After the five minute wait, Administrator Huang opened his eyes and swept his gaze across the crowd receiving their briefing. “I see none of you left,” he said. “Good.
“The empire has recently developed a new warhead as well. Dubbed the ‘black hole bomb’, it’s exactly what it says on the tin: an oversized capacitor and artificial gravity generator strapped to a rocket engine. When detonated, it creates a short-lived, yet highly destructive, black hole in a small area. ‘Small’, by the way, is a relative term.
“And the only reason you’re being informed of its existence now is that we don’t want you asking about it later when you’re in potentially hostile, unsecured environments....” He continued on the topic of weapons for a while, explaining each of them in detail, then finished that portion of his briefing by asking, “Any questions?”
Nobody in the lecture hall had any. At least not about the weapons of the EF and TSF, anyway, but they had already been taught not to ask questions that weren’t relevant to the topic they were being briefed on.
“None? Excellent,” Huang Wei confirmed, then switched to another topic: the ships that would be escorting and backing up the exploration fleet vessels in this momentous step in humanity’s journey among the stars.
Ships in the TSF, and their semi-militarized siblings, the exploration fleet, were still separated by category and role, much like the Poseidon Navy. From the enormous city-ship down to the humble corvette, each ship class played a necessary role in the Terran Space Fleet.
City-ships were designed to carry entire seed colonies with them, including tens of thousands of civilian passengers, thousands of ARES troopers, and all of the equipment necessary for starting up a colony on any habitable worlds the exploration fleet discovered. In their cavernous holds, they could also carry entire TSF fleets, and in order to save on reaction mass and wear and tear on the TSF ships in routine operations, they acted as the core command and control ships during combat actions and transport vessels to and from battles.
Stretching tens of kilometers in diameter, the disc-shaped vessels would be the flagships that carried the Terran Empire’s flag to distant frontiers.
The next category of vessel in terms of size was the drone tender. Stretching three kilometers from stem to stern and a kilometer and a half in width at their widest point, the elongated arrowhead-shaped vessels carried a complement of dozens of thousands of drones, each armed with plasma cannons. The drones were mostly disposable and were basically just engines with a gun strapped to them, designed to swarm enemy vessels and chew them apart with balls of plasma.
Slightly smaller than drone tenders were the hammerhead battleships. The researchers in Lab City had debated back and forth for decades before settling on the hammerhead design. Eschewing traditional broadside armaments, the behemoth battleships were two kilometers long, a kilometer wide, and their bow was perpendicular to the rest of the ship and densely packed with missile launchers.
Hammerhead battleships were capable of launching up to ten thousand missiles in a single launch wave and carried enough missiles to fire ten waves of missiles before returning to the accompanying city-ship for rearmament.
The workhorse of the TSF was their cruiser. Shaped like extended pyramids, they were a kilometer high, a kilometer wide, and close to two kilometers long, and they were the only multirole ships in the TSF capable of landing on a planet’s surface. Modular in design, it could take up any role needed in any given fleet depending on its loadout. Cruisers studded with point defense batteries served as a shield against potential enemies with the same missile-centric military doctrine as the empire, while those fitted with heavy ablative armor layers served as troop transports and would carry eighty thousand troops at full load with all of their assorted equipment.
(Ed note: Picture Pyramid Head from Silent Hill. That’s the general shape of the empire’s cruisers.)
Cruisers also made up the entirety of the exploration fleet, it had to be noted.
Destroyers, at eight hundred meters long and two hundred across, were lightly armored, lightly armed, highly mobile, and designed to carry small teams of elite troops meant for boarding actions. What they gave up in durability and attack capability, they gained in speed and maneuverability; given enough distance, they were the largest ships in the fleet capable of actually dodging lasers and other light-speed weaponry, given enough distance between them and the vessel firing upon them.
And finally, the humble corvette. At a hundred meters long, they carried a crew of four and ten passengers, and were designed for picket duties. Heavily armed for their size, they were the mainstay of the fleet in case of piracy, and they were also the only vessel design in the fleet that was capable of stealth, invisible to both sensors and the naked eye.
Administrator Huang wrapped up the technical briefing by saying, “Fleet formations in the TSF are ad hoc and dynamic. With the uninterrupted, instantaneous communications made possible through quantum communicators and the assistance of ships’ AIs, every vessel in the TSF is capable of fulfilling the role it was designed for in any fleet at any given moment.
“The only difference, ladies and gentlemen, is the color of the paint in the passageways of the city-ships coordinating a fleet.”
Administrator Huang moved to the final portion of his briefing, informing the attendees of their specific escort fleets, the standard operating procedure they would be functioning under, their detailed chains of command for the exploration, and so forth....
An hour later, the briefing came to a close. “You are all hereby ordered to go dark. No communication with Earth or outside your own ships will be permitted until after you’ve left the heliopause and are on your way. I won’t lie to you—there’s a possibility that this first step into the greater galaxy at large will also be your last.
“Should you choose to do so, you may visit the legal affairs office at whichever outpost you’re currently docked where a special liaison officer will help you write your last will and testament, as well as record a message that will be delivered to people of your choosing once you’ve passed through the Oort Cloud.
“Now, ladies and gentlemen, you have a week of shore leave. Your vessels must be completely vacated of any personnel and personal belongings in the next three hours, Earth time, as they are to undergo a specialized refit over your shore leave.
“Once your leave is complete, you’re hereby ordered to report to ARES Central Command on Mars to link up with your assigned escorts and begin your mission. Good luck and godspeed, explorers.”
Administrator Huang finished the briefing with a formal salute to the crowd, then vanished.
