The Benefits and Pitfalls of Othering

[Jorga the Hutt]

A memo was sent to the acquisitions department of one [member="Danger Arceneau"] from the highest levels of Iron Crown. It was a variation upon the standard 'do you have any use for this?' press release, but not a large variation. Boilerplate standard, almost: standard marketing language and standard amounts of technical detail. There was humor to that choice.

The memo was a notice that a certain product was in development. The advertising package included a publicity photo of the prototype ship with the shipwright, one Rel Connory.

Purely an incidental concern. The idea was for the ship itself -- a delightfully niche product -- to attract the professional attention of a merchant and a conglomerate who had a significant role to play in prospecting and monitoring the pocket universe known as Otherspace. A niche role, to be sure, but one that Iron Crown had pioneered. And one that Iron Crown now meant to, if at all possible, monopolize.

 

[Danger Arceneau]

[member="Rel Connory"]

Danger was a simple woman. A simple woman who appreciated a finely crafted product and the reputation a name had. It was all about quality and respect.

Throughout her years Danger held few of her counterparts with as much respect as she had with Rave Merrill. Iron Crown was a company that Rave had even mentioned personally to Danger in Mandal Hypernautics grand auction years ago. Her work was above reproach and if anything, Danger always supported the woman.

And she would continue to do so in death as she did in life.

So when word came about a particular new product from Iron Crown's production line specifically formulated for Otherspace prospecting... Well... One didn't need to go far before the woman threw her wallet towards the investment.

She knew that Aurora Industries had produced its own otherdrive. However, there was no ignoring the original. Rave Merrill was the one who gave Danger the keys towards that niche market. A market Danger had every inclination to continue to pioneer and expand.

So it was with no further ado that the following missive was sent out towards Iron Crown's accounts payable.

With it came Arcenaeu Trade's interest in investing and purchasing the Voidwalker Expeditionary Transport.

For sole exclusive rights.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

[member="Danger Arceneau"]

That got, you know, attention. Quite a bit of it. In short order a letter - clearly not form -- was returned to Ms. Arceneau directly. The letter indicated that Iron Crown's Powers That Be were willing to accept that offer on a prima facie basis, barring a few exceptions for internal ICE use. The letter indicated, furthermore, that a member of the board of directors -- one Rel Connory, the shipwright -- would be pleased to be available to Ms. Arceneau for a face-to-face or holographic consultation at her convenience.

Meanwhile, the office party began in earnest. The Voidwalker had been designed with one customer in mind: ATC. Though other companies might have made comparable offers, ATC had the requisite dimensional foothold. It was also, by some measurements, the largest and most successful corporation in the galaxy, full stop. Iron Crown was, you know, pretty large, but ATC was an order of magnitude bigger, more prevalent, better entrenched -- and, ultimately, sexier.

At a boardroom table, various members of the Foundation Trust exchanged satisfied sighs and adrenaline highs. Rel Connory, Linna Beorht, Selka Ventus, even Mara D'Lessio-Merrill (normally a silent partner).

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Meanwhile, others toiled behind the scenes. Putting a new product to market took years. This one was something of a hasty adaptation. The space frame and stealth suite had been meant to replace the ageing Sekairo-class stealth transport. That, too, was stygium-cloaked, with thrust trace dampers and a gravitic modulator. But the older ship has been a cardboard box otherwise. This one would be a generation past it, with a better modulator, TibX engines, and a hull designed to evade magnetic sensors. The Rekali Dha'karbakar hyperdrive would prevent the vessel from setting off hyperspace reversion sensors and grmcutters, among other things. A unique piece of tech; a unique contribution to the project. This was the kind of ship for which Clan Rekali had designed its proprietary gear, and what better connections could you make, in the end?

Then again, the Clan might be an order of magnitude smaller than Iron Crown or ATC, but Alec was quickly becoming aware that branches of the family were taking root all over. Raiding, shipbuilding, trinkets, sure -- but specialty tech like this was the future. In a way, that made the Voidwalker project a much more serious coup for the Clan. It was a proof-of-concept for things like the Dha'karbakar, which covered a major gap in even the most modern stealth suites: hyperspace reversion. It blended well with the TibannaX (a choice which had been designed to appeal to ATC) and the magnetic sensor resistance, not to mention the upgraded modulator.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Part of the usual pitch went like this: why take risks? Why manufacture every little piece of your product yourself, when others can make better things? Why not contract for some very nice Rekali exploration tech as part of your project? But with these Foundation Trust people, and Saiba, they'd taken that principle to heart. No pitch necessary. They'd been the ones to reach out to Rekali, not the other way around.

For all that Iron Crown owned half the Unknown Regions, convenience put much of the development process in known space. The Tion Trade Nexus, to be precise, a four-kilometre sphere right next to Rekali territory. What with various frivolous consortia having defaulted on their rents, plenty of empty space was available, and the Clan rented a one-percent slot. One percent of the Tion Trade Nexus was a moderately ridiculous amount of room, suitable for R&D, sales, manufacturing and so forth. The clanspeople were used to using stations for their manufacturing and sales; that was the Rekali waystation model, which stretched across the Gordian Reach and deep into the Roil. It was cheaper, though, to manufacture in the Roil or Jovan Station or the Yavin system, and ship things here for sale. And sell they did: nothing beat the Tion Trade Nexus, not right here within spitting distance of the Mara, the Perlemian, the Daragon, and half a dozen lesser but still important hyperlanes. This was the place where you could find anything: any component, any substance. And the Rekali intended to deliver. That was why putting the Voidwalker together required a place like this: Arakyd, Rekali, Koensayr, Silk, and the other component contributors all had either distribution venues here or they had the appropriate contacts. Thus did the stealth suite come together.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The Voidwalker's stealth approach relied on the following.

