A/N: This chapter is where the major changes will start from my original version of the story. Time jump from 6 years before SGA to 5 years before SGA. Will be adding in a few more chapters that will take place before the Atlantis expedition arrives.
Zeus501: Scientists have stated many different numbers over the years for what would be needed for a viable population for a colony to ensure long term survival. I am using the 50/500 rule. It has it's flaws, but it is rather simple. The concept is that you need 50 genetically diverse adults of a species to avoid inbreeding and sterility in the short term, and 500 genetically diverse adults in the long term to avoid genetic drift. The increased number on the long term survival would prevent the population from becoming its own sub species and being unable to procreate with others of its original species. The two races I included from the SW galaxy both meet the 500 side of the equation. Twi'lek adults numbered over 500 and were non-relatives. On the human part of this group we had approx double the 500 necessary.
Yes there have been challenges to the 50/500 rule, but no conclusive evidence has been presented that can disprove the use of this rule in general application. Some species are exceptions to this rule, such as rapidly reproducing rodent species in that they need fewer adults or in plant based species that require far more than 500 to make a suitable stable population. There are cases where higher or lower breeding populations are needed for genetic stability and survival, but most of those are either short lived species or extremely sedentary ones. As such, humans and most mammalian species can have stable breeding populations with approx five hundred adults and fall under the 50/500 rule, or are close enough to not require much of a difference in population above or below the numbers listed.
Chapter Nine
Colony (Year 0, Day 14)
Tonin had his work cut out for him. He had received the list from Kaden on the ships needed for the fleet. The amount of ships needing to be built was staggering. The complete list would take a couple years to finish. The hard part would be to get the materials. Durasteel was not readily available for this many ships. With the resource requirements for the desired fleet, he needed to locate everything before he could begin. He had a few hours before the gas harvester ship was complete. Then there was the Future, who's engines were damaged and would need repairs.
"Toy Maker to Dera Kirek. Would you be able to come up for a while?" Tonin sat waiting a few moments on a response.
"This is her husband, she will not be available until tomorrow. Please call back then." And the com link went dead.
"Oh well." He murmured to no one. "Time to get what I can gathered for now." He sent commands to a dozen of the tugs, sending them down to the planet surface to retrieve the two now empty cargo barges. They were made of durasteel. It wouldn't be enough for much, but he could use it. He had enough resources to make fifty fighters and one of the Lancers, if his calculations were accurate. That would have to do for now until they could find substitute materials.
The asteroid mining ship had departed that morning. Easy to make since it was mostly empty space with a very thin metal hull. It would reach the inner asteroid belt the next day, and begin rendering the asteroids in its area to small chunks. Those chunks would then be tractored into one of the cargo bays to deliver to Toy Maker. Maybe he could call one of the science team down on the planet to see if they had been able to determine what minerals were available.
"Toy Maker to Science team. You there?"
"We are a bit busy, what do you need?"
"I was wondering if you had located any of the minerals needed for ship construction. We are running out of scrap durasteel, and I have a long list of things to build. I will need to know what is available where so I can send my asteroid miner out to collect it."
The reply from the science team was slow in coming. "Most of the elements we have found are the same as in our old galaxy. Scans show you should be able to get almost everything from the two asteroid belts. There is also some elements we have never seen before. One is a powdery metal. We have been experimenting with it and it may end up being useful. We added some to a durasteel alloy, and now we can t even break the stuff, at least not with what we have here. I'll send you the formula shortly."
"Nice, thanks! Any word on Tiabana gas or hypermatter?"
"Not positive on the gas, but it looks like Promise 5 has some near the surface. As for fuel, Dera sent the hypermatter refinery to one of the moons. Safer there and it has the necessary materials to start making fuel. Couple days at most before it will be able to start refueling our two ships."
"Good. Thanks for the update, and I just got the formula you sent. I will see if I can incorporate it into the designs. Toy Maker out."
Now that he had a likely source for minerals, he queued up twenty fighters to be built once the repairs to Future were complete. They first batch of fighters would be done in less than a day. Next was a Lancer, then thirty more fighters. This left him with a question. Where would he put the fighters. They would need to land somewhere for maintenance. No facilities had been built on the ground, and he couldn't keep them here on the shipyard. He ran through the list of blueprints available in the shipyard's memory banks again. Nothing there either unless he built one of the much larger ships. His yard wasn't big enough yet.
Walking over to the holotable, he opened a new project. The code name he decided to give it was "Sentinel."
