Victory for I.R.!

[T'yr Dellos]

T'yr Dellos' leather boots clanked upon metal floors as he strolled through the twisting corridors of his new ship. The Celestial Blight II was to be a replacement and improvement upon the original that had been badly damaged during the fall of Crina. His hands were behind his back and one of the engineers that had helped to design and build the ship trailed in his wake. "How many crew?" Lt Commander Dellos asked as they passed through a large hallway, lined on either side by barracks. As near as he could tell, they were roughly halfway through his walk from the bow of the ship to the stern.

"Optimal crew is upwards of six thousand, sir." Said the young engineer. T'yr could feel the man's nervousness and did what he could to force calmness upon the man. "Including roughly two thousand marines."

"Stormtroopers, Lieutenant. Stormtroopers." T'yr responded. "The Imperial Navy does not have Marines. It has Stormtroopers."

The two continued the walk in relative silence. The ship was far more empty than Lt Commander Dellos was accustomed to. She was entering the final shakedown stages before her official commissioning. Weapons had been loaded into the armory, live ordnance had been installed in here torpedo bays with reserve ammo stored in her cargo bay alongside hundreds of tons of tibanna gas for the ships many turbolasers. Every system was being checked and triple checked to ensure that the big girl was in proper working order. It was the calm, awkward time when the construction crews had all but left her hull and the naval crew had not yet claimed her. The ship almost felt lonely to T'yr.

 

[T'yr Dellos]

Lt Commander Dellos went over the numbers again in his head. 900 meters long. 564 meters wide. 226 meters tall. Class 1 Hyperdrive, class 15 backup... Good for a warship. He'd seen better, but it was respectable. Standard sublight speed and maneuverability were class 12... Fast. He'd seen faster in her size category, but she was sporting an impressive speed for what she was. Had... two reactor systems and a system of reserve capacitors. Double armor. Double shields. Double reactors... well... 25 reactors if you wanted to get technical. Ten warhead tubes... each designed for variable ammo options. Ten tractor beams spread strategically over the hull... Then there was the hull itself. Shaped roughly like a wide, flat pyramid, the surface of the ship was split into four primary planes of flat, triangular hull. Each of those planes had four primary turrets, twenty five support turrets, and ten point defense lasers.

T'yr wanted to say that the armament seemed light to him... but the intel officers assured him that the primary battery was a new and impressive class of Turbolaser. He also wasn't happy that the ship's weakest offensive angle was, apparently, the front. Meaning that he'd have to get accustomed to broadside tactics if he wanted his new ship to survive any longer than his last.

 

[T'yr Dellos]

"Tell me about the Ion Drives." T'yr asked of his escorting engineer as they closed in on the engineering section of the ship. A thick partitioning wall stood between them and the aft-most section of the ship. Apparently, the ship could effectively survive the destruction and removal of everything on the fore side of the wall. She'd fly like a brick, but she'd fly.

"Top of the line." The engineer proclaimed. Behind the ever-present nervousness of being near a superior officer and the boredom of silently following said officer through the hull of a nearly empty spaceship, T'yr could feel a bubbling of pride and excitement. T'yr tried to stimulate those emotions within the Junior Lieutenant. "Best Ion Drives on the market, topped off with KV457-C and THR-4B components. She's got combat thrusters and sublight acceleration motors worked into her design as standard, and some of the most advanced maneuvering jets I've seen outside of a snubfighter." The engineer said with a faint hint of excitement.

"That... tells me nothing, Lieutenant." Lt Commander Dellos said calmly as he looked over his shoulder at the engineer. A droid opened the partitioning door for them and the pair entered the aft-most section of the ship.

 

[Crimson Shade]

Shade hovered behind @T'yr Dellos a silent and tall monolith of order and discipline. He was the last living man of the old imperial royal guard that protected emperor palpatine. Having awoken in this time he clung to what little the imperials had left, so he spent his life now protecting upper ranks of the Imperial Remnant. And T'yr was that no matter how strange he looked. So Shade hovered behind the man holding a blaster rifle beneath his cloak that span around the length of his body to completely conceal what lay beneath.

He remained silent and listened to what the commander said, going over information and preparing everything for this new line of ships. All of that didn't matter to Shade, all that mattered was this man's life and how he was to safeguard it. Shade kept following the man until he began to talk to some lieutenant about ion drives or something. The conversation didn't matter to shade, he just kept up watching a being alert.

