~ by Andrew Robins

Free_Trader_Mistral\ Core\Private_Log_Bob-Stark \54

Back in the day Lepanto was built, standoff weapons made a lot more sense than they do now. Ships were slow moving, and did not have huge delta vee reserves so it was much easier to hit them from a distance

What that means is that we have roughly 400 nukes on board. Mostly megaton range. Some big ones though. Which turns out to be quite useful, because we have some Vaders inbound – 22 pulse rockets at last count. Big ones, at that. They seem to be using bomb pumped x-ray lasers whenever they are under acceleration – and that could be nasty if we ever let them get close.

Spent most of today checking over the delivery systems, missiles really, and we should be able to get them working without too much trouble. Been working on a fire plan with Lepanto, and we reckon 40 missiles should do it. Especially if we upgrade a couple with some grav drives.

That should mess the Vader ships up nicely.

Glandin did try to convince us that we didn’t need to bother with any of this – cos Bringer can keep the Vaders under control in any case – but the rest of us aren’t quite ready to trust Bringer fully on this, and even Lepanto was in favour of taking the hostiles out – so that settled that.

Off course that still leaves us with the DT Vaders in the back half of the ship. They have been doing their best to break into the engineering sections up front – trying various different routes through the fuel lines and even up the main central drive coil.

Lepanto’s in-system drive is basically just a big particle accelerator, so one plan is to take one of the smaller bombs – fire it down the central drive shaft, and cook it off once it reaches Vader central. One thing we are sure of is that Bringer will stir itself to keep Lepanto safe when the bomb goes off – so that is probably what we are going to do.

Some of the big brains have been going over the physics, and they seem pretty sure that “the new understanding we have of the fundamental nature of blah blah blah” and “ways to alter the blah blah blah” means that this will work without killing us all.

Buffy tried to explain it to me. Nearest that I can tell is that they plan to get Bringer to alter the “information” component of the energy that gets produced by the bomb, so that the energy goes exactly where we want it to, and not where we don’t want it to.

Of course it does mean blowing the back half of Lepanto up, but none of us are using it anyway and Lepanto doesn’t seem to care – given that it looks like it will be joining/taking over Mistral’s Gestalt sometime soon. Buffy seems to be really excited by that. There has been fist pumping and jumping about and awful music…

Anyway – plenty to do in the meantime. I’ve got missiles to fuel up, mod and prep. Good times and big bangs ahead. Wish Tandie was here to see it.

Log entry ends.

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Check back in on Sunday, 20 March for Episode 14 of 58 Eridani.

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You can read the previous issues by clicking on the following links:

Introducing 58 Eridani, a Game Log

58 Eridani Episode 1

58 Eridani Episode 2

58 Eridani Episode 3

58 Eridani Episode 4

58 Eridani Episode 5

58 Eridani Episode 6

58 Eridani Episode 7

58 Eridani Episode 8

58 Eridani Episode 9

58 Eridani Episode 10

58 Eridani Episode 11

58 Eridani Episode 12

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Andrew Robins is a long time reader – and sometime reviewer – of science fiction, fantasy and history. People pay him to test stuff, which most of the time is more fun than it has any right to be.

To check out Andrew’s book reviews, see “Book Reviews for ‘on Anything, Really’” in the right-hand side bar