Carida: Corner the Market

[Ashin Varanin]

Carida, Alec now knew -- after an uneventful recon run -- wasn't about to disgorge warfleets on Mandalorian territory. So far as any Republic system could boast, it was peaceful and bustling with activity, well-fortified and well-defended in other ways. And while other Mandalorians could worry about war, Alec's Clan had cultivated good relations with at least one faction inside the Republic. Aggressively, in fact. Because heretical as it might seem to some, from time to time victory meant never having to fight.

Hence, Theed Palace Space Vessel Engineering Corps was in town. And they'd brought cash.

A gorgeous K-type yacht, mirror-finished and full-bellied, nestled up against the shipyard. The vessel's telesponder registry called it the Cordé. Alec and her guests, mostly traders from the Slice -- the space between the Galactic Alliance and Techno Union -- disembarked. For her part, Alec had dressed conservatively enough, in a loose-fit off-the-shoulder ensemble that projected neither formality nor strumpetishness. Greetings were exchanged, and the party proceeded to an immense viewing gallery. Mocktail in hand, Alec nodded as one of the shipyard's execs described the view.

"We're almost wholly state-owned, of course," he said. He was a handsome Iktotchi, a man in the Vaudin Miir mold. "And most of our capacity goes to military interests. But over twenty percent of our slips are used by private interests at any given time; it's a standard arrangement, and it gives the Republic a much-needed revenue stream. Separate security measures, of course -- separate, but equal. Our privately operated slips here are just as safe and well-supplied as the military berths."

"I'm glad to hear it. Coreward investment's always a bit of a gamble." She eyed the namana mocktail. "Ideally, we'd be using these few slips for display and marketing. Naboo to Coruscant is a bit too much separation for manufacturing."

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The full twenty-plus-percent, of course, was out of her price range; that, and most of it already had clients. Superyacht parking, some lesser manufacturers from all over. More companies built and sold starships than anything but guns; when she'd been a girl, the market had flooded. You could still pick up ships for wupiupi some places. Hence Theed Hangar's heretofore successful strategy of making a few very, very good ships, taking pre-orders, and marketing aggressively to the elite set. Why, this shipyard's administrator's first cousin's wife had recently acquired a K-type yacht at a handsome cut off sticker price.

One percent would be plenty. These weren't the kinds of shipyards that encompassed planets; they could build a few Star Destroyers at a time, no more. This was what the Republic had been reduced to after losing all their primary yards over the course of a decade's war. Hence this particular yard's need for operating capital, which Theed Hangar was more than happy to provide. The slips had the capacity for display, refit, potentially cover modification -- even manufacturing, if conditions in the Core changed within the next few years.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Standard contracts existed, and though Alec was about as far from lawyery as it was possible to be, she did employ one or two. Republic law varied widely and frequently, another reason why investment was not an especially wonderful prospect right now.

So why do it? (This was the general thrust of the quiet conversation between herself and the manager, couched in inoffensive terms and oblique suggestions.) Well, frankly, because Theed Hangar's ships were designed to appeal to the elites who'd moved from Coruscant to Anaxes to Onderon to Chazwa. People of means and mobility -- UHNWCs, Ultra-High Net Worth Clients, was the industry term -- needed a transport that could serve as home in the middle of a planetary evacuation. She was selling a dream, and the dream was safety. Powerful engines, indefatigable shields, beskar plating, defensive weapons, elite navicomputers: get aboard, live aboard, maintain your standard of living in the face of a decade's retreat.

That dream sold well in the Outer Rim. She was willing to bet a pretty substantial amount of money that it would sell far better right here, within spitting distance of Coruscant, Anaxes, Onderon, and Chazwa.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Before the signature was dry on the lease, Alec threw a party for the witches. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Clan Rekali included many people of Dathomiri heritage; one of its founding bodies had been Shardrock Clan. The precognitive diviners she’d brought out to the Carida shipyard were classic Shardrock people, old school pseudo-Allyans crossed with spacer trash. Shardrock had been an inclusive catchall Clan for many years, a place for witches who didn’t fit the far more traditional, esoteric clans. Second-generation emigrants, non-Dathomiri students of Dathomiri teachers, derivative practitioners -- a hodgepodge of skills and blind spots. They’d taken on the form of their Clan Father, and thus they generally had potent skills in physical enhancement, tracking, astrogation, and even a ritualized form of flow-walking. It was that last talent that made them so useful for situations like this. Before she’d signed the lease, she’d gotten together a conclave of witches, right here in the Carida shipyard. They’d cast bones and consulted shades and viewed the future in various ways. Their end prognosis had been as follows.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]The Theed/Rekali presence on the Carida shipyard would only help the Clan’s future.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]That future was difficult to pin down; the Dark Side clouded everything. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]The benefit might not be quite what Alec expected. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]The lease agreement would go through.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]So far, one out of four wasn’t bad.[/SIZE]

