46 – Rebirth
Fuck the second Death Star.
I'd decided to ignore utterly everything to just watch as the Dishes – all four hundred of them – separated out. I immediately reclaimed all but ten of them, I didn't need that many giant discs of metal ruining the view. Great clouds of nanites continued to glow in the darkness of space before finally fading as they completed their tasks. Which was nice. Because they'd finally revealed the thing that had taken my longer than any other single creation that I'd ever built while in this universe. I'd done plenty besides while it was building – necessarily slower in the earlier portions due to the need to regulate what it was doing to my economy. Over two months of continual building it up more and more, moving the construction out into deep space so that it wouldn't be precisely in Hub before.
One hundred solar system's worth of resources had been poured into its creation –
continuously – for more than two months!
Let's start with the basics. In terms of shape…she still retained the basic and classic look of the Executor-class vessel though with the modifications I'd made with the initial
Cry of Gimli. No command tower, city-scape transmuted into gun-scape of endless plains of guns of varying kinds in rising banks. But there was more.
A lot of it had to do with scale.
From tip to back, farthest forward and farthest back…
One thousand and five hundred total kilometers. Widest at about five hundred kilometers. I'd made her far taller than before as well. A total of three hundred kilometers in height from top to bottom – though it sloped slightly to reach that point from front being the shortest to the back being the actual limits of that height.
Oh.
Yes.
I'd decided to utterly ignore the idea of blank space on the hull. The alloys making up this ship were strong enough to withstand whatever could be thrown at them – guns included. I was using a shield system combined from planetary shield designs and what the shields of the strongest battleships and battle stations – Death Stars include – put together. Five generators for each shield laid within the innards of the ship to provide overlapping fields of shielding that were rated for the defense of entire planets for every single
kilometer of the ship's hull. Each one possessed its own dedicated bank of generators. Throughout it all, auto-programmed fabricators ran endless patrols of maintenance and repair – capable of self-replicating if the need truly came down to it.
All of the important parts were on the inside save for a single hangar that laid towards the belly – protected by its own bevy of shield generators. From there lay banks of fabricators to produce whatever could be needed and a small path to a Gate which led to
another gate at the deepest part of the ship – the Commander Sanctum. Within the hangar bay lay twelve Sun Crusher devices as well as four Ion Ring Ships for extra mobile firepower. Besides that? There were almost open spaces. All throughout the ship lay the Resource Cores and generators that powered it, all of them protected by thin coatings of quantum crystalline armors. If damage was somehow impossible dealt to the ship, the fabricators would begin creating auto-programmed droids with fabricators built in to repair the damage – entirely without me needing to take control of them! Within it lay stealth systems as well, beyond my own - the Empire's own designs would provide...with my own improvements. I could fade into existence and blot out the stars...or be a giant invisible island of guns just waiting to be unleashed. Heh.
Do you know how many guns you can fit onto a ship when you really do try to ignore the entire idea of leaving free space on the outside? When you have the generators and Resource Cores within to power just about
everything on the ship unto ridiculous excess? Weapons, shields, engines?
It's a lot.
And almost every single bit of those kilometers was covered in weapons. Turbolaser.
Banks. Ion cannons. Laser cannons for taking down missiles or clouds of fighters that somehow managed to get in close. I had tractor beam emitters along the entire length. Great gravity well generators to provide their own interdiction fields that could affect entire solar systems at once, not just small sections of hyperspace lanes. Turrets that could fire whole catalogues of missiles if I needed them too of varying kinds. But that was just the basic technologies. There was
plenty more.
I'd made tractor beam guns. Or as I liked to call them, the Rippers. Though they didn't rise up like turrets or anything they were in small basins of their own that could allow them to shift back and forth within sockets. Even minute pulls in one direction or another would rip enemy vessels apart with the strength wrench stars back and forth from one end of a galaxy to another. Better still I'd had each Ripper Basin linked to a parallel one on the other side of the ship so that two could work in concert to tear ships apart with greater speed.
But that was nothing to the
true weapons of the ship.
