57 Chapter 57: Shipping Wars

"Yeah, that's more like it!" I said encouragingly, directing the massive hydraulic arm. A few meters away, one of my new workers nodded. His name was Zach Zuo, if I remembered correctly.

While I was away, William Wang had hired quite a lot of people and now the shipyard was full of staff. Engineers and technicians ran about, yelling orders or confirming requests. A prototype shield generator stood in the middle, long cables connecting it to a plasma reactor. A research team tested it out, to ensure the thing was running properly before they installed it into the ship itself.

After my return, the first thing I did was take charge of the installation of energy shield generators. That was the easy part. The navy had provided us with quite a lot of old boats that had been retired from service, mostly as experiments. The hard part was building the energy shield generators required to erect a force field of tremendous size – a size that was enough to cover the entire boat.

No, covering the entire boat wasn't enough. The navy requested that I construct a boat capable of projecting an energy shield that was big enough to cover the armada. Obviously they didn't expect a single boat to protect the entire fleet, but the idea was to intersperse the shield boats among the fleet, to create many domes of protective fields. Each shield boat would be responsible for protecting a few of its comrades.

In particular the capital ships. At this time, battleships no longer existed. They had been replaced entirely by carriers. With the kind of destruction that modern weapons were capable of – even the cannons, torpedoes and missiles mounted upon a destroyer escort was more than sufficient to sink a battleship – there was no longer a point to constructing a massive ship that was supposed to soak a few hits. They would only end up being massive targets.

Hopefully my shield generators would change all that, but I hadn't looked too far ahead. I did want to build a battleship one day and once more raise them from the depths of obsolescence to their revered status as capital ships once more. The day would come when I would see a battleship that I had designed serve as the flagship for an admiral, leading an armada.

Well, one thing at a time.

"How is it?" I asked, approaching the team who was running trials on the shield generator prototype.

"It's going fine. Everything seems to be working." The chief engineer, Elliot Jian, wiped the perspiration from his forehead. He grinned at me. "All that's left is to install it on one of those boats."

"Great! All right, let's do it!"

I was more than happy to help out. Back before I expanded my company, I was doing most of these things by myself anyway. So I had no qualms performing hard labor, moving parts and operating machinery. A few of my employees gaped at me while I dismantled one of the components and got it ready for installation aboard the ship.

"What?"

"No, boss…you're just different from what we imagined." I believed the guy's name was Terence Goh. He shrugged. "You're very…hands on, eh?"

"Oh, yeah. We started out as a very small company, after all. I had to do everything by myself back then."

"That's right! We all heard your story, boss. Rags to riches and all that. You're an inspiration to all of us!"

"Uh, thanks."

I felt a little embarrassed, but I hid it by focusing on work. There was a lot of manual labor involved, which almost broke my back (okay, I was exaggerating). Fortunately, I had a lot of help, and the hydraulics and machines that I had instructed my staff to build before I left for Province Y came in useful. Servos whirred as power loaders lifted up heavy machinery that couldn't be carried by hand and hoisted them into the ship deck.

We descended into the bowels of the ship, where another crew was working hard to replace the plasma reactor entirely. They had done a great job, though I made sure to check on their health. Sometimes plasma could produce a lot of radiation, despite whatever safeties we tried to keep to contain it. They were wearing protective gear, but there was a limit to what those gear could do.

Fortunately, with current technology we could minimize radiation exposure and even those who suffered a little bit of radiation illness could take anti-rad meds to repair their cells at the genetic level. Modern medicine had come a long way over the past few centuries and would only progress further.

"Thanks, guys. Make sure you decontaminate yourselves and check for any irradiation. Take some anti-rad meds just in case."

"Sure thing, boss!"

With the plasma reactor crew done, we plugged the cables into the humming reactor. We conducted a few checks and did only the most basic installation. After all it would be a pain to dismantle and take the whole thing out again if we did a full installation, only for the shield generator to fail on us.

Most non-specialist people wouldn't know about this, but we often failed. Inventing stuff like shield generators, building plasma reactors, constructing laser cannons and all sort of other technology required several attempts. There was always a problem somewhere, and we would frequently have to strip the device down to its component parts and try again.

It was hard, grueling and exhausting work, often causing frustration to bubble to the surface and shortened tempers, but when everything finally clicked, we would feel that everything was worth it.