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[SIZE=14.6667px]The witches, she knew, didn’t get on too well with ships in general. There were exceptions, of course. Plenty of Dathomiri worked weather-magic variants aboard Corusca gem harvesters and nebular prospector ships. Most of Shardrock had grown up off Dathomir, and had blurred the lines between witch, Vahla, and Mandalorian culture. Even so, quite a few were more comfortable around nature than in man-made metallic environments. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]To that end, some of the slips here at Carida were being devoted to a new project, bankrolled by the lucrative Indrexu Spiral contract. The party, a raucous affair, doubled as a focus group for the ongoing construction effort. From a panoramic window, Alec and the witches tracked bulbous new arrivals, neither asteroid nor metal. Ithullian Colossus Wasps left their tough, well-insulated shells floating in deep space. Throughout history, Colossus Wasp carapaces had been converted into ready-made starship hulls. The Theed/Rekali shipwrights weren’t fond of the structural weaknesses of the head-thorax and thorax-abdomen connections, but even just a thorax or abdomen had more than enough room for a starship’s internals. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Spacewalking cousins converged on the new arrivals, unbolting Ganker Limpets and backup fuel tanks from the carapaces. Each Colossus Wasp took two full Ganker Limpets.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Colossus Wasp carapace wasn’t as strong as durasteel, but it had good tensile strength. In the interests of shoring it up without sacrificing the concept, the shipwrights were experimenting with lamellar ceramic inserts and unjointed, overlapping hexagons of tough ablative shell that moved with the carapace’s flexion. Crucially, too, the variegated curvature of each given carapace could be cut apart and recombined into different shapes. The end result might just be an entirely non-metallic hull, vastly tougher than fiberplast. You’d have to be an idiot not to see the stealth applications.[/SIZE]

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[SIZE=14.6667px]The issue, then, was ensuring that not even a Mandal Hype sensor frigate could pick up metallic distortions inside the hull. Clan Rekali owned some of those beautiful ships, and Alec had access to the manuals as heir apparent for the Clan Father. Micrometeoroids, battle debris, trace elements and so forth set a pretty firm size threshold for false positives so far as magnetic sensors went. Beskar’gam, for example, would have to be non-metallic. Alec’s suit was duraplast, so that was a thing. And there were hosts of other concerns.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]For starters, how to make a non-metallic gravitic modulator and cloak. And engine reaction chambers and navicomputers and hyperdrives-[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Essentially impossible. Fiber optics and molycircs could do at least something, but in the end, as ever, a sufficiently focused scan from a sufficiently specialized detector suite would generally find [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]some[/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]thing. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Still, there was another school of thought when it came to stealth ships. The Q-ship. Outwardly innocuous, disguised as a freighter or even an asteroid. A Colossus Wasp thorax/abdomen section, roughened by years of microcollisions, looked pretty much like a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid on sensors. Density was a little off, but density could be played with, and took an in-depth gravimetric scan anyways. Looking like an asteroid to anything short of a point-blank CGT? Decent. Very decent.[/SIZE]

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[SIZE=14.6667px]So much for the hulls. The internals, the actual systems of a starship -- those were something else. Yuuzhan Vong biots came to mind; dovin basals didn’t need thrust trace dampers or visible drive nozzles or electronics. But the witches didn’t want to work with Vong biots, and Clan Rekali had no direct access to shapers anyway. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]There were, however, other biotechnologies that could provide portions of the ship’s systems. Sekotan cyborg ships came to mind, and, of course, the secretive Brath Qella, sitting right there by the Mandalorian border. Teljkon Vagabond technology: biotech capable of everything a ship could do, more or less. Qellan weaponry was strange and too large for a project like this, but the Vagabond-style heavy cruisers boasted redundant engines. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]The Qellans, however, had a vastly different psychological makeup, a deeply alien set of preconceptions and processes. The Theed/Rekali negotiators managed to purchase a set of biological hyperdrives, with care and feeding instructions, before an accidental diplomatic slight sent the whole thing off the rails. So the hyperdrive side of things was taken care of, but as for the rest of the ships’ systems, Alec would have to look farther afield.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Much farther.[/SIZE]