Rising up, steadily rising along the length of the ship – which itself slowly rose from the tip to the back in height – were a series of turrets. Three of them were at the very front of the ship, one at the tip, the others a hundred kilometers back and off to the sides – left and right. Further along when the height allowed said turrets to fire over the heads of those at the very front, were another set of three turrets. Left, center, right. The very slight raise of the ship – I couldn't raise it
too high after all without making it look simply ridiculous – meant that there could only be one more series.
Along
that portion, that is.
By raising the overall height of the ship from top to bottom into three hundred kilometers, I'd garnered plenty of space there as well. At the sides, along the growing arrowhead lengths, lay another series of turrets. This time I had managed to fit four pairs, one on each side for a given distance before another could be put down. Again I had ensured that they could all fire forward without blowing those in front of them to kingdom come. I wasn't about to put turret banks
directly behind one another after all.
I'd repeated the scheme on the bottom of the ship to match the top.
Nine turrets on the top, eight on the sides – four on each – and another nine on the bottom. There were twenty six total, each turret furthermore being double barreled. Each one of them was simply massive, outweighing entire starships on their own. Each of them capable of swiveling their vast bulks only with the aid of the unnamed mixture of alloys and metals that I'd created from my original databanks and what I had taken from this universe. It had taken the anti-matter generators, the artificial sun-reactor of Centerpoint, and my own generator technologies all being melded together to finally achieve the frankly
disgusting amounts of power draw that would be required for these weapons and the rest of the ship.
Though I will always be even more thankful for the fact that no organic-based comforts were required – life support, big hallways and rooms, dormitories, etc. – which always freed up a huge amount of power draw for my ow usage.
If I was honest with myself, I had taken inspiration from the Darksaber Project. Only instead of letting such a device float in space, I had installed them into the cannons on my ship. They were most certainly the deadliest array of turrets in the galaxy.
I'd like to reiterate something.
Fuck the second Death Star.
Because each and every one of my simply colossal, mammoth, gargantuan, vast turrets…were all that the Death Stars, any of them, possessed in terms of single beam firepower and
more. I'd literally stuffed the wondrous power behind the Death Stars, behind the Eclipse-class, and melded it with my own Annihilaser designs in order to remove the need for the rare crystals present in the Imperial weaponry, to reduce the recharge time down to a minute each. I had taken all of that and stripped out the sphere that had previously been necessary to house them to turn them into
turret weaponry. The power draw was horrific but I could still manage it.
I had
Death Star Turrets.
Yet…the echo of Billy Mays booms through the galaxy just one more time.
Rising up, from the center of the gun-scape, was the same exact idea of the Darksaber project given form over to a weapon that eclipsed even the strength of the Death Star. Such great battle stations fired and caused a planet to explode from striking it. The weapon mounted upon the vast single barrel turret which lay along the outer spine – along the top yet protected by even more shielding and its own special retractable armor covering – was another turret.
My
Annihilaser turret. The beam that pierces entire celestial bodies and comes out the other end! Stripping out everything
surrounding the weapon save for the actual beam and what would be needed to fire it wasn't actually that hard – though powering it was another thing. Even then the five catalysts locked onto its far end made it look less like a single devastatingly powerful tube and more like…pistol that had the grip disappeared into the sprouting forest of big guns beneath. It couldn't go into the hull, making it the biggest outward change to the ship beyond the other turrets as well, but with its own dedicated shields and a thin yet strong covering of quantum crystalline armoring that could rise up and surround it – creating a sort of raised long triangular prism along the top of the ship – it didn't
need to hide away.
With a full
fifty humongous engines melded with every engine tech in the galaxy as well as my own Halley rockets, the ship was capable of accelerating at a simply ludicrously fast pace for its size. She could still turn and maneuver fast enough to liquidate any organic on board, for instance.
Yeah, she was thick.
Literally every outer part of her was covered in weapons or fabricators - all protected beneath overlapping shields of ludicrous power and breadth. Within were superstructure reinforcements and generators and Resource Cores practically ad nauseam. She'd ceased to be a standard ship on the inside and started becoming more the power systems of a Metal Planet. That was fine though. It was what had been needed to deliver her to the battlefield as needed.
She was
mine.
Emblazoned in the computers, was her name. Because I couldn't afford to actually have the name 'painted' onto the hull – that space was taken up with guns. My finest creation.
The
Cry of Gimli, reborn.
….so yeah.
Fuck the Death Stars.
