Too smart for her own good?

[Jessica Med-Beq]

While Charzon left for Zeltros in an attempt to sell things on a mission for the Republic, Marcia and Jessica oversaw the preparations for the Jabiim expedition where she feels will be the ending of what unfinished business regarding Kuat Drive Yards and from there the launch of the largest ship in the galaxy capable of landing on planetary surfaces. But the Kuat Drive Yards raid showed Jessica that her equipment was inadequate and that she needed to upgrade her main firepower. What she knew about the anti-tank rifle was that it took 15 seconds to cool down, eject the power pack and reload. She knew it was a particle rifle and hence her idea was to look for Trandoshan particle beam power packs knowing that they could seemingly fire particle beam weapons without ever having to reload. They came with one drawback: the models she knew about weighed three times as much as normal power packs for particle beam weapons. Like those used by her SI-74.

"Charzon has left for Zeltros while they left us to prepare the Design Triumvirate for Jabiim"

"We could depart now, Jessica, if Charzon didn't insist on personally being part of the expedition" Marcia said.

"In the meantime, I will make this weapon a lot better than the original"

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"Please do tell me what problems you encountered with your equipment back on Kuat"

"Single shot, 15 seconds to cool down and reload, inadequate power pack; with the right power pack, your reservoir of particles will last longer"

Marcia was a little skeptical about exactly how her coworker Jessica intended to make the SI-74 better for her own personal use. All that Marcia saw of Jessica's work pertained to hydraulics and landing gears in various shapes and forms: designing a variable-geometry landing gear with nearly 200 actuators on them, programming the landing gears' behavior on the Traquia and how that coupled with the point-defense turrets around the ventral hangar, her absent-mindedness forced her to call upon outside help. Said company is now tier-4, in part thanks to her. (Regulations were applied uniformly across all production industries: service industries had to replace Factory entries by Codex entries instead, the obligation of contracts with major factions or tier-5+ companies - but clearly the easiest was to design and release enough mass-produced products almost irrespective of industry) The Anzat Jedi running said company once mistook her for a Wookiee...

"I've never, ever, heard you talk about how you would go on about modifying hand weapons or long weapons"

"Old me would have called upon you to do so but all you would do is to get the targeting solutions to be the best and no more than that: the new me would not do that"

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"Why? You sound as if that infusion of bacta on Alderaan made you a different lady, or if some Force-roadblock was removed from you"

"Force-roadblock? Force-roadblocks as you call them blocks off subconscious memories. I do remember that the doctors back on Alderaan said that my own memory bordered on uncommon"

If, at any time, one such Force-roadblock was removed, that would have to be after she got injured in battle after taking that incendiary bullet hit. Pre-Kuat she was described as rather bright, but nothing exceptional. Jessica just awakened to this new range of possibilities her smarts now being at its fullest would mean to her now. Jessica just began realizing that she kept soaking up knowledge this entire time, and, rather than just being "bordering on uncommon" it actually was uncommon. She had acquired more charisma since the raid, too. For both Charzon and Jessica, that raid was, simply put, life-changing, but for some reason it hasn't been the case for Marcia. She started pulling out the (rechargeable!) power pack, knowing that, regardless of whether the powerpack is empty or full, it appeared to be using a common power pack in long blasters. Immediately Jessica sees that there is a problem and began weighing the pros and the cons of possible solutions.

"There are some trade-offs to be made"

"What trade-offs?"

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"Let's say that Vanir Technologies thought that the standard long-blaster stuff was safer than the particle power packs used by Trandoshans, and lighter, too"

"What kind of high-capacity Trandoshan particle power packs could possibly fit inside a socket intended for a normal long-blaster power pack?"

Jessica began going into the small arms munition database to search for high-capacity Trandoshan particle power packs. She knew Trandoshans would be taken by the allure of being able to fire particle rifles as if there were no tomorrow. But that would be no good if the enlarged particle power pack couldn't fit inside the power pack socket of the stock weapon. But she knew that Trandoshan particle power packs that fit the description given are less common than, well, the stock blaster capacity. For some reason, she didn't feel like talking about the real reason why a standard blaster power pack was inadequate, or otherwise had to dig deeper for that. But as she looked carefully for the type of sockets used by standard blaster rifles, the type that can fire 50 or 100 shots (of course depending on the model: what would last 100 shots on a E-11 or a F-11D may only last 50 shots on those items made by the other small arms manufacturers that spring up like mushrooms lately) she realized that not all particle power packs could fit, regardless of whether they were Trandoshan or not.

"Also, how much do they cost? How easy are they to procure?"

