Chapter 42: Socializing and Ships

Unfortunately, Jon was not content to leave me in my indolent, fiction-consuming ways. That was why we were at this godawful dinner party. As much as I loved Naboo’s environment, the freedom, the ability to enjoy the future, the people could be really tiresome. Especially those who were political.

“You know, that’s the real problem with the Republic,” this one vapid twit was saying. She was in her twenties, blonde, svelte, fashionable, and sort of artsy in her dress. “The wealthy, the corporations, they aren’t stepping up and doing their bit.”

I’d had enough.

“No, that’s not the problem. The problem is everyone always wants to make things someone else’s problem. Look at the Republic. It’s totally moribund. It’s defunct, politically and morally. There’s no proper law enforcement; the Republic Judicial Department’s a joke, and the Sector Rangers are so toothless they don’t even make a pretense of enforcing the law outside of sectors which are already lawful! There’s widespread corruption, including at the highest political levels. Sentient droid-intelligences are regularly mind wiped. And slavery, whether de jure or de facto, slavery is a regular part of life for many so called Republican systems!

“And we sit here. We sit here, as people are facing truly heinous shit. Starvation, lack of clean water, easily prevented or treated illnesses, forced child conscription, systematic rape, honest-to-god slavery. It’s happening somewhere, right now. I’m not being facetious. It’s a human problem. We had it back on my homeworld, too.

“We could certainly do something about these problems. And I don’t mean we collectively, but we individually. You, individually. It wouldn’t be hard. Half a credit would buy netting, allowing someone to live a life without getting infected by pathogens spread by small insects. Half a credit per person would allow for wells and clean water supplies. Sithspit, we could hire mercenaries to provide protection while trainers teach locals how to defend their communities. Hire tutors, or provide droids, to improve the opportunities available to the most abandoned. Help bring people out of poverty, out of ignorance.

“But we don’t. At the end of the day, it’s just not our problem, is it? Hell, that dirty kid who lives at the end of the street, the one with bags under their eyes from a lack of iron in their shitty diet, who flinches whenever you pass by on the sidewalk... they're not your problem either.

“And its fucking terrible, but that's humanity for you. We’d rather go out, drink and dine, and give no thought to how those credits could literally save lives.

“And given all that, you have the gall, the sheer fucking balls to show up here, and complain about how other people aren’t doing enough?

“If you’re living in the smallest, cheapest place you can that’s still reasonably clean and close to work, if you eat cheap but nutritious food, avoid wasting money, and you give everything else, all that money you don’t actually need to help those that do, then I’ll apologize. But if you don’t… if you don’t you’re just a fucking hypocrite.”

Half the room was silent, listening to my rant. The other half was whispering behind their hands about me. Jon had facepalmed. The girl I’d gone off on was literally in tears.

Her date, a young man in the local equivalent of a blazer and slacks, was glaring at me. “Oh, and you’re some paragon of virtue are you? I’ve heard about you, Gangari, throwing credits around like they’re water.”

“You’re right. But I don’t preach the gospel of redistribution and someone-else’s-responsibility. I don’t see being here, eating this meal, spending these credits, as something immoral. If it’s your money, spend it as you like so long as you’re not doing harm. Actual harm, not just an absence of good. As far as I’m concerned, among the natural rights of sentients are these: First, a right to life. Second, to liberty. And third, to property. Together with the right to defend these rights in the best manner they can.

“I’ll try and leave the galaxy a better place than I entered it, but that’s because I’m a good person. Not because I’m inherently responsible for the galaxy. I’m responsible for me and mine, and no further.”

By then, the party was very, very awkward. Our host was stuck somewhere in between glee (her party would definitely be the talk of the city), fury and embarrassment.

“If you’ll excuse me, I have pressing business elsewhere,” I said, then got up and left, motioning to Jon to stay and do damage control.

But I hadn’t lied. I was disgusted by what I’d been learning of the Republic. As bad as Earth, including the US, or parts of it at least could be, it was nothing compared to the modern Republic.