 

[T'yr Dellos]

"She's fast, sir." The engineer said slowly, a hint of embarrassment at having assumed the officer would understand his techno-babble hiding under the surface. T'yr noticed the emotional shift and was mildly amused. "She's got all the parts needed to really cut loose and a reactor system that can let her do it."

"How so?" Lt Commander Dellos asked as they continued their walk towards the aft of the ship. T'yr now finding himself wanting to stop by the reactors to examine them himself.

"The ship sports a massive Solar Ionization Reactor." The engineer explained. "But it's also got twenty-four hypermatter reactors, each of which powerful enough to run a corvette on its own. The entire bank of hypermatter reactors can match the primary reactor on output while taking up much less space, but the fuel's more expensive. Now... normally, only the main reactor is running. It keeps the shields up, the capacitors charged, and the ship moving forward. But if you wanna open up and fire at something? You bring the hypermatter reactors online and start cranking out power. But if you've got all that power and you've got nothing to shoot at... you can reroute the power into the Ion Drives."

"And the Ion Drives can take the extra load?" Dellos asked as he tried to get a grasp on what the ship would be capable of with two reactor systems.

 

[T'yr Dellos]

"They can do a lot more than take it." The engineer said, glancing over his shoulder at the Imperial Guard that was, apparently, also following the Lieutenant Commander. <How long has he been back there?> The engineer thought to himself. Lt Commander Dellos felt his confusion and was almost amused by it. He had felt [member="Crimson Shade"]'s presence quite a while ago. He hadn't been informed that someone had decided to assign him a bodyguard, but he could deduce as much from the lack of hostile intent coming from the red-wearing Imperial.

"He's fine." T'yr Dellos said as he looked over his shoulder at the engineer and the Imperial Guardsman further behind. "Explain yourself Lieutenant."

"Well," The engineer began. "The Ion Drives are designed for a massive amount of power to be pushed through them. They might look fairly normal from outside the ship, but their actually quite huge. Most of the ship's aft section is dedicated solely to reactors and ion drives. The amount of power required to keep the ship moving at its standard, optimal class 12 speed is... fairly moderate. If you pump the extra energy into them, the Victory III's Ion Drives can get her up to class 10 speeds and hold her there for quite a while. Only reason that's not the standard speed all the time is the budget doesn't support that much use of Hypermatter. It's kinda like putting Nitro in a speeder's engine. You can go real fast, but only so long as the fuel lasts."

 

[T'yr Dellos]

"So how much Hypermatter do we keep aboard?" Lt Commander Dellos asked as he mulled over the prospect. Class 10 was quite good for a ship the size of the Victory III. It wasn't unheard of, nor was it the fastest he'd heard of one going, but it was clearly an impressive feat.

"Plenty." The engineer said as he tried to ignore the Imperial Guardsman following them. Dellos did his best to try and calm the man's nervous distrust of the Imperial Guardsmen. "If you're only using the hypermatter reactors during combat or to close with a hostile ship. The Victory III is supplied with enough food, water, fuel, and ammo to go a maximum of four years between servicing." The engineer said with slightly more vigor, the empathic manipulation working. "But if you're overusing the hypermatter reactors, you're only looking at a few weeks or months before needing to refuel."

"I see." Lt Commander Dellos said as he tried to take refueling into consideration. The Imperial Navy didn't have the logistics network it once did. He'd clearly have to be careful with the secondary reactors. "What's she capable of with only the main reactor online?" He asked as he ran over the ship's offensive and defensive systems once again.

 

[T'yr Dellos]

"Well... That depends on how charged the capacitors are." The engineer began. "But you'd be looking at a standard class-12 speed and only about 80% shield strength. And... maybe half the guns? Maybe three-fifths of the guns?" The engineer said as he tried to run the numbers in his head.

"That sounds bad." Lt Commander Dellos said. "But I've seen this ship's systems. 80% shields, half guns, and speed 12 would still put it above most other ships in its size category. Frell, she'd kick the kark out of the old Victory I at with that power draw."

"Maybe." The engineer said as he tried to compare the capabilities of the Victory I and Victory III against one another. "But if you only had to match the Victory I's speed, you could probably boost the shields to 90% or guns to a solid three-fifths capacity."

"Good to know." Lt Commander Dellos said as they neared the primary reactor's massive housing.

