16 Chapter 16
"Can't believe I haven't won even once since our first battle!"
"Observation: While your meatbag is superior to other people's meatbag Master, at the end of the day, it is still a meatbag, Master. You cannot hope to match the superiority of a droid's body and particularly a superiorly crafted body such as mine.
Addendum: Your victory in the first battle was entirely due to my limited knowledge of my target. Given time I can kill anyone or anything."
"Don't feed me that bantha crap. I am only losing to you because you have had significant time to polish your combat with your learning algorithms, whereas this is my first true combat experience with skilled opponents"
"Advisement: It is not too good for one to have hope on something they may never achieve Master."
Renato knew he wouldn't win this verbal spar with HK, so he decided to go back to work on some research as he was too tired to do any more physical training.
While on the way, however, one of the newly rescued R2 units came and informed him that Paddy had asked for him.
"Young Master, the huragoks have completed their work on the Hammerhead cruiser and it is now completely operational. However, while we can slave the cruiser like the other ships, it will become increasingly hard to maintain control in an effective manner as the processing power I possess is limited.
If there is a large-scale battle, then it is very likely that we would suffer heavy damage."
"That is indeed a problem. So, what would you suggest? You only bring up a topic if you can't already do it, or if you need my input."
"My young master is so sweet that he takes care of and notices the behaviours of us droid servants. I have two plans from which young master can choose.
The first plan is to stay here on Mustafar until you complete your research and then completely go in with the plan for building a new ship.
The second plan temporarily abandons the larger ships while you travel with the yt-frieghter."
Renato sat down in his trusty floating chair as he thought through both of the options. On the one hand, the second plan was more tempting as he was honestly getting frustrated with his limited number of social interactions over the years.
Not to mention the fact that because of his massive growth rate and vitality, he was incredibly horny and was itching for some companionship.
The second plan, however, sacrificed some of the safety he felt with the larger ships for freedom. However, as soon as this thought came to his mind, he knew he had subconsciously already chosen the first option.
Because he knew freedom without security was a lie. Without security, no matter how free you are, there is a chance someone can steal it from you. While he had the confidence that he could escape any situation, he would cause incidents that would be detrimental to his future plans.
He hardened his heart and told Paddy, "Sigh, we are going with the first plan. However, since we are going through this plan, what are our resources?"
"You don't need to worry, young master. We have enough food and water to last at least two years with your consumption, which we got from the pirates."
"Ok, now that we have decided, I think the first thing I would require from you is to put a bounty on the holonet to get you to access to Rendili Stardrive's company systems. It shouldn't be too high considering that we don't want them to steal anything, just to plant a bug.
When you do get access, I want you to get me the plans for the dreadnaught-class ships they are making. For this bounty, you can take the money from the pirate's bank account.
Next, I will give you several designs for instruments for my studies in Ultra-chrome alloy. Please have the huragoks make them. This is a priority as we cannot do anything but wait for the plans of the dreadnaught."
"Of course, young master, it will be done. However, this process also showed one of the problems we will face in the future. Mainly our funds are very small, so far, we have been able to survive by scavenging, but in the future, if we want the freedom to travel the galaxy, I think we should look into getting a more constant stream of money.
There is also the fact that if we are looking to build a huge ship such as the dreadnaught there won't be enough crew to operate the ship."
"Yeah, I will think about it when I have time. Also, please send the blueprints of everything the Huragoks obtained from the hammerhead cruiser"
Renato gave a nod to Paddy and moved up to his room. Now that he had moved up his plan to make the ship, he first needed to divide the steps he needed to complete before he could build the new ship.
1. He needed to go over the shield generator technology from both universes and try to find a way to combine both of them.
2. He needs to complete his studies into ultra-chrome
3. He needs to make plans for the ship
4. He needed to make plans for the fighter crafts for the ship
5. He needed to make droids to serve as crew for the ship
Of the new blueprints from the hammerhead cruiser, there was already a blueprint for the personal shield generator and the blueprints for the ship's shield generator. He also collected the shield generator blueprints from his other ships as well and truly started comparing the knowledge from the Halo verse and the Star Wars verse.
What he concluded from all these blueprints and data was surprising because he found that Halo and Star Wars shields were surprisingly similar in technology. The only difference was that while the Star Wars universe shield technology and theory were much superior to the Halo one, while the Halo verse had solved one of the pain points of the Star Wars shield technology.
Shielding in Star Wars is typically divided into particle shielding and energy shielding, with typical energy shielding being more common and particle shielding being too large and taking too much energy to fit on smaller vessels. Whereas the Halo shielding technology has found a way to combine both particle and energy shields into a single cohesive shield. It also had better shield manipulation technology that reduced the shield to just the surface of the object that needed to be covered.