Honestly, I sort of blamed the Jedi. It seemed that they’d become even more fanatical and puritan than they’d been portrayed as in the movies I was familiar of that depicted Revan’s age. Apparently they didn’t even believe in sex anymore, which was fucking crazy considering Force abilities were known to be hereditary. It didn’t even make sense considering the Jedi’s founder, Nomi Sunrider, was married and had children of her own, plus there was Revan and Bastila’s romance and many, many more examples among the top Jedi of various epochs – all a matter of common historical record.

To make things worse, the Jedi had absorbed a lot of the responsibilities for galactic stability. That left something like ten thousand Jedi who were from what I could gather weaker on average than those from previous eras, trying to police ten billion times their number. Imagine that Earth had a single high level FBI agent analogue; no matter what they did, they’d be bound to fail to make a significant dent on crime (or manage anything productive really).

I did intend to leave the Republic better than I found it. The biggest problem was with scale. The Republic had one thousand sectors, each with an average of a hundred thousand systems with a known Republic presence (even if it was just a navigation buoy). Granted, most of these were very sparsely populated, but there were still around a hundred trillion Republican citizens.

I was thinking about going after the slave trade, but that meant eventually going after the Hutts. Hutt space, comparatively, was much more rimward, ie in the direction of the less dense collection of solar systems at the galaxy’s edge, compared to the very densely populated systems in the core. So, even though volume-wise it was about a quarter the size of the Republic on stellar maps, it had far fewer inhabitants. Overall, the best estimates were that they had a population of about a hundred and twenty five billion, maybe twice that counting slaves and non-citizens.

Far more than I wanted to deal with, to be honest. Plus then I’d be left holding the bag with respect to reformation, the economic upheaval, and so on for some two-hundred-fifty billion sentients. Not exactly what I wanted to be doing.

The other primary targets, while smaller, were still too large for me to take over at that time. The Senex-Juvex region, ruled by a slaving aristocracy, had a population of about eighty billion. It was much less centered around criminal enterprise, which made it far likelier as a target than Hutt space, but still too large. The Zygerrians, a race of near-humans some twenty billion in population, ruled a part of the Chorlian sector and had a state-sponsored slavers guild responsible for taking tens of millions into slavery each year. Despite how much I wanted to, they were still too large to go after.

No, if I wanted to do something, my best bet was to target a simple criminal organization. The Karazak Slavers Cooperative, based out of Karazak in the Sujimis sector in the Outer Rim territory was thought to contain some ten thousand members, while the planet itself was likely only inhabited by a few million. The Thalassian Slavers Guild, another group of independent slavers based out of the Meram sector, were of similar size but was far to the galactic north of Naboo.

In a few years time, when I had a small fleet of ships, and had developed a modern military force, I’d show those bastards what it meant to be holding the other end of the stick.

But it certainly said something about the Republic, that it allowed these filth to survive for centuries, especially when the slavers didn’t even pretend to hide their activities and stood no chance against even the relatively toothless Republic forces.

=================================

It seemed that my outburst had made me a less attractive dinner companion, and over the next few months I was mostly left alone to focus on my newly arrived ship. Jon kindly took on my social duties in my stead. The PB-950 Platinum Executive edition arrived about a month after I entered the Star Wars reality. I named it the Nostos, or homecoming in Greek, hoping that it would be a lucky name.

Part of the purchase included four crewmembers who were experts with that ship class to train me and my men and droids in basic piloting, navigation, maintenance and operation of the ship. I of course immediately took their patterns when I shook their hands; there was no way that I or my Paragons, all of us coming from relatively savage technological backgrounds, would be as skilled as the experts.

So, in the afternoons I learned to fly and fight a modern ship, while in the mornings my engineer Sola, and a small horde of droids and I took that ship apart. There were three ways to improve the ship.

First, and perhaps easiest, was applying purely magical enchantments with purely magical effects to the ship itself. That was relatively easy, and something I didn’t need Sola’s help for. But it was also limited; for the most part, it only really meant that my ship had a layer of magical shielding on top of its technological measures. Granted, that magical shielding would allow it to at least survive and escape from even a capital ship’s attentions (at least for a little bit of time), but it was still limited in improving the ship’s function.

This basic upgrade formed the Mk. 1 Nostos.

