Post by Adam on Dec 30, 2008 13:45:40 GMT -5
Picture a space craft twenty kilometres long. So vast it defies the eye and studded with horrifically devastating weapons. A bombardment from one of these could entirely obliterate an enemy army without fuss - as well as an entire region of whatever country they're in. Clusters of powerful engines push it through the void. It cannot land, and if it did, would never take off again. It has a crew of ten thousand or more, many of whom have lived their entire lives on board, some of whom don't even believe the outside world exists. Its captain is responsible for not only those lives but the entire resources of a small strip-mined moon used to build the craft.
Those are the escorts.
Next, the capital ships, the ships of the line. Each one averaging about a hundred kilometres in length. With a population rather than a crew, living in no less than three cities. Among its arsenal might be boarding torpedoes laden with mecha and tanks, energy cannons capable of searing continents off the map, or dark matter weapons that can ravage an enemy ship while barely leaving a mark on the outside. One fleet's capital ships have four captains, a King, a small parliament and councils for each city. The populace of the other fleet's cruisers live in worship of a triumvirate of pharaohs, the chosen ones, who have the honour of representing the gods' will by captaining the ship.
And the battleships. The unstoppable force. Each one over a thousand kilometres in length, larger than a small country. While the capital ships have populations, battleships have entire ecosystems. Each titanic thruster is big enough to fit an escort inside if the thruster's guts were removed. One ship, following the design aesthetics of its race, is long and narrow, its prow protected by a long, curved, cap-like shield. Broadside weaponry bristles from it and three fin-like wings expand from its body, possibly to take in solar energy for extra power. To either side of its snub nose are enormous weapons resembling gatling guns, only each bullet is the size of a small skyscraper and contains enough destructive power in its warhead to wipe out a world population as easily as a meteor strike. Those are only secondary weapons though. The main gun, sticking out from just above the centre of the ship's prow, warps spacetime to cause enemy ships to implode as large black holes appear inside them for a split second. Inside the ship, fifteen million people live, work and play as if barely aware that their world is designed to wade straight into the firing line. There's a semi-democratic government, a convoluted naval command structure, numerous counties and constitutions, and even a commercial air-travel system enabling transport between regions of the battleship. Rapid-duplicating crystal growths placed on the outside of the ship, which took four years to cover it completely, act as both colouring - in a blue-green scheme - and additional armour.
The other, like the first, matches the rough design of its fleet, only upsized. This one is arrowhead-shaped, coloured red-brown-black-silver by virtue of the materials used in its construction. From a great distance it looks sharp, but up close the edge is a 150-metre wall, studded with domes that form projection nodes for an energy arc weapon that can blast simultaneously at targets all around the battleship. The arrowhead bulges in the middle, both up and down, allowing the attachment of engines and more weapon systems. This battleship's population is seventeen million and it, like the capital ships of its fleet, is headed by three pharaohs. This battleship has something else though. Following it, slaved to it, is a four hundred kilometre flying gun. A weapon so lethal that it will destroy itself when it fires, meaning it has to be entirely automated (if it wasn't, and crew space was included, it would probably be nearly the same size as the battleship). Little more than a huge power source, a cluster of bolted-on engines and the biggest gun ever, the plan is to use it to cripple or destroy the enemy battleship, either driving the enemy fleet away or rendering them ill-defended and easy prey. No shields are going to save the enemy from this thing.
The arrowhead fleet get to Sol first. Having spent the past four years decelerating, they pass through the Oort Cloud with debris and asteroids hammering on their physical shields, slowing them down to the point where they can comfortably orbit the system's star at a distance. Activating their gravitic shields, the fleet lurk out of visual sight behind one of the large gas giants, biding their time. A full on troop deployment on Earth is unwise when the enemy could appear at any time. Instead, an escort breaks from the fleet, looping around the Sun on an elliptical orbit, launching a cluster of small aircraft towards Earth as it passes. The machines within will capture humans and transform them into interventors, sowing chaos and sabotaging the defences in time for the eventual attack. Two years later the escort rejoins its parent fleet, and the enemy are detected. They'll be here in three years or so. Launching a desultory salvo of weapons fire to meet them half way, the arrowhead fleet prepares for war.
The blue-green fleet, to the arrowheads' surprise, head straight for Earth and begin deploying troops as if they didn't even detect their enemies' presence. Perhaps the planet was a better sensor blocker than expected. Engaging thrusters and coming to a new heading, their physical, heat and gravitic shields allow them to fly straight through the gas giant's atmosphere, hiding them for as long as possible. Three shields at once drains a worrying amount of power, but they break free of the planet without a hitch and attack.
