Chapter 25 In space with a junkyard ship

As I re-entered our berth, the sight of the drones working on my ship was incredibly nice to see.

Beside the ship were two large pieces of basic armour plating—at least basic for the rest of the universe. Now that I was close, I had full access to the ship’s database, so I could see the results of the tests conducted on this armour plating.

They were, simply said, incredible. Of course, we were running off of models from the small tests we did, but they should be relatively accurate.

The simulations show that those armour plating’s, that are 12 centimetres thick—almost half of my current ones—are about 30 times better. The missiles the pirates used that shredded my current armour would only superficially damage this plating.

This type of armour could also protect against railgun shots—at least, what I know of human railguns.

“Lola, how’s it going with understanding the technology currently available? How do the railguns compare to what we knew back on Earth?”

“There are many places where the technology of Earth is incredibly backwards, but in some places, humans have reached the same level, or close to it, as the rest of the galaxy.”

“As for railguns, humans had reached near the end of that technological advancement. Humans reached about 0.4% of light speed for railgun projectile speeds before you would need to fix it after every shot.”

“On average, it’s the same speed here, but there are models available that have pushed the speed to 0.6% of light speed. They have also been able to scale them up better in terms of projectile mass than humans have, with railguns that can even shoot one-ton projectiles at 0.4.”

“Damn, that’s a lot of damage. Like close to 170,000 tons of TNT. I am assuming that’s only for really large ships?”

“Yes and no. Mostly, those sizes are only built into stationary defences, but I found one article about a capital ship that had two of those built into it. Another thing to note is that there are ship doctrines where railguns are actually pushed way beyond the 0.4 and are just completely rebuilt after every shot.”

“That’s super interesting, but I could see a use for it if you can mass-produce those kinds of smaller ships and are up against bigger ones. I would so want to dive into the ship doctrines of the Galaxy, but I need to focus right now.”

Taking this into account, this kind of armour could take up to 10-gram projectile shot from a standard railgun, which is incredibly impressive considering that getting hit with it would be like being hit by a very concentrated explosion of nearly 1,720 kg of TNT.

Repairing armour after that kind of an attack would be a pain, but it would still be better than being dead. It would, of course, also be a lot better at protecting against laser attacks, but we didn't have proper simulations for those yet.

As I was inspecting the armour plating, I found a manufacturing flaw. It was just a tiny mark left by what I assume was some sort of mold or press. It wouldn't affect the defensiveness of that armour plate, but there was an exact copy of that mark on the other plate as well.

“My God, these things are mass-produced. No wonder they’re called basic armour plating. Lola, do you have any idea where these are made and what the prices of those look like near those manufacturing places? Also, if this is basic, do you know what’s not?”

“There are two locations in the galaxy where these kinds of armour plates are mass-produced. They’re both near the two largest red zones. There are better versions of these types of armour plating, but they're not too much better than the ones we currently have. But there seem to be a lot better ones—of course, the price seems to skyrocket.”

“And the prices near those manufacturing locations?”

“About ten times cheaper than they are here, at least for the basic ones.”

“Yeah, we really do need to go to one of those places, as one of those two red zones is most likely our destination anyway.”

It would take a long while to cut these armour plating pieces into proper shapes so we could patch up our current armour, but I bet there are better tools available that would make the job a lot easier. So I headed inside to start messing around with the nano machines and the 3D printer to figure out if I can get any upgrades and to see what types of technology are available.

First, I tested the sample I got from the city streets. The metal was a weird mixture of what seemed like real metal but wasn’t. It took me a bit of time to understand the composition and how this metal was made. Fortunately, I had access to the web, which allowed me to confirm my theories.

Turns out this metal wasn’t mined—it was grown. It’s like metal, sounds like metal, and looks like metal, but it’s actually something closer to plant matter. So there are plants developed—or perhaps naturally found—that you could harvest and melt down to produce a similar product to what durasteel can give you, and it’s actually lighter than that.

There are quite a few growing stations in this solar system just to harvest this type of metal for the sole purpose of building large megastructures. Otherwise, you would need to mine out the entire solar system to make a station like this. Now you just need time, sunlight, water, and a bit of fertilizer to do the same.

It seems that this was standard practice for basically every megastructure and every other structure—even ships. It seems like real metals that were usually used for construction were used in the making of more durable things like the armor plating. It was an elegant solution for the problems of space civilizations and their resource management.