Second, and still fairly easy but tedious was improving the function of different components through the use of my magic. This took the part of imbuing devices with color-oriented conceptual upgrades, as well as improving the technological functions of different parts. A ship has a lot of parts, but they can be roughly grouped into a few sections: hull (including armor), shields, hyperdrive, sub-light drive, inertial compensators, power-plant, sensors, navigation, communications, life-support and armament.

Third, and strictly for the future, was designing a ship from the ground up to work with magic. A true, optimized fusion of technology and magic. Eventually I had plans for massive living ships, balanced between different mana sources and capable of acting as their own mana-wells to power their enchantments. But that was definitely for the distant future.

We tested using the Valyrian blessing on various materials, and found that it worked best on metals, giving a proportional upgrade. I immediately added making a set of Valyrian steel blades out of Songsteel and acquiring Beskar armor for my men to my to-do list, though I didn’t have the time deal with it then.

It was a good thing that I could summon up extra material once I had its pattern; Sola quickly fell in love with the idea of using Beskar throughout the ship, and there wasn’t enough of the rare metal available on the entire galactic market for a ship even so small as the Nostos.

But when it came down to it, raw materials were easy. What was time consuming was improving individual components in all the myriad of ways that I could, then sending parts off for testing. After individual components were understood, they would be put together into larger and larger sub-units of the ship’s devices, with settings refined to account for the changed performance.

Each time, they would need more testing to see how that larger unit operated, especially as different parts’ magic interacted with each other. Sometimes this was synergistic, sometimes it was very much not. Eventually, we ended up with individual parts which were then ready for re-inclusion into the ship.

This was a time consuming process, though much of that was basic tests that the droids, or sometimes outside expert engineering consulting services did in the background. Everything was going about to schedule, which listed twenty weeks to complete the Mk.2 Nostos. It was going to be a real beauty.

The hull was the first part upgraded, and in many ways the easiest as it was only really structural. We used a combination of phrik, a very durable and light metal, with beskar (also called Mandalorian iron) which was denser but even more durable. A thin skin of durasteel was applied on top to avoid sensors detecting the beskar, then a sensor-deflecting coating on top of that.

My previous training in smithing, and experience in making Valyrian blades allowed me to figure out how to give it the concept of defense, much like a Valyrian sword had the concept of cutting. This made the hull more than simply blessed; it was true Valyrian armor. The sensor deflecting coating was further enhanced with the Blue concept of avoiding notice. The whole thing was further enhanced with my recently developed anti-laser and anti-particle shielding, then given White-based conceptual armor, and projectile shields attached to large enchantment points made from my enhanced dragon-bone.

I had wanted to use a layer of ultrachrome, a silvery super-conductor that excelled at deflecting laser blasts, over a layer of living ice which would massively improve resistance to laser-attacks. Unfortunately, that proved impossible. On Naboo, only the Royal Yacht was allowed to be entirely coated in ultrachrome, and even markings using it were reserved for vessels in royal service.

Further, there were issues with powering active enchantments on spaceships. Unlike when on a planet, where the enchantments’ mana stores could and would recharge from the ambient mana field, in space there was no ambient mana. That meant that unless I was present, the enchantments would run down as they were used. That was one of the major reasons behind my desire to develop fully integrated techno-magical living ships, which could serve as their own mana source.

Short of that, or developing a way to transfer mana over massive distances without my own attention and input, having active enchantment effects form a critical part of the structural stability of the ship was insane. Passive magical upgrades, like the use of Valyrian-modified metals, either didn’t degrade, or did so slowly enough as not to matter.

The general upgrade to the efficiency, resilience, conductivity, and other desired behavior of different electrical components made a massive improvement to the more sophisticated components as well.

The biggest improvement was in the power-plant; by reducing resistance in electrical connections, that massively reduced heat buildup. Improving material performance for the reactor vessel reduced wear, increased life-expectancy, and most importantly allowed for a higher-energy reaction to take place, increasing peak power availability when it was needed.