Weapons fire is exchanged. The art of ship battles relies on activating the correct shield at the correct time to block whatever attack the enemy sends at you. It's a difficult process and relies on psychology as much as tactics. The battleships slowly line up on one another as the escorts and capital ships trade fire. The bluegreen battleship's wormhole cannon swallows half of an unsuspecting cruiser, leaving the other half to bleed bodies and plasma into the cold vacuum of space. The arrowhead battleship lashes out with its energy arcs, blistering purplish-blue light beams hammering the shields of its enemies, slicing any targets it finds in half. Occasionally, a shot from one of the smaller ships gets through a battleship's shields, chewing holes in its nigh impervious armour. The blue-green fleet seems to be taking an unusual amount of damage, especially as the black-hole-slain cruiser is the arrowheads' only casualty so far.
The pharaohs on board the arrowhead battleship decide to fire the Holy Annihilation, a roughly translated name for the gigantic gun-on-thrusters. It's already fully prepared, of course. The firing process takes a couple of minutes, during which the battleships spar, trying to trick one another into letting a shot through the shields. The arrowheads get a lucky escape from an unforeseen salvo of bombers that fortunately fly straight through the energy arc and are atomised. The enemy battleship takes no damage.
The Holy Annihilation fires. Plumes of plasma erupt from its surface and its engines as it ravages itself from the inside out, and an enormous blast of something indescribable sears from the gun's mouth. It penetrates the shields, strikes the enemy ship. There's a vast explosion, a cloud of short-lived flame that blooms in every direction and swallows itself...
...and the entire enemy fleet, apart from what appears to be an enormous fireball roughly where the battleship was, disappears.
Confusion results. Suddenly the shockwave hits. Caught flat footed, without the correct shields up, most of the ships are buffeted, shaken, torn. Many are hammered by enormous chunks of rock, like asteroids. Escorts are smashed asunder, capital ships beaten to a pulp by successive impacts. The battleship lives, damaged but intact. Its sensors declare to a now-empty room - the occupants dead, crushed by the force of a nearby impact - that the enemy fleet is in fact much further away than was apparent, is unharmed, but is now being battered as well by this inexplicable shower of semi-molten rock. The heat and light from the new fireball in the middle is distorting the readouts. Shields down, caught in the gravity field, broken ships begin spiralling downwards towards the surface of the planet below. Some chunks are destroyed or all but burnt up before they hit; but the inhabitants aren't so lucky as to receive nothing. Enormous wrecks plunge into the scorched soil, destroying fields, deserts, towns, adding to the devastation caused by the sudden asteroid shower. Fires leap up and the planet's temperature begins to rise as the new star in orbit throws out its heat. Earthquakes and continued impacts start to tear the planet's geography apart.
On board the bluegreen ships, triumph at the correct functioning of their deception field - foxing the enemy ships' sensor readings and displays to fool them into thinking their targets were somewhere completely different - turns to horror as chunks of broken crust slam into their shields or their hulls. As the explosion fades away they realise that the shot fired by the enemy's superweapon must have hit Earth's moon, conveniently in between the two fleets' actual positions. As wrecks and rocks rain down on the planet they tried to protect, the remains of the fleet open fire, trying to minimise the damage by obliterating as much of the debris as possible. The people on the planet - of two races, humans and the builders of the bluegreen fleet - have barely any idea what's happening. Earth's inhabitants had feared a war of annihilation, and had taken precautions; burying many of their research facilities, building the Obelisk as a sort of giant time capsule to pass on their story to any survivors, encoding scientific and technical knowledge and skills into the human genome by way of an engineered virus. But they never expected it to come like this, by accident. As devastation rains down and an apocalypse begins, both sides of the conflict know that Earth will never be the same again. The bluegreens send down evacuation vessels to do what they can. Some humans stay; having concealed themselves or refused to leave, they are to be the survivors, the ones who have the burden of rebuilding life as the planet knows it. Some humans leave, for a new life among an alien people. Many simply die, or lose their minds.
It will be almost two centuries before Earth's tortured geography settles down. It will never be the same again. A new ecosystem will evolve, both out of the humans' efforts and from the tenacity of life. Under a scorching double sun, dark trees provide a rudimentary shade, reptiles bask or hunt, rodents burrow, birds fly. Many of these lifeforms are lethal, humans being a fairly plentiful prey compared to the rest of this fledgling system. With bioengineering behind them, humans too evolve to meet the new conditions; tougher, stronger, better able to filter dust or pollutants out of the air, bronze or black skin, inherent knowledge and skills to forge the machineries of a civilisation.