"Marcia, you keep asking way too many questions. The original weapon was limited production for a reason"

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"Here's the real reason as to why I insist on particle power packs. Keep in mind that there is an energy cost to convert the energy of a blaster power pack to produce the high-energy particles: if the particles being accelerated are not already present, they have to be created from something else, whereas if you already have the unstable particles, all you have to do is to expel said particles as if they were energy-made mass driver projectiles"

"I'm mostly a girl for the targeting computers, more than for the inner workings of the weapons themselves. I'm actually quite unfamiliar with particle beams; we mostly work on turbolasers and ion cannons here. That said, it makes sense"

For the particle power packs to be rechargeable makes sense, sure. They have to be. The particles have to be light, too. Trandoshans claim that unstable particles are at the core of the process, yet most varieties of unstable particles have half-lives too short for them to be weaponized even at short ranges. Probably what Trandoshans mean is that exotic particles, that is, some kind of particle that lies outside the Standard Model (or at least as far as Jessica understands it; she might not be a particle physicist but she knows what it is, despite having a limited ability to perform SM calculations at best), are powering their particle power packs. But the result of Jessica's search for the particle power packs return two or three results that seem to satisfy her requirements. Before she even says a thing about the power packs, she begins to talk about how the SI-74 she seeks to modify even works in the first place.

"What a particle beam weapon is: it works according to the principles of particle accelerators and the firing rate of one of those things, and even more so for their range, depends on the lifetime of the particles being used"

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"So they are much like ion cannons?"

"They are more similar one another than I would like to admit. Change the ammunition pack and you can turn an ion cannon into a particle cannon and vice-versa"

Jessica decides that the LSAT180 is the best fit for what she needs out of the modified SI-74. It is the largest of the gang and is still easily accessible. Trandoshans could fire 500 rounds out of a repeater particle autocannon with a LSAT180 loaded in it. A crate of LSAT180s contains 12 such power packs, in a 3x4 configuration, all pointing up, whereas standard power packs used in a SI-74 weigh about 450g. Four times as heavy, and Jessica got the first part right. The question remains: would other modifications be necessary if one uses a LSAT180? It would probably give Jessica more rounds before the power pack runs dry, but the question is: how many? The testing range would be deathly hot at this time of the day out on the Tiplar Dunes or even in the Aldanna Range. Unfortunately for her, Jessica would have to test the LSAT180-equipped SI-74 without any kind of armor whatsoever, only underwear, making her a visible target for these Jawas lurking around.

"Now, if you may excuse me, I would like to purchase a crate of LSAT180 ammunition packs"

"You never answered the question as to how much do a crate of LSAT180s cost, and how many there is in the crate"

"Each LSAT180 weighs 1.8 kg, and they are sold in crates of 12, for 1,500 credits apiece"

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

Speaking of Jawas, she took her (air-conditioned!) Bluth stair truck out on the countryside with the weapon safely stashed in the passenger seat. She found that the closest shop selling such outlandish power pack on Ringo Vinda was nearly 200 kilometers away from Quendelton, where they were. That meant that she had to cross through the Tiplar Dunes to purchase what she wants and, hopefully, to test her new weapon configuration before she can use it on Jabiim and beyond. Hopefully testing it out on the desert would make sure the issues with the cooling circuits would be properly resolved before she can take it to use it elsewhere. Understandably in colder temperatures, the faster it can fire but the easier it is to detect. She knew that, according to the cooldown equations, cooldown rates are proportional to the temperature differential. But if it took 15 seconds to cool down and reload, how much of the 15 seconds would be spent for the sole cooldown? Upon arriving at the Jawa-run weapons shop, which was deserted and looked rather mom-and-pop in operations...

"Mum m'aloo" the Jawa vendor told Jessica.

"Utinni!" Jessica uttered. "Nyeta speak Basic? (Don't speak Basic?)"

"Nyeta. Utto nye keeza opakwa? (No. Do you want to buy weapon spare parts?)"

Jessica was a little surprised that this particular Jawa didn't speak Basic, or Gunganese for that matter, even though she can still speak some Gunganese on some level. It wasn't as good as Charzon's, but again for some reason the hydraulics team didn't employ Gungans at all. Not because of any slant on Jessica's part or anything though. Jawas were running nilly-willy on Ringo Vinda since the Netherworld event... but clearly Jessica was the one who spoke Jawaese best in the Design Triumvirate.

"Go mob un loo po LSAT180 box? (How much for a crate of LSAT180s?)"

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

Jessica even purchased a special recharge device for a LSAT180; she knew that particle power packs were anything but standard as far as their drain is concerned. But that amounted to buying said recharge device alongside a crate filled with 12 LSAT180s at a bulk discount. Once she got the recharge device for the LSAT180, she got underwhelmed because she ended up buying a used gonk droid with the ammunition. Yet she couldn't understate just how important were glonk droids in operating machinery. She always tended to buy large reserves of ammunition, as she effectively saw herself as larger-than-life in some respects, or otherwise bring in ammunition lasting a lifetime. These LSAT180s were the real deal (assuming the Jawa didn't sell her scrap metal passing for LSAT180s) but it took 20 seconds for her to change the old cartridge to fit the LSAT180 inside the magazine socket.

