The drones will be carried by separate parasite-carrier spacecraft. ![]() Please note that the control ship probably will NOT carry and service the drones, since the control ship will have to be nimble enough beat a hasty retreat if the battle goes terribly wrong. The idea is that the control ship and its human crew stands off at a (hopefully) safe distance from the battle, and sending in hordes of expendable drones to savage the enemy ships. Sort of like the brain center inside a huge swarm of deadly metal space-going hornets with nuclear stingers. It is a lightly-armed combat spacecraft carrying an enormous C4I electronics suite (communications/command/control/computers/intelligence) tasked with controlling huge numbers of remote-controlled space combat drones armed to their cute little pointy teeth. Basically a mobile control center for combat drones. As a public service I present a small glossary so you decipher what they are talking about.Īlso called a "Space Control Ship". The brain trust that I copy from research for spacecraft combat material have developed their own private jargon. It was the only thing to which Victor Henry had ever given himself whole more than to his family, much more than to the sprawling abstraction called the Navy. “If he had a home in the world, it was a battleship. Here’s how Wouk describes his hero, US Navy officer Victor Henry, in The Winds of War: The battleship breeds a certain sort of sailor. And if there are ancient alien intelligences out there who seek our doom, it will be the big ships that marshal the power to stop them, defeat them, and-should they not agree to go quietly into that good night-blow them to Kingdom Come. These are the big ships of the future, the powerful ships that will allow us to face a harsh universe toe-to-toe. It isn’t so much that they destroy stars, as that when such a ship speaks with her guns, the stars themselves might be seen to quiver. When manned by a trained crew under skilled officers, they are not mere objects. They are the first cyborgs in a very real sense, for men are a component of the weapon. It is not only the sheer power of such ships that speaks to the warrior soul, however. In this sense there had been battleships in the days of Phoenicia and Rome, and there would always be battleships-a living peak of human knowledge and craft, a floating engineering structure dedicated to one aim: the control of the sea.” This meant a thousand ever-changing specifications of size, design, propulsion, armor, armament, interior communication, interior supply systems a thousand rituals and disciplines binding the crew, from the captain to the youngest striker, into one dependable corporate will and intelligence. “Put together at different times and places of different steel plates and machines, embodied in many forms under many names, a battleship was always one thing: the strongest kind of warship afloat. Herman Wouk states it beautifully in his World War II masterpiece, The Winds of War: The allure goes beyond sheer power and gets at the intricacy of men inhabiting what amounts to a small world-a world dedicated to one purpose. It matches (and is probably derived from) battleship nostalgia in the world’s saltwater navies. There’s an allure to the battleship, the destroyer, and other big ships of war, going back to the earliest days of science fiction.
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