Tuesday, April 22nd, 2014.

Why didn't I see this coming? We all should've seen it coming, actually.

But it still caught us all off-guard. None of us expected this to happen, even if we should've known otherwise.

Kiyoshimo is back, baby.

Seal Team Six kept Kiyoshimo's reconstruction their little dirty secret for the past couple of months ever since Kiyoshimo sunk herself. After picking up her body, Big, Sanford, Deimos, and Hank began working on a side project that they worked on in their free time, with their main focus going into augmentation research and Abyssal technology research. They called this little side project "Modernization", and as its name implies, the goal of this project was to condense modern naval military technology into human-sized packages, just like how World War II-era military hardware got shrunk to human-sized packages for the current fleet.

There are a few problems with modernization, as Big explained to me while Hayashimo bawled her eyes out over Kiyoshimo outside the main research facility. The biggest problem was the same problem they had when they first started work on the Moebius Four Project: how to get around to shrinking modern military hardware down to a size that's reasonable for a ship girl to carry. They had an idea of where to start, seeing that they'd already done this once before with the ship girls, but World War II-era ship weaponry, because of its age and simplicity, was much easier to condense and much more straightforward. With the complexity and intricacy of modern military systems and technologies, condensing those were much trickier to pull off. Another big problem was the cost. Producing this fleet of ship girls was, initially, pretty expensive, but compared to the government's investments in stuff like long-range carrier-based bombers and nuclear-powered carriers and whatnot, the Moebius Four Platoon was ultimately not too painful of a financial investment, all things considered, especially when costs started decreasing once Seal Team Six got the hang of things and began to work more efficiently. According to Hank, who kept careful records of Kiyoshimo's reconstruction process along the way, Kiyoshimo's modernization was practically as expensive as a quarter of the entire Moebius Platoon (including the girls not currently deployed to my garrison) combined. Big said that they weren't planning to do this for another ship girl for a very long time unless they got some serious cash and resources for it. Kiyoshimo's modernization was a big reason why some of the things they wanted to send to me in Okinawa couldn't come quite as fast as they wanted to send them, and that they made an exception for Kiyoshimo because she's the first ship girl who was essentially sunk, not just killed.

But the one problem that concerned them the most, while it wasn't the biggest problem in terms of finances or technicality, was Kiyoshimo's conscience. Big told me that Hank spent countless sleepless nights trying to find a way to salvage Kiyoshimo's destroyed memory banks, but his efforts had ultimately proved futile: it was impossible to bring back Kiyoshimo just as she was at the time she'd died. So instead, Hank looked for other ways to keep Kiyoshimo's memories intact. Kiyoshimo's memory files couldn't be executed as readable files anymore, but it wasn't like the code itself was destroyed, just ruined by Kiyoshimo's Yamato Cannon radiation. So he got Big to work with him to deconstruct the part of Kiyoshimo's main processing unit (brain) that handled memories and whatnot and extract as much code as they could. Then, they opened up her chest, removed her heart, and built Kiyoshimo's memories back into her heart. Kiyoshimo's heart had escaped her death without taking any physical damage, so it was able to be used in this manner. And by doing this, Hank and Big found out that Kiyoshimo's heart directly injected her blood cells that pumped through with traces of the old memory files, and those blood cells would then carry it to all the rest of the cells in her body - including her brain.

So essentially, what this did for Kiyoshimo was that it let her keep her old memories in a way that she won't remember them, but feel them, if that makes sense. It sounds really cheesy, like it's straight out of a bad romance novel, but it works. Because when Kiyoshimo met the fleet and the destroyers who were once her best friends, like Inazuma, Fubuki, and Samidare, and other girls with whom she'd been close, especially Yamato, Kiyoshimo remarked that she felt like she knew them from somewhere. (Keep in mind that when Kiyoshimo first met us, it's technically her first time seeing us, ever, because she'd been reconstructed.)

Then when Naganami and Hayashimo came in screaming in utter disbelief that their ship sister had been reconstructed, Kiyoshimo started crying with them. Kiyoshimo didn't understand why she was crying, and she said she couldn't remember anything about these two girls who happened to wear the same uniform as she was, but she just bawled with them anyway. She even sensed that Yamato was someone who she'd looked up to at one point in the past. Even if she can't physically remember, the fact that Kiyoshimo is at least vaguely aware of the life she had before she sunk herself is more than enough for everyone. A bit tragic, maybe, that Kiyoshimo can't quite remember everything - but we're just glad to have Kiyoshimo back.

