Log #151
A fair few ork ships are crashing down to the surface, mainly casualties from the space battle, but a few are mostly intact. This does mean that the enemy has ground forces on world and a fair few bases of operation, but these guys seem poorly equipped to handle Nauvis, or even using their own bases of operation as bases, they have barely built fortifications and all their weapons need people, or orks I suppose, to man them.
About the only successful ork base is from one of the bigger ships that crashed down, and by successful I mean there are enough orks there that they can actually hold out for more than a day, and If the movements Im tracking are correct the other nearby orks are going to be linking up with that one, so it seems like it'll be a stronghold till a larger force, either mine or the bugs, makes a concerted effort to wipe them out.
The only weapons that the orks can field that are at all threatening are their vehicles and the rare mechs. Sure an individual ork can fight a smaller bug in close combat and have even odds of winning, but there are always more bugs and they tend to only get bigger, the orks seem to know that too though, and I'm seeing more vehicles being made and fielded every hour, horribly designed yeah, but they do have a fair rate of production considering that every vehicle is apparently hand made.
The good news was that having intact ork ships landing means that I can just send a force to capture a ship without having to deal with the risks capturing a ship in space comes with, and Palisade is eager to lead that operation, breaking open a crashed ork ship is exactly the kind of thing he likes doing, he could probably manage it himself, not that he will be.
On the space front I have only lost one of my 18 ships, and by lost I mean it's wedged into a bigger ork ship that rammed it, and is basically out of the fight until the bigger ship breaks in half or the …. I really need a name for my corvettes, can burrow a hole out of the ork ship with its lasers, and considering both ships are still moving that is a difficult ask, and the orks keep trying to get inside of my corvette for some reason, thankfully though almost all of the attempts fail to breach the shields, and the few that do just poke holes for swarms of drones to invade the ork ship from.
Most of my space production capacity is being taken up by producing more fighters, which also need a name, so the actually expansion of my orbital infrastructure has slowed to a crawl, but in contrast my terrestrial production has never been higher, with the daemons gone and the bugs distracted with the non threat of the orks I have the largest free budget I have ever had.
Needless to say almost all of it is going into expanding that same production capacity, and my plantery production centers are growing rapidly, my 3 largest outposts are even getting the base infrastructure for a few space elevators that will eventually link up with stations in orbit around the planet, allowing my production capacity on the ground to actually matter up in space.
The 3 outposts being the largest outposts on their respective continents, and the central hub for each continent, and are as such suitable, massive and well defended to warrant a space port. With the production capacity and the defensive forces to hold it, while also not being as important to my planet's defense as the main base, if they were lost to say, a massive space tower falling on them, well probably not lost, just partially crushed. Or maybe an invading force could use the space elevators to invade, but that would go poorly for anything I have any hope of fighting in the first place.
And while I could just ship up everything I make via spaceship, that is both fuel and resource inefficient, building a spaceship that can haul enough cargo into space to matter is possible but would have less long term benefits than a series of space elevators handling the same thing, still that's like a few months to build if I focus on just getting one of the things up, and around 6 months to get 1 up if I don't solely focus on it.
The plans for the outposts that will house the base of the elevators are currently being drawn up, I know I said that they would be in my 3 largest outposts, but that would mean redesigning a fair bit of the outposts to safely and efficiently use the elevators, so smaller outposts are being built next to the three largest, and by next to I mean sharing a wall, just with their own power and computer systems.
Log #152
It's around a day before the planned attack on one of the orks still intact ships, specifically the big one. The one that gives the orks anything approaching a fighting chance against the smaller groups of bugs currently attacking them, and while I could just wait for the bugs to send one of the giant bugs to crush the thing, Palisade wants to capture a ship for study and I am a personal example of what waiting a little longer to wipe out your enemy can lead to.
Still, this will be the first mission that Palisade is actually intentionally going into combat distance with a force that has a chance, however slim, of fighting him off, the only times he's closed to acid distance have been when the bugs outmaneuver or overpower his forces, which happens rarely as he is a very good tactician, and he has only closed to melee range 3 times, 2 of which have been when a base he was in was breached, with the third being falling into a giant pit trap the bugs had dug, after which he had needed to fight his way out.
You'll notice that each of these occasions have been nominally unplanned, sure It was always a possibility that when going into battle he would have to fight the bugs at a distance they could effectively fight back, but nothing in the factory that is irreplaceable, currently just Palisade, me, the tree lady and theoretically the minds, should ever be in any danger of destruction. Irreplaceable in this instance meaning something I can't rebuild or remake if it breaks or dies, the minds only count if every instance of them is destroyed, which considering I have dozens of armored and secured backups of each is unlikely.