The armor plating had a different kind of molecular structure. There was real metal here, it was composed of about 40% iron. There were other base metals here as well, but almost 20% of it was once again something that looked like metal but wasn’t. This time, it wasn’t from a plant but from some type of creature.

After a bit of research, once again. I learned that 20% of this was from space monster armor.

I had expected space monsters that came from portals to be more rare, but it turns out they were quite common, and adventurers were always hunting those because they were worth a lot, especially because of that armor every type of space monster had.

Now I could also understand why especially space adventurers didn't want anyone with the looting ability anywhere near them.

My ability would still trigger when fighting those kinds of monsters even if I was quite far away. There was a maximum distance, but my ship would also be ineffective in a fight if I were so far away. If I were to turn a space monster into basic materials with my ability, it would lose basically 99% of its value.

That realization sucked more than I could imagine. Damn, I really hope that the variation I had would actually fix that problem.

Another interesting thing Lola pointed out to me was that there were looting skills for sale—they went for about 4 million. That was a bit weird to me, but turns out skills were more flexible than abilities. And like that examiner said, sometimes the results of the looting ability are preferable.

Seems like with skills, you could control their activation better than abilities. It finally makes sense why they are called different names, as abilities are more innate and less controllable, but usually a lot stronger.

Finally, I finished preparing, happy to use the armor plating metal as the base material for a small cluster of nano machines. It would take a bit for them to be finished, so I started to look over the rest of the technology available.

Immediately I searched for gravity generation, as that was something I had no idea how they were pulling off.

There were entire shops dedicated to devices for different strengths of gravity for ships. After looking at what's available, with not too big of an investment, I could get a device to cancel out the constant acceleration you need during FTL. That meant that I could run my workshop while travelling.

Even better was that there was a way to have both—not only to cancel out acceleration but also to make a constant one-G gravity in the correct orientation so I could feel like I was back on Earth. That kind of dual device system cost more—about 25 to 35 million credits—but that was if you bought from corporations. I bet I could get cheaper versions or make it myself.

Then I started to look into how that actually worked, and I was absolutely flabbergasted. Those devices actually influenced space-time. In the explanation given, while looking at the devices that I can buy. It explains that the effect of mass that helps bend space-time, thus creating gravity, is replaced by energy, giving you a similar effect.

Those devices were real power hogs, but bending space-time to create gravity sounded like it should require a lot of power—yet the requirements as a whole were a lot lower than expected, even if my current setup couldn't run it.

Everything came back to needing fusion. Looking into that made me feel poor again. Even the cheapest and really weak ones that could barely satisfy my needs cost upwards of 50 million.

Owning a spaceship was turning out to be really expensive. Everything seemed so much cheaper when I was just salvaging everything.

There might be a way I could sidestep that. It would need to wait until I can test this nano machine cluster I’m currently making.

There didn’t seem to be any information on how those devices actually manipulate space-time, but I was sure that when I got my hands on one of those devices, I could figure things out.

Next were shields—there were three different kinds. One seemed to be a really solid shield, meant to protect mainly against railgun shots, but it seemed to be overall the best choice.

Another one was kinda similar to the first one, but a lot more reflective—thanks to that, it was really effective against laser-type weapons, although it sacrificed overall protection, especially against railguns, by quite a bit.

The last one was the most interesting one in its function. It made small dots of solid wall. This one could be projected the furthest away from the ship and was usually used to protect against missiles, because these small dots would make the missiles explode further away if hit and they also seem to somehow have some pulling effect.

Another difference was the distance you could project those shields. The third—the dot kind of shield—was the furthest. The next furthest was the reflective one, and the closest was the solid shield, which, according to manufacturers, could only be projected about 8 to 10 meters on most versions.

The real question I had was: how did that actually work, and what was the shield actually made out of?

It took me a lot longer to figure that one out, but turns out it was once again a manipulation of space-time, but less in the time department and more in the space fabric of that formula. Basically, less gravity, more substance. They were solidifying space so much that it acted like a barrier. Now I really wanted to know how they accomplished manipulating space-time like that.

My time exploring new technologies had come to an end because the nano machine cluster was finished, and it was time to start testing how much those nano machines could now survive, because if they could survive enough, I could possibly have fusion, which would solve all my power problems.