"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. Nothing could have survived that explosion."

"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."

"Confidential sources indicate that the Toutatis has transited the node, and is bombarding military targets from orbit in Delta Serpentis."

"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. "Terminal off. 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? How can I help you?" the admiral greeted.

"Just reviewing some of these changes to the Marcus Glaive," the captain answered. "I wouldn't have traded the main torpedo magazines for extra heat sinks."

"I don't need a thousand Eos torpedoes for any mission," the admiral replied. "But I do need the reactors to not melt into slag."

"The powergrid overhaul is nice. Quite frankly, I'm surprised ships are not configured like this, straight from the shipyards," Captain Salas remarked.

"Vasudan warships are," Serkr noted.

"That is another thing 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 Admiral Recamai."

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

"No, nothing like that. The Shepshekaf just happens to be the only combat-ready alliance destroyer in the Sol theater. You convinced the Imperium to come to our aid when the Feds hit the Agincourt. If you could do it again..."

"You must realize that the Federation will never attack the Vasudans without provocation. This immunity allows them to run recon ops anywhere in Federation space, at perfect-zero risk. That is infinitely more valuable than a single destroyer on the front line," 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. It resembles a fighter's control suite by a surprising amount, because we pulled most of the hardware from a Myrmidon.



Your station has four extra aux-input keys:

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 complaints if you fire it up in the middle of combat. But 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.

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 recommended 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 ship will have to begin using the entire powergrid as a makeshift compensator. That may not sound that bad - and it's not. But this will generate a lot of unwanted electromagnetic noise, effectively blinding the majority of your ship's sensors.

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. For the love of all that is holy, please do not consider your ship's hull integrity expendable.

At 100% overload state, you 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. I should also mention that 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, was also borrowed from a scrapped Myrmidon and adapted 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 for those beams 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.

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

'Engine' is a bit complicated. Diverting more power to your engines will indeed improve your linear speed, as well as your ship's point-defense 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.

PRIMARY WEAPONS

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

Your beam weapons are now slaved to the fixed forward-firing configuration. Select and fire them exactly as you would operate a fighter’s guns. 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 Wake beam cannons 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. 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 basic 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.

SECONDARY WEAPONS

We rearranged the SARISSA variable-payload VLS batteries, to accomodate the changes to the physical shape of our powergrid, and still provide excellent coverage.

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. As always, these torpedoes have perfectly omnidirectional 360-by-360 coverage, and will automatically home in on whatever target you have selected.

You can also select & fire Eos subspace missiles. These smaller swarm-deployed torpedoes inflict substantially less damage than the Supernovas, but execute a tactical subspace jump upon launch. The 600 m/s subspace exit speed of the Eos leaves UEF point defenses with a very narrow window of opportunity to respond, and can be fired from extreme range. These do require a hard aspect lock, and because of the swarm deployment mode and subspace targeting, getting a shooting solution is not instantaneous.

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 any hostile strikecraft nearby, then explode in mid-flight and release a spray of homing plasma bolts. One day, these will hopefully be standard-issue, and replace the Piranha and Infyrno. The engineers on the GTL Hastings have all the specs and can fabricate as many Jaegers as we need.