Future and Hope came out of hyperspace together. Future changed heading to approach the Toy Maker. Hope resumed her defensive position over the town below. One of Future's engines was out completely. Two others were providing little thrust. The enemy fighters had chewed through the aft shield, and started eating away at the engines until the Hope had nearly exterminated them in a few salvos. Future only had to wait an hour before the freshly built gas harvester was released from the Toy Maker, making room for Future to pull up. Once in place, repairs began almost instantly. Damaged parts were cut away, and inventoried to be replaced. Missing parts were noted, and new parts created.
As the repairs began, a shuttle launched from Future, headed to the surface. Nera and several of the soldiers were on board. The cargo bay held the real prize, several pieces of wreckage salvaged from the hostile vessel, and two of the bodies they found floating in space. The science team would need to examine all of it to figure out what they were and what the ship had been made of. Events like this were bound to happen; however, not this soon. If more ships came looking for the one that was destroyed, this could get very bad very fast. They were not ready.
As they landed, the science team was waiting. Several droids were with them to carry the salvaged ship pieces to the lab, while two stretchers were on hand to carry the bodies. Nera wasn't taking any chances.
"Saber One, take two with you and keep an eye on the bodies. For all we know, they could be able to survive exposure to open space."
"Yes, ma'am" and he followed the bodies with two of his men.
As they left for the lab, Kaden approached. "Glad you made it back. How bad is it?"
"Engine damage for the most part. Hope was far enough away when the ship exploded, but we weren't. Their fighters had torn up one engine earlier, but the explosion took our facing shields down by almost seventy percent. I would definitely recommend keeping at least five kilometers between us and them if we have to fight them again."
"I think we are going to stay close to home for now. If the beings from that ship had friends, they may come looking for them, and I would rather not leave this settlement unprotected."
Nera agreed. "Good point. Future should be repaired soon, but we need something to counter the fighters."
"Already in the works. Toy Maker has a list of ships to build, starting with droid ships and fighters. They will be smaller ships for now, then we will worry about expanding the shipyard."
"As long as the planetary defenses are finished soon, we should be able to handle any large ships that come this way. Any idea on how long that will be?"
Kaden thought for a moment. "Several weeks I believe, at least for the three ion cannons and shields. Ground defenses should be up sooner. We have several dozen turrets to set up, as well as droids patrolling the area. Give it a few weeks and we should be well protected."
Colony (Year 0, Day 16)
Tonin was nervous. He was about to present an idea to Kaden and several others that could cause some problems, it could also be the solution to several other problems as well. The only real enemy he had to face was decades of negative publicity the idea had garnered in their old galaxy. In order to counter this, he would need to make sure he had all of his information presented in the best possible light. Glancing once again at the files on his data pad, he checked for the hundredth time, verifying he had the information he needed from the historical archives.
"Tonin, I am sorry we kept you waiting, however, we had to discuss a few things relating to planetary security before you arrived. It went longer than we thought it would." Kaden greeted him. "Come on in and take a seat."
Doing so, Tonin presented a calm front before beginning his presentation. "I have a couple ideas I would like to see implemented that could help with fleet construction and operations. The first ties into the second, meaning the second will not function nearly as well without the first. The way I see it, given enough time I can build more than enough ships to meet the fleet requirements. The problem is crewing the ships. We wont have enough personnel to operate them, and most would sit idle and non-functional. The first idea I had that would fix this is to build ships entirely droid operated. It ..."
"WHAT?" Nera interrupted. "Droid run ships? That has never worked!"
"Actually it has." Feth Te'vos countered. "It was years ago, but the Clone Wars were primarily caused by the rebellion of several groups who used droids to almost entirely crew their ships and fight in their armies."
"Exactly. It led to the downfall of the Old Republic. The problem was never the droids, it was those controlling them that was the cause for the Clone Wars. What they had done was take ships designed for living beings and substituted droids instead. It was not the same as what I want to propose." Tonin countered. "Then there is the fiasco with the Katana Fleet. The events surrounding that disaster were bad timing, bad luck, and bad implementation. The plan I want to suggest would not let the Katana debacle occur again, nor would we be crewing a normal ship entirely with hundreds or thousands of droids as a substitute for a living crew."
Feth chuckled. "You want to build a scaled up version of the Tie-D fighters, that is my guess."
"In a way. By eliminating all space and systems needed by living crew members, we can reduce power usage by a decent amount. It would also give us the ability to build the ships faster. Fewer systems to control means less maintenance on systems that are the most needed on a normal warship. Life support, artificial gravity, water reclamation, and more could be removed completely and give more room for combat related items or systems. I would need some help designing the droid parts of the ship, but it can be done. It would not be as much work as building a brand new ship type from scratch since we already need ships built sooner rather than later." Tonin continued. "The major upsides to this are faster reaction times in combat, and elimination of possible casualties since we have so few people here. With the current fleet list you want me to build, it would require nearly every able bodied adult on the planet to live and work on board ships."
