"This is the GTVA emergency broadcast system at Delta Serpentis. Condition ORANGE. Please report to bombardment shelters immediately. This is not a drill," a genderless, monotone voice announced on the background of a multicolored, striped display. 

The admiral touched a key on the remote, and the display flicked to another subspace broadcast. A news report, from Mars:

"The Federation rejoices today at the liberation of the Jovian Systems Republic..."

Over and over again, he flipped between channels.

"Hostile destroyers Imperiuse and Carthage were eliminated at Saturn three days ago..."

"...An interview with Captain Kyrematen of the UEFG Yangtze in-"

"Now you can get these limited-edition Wargods action figures, for the low low price of..."

"...I would like to thank the brave men and women of second and third fleets. The federal counter-blitz successfully..."

"Do you have too much recyclable paper and not enough money?! Bring your recyclable paper to RecycleMax! Your one-stop source for all your recycling needs..."

"No, there were no survivors from the Atreus. The explosion nearly vaporized two of our cruisers and..."

"It's time for 'Show me what you got'! The game show where-"

"This is the beginning of the end for the GTVA forces still in Sol."

"...rumors circulate that the Toutatis has jumped to Delta Serpentis. The Federation Navy has declined to comment."

"Kyle Netreba today said that the elimination of remaining GTVA forces in Sol takes precedence over control of the node..."

A trio of soft, rapid beeps roused the Admiral's attention. "Enter," he stated.

The door silently slid open, revealing another officer, dressed in the traditional blue, grey, and black uniform of the GTVA.

"Captain Salas? What's up?" the admiral asked.

"Sir. I've been reviewing some of these specifications. A total rework of the powergrid, an extra dozen capacitors, two more open-cycle heat sinks..."

"I know, it's dangerous."

"Actually, I was going to say, it is exactly what we need. If it works," the captain could not help but hold back a smile.

"There is no reason it should not. Vasudan ships are built exactly like that. They have always been ahead of us in starship engineering,"

"There is one other matter I wanted to discuss with you..." the captain sounded somewhat uneasy, not entirely sure how to proceed. "It's about the Shepshekaf. And your friendship with Recamai."

"If this is about my loyalty index, I'll politely tell you where to shove it," the admiral emitted a chuckle.

"No. The Shepshekaf is the only combat-ready destroyer at our disposal. And I never understood exactly how you convinced the Vasudans to come to our aid in the first place. If you could do that again..."

"You must realize that the Federation will never attack the Vasudans. That limited invulnerability is more valuable than any destroyer," the admiral informed, pulling out a razor-thin, plastic wafer, offering it to the captain.

"What's on this?" he took the data chip, eyeing it. Knowing the admiral, it could be anything.

"Instructions. See to it that they are transmitted to everyone in the fleet?"

"Of course, sir."

As the captain left, the admiral stretched out on the sofa, picked up a nearby tablet, and began reviewing the report from the engineering team.

==============================================================================================

CIC MODIFICATIONS

We have completed the modifications to your station on the CIC.

One thing you will notice is a control stick in place of the right-hand console: That controls pitch, roll, and yaw. You will be handling the ship's movement yourself, instead of leaving the combat maneuvering officer to it. The throttle on the left-hand side controls your ship's fusion thrusters. It resembles a fighter's control suite by a surprising amount. 



Your throttle has four extra aux-input keys under your thumb:

Key one engages the sprint drive. If you have a valid target selected, and have the nose of the ship pointed at it, the sprint drive will automatically take you to within  2 kilometers of the target, well inside optimal beam firing range. If you do not have the nose of your ship pointed at your current target, the sprint drive will launch you 7000 meters in that particular direction. Your sprint drive will now shame the linear speed of interceptors - assuming that you avoid catastrophic meltdown. This takes an incredible amount of power, achievable only by surging and overloading your reactors.

Key two overdrives the reactors quite literally to within a hair's breadth of catastrophic failure, and surges the surplus power to the beam capacitors. With it, you can very rapidly charge and fire your main beams. This is one of the most aggressive power transfers possible. The Bellerophon was built from the inside-out to do exactly this, up to within an inch of suicidal meltdown. Use it with extreme caution. The amount of destruction you can unleash with this system is nothing short of frightening.

