Ship Mounted Gun Design
They created a retro-grade spell to update the existing ships and changed the constructs so all future ships would have the changes. Each addition to their arsenal made them more effective and allowed them to dominate the battlefield far beyond their limited number of actual troops. They still needed to have boots on the ground, but more and more those boots were getting replaced by their mechanical counterparts. Which meant the potential for casualties on their side was significantly reduced.
With the interface planning mostly sorted out they moved on to mission planning. They decided to help with the initial attack and also for future missions that it would be good for each of the RT Squads to have their own ship. They would have one for Alpha and one for Bravo Squad. That would give them a total of three large attack ships in addition to Ship and ten Bashers to attack the base and its defenses. It would allow them to spread out their forces and attack from different vantage points. Once all the enemy ships and exterior defenses had been taken out the teams would coordinate attacks on enemy troops from within the ships. When the majority of the enemies forces had been taken out with robot forces, the teams would start deploying to the surface to continue the assault. The Bashers and Ship would remain in orbit hitting infrastructure and other targets of opportunity to keep the enemy off balance.
Two more ships were put into production and the plans continued to be put in place. Since the enemy base was so huge they were required to split in to small two man teams to be able to hit all of the targets in a timely fashion. While they were making their plans, the Red Team SF team was preparing to depart the Alliance’s Flag Ship, they were going to leave a couple of guys behind to make sure the SF teams had some support, but most of the team would be leaving to participate in the battle. The main team would rendezvous with the rest of the attacking force in the Saturn Region. The Team Commander and the Squad Leaders were taking the Basher back to Earth to be there for the planning phase, so they would have input in their role in the mission. They would have taken a Javelin back, but the Basher was faster and they were beginning to think time was a factor in getting the attack underway. Also they knew if they didn’t get there quick all of the planning would be over with and they would not have a chance to make any suggestions or claim some of the more fun targets.
Besides the Commander had not flown in one yet, and he wanted to get a feel for their capabilities before the mission started. They took out some asteroids on the way back to see how the weapons systems worked. The Commander and the Squad Leaders were dually impressed with its capabilities. They felt better knowing that not only did they have a Basher to defend them when needed, but their new ship had the same capabilities and could hold off a pretty large fleet of ships long enough for the Basher to launch. Between the two of them any attacking force would be in for a very bad day.
They arrived at headquarters and David and his team brought them up to speed. They also gave them a tour of the new training facilities and they were able to see what the ship that they now lived on looked like from the outside, since they hadn’t seen it other than when it was cloaked. They were impressed with everything they saw, and excited to get started when they entered the briefing room to put the finishing touches on the battle plan.
They went over everything that had been planned up until they arrived, most of it had to do with the exterior of the base. Reconnaissance had shown that the base was heavily defended from attack, with several gun emplacements and launch platforms for small attack craft. Adding to its defenses were the twenty five ships orbiting the planet. Obviously the first order of business was the ships and launch platforms. They had planned on the four larger ships coming in from the four points of the compass at the equatorial level of the planet. In their 3D interface model it showed the planet with a grid expanding out from what would be an equator, if the entire planet wasn’t covered by the base, this was the horizontal center or the zero point for y in Cartesian Coordinates. Another grid went out from the vertical center of the planet this was the zero point for x in Cartesian Coordinates. This allowed them to divide the planet and the area around it into regions that could then be used to help coordinate areas of responsibility for the attacking ships.
It was similar to the way the interface for the Bashers worked except in that interface the Basher was the center point. This interface made it easier to visualize the targets in a broader multiple ship attack scenario. Where the attacking force would have multiple ships participating in the battle and could pre-designate the areas they wanted the individual ships to concentrate their attacks. In this regard it was similar to the 2D attack interface they used when assigning targets for individual team members during ground attacks.
They had integrated the 2D attack screens into the new 3D model so that when you drilled down into the plan from a higher level you could see the target designations of the team members, during the battle their interface would be the old 2D interface except when they were transitioning to and from battle zones, then they would see where they were within the model to keep them orientated. This would help them move freely within the base once that phase of the battle started. It made since, there were multiple targets throughout the base and they were on different floors and on different sides of the base.
