32 Preemptive Strike 4

"They really can't see us."

Don had maneuvered the Noah to an area orthogonal to the plane of expected fire vectors. If the fleet's line of travel was considered a line headed directly north with Uranus' rings being the plane of the map, then he was due east with the planet to the west.

He was currently sitting in what would normally be called a 'kill zone'. His position was open to enemy fire from their entire broadsides, with no celestial bodies to use as cover. Normally this would be suicide at the range he was at, but they were none the wiser to his presence.

Plus, this position gave him the best sensor profiles of the dock. His angle was damn near a perfect 30 degrees off of their horizontal (long) dimension, so he had flat armor faces for his sensors to bounce off and they were further distinguished by the 'hole' that the dockyard made in the ring. There would be little to no false feedback from rocks in the vicinity.

There wouldn't be overlapping hulls either, so he could see everything.

Another reason this position was ideal was that once the chaos began, there would be no interference by friendly fire. The margins between the enemy docks were large enough that radiation clouds from direct hits and explosions would not reach the profile of the nearest ship.

"Do you think we could remain hidden even after we start firing?"

"Unlikely. The coating on the Noah only prevents detection from wavelength that are either internal to or make contact with it. The external magnetic field generated by the railguns will expose your position in a heartbeat."

"That's true. I suppose that level of energy would be impossible to disguise. Does that coating also apply to gravity fields?"

"No. Gravity is less of a wavelength or energy and more of a law. With our current level of technology these field can be manipulated, but never eliminated. I believe the relatively low mass of the Noah to be part of the design decision with this in mind."

"And how did you come to that conclusion?"

"Would you expect an object with the mass of slightly oversize corvette to have the firepower of a capital class railgun?"

No. In fact he hadn't believed it until he actually fired the damn things.

Don had long since been interested in the field of designing a ship. He had the know-how and he would soon have more than adequate field experience, he just never had the chance. He had a few mock-ups of hull designs and theoretical operational doctrines drawn up during his (limited) free time, but he was disappointed to find that hull design and doctrine was pretty much optimized.

There were only so many way to shrug off heavy weaponry, and large amounts of armor were all of them. You always needed the section expected to face the majority of fire to be heavily angled and have a LOT of metal, so that really limited the shapes available.

In the past, experiments were done with a hull shape reminiscent of the old film series 'Star Wars'" imperial Star Destroyers, a wedge shape with all firepower facing forward. It was found to have a few major problems, some of the less serious ones being the exposed backside and inefficient use of volume, but perhaps the biggest problem was the thing couldn't fucking turn from an enemy to retreat.

It turns out putting the majority of the thrust facing backwards meant that you cold really only move forward, and if this area had ALL of your main thrusters then you could not afford to expose it to enemy fire. If you needed to disengage, you would need to turn around, exposing them to the enemy while ALSO completely putting he enemy in the blind spot of your own weapons.

Not really a smart design decision.

'Death Box,' and yes that is the proper name for the hull case layout, remains the dominant hull design.

Don could see some variation moored down there, a double angle casing on one of them, gentle sloping fore and aft on a few. There was actually a half-wedge amongst the Large Cruisers, a design that likely focused on closing the distance using the side with more thrusters.

One of the heavy cruisers was distinctly disc shaped, a design that while feasible in theory was absolute dogshit in practice. Having guns facing every direction was not useful if the enemy was only attacking from one direction. This was counteracted to some degree by slowly rotating the ship, but that was horrendously inaccurate at range.

"As I thought, Death Box is Best Box. A frame in the general shape of a hexagonal prism is without equal when it comes to long range combat efficiency."

"What are you talking about?"

"Nothing much. I was just musing to myself over how we have effectively perfected the hull form of capital ships. Armor effectiveness to volume usage is simply unmatched with any other design."

"I see." ARC did not comment further, something that Don took as a sign of agreement. ARC did not find further elaboration on topics they were in agreement on to be productive, so it had an annoying habit of effectively ignoring conversation starters.

"ETA of the strike craft?"

"4 minutes until they enter quiet communications range. Ten minutes to transmit attack orders and designate danger zones."

He admired the design of the largest ships, and he was about to communicate with some one piloting his least favorite design that he found a grotesque fascination with.

The Domino Class Bomber Striker.