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Over the course of nearly two years, she’d led a Rekali/Underground expedition into the Kathol Outback, all the way to Demonsgate. There, she’d locked horns with the Qektoth Confederacy and their lethal biotech weapons -- weapons which could ignore shielding. A massive project had adapted those weapons for the use of the Underground, but the end result was almost fully technological in a non-living sense. But original Qektoth weapons could still be procured through the network of contacts, comm relays, and agents which she’d deployed so carefully along her route. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]It just took a long time. Getting from Demonsgate to the start of the ‘civilized’ galaxy at Kal’Shebbol took months, even with a very fast hyperdrive. She pitied the people who kept making trips to Demonsgate to steal phrik; they were sacrificing years of their life for something fairly unimpressive. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Qektoth weapons fell into three broad categories: ion cannon analogues, plasma cannon analogues, and biogel launchers. The Underground had been most interested in the cannons, at Alec’s urging; the biogel could be defeated with the right shield modulation. Which wasn’t to say the cannons didn’t have their downsides. Qektoth plasma cannons were short-ranged, and their ion cannons were power hogs to a grand degree -- to the point where even the Underground’s adapted versions reduced the firing ship’s shield power significantly. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]So Alec made inquiries, but in the meantime, she’d have to look in other directions.[/SIZE]

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[SIZE=14.6667px]The puzzle, the challenge, excited her. She wasn’t much of a shipwright, but this was about scavenging, even stealing. She couldn’t help but enjoy that.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]For sublight motility, the Ithullian wasps had a bladder-release system and a sort of biological impeller that couldn’t be kept alive in isolation. That was a dead end, so far as anyone could determine. The wasps were capable of reaching escape velocity, but short of grafting howdahs to living wasps, their biological processes just wouldn’t bend to the Rekalis. Theed and the Clan didn’t have that kind of genetic modification expertise. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Research was ongoing, however, on the wings of the thranta-like space-mobile creatures in the Hard Roil. Impellers, perhaps interacting with quintessence or shadow energy in the manner of a so-called solar sail -- that direction offered a host of possibilities. And when it transpired that the skin of their wings had properties that allowed them to fly/swim through space -- empty save for quintessence and shadow energy and such -- it was a fairly short step to get to biological solar sails. Gas bladders and pellet launchers would work for close-in maneuverability, such as fine-tuned docking. For other maneuverability concerns, a three-dimensional array of leather sails would have to do. Not interacting with actual realspace stellar radiation, of course; those were slower than feth. Just a biological equivalent of dark-energy solar sails like some elite ships had. Less efficient, too.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]But still: leather sails. Capable of five hundred gravities of acceleration. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]The witches were ecstatic. [/SIZE]

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Outriggers were easy enough; the wasps had legs hundreds of metres long, tough enough to be used as structural supports in the traditional Ithullian ore haulers. For cables, the same hide would do; it braided well enough. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]For weapons, teams explored pneumatic cannons, spine launchers, mynock launchers, ionite charges, and other permutations and combinations. Throwing rocks was always good, after all, but that generally required either a lot of volatile gas pressure or a mass driver. And good luck making a non-metallic coilgun. To pass as a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid, metal had to be kept below a certain threshold and concentration. What they were looking for, ultimately, was a non-Vong Vong cannon. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]She thought, too, of the grappling arms she’d faced, amputated, and sold in the Kathol Rift. She thought of weaponized Dathomiri rituals and Mandal Hypernautics prison ships. She thought of non-metallic lasers and torsion catapults, or steam. She thought of Veshet spells in place of optical sensors, braided trails of command webs streaming behind any given ship, and Calypho Compasses for navicomputers. She thought of tracking talismans and blood trails and farsight and every other kind of Force tracking for target acquisition. She and the witches talked it over. Mostly they thought she was crazy.[/SIZE]