This was the first time they had to attack a target this complex so the new interface was a logical extension of what had worked for them in the past. It gave them more control of the plan and they could easily visualize each step of the attack, and therefore could make a better plan. The ability to have the virtual war room as the highest level of the interface allowed them to meet and discuss the plan or make changes on the fly. During the battle the commanders would all be in the war room coordinating the attack and making changes as necessary from that perspective. However, perhaps the best part of the interface was that it was all virtual, so they did not have to be in the same physical location.
This allowed them to be able to pop any member of the team up into the war room as needed during the mission to make last minute changes or impart updated intel so that everyone was on the same page at all times. They could redirect their team anyway they needed to, and they would understand their place within the battle at all times, and having a better situational awareness made them more effective. Having the big picture view when needed so they understood their orders and didn’t feel like they were being moved around the chessboard like some mindless pawn by some disassociated commander in an ivory tower. The other great thing was that most of the battle was going to be done remotely with robots used to dispatch targets within the base or ships using torpedoes to dispatch targets outside the base. Because these weapons could be deployed anywhere within the actual physical space of the battle zone they had a lot more flexibility to make adjustments as needed. They wert dependent on troop movements prior to attack or getting ships into place before firing on a target.
A mid-tier addition to the interface let team commanders of any size, meet in a mini war room that displayed a 3D model of their designated area of responsibility so they could relay information to their team members and keep them apprised of changes as needed. For their style of combat this interface was the best it could possibly be. It offered the highest level of command and control with the greatest amount of flexibility.
They made changes to the Basher and the other ship interfaces to allow them to start from this prospective. In future missions when they setup the mission some center point would be chosen and the space around that point would be divided in the same way, then the ships would be given targets within the regions that they would be responsible for. It made it much easier to setup the battle, and of course the targets were mapped to the objective model which kept track of the phase of attack. With the new interface setup, the system mapped all of the enemy ships to their x,y,z coordinates within the model. Then it overlaid their friendly ships into the model with call outs for everything. Sur
veillance drones kept the model up to date, by updating the enemy locations as they changed.
Tracking data from the interface would update the friendly positions within the model. For now since they were not actually in that physical location a place holder would represent their starting point. As the battle started the system would track their ships as they moved into position and then when they reached their starting point the place holder would go away and the tracking data from the ship would be in its place.
The beauty of the system was that when the weapons crew of the ships selected a target within their region of responsibility. The system would bring up a reasonable 3D model of the target ship and a calculated position for their command and control as well as their reactor. The areas would show up as a numbered objective. Each objective within the system had a unique alpha numeric designator that would show up as a round dot on the target. When the actual attack took place as each objective was hit the system would update the status of the objectives. Target elimination and objective completion was tracked by the AI of the system and most of the time could be determined without any input from the person executing the attack. On the rare occasion that a target still survived after an attack. The system would ask the operator to verify objective completion.
That should be a very rare occurrence since the interface tended to use excessive force against targets and usually hit them with more than enough weapons to destroy them and render them completely useless or dust in the case of robot attacks. The robots seemed to like to obliterate a target, perhaps it was because Emma and Gordon programmed them that way, but then again who could say for sure. All that they could really say for sure, was that robots did their job well, and used extreme prejudice when eliminating targets.
For the ships the crew member simply had to designate a torpedo for each of the objective points and the system would store that designate and update the location of the ship and objective points within the model. If for some reason more information was needed while the objective was selected all of data was displayed to the crew member. For instance if the crew member needed to know where this objective fell in the time phase of the attack or target information such as thickness of the hull, based on measurements taken during earlier attacks, it was all right there for them to help in the planning.
This information was useful in the planning stage since it allowed them to plan their flight path more efficiently hitting targets that had a higher priority due to the attack plan as a whole, it was all accounted for, and the hull thickness allowed them to set the depth of the new bubble feature of the torpedoes.
The attack interface had evolved into a state of the art weapons system that allowed them to plan missions down to the millisecond and then update the plan accordingly as the situation changed. The system was rigid in that it constantly made sure that the individual attacks took place within the time frame of the overall attack plan, but also flexible in that it always made sure that the individual attack plans were updated based on changing conditions and that the overall attack plan was adjusted accordingly to accommodate those changes.