"Gonk, gonk" the gonk droid told Jessica upon activation.

"Stay calm, Gonk"

"Gonk!"

"Fire!"

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

On a SI-74, there was a light in the scope whose color indicated whether the weapon could be fired again. If it was ready to fire, the scope would have a green background; on the contrary, it would be red; there was a yellow bar that indicated the charge level of the weapon. With a normal blaster power pack, the yellow bar would be completely empty by now, but Jessica estimated that she would be good for 15 shots with one fully-charged LSAT180. Upon seeing that scene of the dune exploding after contact from the weapon, she realized that she attracted the attention of the nearby Jawas, taken by her allure - and her bulk. Jawas tended to find bulkier human/Near-Human females more alluring and attractive than equally tall but slimmer ladies of the same species, or at least the Ringovindian Jawas. She even had the chronometer in the power droid calculate how long it took the weapon to be ready to fire again, even without the cooldown period.

"Thirteen seconds! No good!"

"Utinni! What do you mean, 13 seconds?" a Jawa bystander asked Jessica.

"I can only fire this thing once every 13 seconds. I think I can do better than that. I know it's all about the cooldown. This thing can burn as much as 50 times as much energy as a normal blaster"

"Dyo kisewa? Ny shootogawa! (Fifty? Don't shoot!)"

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

Hmmm... Jessica quickly stored the crate of LSAT180s and her SI-74 inside the cabin of her Bluth stair truck in an attempt to outrun these Jawas, realizing that, of the 15 seconds the whole process of cooling down and reloading took with the stock weapon, only the last two seconds were actually due to the reloading process. The original weapon gave her almost 5 shots per minute, which was lackluster compared to what she knew would be necessary out on the battlefield. She knew that this weapon had the ability to tear tanks apart. Coruscant was the main deal and the Army of Malastare could rip apart enemy minesweepers with it. And she knew that some thermohydraulic actuators looked like they had a truckload of cooling fins. So she quickly made the connection that she would need some lateral heat sink to achieve what she wants out of it, knowing that the stock SI-74 has a supposedly advanced cooling system. At the same time she can't have the heat sink interfere with the scope or with the LSAT180. Upon return to Quendelton and hence with Marcia...

"Marcia! I would like your advice about heatsinks. While I found that I could get 15 shots out of a LSAT180, the main limitation on the firing rate is the cooling system"

"You have probably realized that the Nekogal, the Bulkhunter and the Lusankya are all prone to overheating if used too often in a short amount of time. A fast firing rate won't do you any good if the wear and tear on the heat sinks took a tool on your stuff"

"I knew that for thermohydraulics, usually alusteel envelopes with liquid nitrogen will be used for heat sinks, but a battlefield is not the same as a landing gear, Jessica or not!"

"Even if you wanted me to consider a battlefield, you would most likely be using your SI-74 with an atmosphere of some sort, and hotter than outer space"

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

Which would make the heat sink less efficient. Outer space is 2.7 K due to the cosmic microwave background, and Stefan-Boltzmann's law states that a heat sink in space will radiate as AS(T4-T04) making it an essentially perfect blackbody where A is the total contact area of said heat sink and S = 5.67 x 10-8 W m-2 K-4. Alusteel encased with liquid nitrogen were just fine for landing gears, where the internal temperatures are not expected to reach more than 700 K, even if for brief periods. In space combat one can divert the heat from the weapons into the life support circuits as on all Ringovinda Systems weapons, so that the ship's occupants can remain heated (and sometimes the cooling life support systems kick in) so long as the ship survives and combat takes place. But ground weapons were another can of worms altogether. What heat sinks will work on turbolaser turrets may not work on a ground-based particle gun and not just because of size. You want heat to be exchanged in ways other than blackbody radiation. Thermodynamics will tell you that the second law will force the heat to flow from the hottest to the coldest, all right, but the systems create a lot of heat.

"The efficiency of a heat sink depends on the temperature differential, and an atmospheric battlefield will be less efficient than outer space"

"For the heat exchangers we use on every single energy weapon we build, allowing it to be used for life support, we use grooved duralumin extrusions. Part of the heat sink is, well, the barrel. But what exactly is in use in this thing?"

