Trials 3

"... Do you really think I'll get hit?" Don was speaking to the Doctor (located in the bridge of the Large Cruiser) from his seat piloting the ship.

"Do I think you will be hit? No. Do I recognize there is a non-zero chance? Absolutely. Your target area is gonna be around a thousand square meters at its largest, so while you don't take up much of the sky at the range you are at, you are a far larger target than most other ships out there."

"I guess that's true. Am I ready to start reporting targets?" After about a half hour of travel, he had reached the standard engagement range for most capital ships - 25 thousand kilometers.

At this range, the vast majority of sensors would give somewhat hazy readings due to both the range involved as well as any sort of interference performed on the behalf of the target. It is also considered to be the range where accuracy for the main battery drops below twenty percent.

Given the sheer distance involved, it would be a feat according to our modern weaponry to hit even a thousandth of the time.

What was truly impressive was the energy output of the railguns that achieved that level of accuracy, the capital class railgun. The projectile was a magnetized rod with a density of precisely 5,000 kilograms a cubic meter. If you were to simplify its shape and measure the volume as a cylinder, you would find it to have a diameter of exactly half a meter and a height of just over ten, meaning that the total mass of the projectile is almost exactly 10,000 kilograms.

Most people, including the people in charge of designing them, call them railguns. That classification is not correct as there is no 'rail' involved in the projectile's acceleration. Instead it uses an electro-magnetic field to do the job. The instant the projectile, commonly referred to as a bolt, begins acceleration it is no longer in contact with any matter.

The field is not just contained within the emitters (the sections that look like cannon barrels) but also extended out from them. If all of the acceleration were to happen in a space of only 40 meters, the turrets would not be capable of withstanding the recoil of launching something of that weight close to a ten-thousandth the speed of light. For about a kilometer beyond the muzzle, there is a field similar to that within the emitter that exerts a force that weakens with distance.

The specific kinetic energies are given as estimates. No piece of hardware yet devised can withstand a direct hit from one and extract any meaningful data, and the intense amount of heat and noise created makes it difficult to figure out what fraction of the electrical energy used is turned into kinetic.

Truth be told though, the energies and penetration characteristics of a metal rod moving at that speed are purely academic. Anything they hit is guaranteed to have a bad time, whether or not they survive. In fact, that 'bad time' is what makes it so easy to spot hits at that extreme range.

It turns out that the ridiculous heat let off by either a glancing or non penetrating blow is similar to what it would be if something vital was hit, like a reactor or munitions bay. If you looked closely on the older ships in the fleet, you could see the scars of a few such impacts. Even if plating was replaced and a new coat of paint was added, the warping caused by such high velocity impacts is hard to fix.

"Assurance: Do not fear being hit. While it is true that deviancy is to be expected, our position should be far enough away from the main firing vector that only a monumental failure of a railgun's emitter system could put us in a firing cone."

"Thanks ARC." A genuine relief to Don. He trusted that the ship would be able to hold up to the impact (he had ARC's assurance) he was not eager to feel what is was like to have heavy cruiser class railguns make contact.

"If you think you have made proper preparations, designate one of the bigger asteroids as a target. I'm patching you through to the targeting station. Best of luck."

A click indicated the end of Doctor Helmsguard's instruction. The rest would be left to the experts in the core of the ship, the people who lived to throw ammunition down range.

"Hello hello. This is Gunnery Captain Dodder of the UES Ranger, to whom do I owe the pleasure?" A peppy voice continued where the doctor left off.

"Donovan Strauss, rank DS. Can't divulge much more than that." It wasn't that he couldn't divulge more than his name in rank, it was more like he wasn't sure what information was still classified.

"Understandable, I'm just glad to get the chance to drop some lead."

"Drop some lead?"

"Oh yeah! Letting loose with the main battery is a drug more addictive than heroin. Permission to fire, even if its for the purpose of calibration, is rare these days. Send over the target data already!"

Some of the cheers in the background indicated that the gunnery captain was not the only one ready to lighten their ship.

"What size asteroid do you want to start off with? If you wouldn't mind, could you tell me some of the specifics of your ship and what data you want?"

The talk about specifics was more oriented to small talk and conversation, it was the data that was truly important here.

"Aaaaah yeah. We honestly don't care too much for anything other than velocity by center of mass, range, acceleration values, and the expected target area. Given we are to be shooting at glorified rocks the stuff like armor, profile, and mass estimations isn't necessary. Rotational data would be nice to give us an idea of where exactly we are hitting, but I don't expect it to hold together longer than four or five impacts. Start with a boulder about the size of an escort cruiser, we'll work our way down and away from there."