 

[T'yr Dellos]

Lieutenant Commander Dellos and the two other men continued walking in amiable silence, broken by the occasional question over one technical detail or another. They toured the primary reactor and both bays of secondary reactors. They had entered the starboard hypermatter reactor bay and the young engineer had done his best to explain how the hypermatter reactors functioned in comparison to the solar ionization reactor, as well as explaining the various safety procedures of each reactor to Lt Commander Dellos. After that, the trio had made their way to each of the primary and secondary ion drives and the engineer had pointed out the important components and power conduits to Lt Commander Dellos. And after the engineer explained that they were only seeing a small portion of the actual ion drives, which were massive, Lt Commander Dellos had insisted on testing out the ship's engines. The ship was scheduled for a shakedown cruise sometime during the next few days, and it would be a simple matter to move that timetable up to now, so there was little inconvenience to the maintenance teams or admiralty as a whole. Once leaving the ion drives and reactors behind and making their way to the bridge, it had only been a few hours before Lt Commander Dellos had the port admiral on the comm. "I need to get a feel for her." He had said to the woman, and had gotten permission to take his new ship for a test drive.

 

[T'yr Dellos]

Lt Commander Dellos stood upon the bridge of the Celestial Blight II. It was crisp, clean, and new. Only a handful of the ship's planned complement was on board. And of that, it was mostly officers. The enlisted crew and technicians, not to mention the Stormtroopers, were still aboard the station preparing themselves for the coming duty rotation. Dellos glanced around the nearly empty bridge. Four engineers and three officers were trying to do a job that usually required close to twenty, but they had gotten underway. "Ahead one third." Lt Commander Dellos said as he stood only a few feet from the forward observation window. Through the window, he saw the entire length of the ship's massive prow as it cut through the void. On the display screens that ran below this window, Dellos saw the main reactor hit forty percent and continue to climb. Shields were at twenty percent and climbing steadily. Secondary systems all over the ship were brought online as the reactor warmed to normal operating levels. The Ion Drives pushed them forward at ever increasing rates of acceleration as more and more power became available. Behind them, the shipyard grew ever more distant as they left the nostalgically named 'no wake zone.'

 

[T'yr Dellos]

"Ahead half speed." Lieutenant Commander Dellos ordered as his eyes danced across the display screens in front of him. Absently, his other senses stayed open to the emotions of the crew present on the bridge. There was a mixture of stress and excitement among them. Each was doing the job of several men, but each was excited to see the results of all their hard work. There was not a man or woman among them that didn't want to see what the ship was capable of.

62-percent. The main reactor had barely opened up and the hypermatter reactors were still offline. Shields were at 34 percent and the Ion Drives were continuing to build their rate of acceleration. "Increase reactor output to 85-percent and divert energy to shields." He said as he stared at the displays. A few seconds of numbers slowly increasing rewarded him with an 84-percent primary reactor output and shields at 46 percent and climbing. The reactor's readout rolled over to 85-percent and the shields cycled up to 48 percent. The Ion Drives dipped slightly in rate of acceleration, but then improved slightly. Not as much improvement as they had been making before, but it was enough.

 

[T'yr Dellos]

"Bring Hypermatter Reactors one through twenty-four online." Lt Commander Dellos instructed. "Cycle up to twenty percent and prioritize energy to Ion Drives."

The crew was a flurry of activity and mixed emotions. On one hand, those who cared knew that the Lt Commander Dellos was wasting precious hypermatter fuel, a valuable and expensive resource of the Imperial Navy. On the other, many understood that it was critical that a commander know the capabilities and limitations of his ship. And a few... a few were mildly worried that they might overload a reactor or damage an Ion Drive, which would set back the ship's commissioning for several months.

T'yr Dellos did his best to sooth these concerns and emotions within his crew and focus them on the task at hand. As he did this, his fore-brain focused on the displays in front of him. The primary reactor was holding at 85-percent output and was maintaining a temperature well within the capabilities of it's cooling system to manage. The secondary reactors showed numbers ranging from 14-percent to 18-percent output, each steadily climbing to the 20 mark within a few seconds. These too were maintaining easily managed temperatures. The shields jumped up to 62 percent capacity of their own volition and the Ion Drives kicked with the sudden leap in power output. He could almost feel the G-forces in spite of the inertial dampeners installed aboard the Celestial Blight II.

