A.I. Ship Cassiopeia: Escort Class Starship: Book One by D. L. Harrison

A.I. Ship Cassiopeia: Escort Class Starship: Book One by D. L. Harrison

Author:D. L. Harrison [Harrison, D. L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-12-19T16:00:00+00:00


Chapter Seven

“Status?” the captain asked as she took her post. The central hologram showed them to be damned close to the gas giant in the system, and it looked like the two enemy ships had moved.

Dennis said, “Ten minutes for weapons range, twelve until they can return fire.”

Susan replied, “The two ships have moved, according to the logs they waited until they were sure we were committed to our course and interacting with the gas giant’s atmosphere.”

She asked, “Analysis?”

Maria said, “It’ll be harder to dodge their plasma balls when fired straight on, and I’m limited in how far we can dodge. If we can’t recover our original course and wind up going deeper into the atmosphere, then the drag will overwhelm the inertial compensators. The ship will likely survive the rapid deceleration and friction heat, but we won’t.”

She nodded, “Just do the best you can. Anton?”

Anton replied, “Countermeasures are ready to launch captain. I don’t think they’ll get more than three volleys each before we blow by them and put the gas giant between us. It’ll take at least ten direct hits to take us down with the Mirix’s stronger EM shields installed. I think between Maria and I we can avoid more than five in every wave of eight.”

Carl said, “We need to do a little better than that to come out unscathed, sir. We need at least thirty percent on the shields when we hit the atmosphere to reflect all that heat, or we’ll take significant hull damage. Avoid or neutralize six of the eight plasma attacks in all three volleys at the least, but if you can avoid all of them, I wouldn’t complain.”

Right, they could only take six hits, not nine or ten, since they’d be plowing into an atmosphere right after passing the enemy ships.

Maria snickered.

Anton said, “Good call.”

The captain asked, “Suggestions?”

Dennis said, “We don’t need to destroy them, just get past them. I’d suggest firing straight down our course line. That will have them dodging away so they can’t fire directly head on once we’re in range of their weapons, which will make dodging easier. They can’t dodge our fire with the enhanced course correction abilities our weapons have, but they don’t know that. Yet.”

That… made sense. Once they learned that, they wouldn’t bother even trying to dodge next time and just fire from their best vantage point, which was straight on.

Jessica ordered, “Stop our forward acceleration now, and restart it once past. How many volleys will we get?”

Dennis said, “Five. Our reload time is a little faster, since our weapons don’t carry as much active plasma it takes less time to load and heat the chamber to appropriate levels. Ninety seconds, as opposed to every two minutes. We can fire four times for their every three, and the extended range will give us that fifth volley.”

She pondered that, “Can we degrade the weapons maneuverability to match theirs?”

Dennis looked up startled, and then said, “We could limit the gravity fields to fifteen Gs instead



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.