Gunboat (A LitRPG Adventure), page 8
The beams should burn through almost anything with enough hits, though the body armor he could now build would mitigate the damage somewhat. In addition to protection against kinetic projectiles, such as bullets, the armor would vaporize when hit with beam weapons, creating a small puff of particles that helped diffuse the beam.
For his bladed weapons, they were not much different than the ones he’d used all his life. These, however, were made of better alloys and could be honed to a sharpness not found on any knife or sword on Earth. As for the shipboard living facilities, it meant he could re-create the bunks, footlockers, and armory fixtures when they eventually were needed.
Watkins was more interested in the weapons and wanted a way to further research and integrate them into his MOBS. That was beyond him for now, but there was a long future ahead of him if he could get his ship working properly.
Chapter 13
New Compartments
“Watkins, I’ve done all I can for my systems, and my processing power is now at forty-nine percent, but to go further, I will need your assistance,” LANI said, distracting Watkins right before he began integrating the next compartment.
“What can I do to help?” he asked. If he could help repair LANI back to full efficiency, she might be able to assist him further.
“Nothing at this time, but as your processing power improves, we can see about creating research modules. Your drones will be able to do more for us both if we can upgrade them past level 0.”
“What are these levels, and how far do they go?”
“The levels are just our system’s way of quantifying how effective something is,” LANI said. “It encompasses many aspects of something like a repair drone, but a drone that is level 1 or 2 would be capable of autonomously making more intricate repairs, as well as likely strengthening itself against damage.”
“Good to know, and from what you said before, you have a schematic for one of these research modules?” Watkins tried to confirm.
“Yes, though you’ll have to grow in power before you’re able to construct one. You’re making good progress, so continue what you’re doing. While I’ll refrain from overexerting myself, I can focus some of my processing power to assist you in assimilating the rest of our ship.”
“Thank you. I’ll take all the help I can get,” Watkins said as they started on the next compartment. He could feel LANI helping, nudging him in the right direction and smoothing the path as he integrated the compartment back into his ship. Similar to the fore and aft compartments, this one was heavily damaged, and the entire port side of the compartment was exposed to vacuum.
When his control snapped into place, Watkins got a look at his next find. The debris that had impaled the ship entered through the hull here and went into the next compartment aft. Most of the loose debris in the compartment had long ago drifted off into space, but shoved up against the bulkhead was the aft part of a smaller vessel.
“I believe that was our ship’s boat,” LANI said, “and this was our main airlock hatch and hangar. Try to save as much as you can as we clear away the damage. Other than the docking hatch on the bow of the ship, this was the only way to move personnel and supplies onto the ship.”
Looking around, Watkins could see that the hatchway leading from this compartment was much larger than the others, which made sense if pallets of supplies would be moving through it.
“Any idea what it is that hit us?” he asked. The hunk of debris impaling his vessel resembled a large cylinder with jagged broken bits that had stabbed through the hull.
“Give me a minute. I’m trying to match it up with anything in the database.”
“It looks like it took out this compartment and the next one down the line. Once we integrate the next compartment, we can see about harvesting this hunk of salvage.”
“I think I’ve got it,” LANI said. “It looks like a portion of the boarding arm from the research station.”
“That would be consistent with the events that happened. That part of the station was close to where our ship docked, so it would be more likely to hit us than some random debris floating around the system. Do you think there’s anything important in there that might help us?” Watkins asked.
“No,” LANI said with some disappointment. “Other than salvage, I don’t believe we’ll find anything of import. It was merely a boarding ramp, and the connection portion had been torn off so we can’t even study that to improve the boarding hatch when we get around to creating one.”
“Let’s get that next compartment integrated and we’ll see about harvesting the debris,” Watkins said. It was taking almost no time now between integrations as he rapidly incorporated each new section into his vessel.
The next compartment was another barracks area, almost identical to the first he’d discovered. It had also been torn open by the impact of the station debris, and he could tell the compartment behind it was also compromised. The damage was even more extensive than he had first thought.
In the next compartment, he found something interesting. This compartment turned out to be their medical bay. Like with the hangar and barracks next door, it was torn open and wedged with part of the station debris. Some of the medical equipment survived the ordeal, and Watkins had one of his drones take it apart and carefully reprocess it so he could re-create the device.
You have unlocked new schematics:
1. Med pod, level 0
Every little bit helped, and with this section of his ship under control, he could start harvesting the station wreckage. Four drones were assigned the task of securing and harvesting the debris. It would require some careful planning to make sure none of it drifted off while they were working to cut it down into manageable chunks. His analysis of the drones showed they should be up to the task, though there was a small chance of failure and the loss of both debris and some of his drones.