Kiyoshimo's personality codex got revised along the way, so now she doesn't have as much of that bouncy, childlike enthusiasm as she used to. She's shown her moments, but it appears that she's more easily able to control herself and not go ballistic whenever she sees Yamato like she did before. I think I'll miss that side of her. That's what made Kiyoshimo Kiyoshimo, y'know?

So let's talk about just what kind of modern ship girl Kiyoshimo's been reconstructed as. Here I want to make it very clear that the Modernization upgrade is very different from a standard Kai upgrade in the sense that Modernizing is a complete overhaul. Fundamentally, Kiyoshimo now operates very differently from the rest of the fleet, with different fleet maneuvers, combat strategies, and characteristics due to her new function as a modern ship girl. Speaking on a strictly technical level, Kiyoshimo is a Guided Missile Destroyer - a DDG in naval acronym - because she carries the Aegis IWS. And more broadly speaking, Kiyoshimo is a specialist destroyer, whose primary task is to locate and hunt down high-value targets in the battlefield, no matter what their ship type, and ideally kill or sink them with a single attack. True to the history of weapons development in modern times, while the rest of the Platoon is geared to fight on terms of endurance, both physically and resource-wise, Kiyoshimo is geared instead to start and end a fight within a matter of seconds - a one-hitter quitter, or go home.

Seal Team Six based Kiyoshimo's weaponry off weaponry already on board existing JMSDF destroyers, like the Kongou: Kiyoshimo's primary weapon is the RGM-84 Harpoon Surface-to-Surface Missile (SSM), her main offense against other ship girls and against other warships. And because of her Aegis IWS, which has been loaded with the necessary tech to become capable of the Aegis BMDS, Kiyoshimo's second primary weapon is the RIM-161 Standard Missile 3 (the SM-3) for anti-ballistic missile and anti-satellite use. Both of her primary weapons are launched from the same missile array, and the missiles themselves use the same miniaturizing technology as all the other ship girls' weapons, meaning that during pre-launch and at launch, Kiyoshimo's missiles maintain their miniature form until they reach a certain distance when it's safe for them to expand, from which they deploy their full size and proceed to their targets. Kiyoshimo's secondary weapons are the RIM-66 Standard MR (the SM-2), a medium range SAM for anti-air use and the RUM-139 Vertical Launch ASROC, an anti-submarine missile system. Unlike her primary weapons, the SM-2 and the ASROC have different missile arrays, since their methods of launch are different. So if you can imagine Kiyoshimo with a single tall missile tower on her back and two separate rectangular missile arrays out to the sides, that's what she looks like so far. Not too different from a normal ship girl's looks, just her weapons are a lot different.

Kiyoshimo also has two 12.7cm Oto-Breda Compact Guns strapped to her arms with retractable barrels when not in use and two Type 68 triple torpedo mounts strapped to the sides of her thighs that fire both Mk. 46 anti-sub torpedoes and the general-purpose Japanese Type 73 32.4cm torpedoes. But perhaps the most badass part of Kiyoshimo's new modernization is the fact that she now wields a modified and scaled-down version of the ever-popular M-134 Minigun that fires 7.62x51mm armor-piercing tungsten rounds. The Minigun was the solution to Seal Team Six's quest to miniaturize the modern Phalanx CIWS anti-ship missile defense system, and originally, Kiyoshimo's Minigun was supposed to fire 20x102mms just like the ordinary Phalanx, but it proved too much weight for Kiyoshimo to hold, so it was scaled down to the conventional 7.62x51mm. There's a special rack for her Minigun on both sides of her gearbox so she can put it away to focus her efforts on providing secondary fire.

Bringing Kiyoshimo back from the dead - as much as they could, anyway - was both extremely tenuous and extremely expensive. But the fact that Kiyoshimo is the way she is now is proof for two things: that modern fleets can now be replaced by modernized ship girls, and that sunken ship girls, if properly salvaged, have at least some chance of recovering their lives. Kiyoshimo's modernization, while neat and cool and all, is simply just a bonus. Everyone's just glad to have her back.