You now might be asking why I let Palisade fight if I don't like irreplaceable things being in danger, that because Palisade wants to, even if he largely wants to do it to prove his usefulness and worth to me, and because sending him out with Balistaria watching is better than trying to keep a superhuman, and an absurdly powerful one at that, from going out and fighting a giant horde of bugs in some attempt to prove himself. The kid has serious self esteem issues for a 5 year old.
So I send the kid out with a large force on operations basically guaranteed to be a success, to fight off weaker or less exotic bug variants, and he gets to feel useful in a way just sitting in a lab designing things doesn't. Which is understandable, fighting giant monsters is way more fulfilling than making a mining drill run on 48% less power.
If I am going to be letting the kid run an actually dangerous operation against an enemy I know very little about I am going to be doing my level best to make sure he comes through alive and with all limbs attached. So I'm giving him some upgrades.
The kid build good armor, and his drones and better than any of the standard models I field in bulk, but and I don't talk about this much, anything I build by hand works better than anything the factory builds without me, even anything Palisade build is the same, even with the same or worse components something I build works roughly 20% better than something an assembler builds, and that was before I came to this new dimension, where that number shot up to 35% if I build the machine myself, and 15% if I just repair the things, even machines I'm near just run better now, for no real reason, which now that I think about it that kind of thing is something to ask the tree lady about, the kid in contrast only build something roughly 15% percent better than an assembler, though that number is up from 10%.
So even if I just built exact copies of the kids drones and armor It would be a significant improvement over what the kid already has, but that's not what I'm doing, I said the kids armor is good, mine is fantastic, I have spent literal years designing better armor for myself, and even if the kids armor is significantly larger than mine, If we fought our armors without anyone in them, mine could take on 3 of his in one on one fights before it went down, and that's if I didn't let it self repair, in which case it would fight indefeatly, just taking supplies and fuel from the kids broken armors. If the kid was in his armor its a different story, his is apparently a demi-god or something and that tends to level many scales, still the armor, shielding, and weaponry on my armor is leagues better than the kids, and I have been building him a suit ever since we hit real space, it's actually been done for a few days, I was just waiting for an occasion to give it to him.
The drones I'm giving him are less significantly better than his, pound for pound they are better, with more expensive weapons and armor, I don't tend to build powerful individual drones like the kid, so these are just coming from the inner factory, the better ones coming from the inner factory sure, but not custom made to be the best of the best like my armor is.
I did think about giving him a few of the more experimental weapons I have in storage, but the grand majority of those wouldn't actually leave much of the ship intact if he needed to use them.
So roughly a day before the kids operation I'm giving him a new set of power armor and a bunch of highly advance combat drones, Which seems like an excellent crash day present, even if that anniversary is actually in like 4 days, I'll just have the minds bake him a cake or something on the day itself.
The outposts that are going to house the space elevators are largely done, with only the specialized parts still being installed, it's mainly just storage space honestly, so I can quickly load and unload the elevators, along with the computer and power systems actually running the damned things, which will eat more power than most outposts just to not snap in half from their own weight, shield generators can do a lot but at higher scales they start needing exponentially more power.
The space battle is slowing down now, it'll probably be a few days before the whole thing is over, and weeks to clean up any survivors hiding in the system, but the main battle should be one with only one ship taking significant damage, the one that was inside the ork ship got a large chuck blown out of it when the ork ship blew up, and it will take a while for the ships to refill on munitions and drone fighters, but pretty soon my asteroid factories can focus on making more asteroid factories, rather than just swarms of fighters and new defensive installations.
I'm even thinking of making larger mobile factories and miners to go through the asteroid belt, rather than using smaller ships to mine and haul ore to stationary factories, as it is now whenever a chunk runs out of resources, which has not actually happened yet, I'll need to have a corvette or drone swarm move the thing to a new zone.
Palisade also seemingly wants me to build a battle capable ship that people can use, rather than a drone only one, which seems impractical, considering that would mean significantly less room for ship components and armor, but he did make a few designs and they aren't bad, worse than a drone only sure, but the difference in machine performance with me near should mean they are only slightly worse than a ship without me.
AN-
just realized how long its been since the last chapter, this is half the planned next chapter for the warhammer thing, only lightly edited and not re read, but it felt both long enough and good enough to post, the next part was just going to be a log over the fight than a short interlude from Palisade perspective, and maybe an orks, before it was over. I will still write that though so don't worry.
I may or may not have gotten distracted with the future marine interlude and written 6k words for it, and its not done yet, so that's the main reason for the delay
once again reviews are my blood, give me blood.