After the med bay, the next compartment aft was a combat information center (CIC). Inside the relatively intact compartment were several workstations that resembled the bridge layout. Instead of controlling the ship from here, the crew could control the ship’s weapon systems.
As with the bridge, the CIC had controls for a human crew—or the crew of some other humanoid species—to operate. Watkins could override everything, of course, but it was yet another reminder that a full crew could take some of the burden in dangerous encounters. This compartment and the original armament of the ship brought up a question that had been bugging him.
“LANI, why is this essentially a warship if it was supposed to be some experimental vessel?”
“While this was an experimental vessel, it was indeed intended as a testbed for weapons systems,” LANI explained. “You can control them with greater precision than a human crew, and that was one of the things we had hoped to examine. Space, both out here in the fringe systems and in the more populated areas, is a dangerous place. Advancements in science have not mitigated the conflicts between the various species. For the most part, the Council keeps the various member species from causing too much harm, but they are allowed to resolve most issues among themselves.”
“Is that why the Council exists, to protect the majority of the species?” Watkins asked, beginning to think of the Council as more of a galactic version of the United Nations, and from the danger and level of conflict in space, it seemed this Council was about as ineffective as the actual UN in keeping the peace.
“Peacekeeping and preventing the extermination of species is not its primary purpose, though. The primary purpose is to monitor, contain, and discover . . .” LANI paused, and Watkins could feel confusion through their connection. “I seem to not recall our main purpose. That data is in part of the damaged section of my servers. There are also files missing that might explain why this research station was placed in an uninhabited and rarely trafficked section of space. Hopefully, we can re-create the missing data once we have access to the research station.”
“Very well,” Watkins said. “Let’s continue to integrate the rest of the ship and then try to find this research station that we’re banking so many of our hopes on.”
Something about the missing data in LANI’s servers seemed odd to Watkins, but he could sense no duplicitous thoughts through their connection. He genuinely believed that LANI’s data was truly lost through damage. Still, something about it unsettled him, and he would make a point to keep a close eye on things when they finally did locate the station.
After the CIC, the next compartment turned out to be a jackpot. It was a research lab, and though part of the outer wall had been damaged, there, in the middle of the deck, was a large workstation with what looked like a miniature version of LANI’s server connected to it.
“That’s it, Watkins. You’ve found a research module! Have your drones bring it somewhere safer, maybe our compartment or near the fabricator,” LANI said excitedly.
“This is great. I’m going to have it brought to our compartment. I want to get a close-up view of how this thing works,” Watkins said. It was their only research module, and it could be the key to so many things. All he had to do now was bring it somewhere safe, repair it, and put it to work.
“Do you think the drones can make it work?” he asked. From his initial observation, it didn’t appear seriously damaged, but the housing had been battered by debris and part of it had been torn away. He had to believe that something intended to work on a starship that would likely see combat was durable enough to resist some battering about.
“It should be fine, and if not, I still have the schematics in my database we can use once your processing power improves,” LANI replied.
It seemed like things were looking up. Watkins had a research module, and a supply of resources to harvest, and soon, he’d have control over his entire vessel.
Chapter 14
Void Beast
Watkins watched carefully as the drones were pulled off salvage duty to help safely transport the research module to the core room. It took his drones a while to dismount it from the research lab floor. After that, they had to physically move it through the ship. Hatchways were a bit of a struggle, as they weren’t mounted flush to the deck, and there was a small, five-inch frame that the drones had to step over.
He almost ordered one of his rats or the beetle to be reprocessed so he could control an extra drone to help, but the crew of six drones that he had on hand seemed to manage things. It wasn’t until the research module was placed on the deck of his core room that Watkins felt some relief. Five of the drones went back to salvaging the station wreckage, while the last drone went to work on repairing the research module.
“LANI, how can my drones repair the research module when they’re only level 0?” Watkins asked. “I’m not going to complain, but I would have thought they would have needed more upgrades to work on something that complex.”
“For repairs, they can often handle more complex items than their level would suggest,” LANI explained. “Creating one from scratch isn’t possible at this time, but since they have most of the device to examine, they can get it to a functional state. That doesn’t mean the research module will function at full capacity, and the makeshift repairs the drone is working on will surely hamper the module’s effectiveness.”
That was a logical enough explanation, and as much as Watkins wanted to start researching upgrades, he still had the rest of the ship to integrate. His work wasn’t going to stop with the integration; he had the whole bow and aft engine sections of the ship to rebuild. As for the interior of the ship, there was one last compartment to integrate. It was the furthest aft, save for the engine compartment.
As he pushed his will into the compartment, Watkins felt his control rapidly spread over it. This was the fastest he had integrated a compartment so far. When total control snapped into place over the compartment, he realized that while he was getting faster at his efforts, this compartment was the smallest one he’d explored so far.
