Wrath of the Outer Rim : Episode II

While placing the order for two Venators was an investment I'm confident would pay off, the fact that it was possible was worrisome. It had been just barely a year since the war on Naboo when I had discovered that KDY had quietly put the Venator-class Star Destroyer on the open market. Not an impossible development cycle, but definitely implausible. The reason was obvious of course, Palpatine had been caught off guard by the way his machinations had snowballed into a full fledged ground war, and was either accelerating his plans for a Republic civil war, or he was preparing for the possibility of a war he didn't mean to cause.

How he had been able to speed up development like that, I couldn't say, but it likely involved either a great deal of money, or force bullshit. Possibly both.

Kuat had tried to keep their new line of capital ships quiet, likely at Palpatine's direction. Obviously he wouldn't want anyone else being able to get their hands on his warships. That said, Republic laws didn't really allow for secretly developing warships. If you knew to look for it, you could find it. Better still, one of the few benefits of the armament restrictions was that nobody ever bothered restricting the sale of warships to private individuals. Why bother, with even state military ships limited by the restrictions, they could always just purchase a comparable ship from a rival, less scrupulous shipyard.

Of course, the Venators as they currently existed lacked much of their canon armament. Their main batteries in particular, the eight ventral turrets alongside the bridge were missing entirely. They were, however, deliberately designed to have those weapons easily added in later during a "refit." The mounts were already in place, just waiting for the armament restrictions to be lifted. Best of all, whoever had written the armament restrictions had forgotten mass drivers were a thing. When my Venators were completed, their first stop would be a Trade Federation shipyard, where they'd have quad barreled, twenty inch rail guns installed in place of their canon dual barreled turbolaser turrets. I was tempted to do something similar with my Lucrehulk, but the problem there was reloading the guns. The Venator's main batteries were all close enough together to be fed from a single ammunition bunker, converted from hangar space. Getting complete coverage on a Lucrehulk would mean spreading ammunition bunkers out across the entire ship. Right there just wasn't anything in the galaxy that was capable of penetrating a lucrehulk's shields, not after my enhanced shields had become the standard. If I really needed firepower, it'd be more cost effective to purchase more strike craft, or dedicated escorts.

There were a few other modifications I had in mind. I had originally intended to move the bridge from the conning tower, when I discovered that there was in fact a reason for that in the star wars universe. I doubted it would apply in a universe more in line with my previous life's laws of physics, but my original plan, moving the bridge to the Venator's center of mass, would have been a very bad idea. As it turns out, impacts to a ship's shields tended to cause power fluctuations. One of the secondary measure's of a ship's shield strength is how well a ship's electrical systems as a whole handled these fluctuations; the strongest shields in the galaxy could earn a poor rating in an evalutation if your systems were overloaded by the feedback. How did this relate to placing bridge where it was? Simple, the closer you are to the ship's generators, the more affected you'll be by a power surge. Given that the bridge tended to be the single greatest concentration of electronics on any given ship...

Kuat's engineers called it "Shield cooking," named after historical records noting that poorly placed bridges tended to result in the entirety of the command crew being lethally electrocuted by a power surge under heavy fire. The Kuat's elevated conning towers were the simplest way to avoid having a ship's leadership being decapitated by such a surge. The bridge's shield emitters were reinforced to be the strongest point of the shields across the entire ship. The shields protecting the bridge were always the last section to fail. They were vulnerable to to certain kinds of fire, mainly kinetic projectiles which could ignore energy shielding, but the bridge was a small, difficult target, near impossible to hit anywhere other than point blank range. Guided munitions were little better, modern electronic warfare could throw missiles kilometers off course unless fired from close range, and guidance computers that could overcome that were better used as the brain for a droid bomber.

That's not to say the raised bridge wasn't a potential liability, it's just that shield cooking was a bigger one.

Moving the bridge having been shot down, that left more mundane changes, such as converting most of the immense hangers to cargo bays, and packing the remainder with droid fighters. Oh, and installing central computer cores similar to the one on a Lucrehulk, and loading it with my distributed AI software.

Nothing major. Nope.

This would all take a good two years at best. KDY's shipyards would take the better part of a decade to fully reactivate and retool their drydocks and reach the immense production capacity they had in canon. I couldn't have my refits done in KDY's shipyards either; having them done in a Trade Federation shipyard would allow me to patent the changes under my own name and hopefully hinder Palpatine's likely attempts to benefit from my work.

Two years to kill... well then. This train was already derailed, time to take advantage of that. Within the privacy of my captain's quarters, I began researching Ryloth's economy. I had always wanted to visit Vegas... Lacking that option, I'd have to build my own.