We've survived.
Those are the escorts.
Next, the capital ships, the ships of the line. Each one averaging about a hundred kilometres in length. With a population rather than a crew, living in no less than three cities. Among its arsenal might be boarding torpedoes laden with mecha and tanks, energy cannons capable of searing continents off the map, or dark matter weapons that can ravage an enemy ship while barely leaving a mark on the outside. One fleet's capital ships have four captains, a King, a small parliament and councils for each city. The populace of the other fleet's cruisers live in worship of a triumvirate of pharaohs, the chosen ones, who have the honour of representing the gods' will by captaining the ship.
And the battleships. The unstoppable force. Each one over a thousand kilometres in length, larger than a small country. While the capital ships have populations, battleships have entire ecosystems. Each titanic thruster is big enough to fit an escort inside if the thruster's guts were removed. One ship, following the design aesthetics of its race, is long and narrow, its prow protected by a long, curved, cap-like shield. Broadside weaponry bristles from it and three fin-like wings expand from its body, possibly to take in solar energy for extra power. To either side of its snub nose are enormous weapons resembling gatling guns, only each bullet is the size of a small skyscraper and contains enough destructive power in its warhead to wipe out a world population as easily as a meteor strike. Those are only secondary weapons though. The main gun, sticking out from just above the centre of the ship's prow, warps spacetime to cause enemy ships to implode as large black holes appear inside them for a split second. Inside the ship, fifteen million people live, work and play as if barely aware that their world is designed to wade straight into the firing line. There's a semi-democratic government, a convoluted naval command structure, numerous counties and constitutions, and even a commercial air-travel system enabling transport between regions of the battleship. Rapid-duplicating crystal growths placed on the outside of the ship, which took four years to cover it completely, act as both colouring - in a blue-green scheme - and additional armour.
The other, like the first, matches the rough design of its fleet, only upsized. This one is arrowhead-shaped, coloured red-brown-black-silver by virtue of the materials used in its construction. From a great distance it looks sharp, but up close the edge is a 150-metre wall, studded with domes that form projection nodes for an energy arc weapon that can blast simultaneously at targets all around the battleship. The arrowhead bulges in the middle, both up and down, allowing the attachment of engines and more weapon systems. This battleship's population is seventeen million and it, like the capital ships of its fleet, is headed by three pharaohs. This battleship has something else though. Following it, slaved to it, is a four hundred kilometre flying gun. A weapon so lethal that it will destroy itself when it fires, meaning it has to be entirely automated (if it wasn't, and crew space was included, it would probably be nearly the same size as the battleship). Little more than a huge power source, a cluster of bolted-on engines and the biggest gun ever, the plan is to use it to cripple or destroy the enemy battleship, either driving the enemy fleet away or rendering them ill-defended and easy prey. No shields are going to save the enemy from this thing.
The arrowhead fleet get to Sol first. Having spent the past four years decelerating, they pass through the Oort Cloud with debris and asteroids hammering on their physical shields, slowing them down to the point where they can comfortably orbit the system's star at a distance. Activating their gravitic shields, the fleet lurk out of visual sight behind one of the large gas giants, biding their time. A full on troop deployment on Earth is unwise when the enemy could appear at any time. Instead, an escort breaks from the fleet, looping around the Sun on an elliptical orbit, launching a cluster of small aircraft towards Earth as it passes. The machines within will capture humans and transform them into interventors, sowing chaos and sabotaging the defences in time for the eventual attack. Two years later the escort rejoins its parent fleet, and the enemy are detected. They'll be here in three years or so. Launching a desultory salvo of weapons fire to meet them half way, the arrowhead fleet prepares for war.
The blue-green fleet, to the arrowheads' surprise, head straight for Earth and begin deploying troops as if they didn't even detect their enemies' presence. Perhaps the planet was a better sensor blocker than expected. Engaging thrusters and coming to a new heading, their physical, heat and gravitic shields allow them to fly straight through the gas giant's atmosphere, hiding them for as long as possible. Three shields at once drains a worrying amount of power, but they break free of the planet without a hitch and attack.
