Sometimes - indeed, often - simplest is best. The New Den is nothing but a large hull mounting a standard colony base and extended fuel tanks, with room to spare thanks to our advances in planetology and construction technology. The best thing to do with the extra space, as none of my predecessors understood, is of course to leave it empty, thereby saving production and maintenance costs and streamlining the ship. To most engineers, this is obvious for colony design, but it must be remembered that nothing is strictly obvious when it comes to starship engineering. It has been said that a brilliant engineer named do0m once advocated including a single laser on every colony design. His debates with the legendary ZedF were reportedly better ways to learn the field than the most advanced engineering courses. I subscribe to the Zed school of colony design, that holds - if I may paraphrase - "If you want guns in the system when a colony ship arrives, you'll want them more once the colony is made. Better to spend a little more on even a single fighter than to arm your colony ship" - but specialized circumstances can sometimes arise for which the do0m school is a better fit.
In any case, what's obvious for a colony also applies to every ship in the fleet. Each starship should be designed with the equipment it requires in order to complete its mission ... and nothing more, no matter what will fit! It has been said by wiser bears than me that the key to understanding combat ship design is understanding the missions each combat ship must complete. Fortunately, if the Darloks continue as they have been, I may have an opportunity to explore that idea in greater depth! (Yes, I said fortunately. I'm not going to be the one on the front lines fighting, you see. Although to be fair, most of our ground troopers enjoy the thrill of battle - which they tend to always win - as much as I enjoy the thrill of designing a fleet!)
2361:
The boys have some new hand lasers to play with, and the attendant miniaturization techniques should help a bit should we need to design any combat ships. (Sadly, being enormous masses of ursine muscle, nigh-invincible in ground combat, especially with these new toys, we can get away with delaying them longer and better than any other race; this is sad because I want to design some ships here; it's my job and everything!) Munchy has even better news for us though: His next project, among lots of good choices, will be the development of Neutron Pellet Guns, one of the most versatile starship weapons in the galaxy!
2362:
At long last, the first New Den 1.0 has arrived at its destination: The lush jungle world of Klystron!
The atmospheric landing craft - my own design, of course - is settling to the planet's surface with the new inhabitants of the world, even as the ship itself undergoes an automatic disassembly routine to create habitation modules for the new Klystronians. How different from Denubius, where I had to carefully walk them through the task of salvaging the parts of their junker colony ship without blowing themselves to bits! Better still, the rest of our fleet is already crossing the stars: Two of the New Den's sister ships, one completed just last year, and no less than thirteen new Stretch scouts to take advantage of the new refueling base and bases-to-be. At long last, my beautiful starships are truly beginning to cross the galaxy.
2364:
Another of my New Dens has reached its destination, and the world of Spica is ours - only minimally habitable for ursine life, but so huge a world that scattered population centers in its few semi-fertile valleys can one day amount to the same total population as the jungle of Klystron itself. There's just one frustrating problem: The moment we formed the colony, something calling itself "Ssithra Emperor of the Darloks" warned us to stay clear of its territory, growing so ill as a result (by its own report) of our mere existence that it refused to even attempt to establish trade. I don't know what a Ssithra Emperor is, nor how it differs from a regular old-fashioned kind of emperor, but it doesn't bode well for attention to important starship design programs. People are going to be talking about these Darloks again for ages, as if all it takes for something to be interesting and mysterious is to be a heretofore undiscovered alien race that looks like a pair of glowing red eyes deep behind the shadowy cowl of a hood, harboring a dangerous secret agenda or something!
Well, if everyone's going to be talking about them, I may as well use the momentum as I can. I'm going to include a galactic map here, with such limited knowledge as we have of it, to illustrate a couple points about starship design. And because I think it looks kind of cool. The embedded image is just a view of Darlok space - apparently someone in the RBO-9 had the brilliant idea of calling up their Ssithra Emperor to ask what territory we were supposed to be staying away from, and was actually greeted in halfway decent fashion - and the map also includes our southernmost colony and some information about the local fauna. Clicking through it should show it in context, revealing a map of the entire galaxy.
One thing to notice is a particular aspect of the local fauna: The Bobcat destroyer passing by Spica toward the galactic rim. It responds to all signals as a "Mrrshan fleet," indicating that the Mrrshans of whom the newsdroid speaks so highly (they were ranked first in production just this year, above the Klackons and our Darlok neighbors, while we outranked only the Silicoids) seem to live near the center of the galaxy. This Bobcat is obviously an armed scout of some kind, bound for the red star rimward of Spica that we plan to scout for ourselves with my super-cheap Stretches in a few years' time.