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Each adult Ithullian Colossus Wasp was around a kilometre in length, which made an abdomen four to five hundred metres and a thorax around three hundred metres. Capital ship scale -- light cruisers or heavy frigates. That size was ideal, in terms of mobility and capacity, for the tactical usage that the cousins envisaged. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Because the Dathomiri cousins weren’t the only ones interested. The Vahla side of the extended family, the blood Rekalis and the Tash-Tarali distant cousins, had them far outnumbered. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]The Vahla weren’t quite so down on technology as their Dathomiri clanmates, but the nature of the ships appealed to them, that bio-arcane edge. Living components and a biological hull lent themselves well to the Vahla’s tender ministrations.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]By this point, production had moved away from Carida and into the Hard Roil, for two reasons. One was operational security, now that the project was blossoming and shifting focus; the other was availability of resources. Living resources, to be specific. The Hard Roil was home to just about every kind of spacefaring critter in the ‘verse, a haven for hard-vacuum vermin. That had cause its share of troubles, from the starweirds that so terrified Vesta to the mynocks that required specialized Ceto satellite emplacements. [/SIZE]

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Power generation would be a matter of choosing the best of a bad lot. Then again, most of the components thus far didn’t actually require electricity. Rancors and pulleys could handle the sails, and few of the armament options were powered in the strictest sense. The Qellan biological hyperdrive needed electricity, though, and depending on how many analogues could be found for standard ship systems, power needs would likely be quite modest. Silk photovoltaic/thaissen everlast cells syncopated nicely with the target crew, but their power output was unimpressive. Ganathan starship-grade steam power was also an option, provided everything got engineered so as to minimize steam venting issues in the event of a penetrating impact. Boiling the flesh off your bones was a good way to lose combat effectiveness. Ram pumps and other analog solutions could find a place.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]They came back to the issue of navigation, specifically interstellar navigation. The Qellan hyperdrive hadn’t come with a navicomputer analogue. The best they could do was instinctive astrogation, aided by Calypho compasses and analog hyperspace compasses. This ship would be limited to relatively short jumps, such as in the Hard Roil, where the sails could snare intangible currents while resisting harsh local conditions. [/SIZE]

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[SIZE=14.6667px]In keeping with the Arceneau contractual obligation, green energy was also key. The steam engine didn’t fit the bill, but the Silk thaissen cells did. Even so, that left the ship dependent on electronic components, no matter how small. The thaissen cells would simply have to serve as backup. A similar and much cruder solution was enacted. A derivative solution, really.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Mimban had spent a good deal of time outside of any given government’s control, lost and regained by the Republic over and over again. Thaissen crystals weren’t terribly hard to find when you had a small legion of witches and Vahla at your disposal. Just like the Silk thaissen cells, the chambers that the Rekalis built would mate bulk quantities of thaissen crystals to non-electronic photosensitive panels. And not just thaissen crystals: others shone when exposed to the Force. Sustained meditation could crank out a modest but respectable amount of photovoltaic power, without electronics involved. A crude capacitor stored it for hyperjumps. In the end, Alec expected the witches to be able to power up their Qellan drive and jump -- always short jumps -- in around the same time it would take a normal navicomputer to compute a normal course in known space. Minutes, maybe hours, depending on how many witches were meditating on the crystals, how strong they might be in the Force, how many distractions might be around...[/SIZE]

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Life support presented challenges. Fortunately, disposable chemical air fresheners were a thing, converting CO2 into breathable oxygen. An ancient technology, but one that required no electronics at all, and the chemical trays could be stacked and stored in bulk very easily. The ship’s consumables rating would suffer, and other passive filters would be needed to take care of the humidity balance, microorganisms and so forth. Small concessions to modernity, but even the most traditional witches could see the undoubted benefits of not drowning in vaporized sweat.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Artificial gravity likewise presented challenges. Gravity and inertial dampening. Five hundred metres on the long axis, with a side-to-side measurement of maybe two hundred metres, wasn’t a lot of room to spin up for centripetal force, and it had issues when the time came to accelerate or maneuver. The obvious solution was to orient the walking surfaces diagonally, so that the combination of centripetal and linear (more or less) acceleration made the surfaces feel like a torus. When you stood on it and the ship was both accelerating and spinning, and assuming no walls were in the way, you would feel like you were walking in a laterally circular course on level ground, though it looked like you were always climbing a hill. A slanted stacked torus, then. The arrangement restricted acceleration drastically, with implications for maneuverability and top speed and such; the sails would be capable of acceleration that could turn people to mush.[/SIZE]