Weapons fire is exchanged. The art of ship battles relies on activating the correct shield at the correct time to block whatever attack the enemy sends at you. It's a difficult process and relies on psychology as much as tactics. The battleships slowly line up on one another as the escorts and capital ships trade fire. The bluegreen battleship's wormhole cannon swallows half of an unsuspecting cruiser, leaving the other half to bleed bodies and plasma into the cold vacuum of space. The arrowhead battleship lashes out with its energy arcs, blistering purplish-blue light beams hammering the shields of its enemies, slicing any targets it finds in half. Occasionally, a shot from one of the smaller ships gets through a battleship's shields, chewing holes in its nigh impervious armour. The blue-green fleet seems to be taking an unusual amount of damage, especially as the black-hole-slain cruiser is the arrowheads' only casualty so far.
The pharaohs on board the arrowhead battleship decide to fire the Holy Annihilation, a roughly translated name for the gigantic gun-on-thrusters. It's already fully prepared, of course. The firing process takes a couple of minutes, during which the battleships spar, trying to trick one another into letting a shot through the shields. The arrowheads get a lucky escape from an unforeseen salvo of bombers that fortunately fly straight through the energy arc and are atomised. The enemy battleship takes no damage.
The Holy Annihilation fires. Plumes of plasma erupt from its surface and its engines as it ravages itself from the inside out, and an enormous blast of something indescribable sears from the gun's mouth. It penetrates the shields, strikes the enemy ship. There's a vast explosion, a cloud of short-lived flame that blooms in every direction and swallows itself...
...and the entire enemy fleet, apart from what appears to be an enormous fireball roughly where the battleship was, disappears.
Confusion results. Suddenly the shockwave hits. Caught flat footed, without the correct shields up, most of the ships are buffeted, shaken, torn. Many are hammered by enormous chunks of rock, like asteroids. Escorts are smashed asunder, capital ships beaten to a pulp by successive impacts. The battleship lives, damaged but intact. Its sensors declare to a now-empty room - the occupants dead, crushed by the force of a nearby impact - that the enemy fleet is in fact much further away than was apparent, is unharmed, but is now being battered as well by this inexplicable shower of semi-molten rock. The heat and light from the new fireball in the middle is distorting the readouts. Shields down, caught in the gravity field, broken ships begin spiralling downwards towards the surface of the planet below. Some chunks are destroyed or all but burnt up before they hit; but the inhabitants aren't so lucky as to receive nothing. Enormous wrecks plunge into the scorched soil, destroying fields, deserts, towns, adding to the devastation caused by the sudden asteroid shower. Fires leap up and the planet's temperature begins to rise as the new star in orbit throws out its heat. Earthquakes and continued impacts start to tear the planet's geography apart.
On board the bluegreen ships, triumph at the correct functioning of their deception field - foxing the enemy ships' sensor readings and displays to fool them into thinking their targets were somewhere completely different - turns to horror as chunks of broken crust slam into their shields or their hulls. As the explosion fades away they realise that the shot fired by the enemy's superweapon must have hit Earth's moon, conveniently in between the two fleets' actual positions. As wrecks and rocks rain down on the planet they tried to protect, the remains of the fleet open fire, trying to minimise the damage by obliterating as much of the debris as possible. The people on the planet - of two races, humans and the builders of the bluegreen fleet - have barely any idea what's happening. Earth's inhabitants had feared a war of annihilation, and had taken precautions; burying many of their research facilities, building the Obelisk as a sort of giant time capsule to pass on their story to any survivors, encoding scientific and technical knowledge and skills into the human genome by way of an engineered virus. But they never expected it to come like this, by accident. As devastation rains down and an apocalypse begins, both sides of the conflict know that Earth will never be the same again. The bluegreens send down evacuation vessels to do what they can. Some humans stay; having concealed themselves or refused to leave, they are to be the survivors, the ones who have the burden of rebuilding life as the planet knows it. Some humans leave, for a new life among an alien people. Many simply die, or lose their minds.
It will be almost two centuries before Earth's tortured geography settles down. It will never be the same again. A new ecosystem will evolve, both out of the humans' efforts and from the tenacity of life. Under a scorching double sun, dark trees provide a rudimentary shade, reptiles bask or hunt, rodents burrow, birds fly. Many of these lifeforms are lethal, humans being a fairly plentiful prey compared to the rest of this fledgling system. With bioengineering behind them, humans too evolve to meet the new conditions; tougher, stronger, better able to filter dust or pollutants out of the air, bronze or black skin, inherent knowledge and skills to forge the machineries of a civilisation.
We've survived.