It was a galley, and it had been spared the worst of the destruction. The compartment had retained its hull integrity, so most of the items inside were still functional. There was a small food and drink fabricator that worked off biomass cubes. The fabricator had suffered minor damage, and his drones could fix it up without too much trouble.
For now, his ship had no living crew, so the galley renovations could wait. There was a nice discovery inside the compartment. It had been fully stocked for the potential first voyage of the ship. Nearly a hundred biomass bricks were stacked in the various storage cabinets, and the food fabricator itself had eight loaded into it that were ready to be used.
Watkins put the galley repairs low on the priority list but did have recovery of the biomass bricks set a bit higher. He wanted most of them safely stored in the fabrication compartment with the others. He decided to leave in place the biomass bricks that were already loaded in the food fabricator in case his crew were hungry whenever they eventually made it back to the station.
With the last internal compartment under his control, Watkins examined his status. He could feel the improvement, but it was always nice to see it quantified.
Status
Vessel: Pending
Vessel core: Jesse Watkins
Hull durability: Unknown
Core processing power: 24%
Core durability: 100%
Systems
1. Level 0 auxiliary processing server housing the LANI system: 43%
2. Level 0 Universal Fabricator: 100%
3. Level 0 reprocessor: 81%
Units
Crew: None
Core-Controlled Units:
Command limit: 12/13
1. Simple repair drone, level 0: 6
2. Mutated bilge rat, level 0: 5
3. Yendax beetle, level 0: 1
Resources
1. Salvage: 87
2. Biomass: 89
He had bumped his processing power to twenty-four percent, still not even close to what he was capable of, but enough to boost his command limit up to thirteen. With an extra slot open, he ordered a new drone to be produced, giving him a total of seven. The new drone would be ordered to work on the reprocessor before helping with the salvage operations.
The reprocessor was still at eighty-one percent and was suffering from internal damage that the beetles feeding off it had caused. With so much salvage being pulled from the wreckage embedded in his ship, Watkins wanted to make sure he wasn’t wasting any due to inefficiency while reprocessing it into usable material. There was a lot of the ship that he needed to rebuild, and every ingot of salvage that he could eke out of the reprocessor was crucial to his survival.
“LANI, I’m going to start working on integrating the hull,” Watkins said. “We need to have total control over the ship before I begin major repairs and rebuilding.”
“That is a logical approach, though I will try to get your attention once the research module is functional. Which research options do you wish to pursue first?” LANI asked.
“I’m not sure yet. I think we need to see what we find on the hull. Maybe there is a major component that we’re missing or needs to be upgraded.” In truth, despite the information in his database, there was much about the ship he didn’t know or understand. By integrating the entire vessel, he’d have a better feel for it, as the ship was essentially his body. Once it was fully his, Watkins would know what was missing.
His first efforts at integrating the hull were slow. He started on the hull directly over his core room, using structural braces to reach the exterior. It might have been faster to start where the hull was breached, but for some reason, Watkins felt that having the hull over his core compartment secured would help to protect him. He was also slowed by the rather unique makeup of the hull.
Internally, the ship’s compartments were heavily reinforced, essentially armored boxes inside the ship, but the hull itself was on a whole other level. Only two inches thick, the armored hull possessed far more integrated devices than the walls of the internal compartments. For a while, Watkins pondered their use, but eventually, as more sections of his hull integrated with his core, he could tell what he was looking at.
The most complex components turned out to be his ship’s sensors. He’d already integrated with the internal sensor devices that gave him vision over the compartments, but these were much more powerful and numerous on the armored hull. His armor was also oddly complex, and it had several kinds of protection built into it.
When hit by a beam weapon, like a laser, the hull would fragment into tiny particles instead of melting. These particles would remain near the hull for several seconds, dispersing the power of further attacks in the same location. His database flagged it as ablative armor, and it would weaken any energy weapons fired at his ship. The alloy of the armor itself was a weave of metals and ceramic, which would both protect against kinetic energy and shield against any harmful radiation or similar energies he might run into.
All in all, it was advanced protection, and he confirmed with LANI that his armor was another experimental component of his ship, more advanced than even most warship designs. The only drawback was that his hull could only mount about two to three inches of armor over his ship. It seemed that the processing power of his core would limit his ability to integrate more hull material or expand the vessel’s size.
Additional protection would be offered by a shield generator unit that would block any damage up to its load limitation. Sadly, he couldn’t detect any shield generator units currently functioning on his ship. Watkins would need to integrate further forward on the ship; according to his schematics, the shield generators were wing-like projections just aft of the torpedo launchers at the bottom of the hull. He’d get there eventually, but given that they were projections off the hull, there was a good chance the debris had destroyed or at least heavily damaged them.