First: A stygium cloak to hide the vessel from virtually all sensors -- all but magnetic and gravitic -- as well as the visual spectrum. Tuned, in fact, so that the ship could jump and revert while stealthed.

Second: A gravitic modulator to take care of the possibility that the enemy might have a crystal gravfield trap. Charon weren't known to have CGT tech, but their bioships' capabilities still weren't entirely known, and they hadn't even made those undead bioships in the first place -- just taken and reanimated them.

Third: A hull engineered and treated to minimize vulnerability to magnetic scanners. Might not work too well at very close ranges, but this ship would never be at very close ranges with hardly anything.

Fourth: Engines that burned TibannaX, a burn outside the visible spectrum. No visible drive glow, with or without the cloak up.

Fifth: Thrust trace dampers to make the ship's exhaust wake difficult to detect, even with specialized sensors.

Sixth: A Rekali Dha'karbakar hyperdrive, rendering the ship immune to hyperspace early warning sensors and gemcutters.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Of course, a stygium cloak, thrust trace dampers, and a gravitic modulator were pretty standard by this period. The holy trinity of basic elite stealth, a combination that covered most bases, originally invented by the head shipwright of the Voidwalker project. Sufficient...most of the time. Every once in a while you'd get someone trying for a high-powered magnetic sensor or one of those Silk short-range gravitic interference things, the Angel Eye -- also invented by Connory. And though this upgraded modulator still wouldn't beat an Angel Eye, the Voidwalker's suite was designed to cover as many bases as possible.

The power requirements were non-negligible. Exacting, even. Fortunately, the Voidwalker had unimpressive engines and low firepower. It had electricity to burn. All those stealth gadgets and gizmos aplenty could run just fine. This ship didn't have to be nimble, at least at sublight. It could coast through a Charon warfleet if necessary.

That, at least, was the idea. Stealth tech often led to overlaps, redundancies, and occasionally gaps; so many components with so many different purposes. Not all of those could be eliminated, no matter how many things one crammed into one's spaceframe.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The real trick, then, was foreseeing those gaps and working to fill them, despite technical limitations and the very real time constraints of manufacturing solutions from whole cloth. One such gap had been the nature of hyperspace early warning sensors; the Rekali contribution to the suite. Another had been Santhe's development of long-range magnetic sensors, which had necessitated specialized hull treatments. It didn't hurt that phrik had a very different magnetic profile from most hull metals; phrik was special in rather a lot of ways, at a molecular level. That didn't make it invisible to magnetic sensors; far from it. But coupled with other engineering techniques and technologies, it made the hull of the Voidwalker something qualitatively different from your average starship hull.

As for the stygium...well, getting the chance to work with stygium was always fun. Aeten II was basically mined out, used only by the occasional Mandal Hype product. There was a place called Kelsier that exported small amounts of stygium, out past the Sanctum. There was also Yalara, but that had not been a natural deposit and it was long empty. And then there was Maramere -- trace amounts remaining, only. She was fairly sure this particular stygium came from Kelsier, but whatever connection had provided it was deeply hush-hush.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The Kelsier connection interested her, in part because she'd spent enough time with the Frontier Corps and the Levantine Astronautical Academy to hear the stories. Some were old, like the ballad about the man carried off by the beautiful pale pirate in her invisible ship. Some were new, like Jorus Merrill butting heads with stealthed raiders in the dust cloud off Kelsier. It was clear enough that the Echani of Kelsier did not want to be disturbed, but sometimes stygium appeared on the markets in the Kyrikal system. The quality of the stuff varied. She could well imagine the Kelsieri Echani treating their crystals like the Vratix treated their bacta or the Selkath treated their kolto: keep the best, export the rest. Whatever the case, whatever the arrangement, Iron Crown had accumulated a pretty hefty amount of rather decent stygium. As for the technological side of things, though the Rekali role wasn't terribly strong and she couldn't just sit there reading proprietary blueprints, ICE had been making stygium cloaking devices for many years. The Chimaera. Sekairo-class light transports. Penumbra-class interdictors. Seroth-class assault frigates. Years upon years of lethal, cloaked ships...

All showing their age, but all gone. Vanished somewhere into Primeval space, or out there in the Unknown Regions. She'd sensed a good deal of associated frustration from the people of Iron Crown, almost as much over that as over Rave Merrill giving away Jen'asha Station. And that was quite a lot.

Yes, connections like these needed to happen.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Integrating the Otherspace technology incurred a whole host of issues for the stealth outfit. For one thing, nobody had ever flown a full-spectrum stealth ship in Otherspace. Never. Physics acted differently there; the sky was gray, dotted by black holes, and the Charon had sterilized the pocket universe's galaxies without FTL travel. What worked perfectly here might work less reliably there. But that was tomorrow's battle. For now, what mattered was that all the gear had been tested in Otherspace, with T-2000-equipped transports, and it seemed to work fine in concert.

Otherspace. A fringe concern, largely useless, but so many people had invested so much money into it. Alec's interests, frankly, lay in the direction of spacetime distortions like the Maw, the Chiloon Rift, and the Tyus Cluster, for a variety of personal and family reasons. The galaxy, realspace, hyperspace, had enough strangeness and enough frontiers and enough opportunities for a million lifetimes. But if Otherspace transit, slow as it was, could help get past hyperspace-impassible regions -- things not even S-thread boosters and instinctive astro could circumvent safely -- well, that could make all the difference for the colonization of the Hard Roil.

Disturbingly, it also meant that no perimeter, anywhere, was safe. Otherspace-to-realspace reversions were never precise, but still. But still.