Your ship has been equipped with a short-burst ECM system and a high-saturation countermeasure array. You can fire the array by pressing the countermeasure key on your control stick. That thing will kill EVERY hostile missile lock in the battlespace - but not friendly locks. However, as you might have noticed, we did not weld a Charybdis onto the Marcus Glaive, so you don't have the indefinite jamming endurance of a dedicated AWACS ship. You only get three shots before the system is expended and needs to be recharged. Key three does the recharging, and it takes a fairly substantial amount of power to charge all of those plasma flares.

Key four pumps active armor sealant into your damaged armor layers. This is the only system we did not completely overhaul - it works more or less just like it did before. We just remapped the control to your station, and overrode every safety protocol in the software. The ship's computer should give you no shit if you fire it up in the middle of combat - but you should be advised, it is quite a power drain, so much so that the only way to power it and still fly the ship is by overloading the reactors.

Note also the throttle switch under your index finger: This toggles automatic RCS management on and off, especially useful if you want to 'glide', moving in one direction while facing another.

ABOUT OVERLOADING

Now, about overloading: It's dangerous. Extremely fucking dangerous. The fact that anyone ever considers it shows how little they know about meson reactors. But I know that's unlikely to stop you from doing it. That's also why engineers do not usually command warships. So let's get down to what happens when you do surge your reactors beyond safe levels, and expect not to explode from it:

'Overload State' is an abstraction between containment stability, quantum cascade resonance, subatomic causality disassociation, and your ship's ability to radiate waste heat. 'Saturating' any one of those beyond safe limits would cause a chain-reaction that would completely obliterate the Marcus Glaive. The system will automatically balance those saturation loads, but it's a zero-sum gain.

At 50% overload state and above, you will overwhelm the reactors' ability to self-compensate, and the powergrid will have to use every conduit in the ship to manage the automatic compensation cascade. That may not sound that bad - and it's not. But the feedback will effectively blind the majority of your ship's sensors, so you will be giving up missile lock and forward Hellstar tracking.

At 75% overload state and above, the Marcus Glaive will begin suffering structural fractures in the hull as the surges become more intense and less managable. Do not consider your hull integrity expendable, for fuck's sake.

At 100% overload state, you will explode. Your ship's entrails will become extrails, yourself and your crew will become a fine mist of white-hot vapor, and people will be picking through the neutron-embrittled wreckage of what used to be the Marcus Glaive for decades to come. Did I mention the meson flash will turn it all radioactive for a few thousand years?

ETS CONSOLE

Your energy transfer system (ETS) console, mounted directly above your upper-right multifunction display, looks a lot like a fighter's. That is because that particular unit was made for a Boanerges, and we adapted it to the Marcus Glaive. They don't make a proper one-man ETS console for warships.

Diverting more energy to 'guns' means your main beams, and to no one's surprise, the power demands are enormous. The beam capacitors work a lot like weapon energy on a fighter: Once depleted, you have to wait for them to recharge, and turning up the power recharges it faster. The main difference between fighters and the Marcus Glaive is that even at the 'zero' setting, you still have some baseline beam recharge. Mostly because the Bellerophon generates so much power, spinal beams are the only system that can handle it all.

The 'Shield' option on the ETS console is a little misleading. You don't have shields on the Marcus Glaive. That instead controls your active armor hardeners. Sending more power to the active armor increases your resistance to damage. Keep in mind, the Marcus Glaive has some fairly strong plating as-is, so even completely depowered, the ship is almost as durable as its factory specs.

'Engine' is a bit complicated. We managed to override a few of the safety protocols for the fusion thrusters, so diverting more power there will improve your linear speed. But you can only send so much power to your thrusters before you begin melting conduits. The surplus power that cannot go to your engines instead goes to your point defense turrets, so maximizing your agility also maximizes your turret performance.

Note that your ETS system directs output at nominal power levels. ETS overloads nothing and taxes nothing. However, ETS is a zero-sum gain, so sending more power to one system starves the others of power.

