Blue Star Enterprises

"Are you sure it'll fly?" Branston asked.

Alexander had asked his erstwhile shuttle pilot, Captain Krieger, Lucas, and Archie to view the ship's design after the fact. It wasn't going quite as he expected. Branston was a bit more reluctant to fly it after first seeing the ship schematic.

"I was kind of hoping you would be able to tell me," Alexander admitted to the former STO pilot.

The man looked back at Alexander in shock. "I was joking. Please tell me you did a flight simulation on this?"

"…I was kind of rushed."

"Rushed for what?" Krieger asked in concern.

"What I tell you next doesn't leave this room, are we clear?" he deliberately looked at Lucas when he said that.

The man held up his hands in surrender. "That was one time. How was I to know that she would tell everyone she knew about it? And it wasn't like you said that was a secret."

Lucas was referring to Alexander's alien nature. He had eventually tracked down the source of the rumor to the man's occasional bedtime companion. From there, it wasn't hard to figure out where she had heard it from.

"Yes, and that's why I'm specifically telling you this time," Alexander reiterated.

"I won't tell a soul, not even Damien or Gabriella, I promise," Lucas made a zipping motion with his finger across his mouth.

Alexander emulated a sigh. It was probably the best he was going to get, and it wasn't like this secret would stay secret for long once Katalynn and her fleet left the system, but that was her problem to sort out.

"You remember that fleet Char was having a battle with when we arrived?" seeing as Krieger was the only other person with him during that time, he posed the question to his Admiral.

"Yeah? It was a dispute with another Jarl wasn't it?"

Alexander nodded in confirmation. "Jarl Isbjorn. The man decided to take advantage of the Lagertha's absence to return to Asgard and try to claim the throne for himself, or so that's his intention. Asgardian law is a bit weird there, and the Asgardian people only recognize a new ruler if the previous one died, or was killed in combat. Normally when a Jarl disagrees with the way the current ruler is running things, they challenge them to a trial by combat.

Archie quirked his eyebrow at that but remained silent.

"From what Char has told me and what we witnessed back then, I believe Isbjorn will not face her in single combat. He will instead force their fleets to battle, likely knowing she won't have the firepower to take him on anymore. Depending on what information the Lokis deem to share with Jarl Isbjorn, he may or may not already know that her fleet was nearly gutted during the fighting with Harlow."

"And she asked for the remains of our fleet to help bolster hers?" Krieger asked in confusion.

Alexander shook his avatar. "I asked her that same question, but she said this matter had to be settled between her fleet and Isbjorn's or her and Isbjorn."

Everyone seemed to understand then and Archie spoke up for the first time. "She intends to sneak past the Jarl's fleet and force him to engage her in solo combat. I assume she holds the advantage there?"

Alexander shrugged because he honestly didn't know. He knew Char was an expert fighter, but he had no information to gauge Isbjorn.

"What's to stop you from challenging her and taking leadership for yourself?" Archie asked in a follow-up question.

Alexander had expected someone to bring this up. "Nothing, except the fact that I don't want to rule the Asgardians. If… God or Odin forbid, Katalynn Char falls to this Isbjorn, I may have no other choice but to confront him myself. It's been made pretty clear that the man flirts with the STO corporations a bit too much for my taste. For all we know, he could be a corporate plant, which is why I'm building her this stealth ship instead of flying to Asgard myself to remedy this situation."

"Still," Krieger stated, crossing his arms. "It seems like a mighty big risk to allow this technology into the hands of someone you barely know. I know they helped us against Harlow, and I'm thankful for that, but I'm just playing devil's advocate here. What if she keeps the ship and tries to reverse-engineer it? We know her people are capable of doing it given time."

"That's a good question," Alexander admitted. "After what Char and her people did to help us, I'm inclined to trust her motivations. There was also an agreement to sell her technology after they helped us defeat Harlow. That doesn't mean I'm unconditionally trusting her though. I took certain measures to ensure BSE technology remains safe. One of those measures is an anti-tampering program. If anything is removed, the ship reactor will overload."

"Now I really don't want to fly it," Branston muttered.

"Those measures won't go into place until I add the modified fusion crystal, so the testing will be saf- safer," he amended as the pilot gave him a skeptical look.

"No system is foolproof, Alex," Lucas chimed in.

"I'm aware," he sighed. "I will also get her word that they won't attempt to keep the ship or take it apart. She takes her oaths very seriously so that will likely work as a better deterrent than the security measures. It's the best I can do other than flying to Asgard in the ship myself, which I don't want to undertake with our forces so depleted. In the end, I would count the loss of one prototype stealth ship as a small price to pay if it means Eden's End and I aren't dragged into an Asgardian power struggle. If she goes back on her word and they somehow manage to disassemble the ship without triggering the fail-safe, we will know they can't be trusted and we will end our relationship with the Asgardians despite the agreements I signed. I don't think that will happen though. Does anyone else think that's likely to happen after she came here to help us fight off Harlow?"

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The silence that followed his question spoke volumes.

Alexander nodded his avatar.

"Enough about politics," he stated. "I didn't gather you all here for that. I gathered you here to help me make improvements to the ship."

Lucas eyed the vessel. "It's certainly better looking than the fishbone ship you first showed me, but it's still rather ugly. I assume its geometrical shape is the result of our limitations with the armor?"

"I thought it was rather intimidating looking," Alexander grumped. "And yes. I have not been able to figure out that particular issue so flat panels are all we have so far. I assume the STO ran into the same issue since the Dawn was mostly composed of flat surfaces as well?"

