Captain's Log, Stardate Stupid machine still insists on starting every entry with that, well, I refuse to use it.

Anyway, now it's me running Oz, our Battlestation & shipping company & boy is the paperwork and all that a hassle. I delegate as much as I can, and we don't believe in having lots of forms in any case, but still there have to be some and that takes time. But it takes a lot of getting used to.

But I wanted to write about an event that we just heard about. It has the crews laughing at the situation & feeling strong. That's good.

See, Kondor (that's one of our Hydran-built Q-ships) got a new captain. Now Captain Murray has good qualifications or we wouldn't have let him be a captain. But it turns out he's a little jumpy. We expect that will sort itself out, but in the meantime his ship has soot all over it & he is the butt of some jokes over that.

See, it was the first time Captain Sooty (I mean Murray) had been attacked, so he was nervous - even more so because it was an Orion pirate (they have a mean reputation and can back it up too), and more yet because he couldn't get the pirate to close in and board. We tend to just win boarding operations flat out, since nobody carries half so many troops as us. But this Orion ship was small - their smallest, a Light Raider, and the pirate captain knew he'd have trouble boarding in general – that even some normal freighters might fight him off. So he didn't want to take any risk. He was demanding that our crew abandon ship in shuttles. That way he'd eliminate his risk.

Well, Captain Murray played along & launched 'shuttles' which were actually fighters. But he launched them sneaky-like. He sent them out just like shuttles would launch - slowly, one at a time & had them throttle everything back to the same specs a shuttle would have. Then he added in just a touch of Electronic Counter Measures (that's ECM - something the Scout Sensors are good at) - just enough to help make their emissions signatures look right but not enough to make it clear he was using ECM. He figured, and he was right, that folks see what they expect to see & the pirate wasn't expecting him to have either fighters or that kind of ECM ability.

See, ECM is most often used as jamming. That's where you see what kind of signals the other guy is sending out & then send out a vast flood of the same kind of signals as loud as you can, so he can't tell which are the returns on his signals & which is your noise. It's like shouting in someone's ear when he's trying to have a conversation.

But it can be used a lot more subtly. Put simply, you see what kinds of signals he is sending out & what kinds of returns he expects, and you either add or subtract or alter those signals just a little so he gets a very different idea of what's going on. It gets complicated, but I won't bore you with talk of constructive or destructive interference & how you get around timing delays & how it's all done & such. In short, you can mess with their ability to tell what is out there – both telling what something is exactly, how far away it is etc, and even whether something is there at all, if it was hard to tell that to begin with.

Now there are tell-tales to watch for that'd let them know they're looking at false returns made by ECM. That takes a lot of computing power and is known as ECCM (or Electronic Counter Counter Measures), but folks don't usually bother to use that unless they suspect ECM is in use – that'd be like looking hard for invisible ink on paper – you don't bother unless you suspect it's there.

Now, visually, fighters look a lot like shuttles in any case, unless you can get a close look. And remember we're dealing with some distance here when we talk about ship combat – what we call Range 1 is actually 10,000 kilometers. Now 10,000 kilometers may sound like a lot, but modern sensors and scanners make that distance seem like nothing...unless something is altering their feedback to give them false impressions.

So anyway, folks rely on their sensors to tell them what's out there, and in this case the ECM fooled those ok.

Then when he was ready, Captain Murray let loose with everything he had, all at once: The fighters fired Gatlings and fusion beams, the ship fired overloaded Fusion beams, Gatlings, the Plasma Torpedo - the works. Well, he hit that teeny little pirate ship so hard it exploded & caught Kondor in the blast hard enough to knock down his shields and cover him in soot. Of the pirate, there wasn't even any salvage left.

It's kinda funny to imagine the look on the pirate's face as he went, in an instant, from being totally in charge to being totally outclassed. Pirates deserve that.

Still, while we tease him, we didn't censure Captain Murray. Better to hit too hard than not hard enough. See, our Q-ships (which is all of them but the tug and the base) are still based on a freighter, not a warship. That means they haven't got much in the way of shields, nor power to reinforce those, nor ability to soak up damage.

They're more like rattlesnakes than bears (talking about animals on Earth here) - if they can get in a surprise strike, they can mess you up good, but they can't slug it out well.

Captain's Log, Stardate No I'm not entering a date. I'm done with that.

Stupid automatic systems automatically doing what I don't want it to do...

Anyway...

Well, 3 weeks have passed & something interesting happened. It's like this:

I got approached with a business opportunity. Well, a different kind of one, I mean. Sure I get lots of business opportunities, some of them even good (It's amazing what some folks think is a good idea - seems the less actual business they've done, the less clue they have about what'd work & what wouldn't).

But, it isn't everyday that a competitor in exactly the same line of work fails and wants to sell out to me.