"I may not like it but I do see the necessity of it." Nera responded. "Question is, if the ships are completely automated, how would they be controlled?"
"That is the easy part. The Trade Federation used command ships, mostly droid crews with a living crew for overall control. I was thinking about how you wanted the fleet to be organized, and realized the ISD III hulls you want build would make the perfect command ships. Heavily armed and armored, which will only be improved by the redesign, and still would have a greatly reduced crew that could be very well protected. Until we get one built, we can coordinate them from the ground as long as they are in system. I have to expand the shipyard before we can build anything larger than the cruiser sized vessels anyway." Tonin answered. "And with the proper safety protocols installed on every ship, it would prevent the repeat of the Katana Fleet."
"We would need to see the protocols before this could be approved. Now how does this tie in with your second idea?" Kaden asked.
"The largest problem facing the construction of a ship is working from one point outwards, assembling the ship once piece at a time. What I propose is to make the ships somewhat modular. The weak points of any ship are fairly standard, comm relays, weapons turrets, and engines. I want to make some parts of the ships modular to allow for easy repair and production. We would even be able to produce the items I would need on the ground to free up Toy Maker for the actual framework and hull construction. If an engine is damaged, it would be far easier to just pull it from the socket and replace it with one already built than what we have to do currently, which is cut away all the damaged sections and assemble the new parts in place. My estimates are it would reduce most ship repair times by close to eighty percent. Damaged modules can be brought ground side for repair or recycling."
Nera thought a moment. "How would you make the weapons modular?"
"When Kaden's father reduced the crews on the ships we came here in, he changed the design of the weapons turrets. He installed droid brains for actual weapons control. If we put an armored socket in place of each weapons port, if the weapon is destroyed, it would not leave a weak point on the hull that could be exploited. Then, when the ship makes it back to the shipyard, we just remove the damaged turret module, and put a new one in. Same for the engines, comm arrays, and even some of the internal systems. A shield module could be removed and a new one dropped in, allowing the ship to be back in operation far faster than if we had to do everything using the current method. The reason I want to use weapons modules is simple. How long would it take to remove a turbolaser battery and install an ion cannon in it's place? Weeks in some cases, whereas if we use modules that time drops to a matter of a few hours. It would give each ship a bit more versatility without a complete overhaul. Another positive from this is when new advances are made that improve a weapon or other module, we would be able to upgrade the fleet far faster, as in days or weeks instead of months or years." Tonin plead his case.
Nera nodded. "I would support the modular idea, but I am still not convinced of the completely automated ship. I have concerns on it's effectiveness."
Tonin pulled out his data pad. "That is why I brought everything I could find on operation and combat with droid controlled ships. Some of the files are hundreds of years old. The first attempts were pretty crude, yet it allowed for far superior numbers that won..."
One year later
Colony (Year 1, Day 8)
Admiral Nera stared out the viewport of the Toy Maker. It had been decided months ago that she would be in command of all space forces, giving her the position of Admiral. Kaden had stepped down as commander of military forces and left her and Koth in charge of all military aspects, with Koth being given the rank of General and placed in charge of all ground forces. There had been no further contact with any alien or hostile forces during the last year since they had destroyed the massive ship. Then again, Kaden and Nera had not sent any ships out to look at any other systems. Now that she felt the system defenses were adequate, exploration of the nearby sectors would begin soon.
The one hundred twentieth Ingot II had been finished months ago, replacing Hope and Future. The two original Ingots had been scrapped and used for building material for the current fleet. Nera observed Tonin entering new commands into the master console to her right. They were almost a month behind schedule due to Tonin's side project, though the project had merit. Her original skepticism and opinions on Tonin's sanity had been proven incorrect as it began to take shape, Tonin's "Sentinel" stations.
"Sentinel" was massive, far larger than Toy Maker could have built in one piece before it's expansion. So the pieces, square tubes one hundred meters wide, were built and assembled by tugs and worker droids in zero g. The cube, nearly fifteen hundred meters long on each side, was larger than an Imperial II Star Destroyer, but had far less mass. It sat in geosynchronous orbit one thousand kilometers above Elmar's Dream. Tonin had created a work of art in the form of a defensive battle station, a fully automated bastion made to look like a museum art sculpture from a distance.
