The XSV Titanhad begun her career in the red navy, rolling out of the shipyards as the first of the enormous 'Akula' class mere days before the invasion began in earnest. Despite efforts from the government to accelerate her commissioning process, she had remained an uncommissioned and under equipped behemoth by the time the bombs fell and the panic began. She had wandered aimlessly for a time, until the Soviet government managed to scrape enough of its own pieces off of the floor to give the ship some meaningful orders. The orders had been simple enough, given the situation: an immediate transfer of the vessel and her crew to the Xenonauts.
The change suited Xenonauts Captain Abramov just fine. The government didn't have to waste time and resources it didn't have on a submarine it no longer had any use for, and the Xenonauts got a new, state of the art, gigantic (by submarine standards) test bed for their theories on submersible weapons platforms. Or, at least, that was the idea. In practice, the first major action the Titanfound itself taking was as a glorified tugboat. It, along with every other submarine in the Xenonauts' rapidly-growing fleet, was performing tightly coordinated underwater towing operation on the alien warship that had crashed in the north pole. It's fellows had been blown into smithereens, but this one had merely been mortally wounded, and had gone down like an old Great Patriotic War bomber into a part of the northern ice that had proven too thin to hold it.
The pressures of the arctic sea had not been kind to the dead vessel, but it had still remained in one piece - much to the surprise of Captain Abramov. He'd half expected it to break apart, and then he and every other poor sod here would have to fish the pieces out. Mercifully, that had not happened, and the flotilla of press-ganged tugs brought their charge to the seemingly random coordinates beneath the ice. Every sub in the fleet double-checked its sonar - it wouldn't do if they liquified their comrades with the sound waves.
Divers descended from an enormous and suspiciously-alien-ship-sized divet in the ice and secured cables. It wasn't long before the subs received the signal, and detached their own cables. Mercifully, it seemed that the devastated UFO would not snap the new cables. Captain Abramov breathed a sigh of relief.
Good, now it can be someone else's problem.
—
In a carefully constructed hollow in the sea ice, xenonaut technicians scurried about as they prepared for their latest find. Doctor Brown had attended the event personally - there's no world where he'd miss the most important piece of salvage in the war thus far. The massive hold in the floor eventually stirred mightily as the winches brought up the blackened, pressure-crushed wreck of the alien warship. Doctor Brown gave a real, actual grin at the sight.
This. This right here is the first step on the road to the proverbial shoe finally being on the other foot.
—
Alien Destroyer
I've taken the liberty of assigning roughly equivalent ocean-going naval terminology to the various classes of warship we have gained intelligence on. As I learned from questioning our wayward captive, the starship we've scavenged would be considered a rough equivalent to a destroyer by the other residents of this galaxy. It speaks to the scale of galactic civilization that an immensely powerful feat of engineering like this is considered a combatant on the lower end of middling in both size and power.
Unlike the other UFOs we have felled, which were little more than support and transport craft for the most part, this ship has not had its core systems completely destroyed by thermal charges. Though they still suffered catastrophic damage, it failed to render them completely useless to us as it normally would. I questioned our captive on this, and from what I gather the reason for this is nothing more than negligence on the part of their crew and good fortune on our part: They simply didn't consider the possibility that one of their capital ships would be shot down, so the sabotage of the ship's systems was largely a token effort. Add to that the fact that most of the ship would have been underwater when the charges went off, and we have a recipe for reduced damage to the valuable technology (waterlogging is considerably easier to work around then being melted into slag). Though, regrettably, the personal equipment and technology of the crew was still successfully destroyed upon their deaths (for the most part) as has been the case at other crash sites. According to our captive, the sabotage of personal equipment was applied secretly to all personnel under Banneth's supervision at the start of the campaign, whereas individual starship sabotage was conducted by the captain and crew of each ship, which perhaps explains the disparity in effort.
The negligence of this destroyer's crew will prove to be an incredible boon for our research. Even the fragmented, waterlogged remains of its computer systems provide a wealth of information, albeit somewhat arbitrarily due to the random nature of the thermal damage. We could spend decades studying what is located in this crash site, and still have extracted only a small fraction of the intellectual resources contained within it. I use no exaggeration when I say that, in the event of our victory (read: survival), then this find alone will send our technology centuries, if notmillenia, into the future. However, in the short term we still need to glean knowledge that will help us win the war. To that end, I've broken down the most important focuses of our research into more digestible chunks, which I have left on your desk for you to read at your convenience.
Alien Reactor
As one might expect, the destroyer uses a mass effect field to achieve the incredible feats of flight and acceleration that it uses to traverse space. This enormous (by our standards) field is generated using a specialized fusion reactor that is infused with a large amount of element zero to create a mass effect field of a level of power vastly in excess of anything we've encountered thus far. From what we can glean of the remnants of the reactor's computer systems (which, helpfully, have a Trade Tongue UI translation option), about 67% of the reactors power output is dedicated to maintaining the mass effect field, with the rest going to the ship's weapons, propulsion, and other systems. From what we can gather from what's left of the ship's archives and interrogating our captives, this is fairly normal for a ship of its size: the power requirements of a mass effect field for an object increase with its size exponentially.
