet fightercraft, 2 losses. Either the drones had gotten a lot better, or the drones were no longer drones.

Only two bomber wings completed their passes; most of them aborted their runs and went "defensive" to assist their escorting fighters in sharp fights. Numerous new contacts were logged in the remainder of the engagement. It was becoming obvious the Fishies had revamped their fightercraft arm to cover its old deficencies. Bombers were sighted, an unpleasant surprise in itself, new heavy fighters as well. The bomber attack had been only to clean up the field for a repeat; the numerous derelicts clogging the area around the node were judged a sufficent success, and the attack was called off.

Operational Contingency Plan Snowbird was judged a qualified success by First Fleet Command. They had delayed the enemy entry into the system and ensured it would take at least a week before the node was truly navigable again; more if they continued harassing attacks on less-tight timetable, which was intended. Time was bought to bring Sol to a war footing, to to recall reservists and veterans to the colors, to brings ships and fightercraft out of mothballs.

Meanwhile, radical adjustments to other plans were being hurriedly drawn up. First Fleet’s improvements in the last twenty years had been incremenetal, not revolutionary. The old ships still served, carrying new weapons usually, with new drives and new power sources. If the Fishies had learned much from the last encounter, and they evidently had, then there was great danger in the choices that had favored keeping Sol’s military strong over keeping it new.