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[SIZE=14.6667px]So a solution was needed for inertial dampening. A non-powered, preferably organic solution. Non-powered at the least, or else concede the point and tie proper inertial dampeners and artificial gravity to the same power source as the hyperdrive. With that source’s limitations, though, it seemed like an unnecessary compromise of the thought experiment, at least at this stage. Besides, there was always the Chiloon Rift.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]But that way lay madness. Even if a chunk of the monolith was placed in each ship, even if the time dilation effect was estimated just right somehow, even if their very slow ships went significantly faster relative to the rest of the ‘verse, maybe enough to play in the same ballpark as technological ships -- even if all that worked, the ships’ crews would age more quickly. Get bored more easily. Die more slowly, in some circumstances.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Best not to think about that. Bending time just to avoid having to strap a battery to an inertial dampener array? Too far, Alec, too far.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Incidentally, the Clan would probably need to patent the process that made the wingleather do what it did, maintain its qualities after the creature died, et cetera. Much like AEI had done with specially alchemized terentatek hide, for all the good it did them.[/SIZE]

The end result would be a series of once-living ships, able to be attuned to their crews, immune to ion fire, relying on green energy -- and elegant as feth. Expensive, and she knew a thing or two about marketing upscale. First dibs on this design would go to ATC, who would doubtless look to sell it to the environmentally conscious, as well as witches as far afield as that one refuge world with all the aureks in it. And technophobes, too. Now, granted, not all of those customers would have access to choirs of witches to power up the hyperdrive or maximize the ship’s tactical utility. That meant other green power generation options were necessary. Saiba’s zero-point technology came to mind, but that would take electronics in a serious way. The same went for just about anything short of an actual quintessence generator, which the Clan did not have time to make. And then there was the Siantide issue -- but the Clan was not about to power a starship with genocide, no matter how staunch the Jedi spearheading that project.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The current vessel concept could charge up a hyperdrive, jump, use so-called solar sails to accelerate like mad, hold an atmosphere, take a hit, provide an approximation of artificial gravity, pass for an asteroid...

What it couldn't do was dock, keep its own maneuvers from turning its people to sludge, or attack anyone. Even the inclusion of a Ganathan steam generator bank made for limited power -- very limited systems, electric rather than electronic. This wasn't even fission-powered steam. It gave the gears and the rancor wheels the extra oomph to extend and retract the sails. A carefully designed, archaic pressure system took care of the airlocks and simple docking clamps. This ship would need combustible fuels.

The weapons issue could wait. Inertial dampeners were key here.

Not an insoluble problem, to be sure. Alec ascribed to the family school of thought: if it's impossible, you just haven't figured it out yet. That said, it was something of a tall order, dampening inertia with minimal metal and nothing electronic. Alchemy offered potential solutions, in theory, but alchemical theory was so, so far outside Alec's wheelhouse. Nor was it a specialty of the Vahla and witches of Clan Rekali. Oh, things could be made, and frequently were -- the Calypho Compasses proved that -- but Alec couldn't put her trust in that direction. Maybe Cousin Oren would have a different perspective.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The thranta-like creatures, the size of large capital ships, were called Neebray or Neh-bray mantas; they flew the Balmorra Run, feasting on unusually dense nebular regions. They were also common to the Hard Roil, the centre of Rekali power and influence. Capturing them in quantity was nothing but a matter of ion cannon fire and Connor nets, then using Ganker Limpets to drag the bodies across hyperspace. Skinning them took KUT-42 plasma torches and mining ship tractor beams. The big question was how to treat the hide in such a way that it retained the properties of the original. Biological research wasn't Alec's forte, but the pest control crews of the Hard Roil had their uses.

In the meantime, the whaling crews encountered a problem that was also a solution. Plasma leeches, common pests in the Hard Roil, latched onto their ships and ate excess energy. Not especially impressive creatures, plasma leeches, but easily lured and snared. Normally that was an inconvenience.

Except for when the Clan realized that if you covered a starship in plasma leeches, those leeches would provide at least some kind of resistance to plasma fire as they died. Disposable, like the lamellar ablative armour; likewise in need of replenishment after action. The Hard Roil had more than its share of plasma leeches. And the ships now had their shields.