The shields also experienced massive improvements. There were two critical metrics for shield performance: peak output, and maximum recharge rate. Peak output determined how large of an impact the shields could resist before the shield generator overloaded. Maximum recharge rate impacted how well they held up against sustained bombardment. Both depended a lot on how resilient the shield parts were, and improved by orders of magnitude with my magical treatments. Efficiency, which affected shield strength as well as waste-heat, which limited shield sustainment times both improved as well, though not as significantly.

With ultra-rare and high performance alloys, as well as the magical enhancement, my hull gave protection several times better than a typical frigate’s per unit surface area. Between all of the improvements to the shields, the greater power-draw they could take from the improved power-plant, and the relatively small area they had to cover, the shields had the performance expected of a frigate, rather than a humble patrol boat.

Considering that my ship was a much smaller target than a frigate, and there were magical shields and improvements too, its survivability was far superior.

The inertial compensators and sub-light drive were together responsible for how fast the ship could accelerate outside of hyperspace. A normal Platinum Executive version of the PB-950 could manage two thousand g’s of acceleration, which was good, and only really beaten by dedicated space-superiority fighters and interceptors. Fully upgraded and enchanted, the new drives were projected to manage four thousand g’s of acceleration, fully twice as good as before, and at least as fast as all but the most agile interceptor-fighters.

The weapons saw similar improvements, hitting harder and firing faster than they could have been expected to do otherwise. The ship came with a quad laser cannon, which was mostly effective against fighters and lightly protected civilian freighters commonly used by smugglers. After being upgraded, it was powerful enough to be effective against heavier fighters and bombers, as well as light patrol craft like the PB-950. The nose-mounted ion cannons, designed to immobilize small craft and unshielded freighters for capture experienced comparable improvements.

But overall, the PB-950 wasn’t really designed to go against other warships, focusing on customs patrol and anti-fighter work. It was a lack that Sola was planning on correcting in the future with the addition of one or more options out of blaster turrets, proton torpedoes and magically-powered spell-cannons, but that was for later generations of the Nostos.

This meant that the big winner weapons wise were the concussion missiles. Between an enchantment with enough mana to generate four times as many missile reloads as the ship normally carried, as well as the enhancement to missile speed and targeting, magical protection against point defense fire, and huge improvement in payload damage, the concussion missiles made the ship a legitimate threat to a corvette or even, with a bit of luck, a frigate. Worst case, between the Nostos and a frigate, the Nostos should at least be able to damage it enough with the missiles to render it combat ineffective and then escape.

Ironically the biggest upgrade to the weapons effectiveness wasn’t in the weapons themselves, but in the sensors. I managed to get the sensors to not just operate better, with a greater ability to sense what was truly there at a greater distance, but to be precognitive by a full two and a half seconds. In space combat, time was distance. Two and a half seconds meant that the effective range of any laser weapon increased by seven hundred and fifty thousand kilometers when their normal effective range was a tenth of that.

In the Star Wars universe, there was one group that easily claimed the position of top-dogs when it came to fighter-pilots: the Jedi. From looking at records of space-combat, I estimated that a good Jedi Ace, their pilot specialists, might have as many as five full seconds of precog in combat. This meant they were almost never hit, and almost always hit their own targets.

I wondered at first why people used actual flesh and blood pilots, rather than removing the human from the equation to eke out a bit of extra acceleration and remove all the cost for life support. Then I looked at statistics that showed trained fighter pilots managed a .1 second precognitive advantage, did a back of the envelope calculation, and understood.

Without precognition (in other words with a drone pilot) for a ship firing a hundred pulse laser burst (which many ships could manage in about a tenth of a second and is a fairly normal targeting time for a fighter), there is a 18% chance of at least one hit on a typically-sized enemy fighter at .35 seconds distance (ie, one hundred thousand kilometers range with a laser). This improves to 54% chance of landing a hit with that trained fighter pilot.

Now, that’s for 0.1 seconds precognition. A Jedi pilot will land every shot at that range, and into critical components too. And now, with my new sensor system, my ship’s auto-aimer was about as good as a standard, non-specialized Jedi-knight. I could upgrade individuals with enchantments to have a similar level of precognition on top of that, though there were significantly diminishing returns using a precognitive operator on the precognitive sensors. My sensors combined with the improved acceleration also meant that my ship was nightmarishly dodgy.