We can't tell anything else about that ship from this range, but I can speculate about what it would look like were it one of mine. Scouts, like colony ships, normally have no need for armament of any kind, but there is a special use for an armed "scout" that I would have considered during my tenure here already had the timing of various encounters and discoveries worked out differently. It's about the opposite of what the poor Mrrshans are doing here, but with their enormous production base, it sounds like they can afford some inefficiencies. They're sending a single, regular, short-range destroyer (foolishly trusting in Darlok fuel bases thanks to a long-since-dissolved alliance) to scout an unknown system far away. A better early use for the destroyer hull is to build a combat-ready long-range scout, with fuel tanks and as many lasers (even just two) as it can cram aboard, then churn out enough to provide meaningful protection for a world that colony ships can't yet reach, but which is of major strategic importance. This is in some ways as much of a risk as leaving the world undefended, since ships like that (often called "Long-Range Lemons" by my fellow starship engineers) are pretty much worthless except for the specialized purpose of keeping a key middle-distance planet safe in the early stages of galactic expansion, and resources spent on them could otherwise be used to get closer to actually colonizing the place ... but if the planet is at risk, this tactic can be well worth the costs. I would likely have used it myself had circumstances been different. (For instance, if I'd seen any sign of the so-called Silicoids near Yarrow!)
Another important thing to notice from the image of Darlok space - apart from the Ssithra Emperor's xenophobic tendencies and purported love of technology - is its sheer distance from Spica. If we were to go to war with them, we would need long-range combat ships (inefficient in the extreme) to reach them in their homes, while their regular combat fleets could hammer away at Spica; since we're in contact at all, they obviously have better range technology than do we. Worse yet, our skilled and mighty ursine warriors can't reach their worlds at all until we develop better technology or a more advanced refueling base! This is one of the (many) reasons propulsion technology is so critical to the success of our starfleet. If our xenophobic neighbors elected to attack us right now, they would have nothing meaningful to lose, and everything to gain!
Well, okay, no, actually they'll also have nothing to gain. They'll never take Spica from our ground forces, and anyway I won't give them the opportunity. If they decide to attack before the planet is developed enough to build its own defenses, it'll be a great opportunity to design a new defensive combat fleet! (If not for our incredible ground fighters though, given the distance from Spica to our other worlds and our dearth of engine technology, it might have proven wise to design such a fleet before we get attacked, is the only thing.)
2371:
If only it could have been one of the outmoded clunker-scouts....
For the first time in my tenure, we've lost a ship in battle - one less Stretch in my beautiful fleet! Unlike at the Mrrshan world of Hyboria two years back, the Stretch wasn't able to retreat in time, and was destroyed completely. I asked the RBO-9 to erect a memorial, but Bolork "The Hammer" Brugrup (493 Knockdowns, 84 Assists, 43 Secondary Recoveries, including 17 for Goals, and 8 Confirmed Kills) growled at me to get back to work on the new Cave 1.0 I've been promising. It'll be finished on schedule before the end of the month, so he needn't have worried, but - to quote a famous product endorsement tagline from his playing years - "You don't argue with The Hammer."
I tried to go to Munchencrunch for sympathy, but he's still buried in his project to enhance our ecological restoration techniques. He hasn't come up for air since he finished the death spore project two years back and locked the results away in a file marked, "NOT FOR USE," so I guess I'll have to console myself by watching my teams' work on the Cave. The ship is completing exactly as planned - no reserve tanks of course, but it doesn't need them for its only mission to Rotan - the red star almost directly rimward of Spica. Scans suggest that the Mrrshan Bobcat we saw heading there a few years back burned up in the atmosphere of Rotan V when its orbit decayed for lack of fuel. The planet is barren of life of course, but the automated disassembly routines of our new Cave 1.0 will generate habitation modules with all the life support systems necessary to sustain a colony there. It's a good thing it's finishing quickly too: We've got some catching up to do! My coreward Stretches are sending back reports and surface scans from still more alien colonies: 70 million Mrrshans at the ocean world of Firma, and a few million Silicoids at Rhilus - a star whose second planet is as hospitable, and nearly as large, as Ursa Prime! No doubt Primodius would be colonized by now too, but even Silicoids can't live on asteroids, and that star lacks even a single planetary body.
2377:
Word on the street is that the Darloks have finally agreed to a trade agreement - something on the order of 150 BC. It also seems that Ssithra is their emperor's name, not the type of emperor they serve; they just don't use commas the way we do. Go figure. Anyway, this is semi-interesting news because it should give me an opportunity to study some of their trade ships and see if their design suggests any new ideas to me. Since Munchy still hasn't stopped talking about the Class III Deflector Shields he's been working on since the Class IIs were ready - is it really three years now? - I have to take my insights where I can get them!
2379:
I've completed my analysis of Darlok trade ships. Let's just say I'm not impressed. The Klackons might prove more interesting though: They just showed up at the mineral-poor world of Dolz with an armed colony ship and fighter escorts! The Stretch that had been patrolling the system is now on its way home for a full debriefing.
I'm still not sure if it was that Klackon colony at Dolz or ours at Rotan - both were finished this year, almost simultaneously - that triggered the latest galaxy-wide broadcast from the Guardian's star system.
I guess it would be pretty neat for the RBO-9 to be elected emperor of the galaxy, but it's not going to happen anytime soon if the Darloks have almost twice as many votes as we do - especially as we seem to have voted for them - and more importantly, it has nothing to do with my beautiful fleet! I'll leave the RBO-9 to get it sorted out by the next election; I'm glad I don't have to deal with politics myself, and anyway, right now, I'm busy.
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Next: Progress