This meant that the new shield technology would be far more efficient as it simply needed to cover a much smaller area controlled to the surface of the ship and it didn't need to power two different shield generators in a battle giving it a much higher endurance than typical shields.
While it may look counter-intuitive to link your particle shield to your energy shield, it would however make sense when you consider that both the particle and energy use the same amount of energy when used separately. This means you end up supporting two shields and due to the nature of the battlefield, you will at times need to support one type of shield over the other, leaving the other shield weaker and prone to attack if the enemy were to find out your actions.
That doesn't mean that Star Wars shielding doesn't do anything better than the halo verse. Star Wars shielding went around this issue of shields taking too much energy with a surprisingly novel approach of making the shields reactive only to the areas that are being attacked. That meant that instead of having 100% shielding all the time, the shield would be at a constant low power mode that, when being attacked turns the specific area that is being attacked into 100% Shielding.
Since the technology is already similar and very compatible already, Renato only took a small amount of time combining the shield technologies. Now he had brought the personal shield generator back to the forefront of the Star Wars universe after more than 1000 years.
His second part of the plan, that is the ultra-chrome research, was the longest part of the whole plan. He had been working on Ultra-chrome research for at least 1 week when he found a breakthrough in the research.
The breakthrough came through when he was thinking of other materials that he could substitute for ultra-chrome if and when either the raw materials were unavailable or simply unusable due to the prohibitive costs.
From the knowledge of Halo verse, he remembered the knowledge of graphene. Graphene was already present in the Star Wars universe but wasn't widely adopted because of the prohibitive manufacturing costs and wasn't looked into too much because they already had stronger natural metals like phrik.
It was a classic case of 'if you have something natural already, why research into alternatives?', this was one of the eternal knots of the scientific community in the sense that the financial overlords don't want to put money into research unless they are driven to a dead-end of commercial exploitation and it proves to be unsustainable.
Thankfully, Renato had knowledge of the UNSC's graphene manufacturing technology. With the knowledge creeping into his mind, he had a sudden inspiration for ultra-chrome alloy. His idea is to try using a nano alloying and shaping technique.
With that idea, he was very quickly able to make some experimental batches of ultra-chrome. To his surprise, the experimental batch was already behaving extremely similar to the ultra-chrome and he wasn't out of ideas to improve the alloy yet.
He had further planned to study the crystalline structure and the interactions between the atoms of the metals to create a nanostructure just like graphene to further increase the properties of ultra-chrome.
From there it was a slog of work to constantly experiment with new structures, note the effects and hypothesise the causes of the effects of the structure, rinse and repeat a few hundred times in a period of two weeks to finally crystallise his efforts into his new alloy Nanochrome.
For the next step, he decided that he needed a bit of a change of pace and decided to make droids. He came back to the holoboard as he started making plans for droids, he was getting exhausted as there were too many positions in a starship and making a single droid for all the positions would be possible but too unrealistic.
Because one of the decisions he made while going into the research for the plans of the droids and the ship was the manufacturability of the plans. While he was alone now, he wouldn't always be alone and he needed to prepare for the future. Making plans multiple times would soon turn exhausting so instead, he wanted to future proof his plans a bit by making them so that they could be easily manufactured.
He was having trouble getting ideas for the droids when something Doc said while healing him after his daily sparring sessions with HK triggered a memory.
She asked him, "On a scale of 1-10 how would you rate your pain?"
This triggered his memory of Baymax. It was there that he found the solution to all of his problems and even possibly unearthed a gold mine.
All this time he had been in the Star Wars universe and studying its technology made him fall into the same trap that the Star Wars universe had fallen into and started designing droids based on profession when you can just create an all-rounder droid.
He was simply going to make a droid design that would be almost universal and instead make the programming modules hot-swappable like Baymax.
After spending a day or two making plans for the droid body, he had finally made the perfect mass-manufacturable droid that could do almost all the jobs that humans could do. The final droid design ended up looking like Chappie from the movie Chappie.
While most of the budget of the droid went into the body of the droid itself, he had sacrificed the processing and memory part of the droid. While the droid would be fine in most professions, anything that needed a significant amount of processing power such as astronavigation, medical, experimental etc, would not be possible on the droid.
Instead, he spent the rest of the day programming different modules for different professions. Each droid could hold at most 3 modules at once with the higher end model which he was going to use in the ship being able to hold 5 modules.
The fact of the matter was he was going to massively sweep the low and mid-tier droid market in the future. This would also solve the funding problem he has been having however it will also make him the target of all the droid companies.
So, he instead wanted to leave them a way to survive and instead decided that he would make the droids his iPhone and turn all the existing droid corporations into his app store suppliers taking a piece of the pie from all their sales of any future modules.
Now that most of the requirements were met, he was going to get started on the plans for the ships and the fighters. It was just in time as well because someone took up their bounty and was able to plant a connection in Rendili Stardrive's database.