Navigation was harder to improve with magic. Overall, I could make the computer slightly faster, and used a Blue-based precognition effect to skip over actually calculating things, instead looking into the future that would-have-happened had the computer actually done the calculations. That made it possible to do more complex navigational maneuvers much faster, especially for hyperspace translations. But while it would help with blockade-running, it wasn’t the sort of massive advantage that I saw in other improvements.

Similarly, the actual hyperdrive was something I was wary of fucking with too much. Hyperspace physics were… difficult. The hyperdrive itself was basically archeotech, and despite tens of millennia of research its underlying principles weren’t actually well understood. Faster drive ratings were as much luck as they were proper experimentation, and the best drives were uniformly manufactured with the aid of force-sensitive individuals who just “felt” how things should be. Because of that, I could basically make the hyperdrive be much, much more resilient, harder to break, and with increased range, but the speed difference was minor. That said, it was already 1.0 class drive, which was as fast as was commercially available. Even with military vessels, only a few nations fielded faster ships, and almost all were top-priority couriers. Anything else was just too expensive and high maintenance.

Hyperdrive navigation was something that did improve, mostly due to sensor improvement and precognition. Navigating outside of the main hyperlanes was very difficult, requiring long scan periods followed by micro-jumps or the use of sub-light drives. This wasn’t because the drives didn’t work outside of the hyperlanes, but because impacting matter while partially phased out of reality tended to have a negligible effect on the real-space matter and absolutely catastrophic results on the phased matter. Hitting a pea while using a hyperdrive could totally destroy even a capital ship.

By using the improved precognitive sensors, collisions could be avoided which made micro-jumps much more viable, and decreased the risk of leaving hyperspace near to a pirate ship, minefield, or other hazard.

Communications likewise saw relatively minor gains. The ship came equipped with a HoloNet terminal which included a hyperwave transceiver. HoloNet communications, especially placing calls, were very pricy, though also fairly long range; there were few places they could not be used, almost none within the borders of the Republic. The ship also had a subspace transceiver. Limited to ten light years in range and less expensive than the HoloNet, it still cost on the order of ten credits or a roughly a hundred dollars a minute to relay a call through a corporate or governmental transceiver. Finally there were a slew of tight-beam laser and radio communication systems. All of these were improved in range, fidelity, and difficulty to intercept by my magic. That said, it was really gilding the lily; the systems the ship came equipped with were excellent, and it was unlikely I’d face a situation that the upgrades were actually necessary.

The last area that did get a major upgrade was life-support. The biggest issues with life-support were heat-management, air and water. Air and water freshening enchantments were simple, and made the ship much more pleasant for longer journeys, keeping the air and water as pure and clean as it was on Naboo, avoiding any issues with smells or metallic taste as it was cycled and recycled.

My conceptual enchantments to help the heat-sinks to shed heat faster were highly effective, and a full order of magnitude more emergency coolant was automatically summonable to refill the stores as they were used. Considering cooling down from weapons fire and shield usage was a major combat issue, that also improved combat endurance.

As an emergency measure, the ship had enchantments to teleport all of the crew to emergency bunkers on Naboo if it were about to suffer catastrophic damage.

Overall, the Nostos was basically a light frigate in armament, with a heavy frigate’s survivability and a fighter-bomber’s agility, all piloted with the level of skill expected from Jedi knights. It was utterly monstrous.

I was really pleased with it, and very much looking forward to putting all the different systems together in the ship at the same time for its final tests. I was even planning on seeing if I could manage to make the ship self-regenerating.

In other words, all was good in the world.

And then, a mere fortnight before my ship would have been ready, that fool child of a queen and those greedy bastards in the Trade Federation all decided to drink idiot juice and escalate the disagreement over plasma rights.

Amidala ordered a cessation of exports, and a halt to all plasma production.

In retaliation to that, and to recent changes in Republic taxation laws from Coruscant which were aimed at weakening the Trade Federation, the Trade Federation decided to take action. They sent eight of their lucrehulks to blockade Naboo, and shut down all food production.

Naboo was under siege.

And my ship was literally in pieces.

Fuck my life.