"How do you come to know that much about weapon design? When you started out here, you were just one to program a targeting computer"

"I learned a lot about weapon design being around everyone in the weapons design team"

"I suppose that you put the targeting computer cables some distance away from the duralumin extrusions you are talking about"

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

Duralumin extrusions are heat sinks commonly used on shipboard weapons, whereas turadium was the preferred material for reactors. Turadium was a thermal isolant that was very difficult to cut with energy weapons (but not as resistant to lightsabers as phrik or beskar are; turadium could resist a glancing lightsaber blow but no more than that). However she knew that a duralumin extrusion would melt at the temperatures at which the particle beam weapon would be made to reach. Jessica would just ask what does the laboratory machine shop can conjure up for her modified particle beam rifle. But before then, she would need to know what to use for the weapon. Jessica would be very unhappy if it didn't improve the firing performance, if only in terms of firing rate. 13 seconds between shots is unsatisfactory but she does not hold out hope that she could actually improve that much on that count.

"I'm afraid that a duralumin extrusion would melt if placed directly in contact with the particle focusing coils. You're dealing with focusing coils tasked to handle 50 times as much energy as a blaster focusing coil, and the waste heat generated by those things is immense due to Joule's law"

"Unless you had focusing coils of ultrachrome, in which case there would be much less waste heat"

"Ultrachrome? Ultrachrome focusing coils are nearly impossible to procure"

"Have another solution?"

"Refractory materials are therefore the order of the day, and even that won't get the work done entirely. Flared fins, that, could be made of duralumin extrusions"

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

What Vanir Technologies called an advanced cooling system actually didn't make use of cooling fins, let alone flared fins. It was just a wide heat pipe running the length of the barrel and ignition chamber. Flared fins allowed better airflow than even straight fins; if putting flared fins on one side of a heat pipe would render it even better, she would expect a greater ability to expel waste heat out of a composite heat sink with a heat pipe and flared fins and hence lower cooldown times. Jessica decides to pay a visit to the machine shop to get to the bottom of this matter. She had all the specs of the SI-74 that are publicly available for the machinists to work with, but she was unfamiliar with small arms cooling systems, much less her own SI-74. She might have increased the magazine size to be able to fire multiple shots before having to reload, but the modification work on that weapon wasn't over.

"What have we here?" she asked the machine shop.

"The best non-ultrachrome heat sink in the galaxy for implements the size of small arms expected to operate at over 1000 degrees Centigrade internally, right here in this gun. Zirconium with HFC-134a containing traces of gaseous lithium" the machinist tells her.

"I'll straight up accept that attaching flared cooling fins made up of extruded duralumin on the outer shell is going to make this thing even heavier"

"Flared cooling fins, running all the length the heat pipes would run. Roger"

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

While the removable attachments called flared cooling fins were being assembled out of extruded duralumin, Jessica helped but ponder how much more heat could these cooling fins soak up and, from there, perform calculations pertaining to just how much she could hope to get out of extruded duralumin flared fins, even though said fins are a smaller-scale version of what's included in a turbolaser tube. In the latter case, it was natural to flare the fins as was obvious on all cylindrical implements requiring cooling fins. She ruled out liquid cooling because the weapon would become too bulky, as evidenced when a Gk3 Cryocooler or equivalent implement would be installed on the power generator of a FWHB-10 or its predecessor the E-Web. She knew the Gk3 Cryocooler was even heavier than a set of lateral, meter-long extruded duralumin flared fins. And extrusions are often the rule of the day when dealing with cooling fins. Once the cooling fins are ready a few hours later...

"I'm going out to test how many shots per minute I can get out of this SI-74, out in the desert!"

"Why out in the desert?" Marcia asked.

"Desert conditions are the least efficient practical settings for small arms cooling systems: if I can get 8 shots per minute (I'm making up figures here) here out in the desert, I could probably get 9 shots per minute on an ice planet"

"Assuming the 50-centigrade figure of 8 shots per minute is correct, it would take minus-50 centigrade for you to get an extra shot per minute, more or less. You seem to know your SI-74 better than I initially thought, and myself, too"

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

Once again Jessica rode her Bluth stair truck; around Quendelton it was about 50 degrees centigrade. For this reason she decided to go out in a bikini, alongside several water bottles nside food conservators. Even though the Bluth stair truck is air-conditioned, and that she intends not to stay outside for more than five minutes, the gonk droid would be keeping tabs on how fast she can discharge a LSAT180 with these new fins. She got into a prone position, her body against the hot sand, burning her skin away from any pesky Jawa. Jawas seem to turn around her as if they were flies. Luckily there was nothing but dunes for miles around Jessica when she began test-firing the weapon. Normally battle droids would be used for testing new small arms, but she would do the testing herself. Jessica had a fully-charged LSAT180 loaded inside her SI-74 for that final test to make sure this thing actually works as intended.

"Gonk!"

"Fore!"

"Gonk!"

"I really didn't make up figures after all!" Jessica said after having discharged at various sand dunes.