The reason why Renato asked for the plans of the dreadnought was that the ship he was planning to build would be similar to most of the aspects of the dreadnought. The other reason was that he was intrigued by the modular weapons platform approach of the dreadnaught.
The ship Renato had planned for would have an alligator-shaped body, with two of the larger ion engines sticking to the side, and two smaller ones sticking to the back to give increased manoeuvrability by a variable thrust in the engines. It boasts an incredible 10x Quad laser cannon, 20x Turbo-lasers, numerous ion cannons, 5 UNSC style variable mac warhead launchers with more than 100 payloads of plasma, concussive, and other types of missiles.
It had fighter launching bays to the bottom of the ship contained through the rib structure of the interior of the ship that could fit 14 fighters. The ship could carry a whopping 9000 tonnes of cargo, and could possibly hold up to 3000 troops for at least a year. He had made a multi-layered armoured plating that was modular enough that armour could be easily replaced if needed. Each armour plate was a hexagon.
It came fitted with his new style shield generators and came with long-range communications systems, a sensor package for all three ranges short, medium and long. It had a concealed bridge and also had numerous escape pods.
It came in at a whopping 614 metres in length and Renato already loved the ship to bits. He had made sure that the ship would be usable for a future organic crew when he had one. Most of the ship's structural support and key areas were made with nano chrome along with the computational systems and various wiring.
For the fighters, he made a plane-like fighter that had three main guns. Two on the wings and one on the tail of the fighter. It had a torpedo storage area in the belly of the fighter and could launch them at tremendous speed with its magnetic accelerator cannon along its length.
It came with an ion engine which had been specially modified with Rendili's whisperthrust engine and a small hyperdrive. He also borrowed from future x-wing fighters and gave them an area in which an astromech droid can be docked below the fighter's seat. It was 13m in length and was 10.6m wide. It had a transparisteel canopy. It had an ejector seat, where it would eject the cockpit in the case of destruction and had all the functions of an escape pod.
When he finalised the plans, he was more than excited for a chance to truly make his own real deal starship, which was not made of legos. He made a short supply run to Hutt space and spent all of his money to buy phrik and cortosis for the ultra-chrome.
His payments even attracted the attention of some bandits trying to steal from him, but he lost them easily due to the much superior performance of his Atlas (yt-1300 freighter) improved by the huragoks.
The huragoks in the meantime had made a new huragok which was aptly named Floats-above-others, or Flao as Renato called it.
"So Paddy, what are your thoughts on the ship and the droids?"
"You have outdone yourself, young master, the ship is a marvel of engineering, and one day when the ship is revealed to the wider galaxy, there would be a lot of people trying to learn its design principles.
As for the droids, as an ex-droid myself, I am quite conflicted. As your personal assistant, I am very happy for you to discover such a huge financial asset for the future. But as an ex-droid, I cannot help but look down on these dumb guys."
"Ah? Why the hostility to the droids Paddy? Wait, I think I know why! You are a performancist! I read a paper on it before. It is said that all droids tend to look down on droids with much less computational power than them.
My god! I didn't know that I was in the presence of such a bigoted A.I. that looks down on others for things, not in their control. Maybe this is what they say that a person shows their true colours when they are in a position of power. Maybe I have to re-evaluate my friendship with you just because you are being a performancist!"
Paddy's hologram immediately had a blush on it from her apparent shame. But she quickly recovered and fired back.
"Says the guy who always lords over that his meatbag is superior to others."
"Ah! You wound me deeply Paddy! But I know who corrupted you to be a performancist, it was HK, right? He is a bad influence on everybody! Why just the other day I saw him giving lectures to Orbo on using his various tools as weapons. He is trying to destroy my poor Orbo's innocence. Just wait till the next sparring session and I will give him a piece of my mind!"
"Hmph! It would have been more convincing if you could beat HK in even a single fight since your first win. Anyway, coming to the topic at hand, according to the Huragoks, it will take at least one month uninterrupted to complete the ship and the fighters."
"One month! So long! I thought it would take a week at most."
Paddy's hologram gave him a deadpan stare as she stated. "Unlike before, they are going to build a ship from scratch instead of repairing and optimising already built systems. It is already the fastest a ship of this size has been built in the galaxy and it is all because of their in-body nano forges. To be honest, I have always wondered how you gained their loyalty young master."
Renato gave an awkward laugh to try and cover up his nervousness over Paddy's line of questioning and instead decided to divert the topic.
"Anyway, after the ship is built, I feel like I have the next destination for our journey. Dac"
"Dac? Do you mean the Mon Calamari world? Why?" asked Paddy curiously.
"I had a force vision of myself on the Planet holding a new lightsaber. Hopefully, I will find my lightsaber crystals there."