While the reactor itself is totaled, we are still learning a great deal about larger scale mass effect fields and how they are integrated with power systems from our study of it. And, frankly, even if we learned nothing it would still be a priceless treasure: the amount of element zero it contains in its reactor will easily supply any project we can dream of for the foreseeable future.
Alien Propulsion
Of all the core systems of the destroyer, the propulsion appears to be the most intact after the crash landing and sabotage. Its computer systems describe it as an 'Anti-proton hydrogen annihilation drive'. As the name suggests, the engine generates thrust by annihilating hydrogen with an anti-proton, which it achieves by shooting a single anti-proton into a blast chamber filled with hydrogen. The protons themselves are contained in some manner of magnetic storage container, maintained by an entirely separate power source consisting of what appear to be highly sophisticated radioisotope thermoelectric generators. This is an intelligent design decision, as it means that the containment of the anti-protons will be maintained even with a catastrophic reactor failure, and will continue to be maintained for as long as the generator's isotopes output sufficient enough heat to maintain the RTGs' function(which explains why the ship hasn't gone up in an enormous anti-matter explosion).
The engine, while incredibly fascinating, is ultimately not useful to us - at least not while this war is being waged, at any rate. We lack the capacity to manufacture anti-protons on any meaningful scale, and we will not have that capacity anytime soon. However, the thrusters themselves are another story. While we can't generate the actual propulsion, we can study how the thrusters enhance it, and it tells a very interesting tale. The thrusters utilize integrated mass effect fields to effectively give the ship's propulsion 'gears' that it can use to change how the propellant behaves. It has what I call a 'low gear' setting where it reduces the mass of the propellant, resulting in a vastly increased exhaust velocity and specific impulse. Effectively, this trades acceleration for efficiency, allowing the thruster to burn for potentially days, weeks, or even months without running dry of propellant. No doubt useful for long hauls. In contrast is the 'high gear', which increases the mass of the propellant, increasing its thrust at the cost of exhaust velocity, useful for short bursts of high-powered acceleration. As this is almost certainly used during combat scenarios, perhaps 'combat gear' would be a more appropriate name?
We had considered manipulating the propellant of our aircraft in this manner during the Icarus project, but we ultimately decided against attempting it. Even if we had sufficient knowledge of precision mass effect engineering to pull it off (which we didn't), the increased acceleration enabled by the mass effect field was already straining the air frames to their limit. However, now that this engine effectively provides us a cheat sheet to follow in developing the technology, the possibilities are many and enticing.
Alien Power Cells
Somewhat surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly, all things considered), the aliens use a technology already well known to us for their smaller-scale energy needs: hydrogen fuel cells. The difference is that, as one might expect, their fuel cells are vastly superior to our own designs. If we assume that they discovered them around the same time in their development as we did (during their pre-space industrial age) then from what we know of their history this technology has had potentiallymilleniaof development. Which would explain why their capacity output, longevity, and miniaturization is so vastly superior to our own fuel cells. Fortunately, we don't have to leap frog thousands of years of development to make use of this particular technology: there are so many of them of various sizes and outputs scattered throughout the fallen starship that we will have more than enough to supply ourselves for the foreseeable future. The amount of possibilities that this power source opens up are too many to count, but rest assured that our troops will be seeing an upgrade in the near-future.
Alien Computers
The information contained within those computers aboard the ship which still function provide countless potential topics for study, but the computers themselves are perhaps the most pertinent topic. There are some more esoteric technologies used on ultra-high end systems (such as quantum computing), but for the most part they are surprisingly not that dissimilar to our own computers, just with a level of sophistication that makes ours look like cave paintings to their Sistine Chapel. The most immediately beneficial aspect to copy is their incredible feats of miniaturization. By now we have recruited, quite possibly, every surviving expert on computer engineering and architecture in the human race (mainly because there weren't that many to begin with and aren't that many left), so I'm quite confident that we'll be able to crudely ape their miniaturization techniques within a timely manner.
We'll still be lightyears away from anything even remotely resembling the capabilities of one of the aliens' microcomputers, but ideas that were limited by the size requirements of modern computing technology are now on the table. The Xenonauts are about to make a quantum leap into the digital age.
Hello, the possibilities of the alien destroyer had given me a lot of ideas long before I'd even finished the last alien perspective chapter, so I've been sitting on a pile of xenonpedia articles for a while relating to the topic, of which the above were the most complete. I figured I'd just release those now as something of an intro to the new advancements that are going to be made, rather than waiting who-knows-how-long for me to finish writing the others and publishing them all at once.