WEAPON ENHANCEMENTS

My team and I have made the modifications you requested to the Marcus Glaive's weaponry.

Your beam weapons are now slaved to fixed forward-firing configuration. The triggers on your control stick will manage the entire beam charging, firing, and purging process. Firing the beams works just like the guns on a fighter, except they are a million times as powerful. Those damned Feds are never going to jam our beam targeting.

Our Ice Queen spinal beam cannon has enhanced range over the standard variant. The Vasudan team managed to greatly extend the containment field projector range, at the cost of higher-than-normal power demand. It has an effective range of around eight kilometers, and its damage output and burn time are unchanged. UEF frigates are in for quite a surprise once they realize we have an artillery-range beam cannon.

The two Aurora Wakes have reduced power demand and diminished range, but with no degredation in their damage output. The spool-up process for firing the beams is almost instantaneous. The modified Aurora Wake beams should be ideal for decisively concluding engagements at short range.

We also installed a pair of the rapid-fire Hellstar cannons in the Marcus Glaive's wingtips as you requested. We have a lot of spare parts laying around, intended for servicing destroyers that no longer exist. Those massive cannons can deflect up to twelve degrees off-center from the ship's nose, and will automatically triangulate and focus fire onto targeted subsystems. Theoretically speaking, you can even use the Hellstar batteries to shred hostile fighters unfortunate enough to end up in that twelve degree arc. Your "Target object under reticule" and "Target subsystem under reticule" controls may be useful.

The installation of beam shutters and hardened electronics does reduce the probability that UEF surgical strikes will disarm us, but not entirely. The front end of the ship is still loaded with capacitors, scanners, and fire control systems that are necessary for operating every weapon system on the ship. We have better armor and redundancy than most Bellerophons do, but you will have to maintain good situational awareness to avoid being disarmed. Switching the Marcus Glaive into glide-mode should help a lot, as it allows you to travel toward a target without exposing your beams to enemy fire the whole time.

MISSILE SYSTEMS

We rearranged the SARISSA variable-payload VLS batteries, to accomodate the changes to the physical shape of our powergrid, and still provide decent coverage. The modified launchers also handle more diverse payloads. By sacrificing magazine size, we were able to achieve higher-than-normal rates of fire.

The Supernova torpedoes work more or less as they did before: They are rocket-propelled tactical meson bombs. If you successfully blow up a federation warship's point defenses, you can use the Supernovas in place of your main beams entirely. Firing them will not cost you a single watt of power. Unfortunately, they are not suitable for 360-by-360 fire anymore; we had to downsize the sensor suite to make room for some of the other modifications. You have to achieve aspect lock on a target to fire your Supernovas, and at the moment, we can only lock targets within approximately 60 degrees of the Marcus Glaive's nose.

We have also built a long-range-missile (LRM) variant of the Eos torpedo. These Eos LRM's have a vastly upgraded propulsion system and can be fired in swarms, though they do substantially less damage than the Supernovas. The 600 m/s flight speed of the Eos LRMs leaves UEF point defenses with a very narrow window of opportunity in which to shoot them down. These also require a hard aspect lock, and because of the swarm deployment mode, getting a shooting solution is not instantaneous.

We made similar changes to several Trebuchet warheads, to produce the Trebuchet LRM. Additionally, the Marcus Glaive's forward sensors are a lot more powerful than those on a fighter, so these acquire aspect lock very quickly. They are ideal for sniping fighters from extreme range that happen to be in front of you, and are also good for  surgical strikes against warships.

Shortly before the UEF counter-blitz and the loss of the Delta Serpentis node, we received a shipment of experimental Jaeger AAA missiles from Hideki Labs. These cutting-edge wonder missiles automatically lock onto hostile fighters, then explode in mid-flight and release a spray of homing plasma bolts. You get full 360-by-360 coverage with them. One day, these will hopefully be standard-issue, and will replace the Piranha and Infyrno. The engineers on the GTL Hastings have all the specs and can fabricate as many Jaegers as we need.