I didn't know he was a competitor until now, since he operated at quite a distance from where we operate (he was down in the Kzinti neutral zone). And he didn't operate long. That's because he tried to do it on the cheap. "optimize his margins" I think he said. Fooey! I say if you cut corners, you suffer & he proves that one right.

Anyway, there wasn't much to sell. He didn't have a good organization, or routes, or many contacts. His staff hate him 'cause he cut corners with them too ("maximizing productivity" he called it - by which he means he tried to squeeze as much work out of each of them as possible, with as little pay as possible for it - a great way to destroy your business, like burning your house to stay warm. No. If you want your folks to do well for you, you first do well for them. Simple.).

Anyway, he did have 2 large Q-ships to sell, plus some contacts & so on. One of the Q-ships is all busted up & therein lies the story of why he wanted to sell.

See, his ship was flying along, moving cargoes & such, when here comes a pirate. Now he didn't have extra boarding parties (that's troops, remember?) 'cause that costs for equipment & salaries & hazard pay and so on.

So he didn't want to be boarded.

And he hadn't sprung for training, so his captains would know what to do & not to do (Q-ships can't be flown the way you'd operate a warship - rattlesnakes, not bears, remember?).

He hadn't even filled his fighter bays with fighters (only Kzinti and Hydran Q-ships normally carry fighters, but he'd bought a pair of Kzinti Q-ships), since fighters are expensive.

Nor did he fill his drone racks with upgraded drones (the faster ones, which everybody but the super-cheap folks use).

He had hired a retired naval officer to captain it & he acted like his training told him to - he let the pirate get to short range, then warned him and opened fire. Well, he did some damage to the pirate, but not enough, and the pirate shot his engines off (what you hit in combat is more or less random, but in this case it happened to be the engines).

We know this from the logs, since the empty ship hulk was found drifting along in space.

Without engines, you can't power your systems – weapons for example.

Apparently the pirate didn't want to tow the derelict, so emptied it of cargo and valuables, took off its crew (presumably to be sold as slaves) and went his way.

Well that was enough for our business-genius, my competitor, to decide his "profit and loss tables were not favorable" (business-speak for 'I give up'), and look for a buyer.

And he found me. Well, whatever his business school taught him, I taught him how to really haggle, but it cost him for the lesson.

I got his ships & contacts etc cheap.

Some of his people stayed on too. We'll see how they work out - they have some things to unlearn. Luckily, good old Grandpaw sprung for the best training simulators, so they can get some simulated experience with no risk.

Anyway, we juggled our repair bay schedules to get them going again as soon as we could - an idle ship is a money pit and all that.

We gave them the same upgrades (including faster drones & Hydran fighters) as Sopwith Camel has, since it's Kzinti-built too.

Paw had given me the list of names they were going off of, though he said I'd have to figure out for myself why it was funny (haven't had time to figure that out yet).

From it, I named the ship that got blowed up Junkers. That seemed to fit. Then there were a whole lot of names starting with Sopwith. I liked those, so I named the other one Sopwith Cuckoo (it was on the list, I swear, though it also fit the unkind thoughts I was having for the former owner).

They're both running around delivering cargoes for us now.

Captain's Log, Stardate How do I turn this stupid function off?

Today was a big day for us. The first freighters arrived full of parts, materials, and Hydran workers to upgrade the base.

Of course they were our own freighters (the biggest ones - Zeppelin and Handley Page), since nobody else is really comfortable flying through the neutral zone - those that will, are only willing because we're here, but they still charge an arm and a leg in hazard pay to do so, so we used our own ships, which saved us a bunch. Anyway, because they were our own ships, nothing looked different at first. Not at least until work started.

See, Paw always wanted to upgrade Oz (that's our Battlestation) to be a full StarBase, and had saved up money to do so, which finally reached the full amount & so we went ahead and started (some folks incur debt to do things 'now' & then have trouble paying for it later & get ruined. We pay in full up front out of savings & it has saved us a number of times from surprise downturns).

When I asked Paw why upgrade, since the base hasn't really been attacked since the Orions did so when we first got here, he said that when you're not under attack is exactly the right time to do upgrades, but also pointed out that we could expand our business, since a Starbase has both more cargo capacity and more repair capacity than does our Battlestation and both are constantly full, since business is booming.

Makes sense to me.

Anyway, the most common way of building a StarBase is to build a Battlestation first, then upgrade it.

Now Battlestations and StarBases have been around a long time, so they've had plenty of time to sort out how to do so without impairing the abilities of the existing base. Heck, if they couldn't, then upgrade would not be the preferred method, since you don't tend to have Battlestations in safe places & they don't temporarily become safer just to accommodate your upgrade. In other words, they couldn't afford to make them vulnerable, so they found out how to do it without becoming vulnerable.

So, the base normally looks like this: there's a triangular central core, with three of what they call "Secondary Modules" equally spaced around it. Now "Secondary Modules" is confusing, given the many other types of "modules" there are, so we generally call them Docking Wings. See, each Docking Wing sticks out like an old-timey pier would stick out into the water, and you can dock ships to it for repair or transferring cargo.