Since it was powered by two hypermatter reactors the same size as those found on an Imperial II Star Destroyer, it would be very difficult to overpower for any ship smaller than an SSD. The shields were double layered, similar to how the planetary shields were for Coruscant worked, though on a much smaller scale. Being stationary, it had no need of the power drain the massive ISDs engines incurred. The power not allocated to the shield systems and station power were utilized by the weapons which adorned the six sides of the station. Each side possessed ten dual heavy turbo laser turrets, fifteen quad turbo lasers batteries, fifty proton torpedo launchers, and five ion cannons.
While they each could hold up to a thousand fighter sized craft, they were not even close to capacity, less than two hundred fighters were docked. Due to all the fighter sized craft being droid controlled, it was not necessary for them to be docked most of the time. They only needed to dock for maintenance, allowing for most of the fighters to be on constant patrol around the system. The station even had the capability of upgrading the current fighter force with new weapons and equipment. Barring combat damage repairs, each Sentinel station could provide maintenance for nearly ten thousand droid fighters with no delays.
The current patrolling fighter craft numbered sixteen thousand, with twelve thousand upgraded TIE-D fighters and four thousand of the new TIE-DBs. Tonin had been busy with making upgrades to the original designs provided with Toy Maker. The new designs gave shields and an extra pair of blaster cannons to the TIE-Ds meaning they were much harder to damage, and had twice the firepower. It reduced their speed, yet greatly increased their longevity in combat.
The original TIE Bombers were manned craft with two pods between the wings. One pod had been the manned cockpit, and the other a concussion missile launcher. Since there would be a droid brain controlling the new fighters, the cockpit was no longer really needed. So each pod had been redesigned by Tonin to include a rapid fire proton torpedo launcher and four blaster cannons. With the much higher firepower of eight blaster cannons, and the ability to launch nearly twenty proton torpedoes in less than ten seconds, a squadron of them could take cause massive damage to all but the toughest targets. The new TIE-DBs were still as slow as the older Bombers had been so they were also shielded to give them a better chance of survival.
Nera thought about her fleet, as Kaden and others had pointed out she had the most experience of any of the people here as to fleet tactics. She had two Imperial III Star Destroyers, twelve Nova-D carriers, and one hundred twenty each of the Ingot IIs and Lancers under her command, plus the assortment of fighters. With the Lancers and Ingot IIs being fully droid operated, and each new ISD III requiring only twenty crew, she only had forty under her command. The new ships had been built using a new alloy using the metals they had discovered in this system, both on planet and in the two asteroid belts. Stronger and lighter, it gave her new ships increased speed and maneuvering ability, and greater durability. The new Ingot IIs had been built without the cargo holds that had been part of Future and Hope; instead, a honeycomb of bracing and armor plates now filled the space the cargo holds once had. These new ships had three times the durability of the original designs, and would be very hard to kill.
As Admiral Nera returned from her thoughts, she watched as the shipyard began to chew through asteroids being fed into the atomic furnaces by a line of nearly a hundred tugs. The asteroids were being brought from the inner asteroid belt of the system not far away. Toy Maker had been moved after the Sentinel stations had been completed the day before. A defensive force of ten Ingot IIs, ten Lancers, and nearly two thousand fighter sized craft were set to guard the shipyard till more permanent defenses could be placed close by.
Those defenses had already been built and were being installed nearby. Two hundred defensive satellites had been assembled and were being brought online. Each consisted of a hypermatter reactor a planetary ion cannon, five quad turbo laser batteries, and a shield generator. They were fairly small in size, only sixty meters long, but packed a powerful punch. Those, when combined with the planned upgrades to the defenses of Toy Maker, would make the shipyard nigh impregnable. Then again, the Death Star had been thought to be the same.
New ship types
Tie-D (only two changes from wiki)
4 laser cannons
star fighter shields
Tie-DB (modified TIE-B)
8 laser cannons (4 on each pod)
2 proton torpedo launchers (10 missiles each)
no concussion missiles or bomb bay
star fighter shields
ISD III (no command tower)
20 crew
50 Heavy Turbolaser batteries (20 fore, 15 port, 15 starboard) (22 GT per shot)
100 Turbolaser batteries (40 fore, 30 port, 30 starboard) (179 MT per shot)
20 Heavy Ion Cannons (10 fore, 5 port, 5 starboard) (8 GT per shot)
80 Quad laser cannons (anti-fighter defense) (30 MT per shot)
160 Tie-D or Tie-DB
10 Wampa Assault Landers
Tombstone Defense satellites
5 Quad laser cannon
1 heavy Ion Cannon
shields (Victory II strength)
Nova-D Fighter Carrier
300 long x 200 wide x 60 high (meters)
20 Quad Laser cannons (anti-fighter and point defense use)
200 Tie-D or Tie-DB