"That could be the case," Krieger said as he looked over the ship, "but I wasn't really in the loop on the manufacturing process or limitations in the armor. They provided me with just enough information to command the ship."

"Does it have a name?" Lucas asked.

"I was thinking of dubbing it the stingray." He had the fishbone ships, he might as well stick with the aquatic theme for his models especially if they resembled actual fish.

They all looked at him with confusion. He realized they probably didn't know what a stingray was.

"It's an Earth fish," he stated as he pulled up a picture of one next to the ship. He would have pulled up a hologram, but stingrays had gone extinct in the early twenty-second century due to planetary pollution.

He did find an article that said efforts were being made to clone many of the creatures that had gone extinct now that the Earth's environmental disasters had been mostly cleaned up. However, that article was over twenty years old and there hadn't been a follow-up on the story, so he didn't know if those efforts had succeeded or not.

"Huh," Lucas stated. "I guess it sort of does look like a stingray if you can get past the blocky exterior."

"How about this?" Alexander asked as he removed the stealth plating and replaced it with a smooth outer hull.

"Okay," the man admitted, "That looks way better. Have you been taking design courses?"

"Yes," Alexander admitted guiltily.

The group chuckled at that.

"Ok, enough teasing me about my choices, what do you think?"

"It looks good, but that doesn't really tell us how well it will function," Archie added, earning a nod from Krieger as well. "I can see it has a small bow profile, that will make it hard to hit in a frontal encounter, but as soon as something gets above or below it, it presents a big target." The man manipulated the view until the ship was facing down and they all viewed it from the top. "A good pilot can minimize that risk, but they will need to be aware of it. Let's start with what type of role you have in mind for this gunship. If it's stealth, then the profile won't matter one bit."

Much like Alexander's other constructions, he wanted this ship to serve in multiple roles and he told the group as much.

"Hmm," Branston tapped his chin in thought. "The short wings will certainly give it better glide in atmo, but we could probably shrink them slightly and reduce the cross-section. Most atmospheric flying is done through thrusters anyway. Without active control surfaces, this thing is never going to be a dedicated atmospheric fighter."

The group talked and picked apart Alexander's design choices for the next few hours until he was left with the modified stingray design.

The wings had been shortened to half their original length, necessitating moving the cannons farther in. The Gauss cannons also got replaced with railguns since a railgun packed more of a punch. The single Class 2 engine was replaced with two Class 2 engines that would be converted to compressed plasma ejection.

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He supposed that would make them Class 9 as that was the experimental designation in the STO. Even after he perfected the design, they would probably need their own class since Class 2 was composed entirely of pulsed fusion drives. He decided that he would designate them Class 2C when they were completed. The C denoted the compressed plasma nature of the new drive.

Everyone liked the inclusion of the fuel core, but Branston pointed out that alternating the vectoring of the rear thrust would allow the craft to rotate much faster, limiting its exposure to fire from the top and bottom. His suggestion was the main reason Alexander switched to two thrusters instead of the single one from his earlier design.

Having stuff like that pointed out was exactly why he wanted the input of people who actually knew spacecraft.

Alexander's detached reactor design was vetoed by the entire group in favor of a slightly larger hump in the center of the ship. That change allowed him to re-add the reactor shielding and move the miniaturized reactor into the main compartment. The group's argument that it would make doing emergency repairs much easier helped sell the idea.

A second layer of the same corporate armor went on as well, covering the majority of the ship and making it look a bit like it was wearing a shell, but with the power from two Class 2 engines, the ship had more than enough thrust to make the added weight nearly meaningless. He could probably add a third layer of armor without cutting into the performance of the sleek vessel too much, but it was already starting to look bulky and they didn't have any hard numbers on how the ship would perform yet.

He was sure once it was run through the simulations, there would need to be some tweaking.

"Are you planning on having a stealth version as well?" Krieger asked.

"I am," Alexander admitted. And he actually had an idea of how to pull that off after looking at the shell of armor around the ship. "For now, we can just use the stealth coating that Lucas developed, but in a few months, it might be possible to replace that with the same type of armor Dawn had. And I know you probably want to ask, yes, the ship has the jump mitigation built in. With gunships already being so small, I imagine not even the sensors littered around Eden's End will be able to pick them up now, which is why I am also including a communication protocol for the ships that will be hardwired into their fusion activation crystals. It will always ping our satellites, allowing us to track the ships without their transponders being active."

"What about your automated gunships?" Lucas asked.

Alexander had put a bit of thought into that and decided he wasn't going to continue building the old gunships. There was a risk someone would destroy the new gunships and get ahold of the armor, stealth coating, and design, but that was true with any ship. Even if he sent out the old automated ships, they would get destroyed, they had been destroyed in battle already. Someone could pull his pseudo-computronics from a wreck. If he was going to deploy them, he might as well ensure they had the best chance of survival.

"I'll be converting over to the stingray completely once testing is finished." Alexander pulled up the interior change, showing the bathroom, food, water storage, and the cockpit gutted and replaced with a Pseudo-computronics array powerful enough to match what was in the Eden frigates. He would have removed the oxygen recycler and the environmental controls as well, but having air allowed for much better heat dissipation from the computer core.

Eventually, he would design a liquid-cooled solution, but it wasn't strictly necessary at the moment and he was hoping Lucas would figure out the processor bandwidth issue so they could reduce the space needed for the central computer.@@novelbin@@

"Well," Branston said with a big grin as he clapped his hands together. "I can't wait to test these beauties out, when will their ugly prototype step-sibling be ready?"

Alexander chuckled at the mental image. "Three weeks. I included a full week for stress testing, so be ready for a lot of work."