 

[T'yr Dellos]

"Bring secondary reactors to forty percent." Lt Commander Dellos instructed. The building excitement within his crew was palpable. Dellos had to admit his own feelings of excitement as he ordered the ship forward at a faster and faster rate. The shields spiked to 88-percent charge and rapidly continued scrolling to the 90-percent mark. A small alert notified him that capacitors were being filled at an abnormally high rate. A few button presses later and the power was being shunted from the capacitors into the ship's Ion Drives as well. As for the Ion Drives themselves... They were not even showing the first signs of fatigue as they blew past a class-12 acceleration rating.

In the deep of space ahead of his ship, T'yr Dellos saw the small, slowly growing dot of a distant planet. It was blue and green with dots of brown and white marring its surface. The ship... the Celestial Blight II... The Victory III project as a whole, was designed to produce the best planetary assault ship in the galaxy. She was made to kiss the sky of foreign worlds and burn the land below. "Plot a tight orbit of that planet." He said as he highlighted the planet on his display screens.

 

[T'yr Dellos]

"All engines, ahead flank." Lieutenant Commander Dellos ordered. "Push all reactors to ninety-nine percent and hold onto something."

The deck kicked beneath his feet as the ship suddenly lurched forward. T'yr Dellos stumbled back two steps before finally regaining his balance. A glance back at his crew revealed that each of them had already been seated and strapped to their station when the order was given. <Why don't I have a chair?> Dellos wondered to himself as he felt the spike of excitement and tingle of subconscious fear slip through his crew. This time, he let the fear stay where it was. It was good to be afraid when you were in a dangerous situation. It prompted caution and heightened your reflexes. Each of which would be critical in the coming moments.

Lt Commander Dellos stepped back to the forward display screens. He couldn't help but notice the sudden and rapid increase in the planet's size. Ignoring the planet for the moment, he tried to focus on the display screens. Each hypermatter reactor was somewhere within the 88 to 93 percent range and climbing steadily. The primary reactor had already reached the 99-percent mark and was holding steady. Each reactor's cooling system rushed into activity at the sudden spike of heat that each was now producing. The external temperatures fluctuated slightly before returning to normal levels.

 

[T'yr Dellos]

Lt Commander Dellos' eyes flicked up to the approaching planet briefly before returning to the display screens. The last of the hypermatter reactors had reached the 99-percent mark and had stabilized its external temperature as the cooling systems kicked into full effect. The minor fluctuation were an issue that Dellos would have to keep an eye on. The system appeared to be designed for gradual increases in reactor output based on the steadily increasing needs of the ship. Had he attempted to ramp the reactors up to full output capacity from an inactive state, he could have overloaded the cooling systems and damaged a reactor. Which... would be bad.

The ship's systems had more power than they knew what to do with. It almost felt as if the ship had awakened from a deep sleep and was confused by the lack of targets to fire upon. Shields were holding at 110-percent, but beginning to heat up. They'd be able to sustain their current strength for long enough though... they'd likely end up bleeding off a great deal of energy once they reached the planet.

 

[T'yr Dellos]

The Ion Drives were another matter entirely. Each drive was reading at 132-percent. They were heating up as well, but much, much slower. Apparently, the ship really had been designed to sustain incredible bursts of speed like he was currently forcing upon it. More impressively, it was apparently designed to do this while under heavy fire. In order for the ship to make full use of its mix of systems... it needed an enemy to fire upon it. Otherwise the shields, reactors, and ion drives simply... failed to work in unison as they were intended. They were impressive regardless, but the shields would overload soon and without incoming fire to drain them. Likewise, a host of warning indicators kept advising him to divert power to weapons.

As the blue and green of the planet overwhelmed the observation window, Dellos' thoughts were drawn from the ship's weapon systems. "Bring us in." He said to the men and women on the bridge. "I need to see how close she can get before being forced to slow down." Worry slowly spread among them and T'yr Dellos forced it from their minds. He needed them focused and he needed them to trust in his command. Fear of a fiery death was the last thing he wanted his crew thinking about, when they should be focused on the tasks he had assigned to them.

 

[T'yr Dellos]

From Lt Commander Dellos' perspective, the planet spiraled in front of the ship before dipping low below the bow. The ship continued to accelerate rapidly towards the planet as her massive, blue curvature slowly dominated everything under the ship's wide prow. Shields flared violently as the outer layers of the planet's electromagnetic field and thinnest layers of atmosphere bombarded the ship. Shields dipped to 96-percent, then began rising again to 104-percent capacity. The extra stress upon the shields created an outlet for the ship's buildup of energy and the shield emitters began lowering in temperature. <Good.> Lt Commander Dellos thought to himself.