The system was as structured as a system could be that dealt with rapidly changing events, but yet flexible enough to handle the chaos of war and adapt accordingly. While shielding the operator from the confusion as much as possible. There was no emotion governing the sequence of events it was all controlled according to plan. The plan just evolved to handle the unknown, without putting undo stress on the people using the system to conduct their battle. It took a lot for an attack plan to be completely abandoned, and since most attacks were based on events taking place that would launch the attack there would have to be a lot things going wrong for those to change. The only exception to this was when previous attacks were too successful thus rendering the current attack unneeded, in that case the system would just move on to the next objective.
For the larger enemy ships which there was only one left for this attack, there would be six objectives since they had seen that four torpedoes were all that was needed to take them out, the other two would hit the launching bays where the small attack ships were stored. Additionally, the crew member would have to designate targets for the small guns such as the cockpits of the small attack ships on the launch platform. The system stored all that data and executed it when the time was right. Alpha Squad’s ship was assigned to the big ship since there ship had more small gun nodes than a Basher did, so they could hit more cockpits at a time.
The system would only re-designate a target once it had been assigned to a specific region and assigned to a specific operator, if the target moved out of that region before the attack could be executed. Even then it only would do it if the target had moved sufficiently far enough away that the only way to hit it was to force the operator to go out of his region of responsibility. More often than not since all of the weapons did not require a physical presents in the traditional sense, the interface would just execute the attack anyway unless by doing so it would interfere with another attack being performed by another operator. The system kept track of the targets no matter where they went after they had been designated so it wasn’t hard to redirect an attack.
When they were happy with the plan for the outer part of the base and all of its defenses they moved on to the inner part of the base. They continued with the regions of responsibility model that they had used on the outside and assigned each squad an area of responsibility within the base. The two team leaders, Michael, and Megan, would each act as the commander for the four teams. David and the twins plus a group of newly trained recruits would work as reserve forces hitting targets of opportunity or handling unforeseen threats as they came up. By this point they had twenty five hundred robots, to support the teams plus all of the obstacles that the teams were going to put in place. The new gun was going to figure heavily in their plans, which would also help direct the enemy into kill zones that they were starting to designate as they laid out the plan.
With small two man teams they had just enough forces to take out all of the small targets spread throughout the base. The ships would concentrate fire on the command and control areas from orbit and any large gatherings of troops, this included barracks areas. There wasn’t going to be much left of the base by the time the teams regrouped to attack any remaining forces. Like any good plan they were going to attack just before dawn when most of the troops would still be asleep. The largest barracks areas were going to be hit at the same time the ships were being hit outside the base. This would not give them a chance to muster their forces and anyone left in those areas would still be disorientated while the rest of the attack unfolded. It was a bad part of war, but most of them would at least die in their sleep. Those that survived the initial attack would not be as fortunate, they would have to endure the fight that was coming to them.
A fight that the enemy could not possibly win, the interface had become too sophisticated, it gave them such an advantage. That even if the enemy was ready for them when they attacked, they still would not stand a chance against the robot augmented forces and superior weapons systems they were going to bring to bear against them. There would have to be a force that the enemy had not tried to use against them in any other battle and it would have to be so overwhelming and devastating that it would not make sense that they would not have used it in past battles. There was nothing that would indicate that such a force existed and that they could marshal it against them. Gamma Faction was for once at the disadvantage in the fight, it was a long time coming but thanks to David and his team they were finally able to bring the fight to them.
Obviously they were not going into it blindly with over confidence, but all of their surveillance and past encounters told them they had the upper hand in this battle. Once all the ground work was laid out and all the troops that were going to be leaving Earth to participate in the battle were ready to go. All the equipment was loaded on the ships the teams wer
e boarded and they headed for the rendezvous point in the Saturn Region. Thanks to a flash update and the new virtual interface the SF Team Members had all their targets designated as well. They had mission briefings with their Commander and the squad leaders. Before they wrapped up the planning sessions, they attended a full virtual mission briefing with everyone that was going to be part of the attack, so all the combatants knew their mission and the interface was just waiting to set it into motion.