"Finally!"

After a couple of tries, we finally got the shield generator to work. Initially, there were a few loose conduits or poor connections, whereby the generator refused to start, but after troubleshooting a few times, we were able to narrow down the issues and come up with solutions. Once those were resolved, we would try again in hopes that it would work. Sometimes, we would find yet another problem, or that our previous solution had been unnecessary because that wasn't the issue to begin with.

Eventually the shield generator came to life and conjured a blue dome of shimmering energy that surrounded the boat.

"We did it!"

"Yes!"

"Great work, everyone!"

All around me, the engineers and technicians that William had hired were congratulation each other, exchanging high fives and looking relieved. It had been a long couple of days and we had finally succeeded. The elation was high.

"What's the matter, boss?" Elliot asked, noticing that I had remained silent and was simply watching the shield.

"Oh, nothing." I forced a smile. "I'm glad we succeeded. But this is only the first step."

"You're right." Elliot wiped the sweat from his face. "The size of the shield right now…it's only big enough to envelop this boat. But the navy wants something bigger, correct? They want the shield boat to project a force field big enough to cover half a dozen ships. To protect the fleet."

"Yeah." This time my smile was genuine. "And we'll definitely give them what they need. Take things one step at a time. Before we can make a big force field, we need to create a small shield first. And we have done precisely that."

"So what should we do next?" Eugene Ng, another engineer on the team, asked. He rubbed his chin as he contemplated. "Should we increase the energy output?"

"Yeah, we definitely need to amplify the energy output and feed the shield generator more power." Elliot nodded in agreement. "But how do we control the manifestation of energies? We might just end up making the energy shield denser instead of bigger. Which is fine and all, but that's not what the navy wants?"

"Actually, I'm sure they would love to have denser and more durable energy shields. But those shields have to be able to cover a greater area." I scratched my head. "Increasing the power is a start, but we will have to modulate the emitters."

For now, we ran several simulations, calling up holograms and relying on artificial intelligence calculations to display what kind of results would materialize upon specific actions. The programs were designed to mimic reality, but…in the end, programs and simulations were not reality.

Nothing could replace practical testing and actual execution. There were way too many variables in reality that no amount of simulations could cover for, no matter how powerful the A.I.

Even so, the simulations were helpful in that they helped us narrow down to a certain set of actions we felt would solve the technical issue. The solutions were often far too broad and vague, numbers and calculations too random, so we needed to narrow down the kind of modulations and adjustments that we wish to try out. Simulations might not always be identical to reality, but they were usually pretty damned close.

So if a computer simulation told you that the machine would blow up if we feed it over a specific amount of power (say ten Tera joules), then it was best not to input ten Tera joules of energy into it.

As frustrating as it was, even though the supercomputer and advanced A.I. could run thousands of simulations under an hour, the human aspect was still required to eliminate the outliers, assess the results of the simulations themselves, and choose the best possible solutions.

So it wasn't always hands-on building and construction. There was a lot of time spent on meeting rooms, with crews of engineers debating on the best course of action, relying solely on the simulations. What worked, what wouldn't work, and whether we should risk this modulation or attempt that adjustment.

Being the leader, I was the one who had to ultimately make the final decision. I was tempted to doze off in the middle of meetings, but I forced myself to stay awake and listen to the various arguments and hypotheses put forth by my staff. I reviewed them as meticulously as I could, and then slowly weeded out the worse ones.

Then I finally chose a set of solutions that seemed likely.

"Okay, let's tweak the emitters by replacing the platinum ring with an Azchar component. That should allow for a wider spread."

"Yes, sir!"

It took another couple of weeks before we succeeded. I was in the shipyard, still working on another shield generator when the team working on the first shield boat activated it. To everyone's amazement, the dome expanded further and enveloped an entire area – a space wide enough for at least a battleship and three escorts to seek cover.

"Woohoo!"

"We did it! We succeeded!"

"Yes!"

Standing on the edge of the dock, I listened to the cheers of my crews before allowing myself a small smile.

Let the navy of Country A come, I thought. We now had the perfect defense against their fleet. Or so I hoped.

As long as they didn't resort to nukes, my shield boats should be able to withstand whatever the foreign fleet bombarded with.