Well, with a Starbase, The Core becomes a big circle, the Docking Wings get about 4 times bigger, and you get 6 where you only had 3 before.

So the way they do it is really involved, but here's the extremely simple version. They build a big framework first – the skeleton of the new base, & then start building sections onto that. Think of the current core as one pie slice of 6. They put the new 5 pie slices where they are going to go, but for a while the original pie slice sits on top of it all, so it can still operate unimpaired (part of me wonders about keeping it there permanently & just adding a 7th pie slice underneath to complete the circle - it'd give us a lot more space and capacity - we'll look into that).

They build the new Docking Wings in place on the framework, with the old Docking Wings originally on the old core, then move them to the new framework, alternating with the new docking wings, so it goes old, new, old, new etc for balance.

Then last, when the new docking wings are done & all 6 pie slices are done & fastened together as a new central core, one by one the old Docking Wings get drastically expanded into new Docking Wings (I think they cut 'em open down the middle, add new stuff so they get a lot bigger, seal it all together so it's strong, & then fill 'em back up with new systems - it's the only part that looks destructive & I think it will hurt to watch it.)

Anyway, it will take a while to complete, but already the new framework is growing sort of like a spider web all underneath the base. It will get really big & extensive before they start covering it over & eventually installing new systems. Even so, it's exciting.

What's more, they Hydrans brought with them plans for Pseudo Fighter variants and a slightly bigger Pseudo Fighter, called a Pseudo Fighter Leader. One variant has 4 barracks & that intrigued me. The PF Leader has 4 extra systems, So we're working with them to keep 2 of those as-is (the extra power reactor and tractor beam) and swap the other 2 for barracks. They said it will be no problem, so we're going to build 4 or 5 of those.

Captain's Log, Stardate I can't believe there's no way to turn this header function off!

Well, this sucks - Sparky is retiring. He's the Romulan that Grandpaw crewed with. Romulans live a long time, you see. Anyway, he was a very capable administrator & really helpful with science & technology too. Plus he had good contacts in the Romulan Empire that helped out a lot one way or another.

For instance, just last month, he came up with a good deal for us - he said he knew a planetary governor out in the hinterlands, well away from any borders or dangerous areas, who wanted to sell off a squadron of fighters to help pay for some personal project. Well, these were Gladiator 2 fighters & they carry a Plasma F each (plus a Phaser 3) and there are a lot of uses for that.

Not like I'm slighting our Hydran Stinger 2 fighters at all - they're still the best.

But it helps to diversify, Paw always said. If we have only one trick, then opponents learn how to work around it (which was another reason to buy those Kzinti Q-ships and arm them differently than the Hydran ones - keep your opponents guessing).

With the Hydran fighters, you have to get in real close to be effective. But Plasma Torpedoes, even Type F (the weakest type) can work wonders even at the mid-ranges that navy ships tend to fight at.

So of course we bought them up quick.

They're in storage now, while we try to work out how to swap a Gatling Phaser for that Phaser 3 (that'd make them far more effective). It should be possible, and we have the Hydran examples to work from, plus actual fighter-sized Gatling Phaser modules in storage waiting to be put into newly-built Stinger 2s. It just takes a lot of finicky fiddling & such. The type of fiddling that Sparky was good at.

Rats.

He's leaving.

I managed to distract myself from that for a minute.

Well, it's his right to retire, and he will do so as a very rich man, since he's been working for a share of the profits & has also earned a lot of bonuses over the years.

But we'll miss him. And he was our last Romulan with any influence in the Empire.

Even worse though, is why he is retiring. No, it's not 'cause he learned I call him Sparky. At least I don't think he ever learned that. I still call him Magnifico to his face.

No, it's far worse than that. He said there's been a change in the government of the Romulan Empire, and that the new one is a bad one. Far more rapacious than most governments are.

See, most governments will never be satisfied with how much money they take from their folks, but at least they increase the amount gradually, so you can go quite a while (centuries even, sometimes) before things collapse & start over in a revolution.

They're like parasites, draining the lifeblood from their people & when they get too eager & drain too much, the host dies. Same idea.

So this new government looks to squeeze as much income as they can from the people, as fast as they can.

But worse, they're aggressive too. More so than most Romulans, that is.

Sparky says it'd be best if we sell out quick, before anybody really feels the impact of the new government & prices drop as others sell out & leave the area.

Well, I'm not selling.

We're in the Neutral Zone, not the Romulan Empire, so technically they can't strong-arm us with their navy - though of course that's just a treaty they have with the Feds - that neither one will send navy ships into the neutral zone. But, being Romulan, they ignore that all the time & send ships in whenever they feel like it.

Still, it takes a small fleet to begin to threaten a Battlestation & if they send one, then the Feds should respond, right?