The slight atmospheric and electromagnetic interference of the planet slowed their acceleration slightly, but the pull of the planet's gravity was more than enough to compensate for this. The Celestial Blight II continued to speed up as the planet loomed larger and larger under the bow of the ship. The flare of shielding soon became the outer edges of a plume of fire as friction ignited air and the ship coasted on the upper atmosphere of the planet. At the speeds and angle of their travel, the atmosphere became almost solid beneath the ship, cushioning her and acting like the surface of a thin, blue ocean as the Victory III skimmed the edge of the planet.

 

[T'yr Dellos]

The display screens were telling Dellos that the planet's atmosphere was creating a cushion of force beneath his ship. They were telling him that the ship could 'ride' this cushion safely, but that attempting to dip into it at the current speeds would result in... terrible things. The only way to gain a lower altitude, according to the computers, was to lower their speed. Unfortunately for the ship and her computers, Lieutenant Commander Dellos was more interested in what would happen if he further accelerated the ship. "Set all reactors to one-hundred-and-ten-percent." Lt Commander Dellos said to his crew. A small wave of terror passed over them, and T'yr Dellos forced it away as quickly as it had come. A few moments later, and the display screens screamed out warnings to him as all reactor outputs spiked sharply over the red-line. The Ion Drives screamed in protest, perhaps having finally found their limits, and the wave of pressure beneath the ship increased as he speed pushed further beyond the safe limits for such a close orbit. The increasing wave of pressure actually pushed against the ventral side of the ship and forced her up, gaining altitude as she went. For a moment, it vaguely reminded T'yr of a surfer at the front of a cresting wave. The first warning lights blinked on in eight dozen places as reactors reached critical heat thresholds. "Get us away from the planet." Dellos said as his eyes glued themselves to the reactor readouts.

 

[T'yr Dellos]

The Victory III bowed up only slightly, but the speed she had gained from overloading her Ion Drives and slingshotting around the planet catapulted her away from the pull of the blue gem's gravity well with incredible force and velocity. The pressure wave she rode burst beneath her as she tore aware from the planet and rear-facing sensors showed horrible storms forming in the wake of the Celestial Blight III. "Vent primary coolant and pump in reserves." Lieutenant Commander Dellos said as he kept his eyes upon the status of the ship's reactors. "Cycle all secondary reactors to ten percent and bring the main reactor down to eighty percent." He said as his eyes failed to leave the screens. The ship was still racing away from the planet at an impressive velocity, but her acceleration slowed considerably as the reactors burned at only a fraction of their former intensity. There was no friction to slow the ship as she raced through space. The ship's own systems could force her to slow over a period of several hours... but most likely, Lt Commander Dellos would need to have the ship perform a number of braking maneuvers to slow herself before she could safely approach the shipyard once again. In the meantime, her reactors would need a grace period before being coaxed back into the eighty-percent output ranges.

 

[T'yr Dellos]

As the Celestial Blight II drifted her way back towards the general direction of the shipyard at high speeds, Lieutenant Commander Dellos kept an eye on her reactors and coolant systems. The automatic sensors had alerted him that the coolant systems were exceedingly close to their rated limits when he had vented the overwhelmed coolant and replaced it with a fresh supply. The ship's reactors used a CryoBan based liquid coolant to absorb the heat generated by the reactors. CryoBan was exceedingly perfect at absorbing heat from the surrounding environment, but it had a bad tendency of hanging onto that heat. CryoBan had to be run through an even greater thermal absorber to remove the heat it had absorbed, or it had to be given a considerable amount of time to cool itself after having been overwhelmed. The reactor control systems of the Victory III, apparently, had included a system that allowed for overwhelmed CryoBan to be flushed into the void of space and replaced by a fresh, chilly supply of the miraculous liquid.

It was this new supply of CryoBan that Lt Commander Dellos now watched. It rose in temperature sharply as it absorbed the initial heat left over from the overwhelmed CryoBan that it had replaced. But after that initial spike, the entire system had cooled drastically. Looking at the numbers, Dellos could barely tell that he had tested the ship nearly to its limits only a few minutes ago.

<You really are a beauty.> T'yr Dellos thought to himself as his eyes were drawn back through the forward observation window and to the dorsal side of the ship's massive prow. <You and I are going to do great things together.> He thought to himself, imagining the ship as more than just metal and wire for a few moments.