Blue Star Enterprises-Chapter 217 - 4-33

After Alexander took a very tired, very grumpy girl to class the next day, he headed back to his workshop to dive into what he had uncovered the previous day.

Having a spinning motor create static electricity wasn't going to cut it to create a defensive field.

The first issue was that he needed the field to be much stronger, and the second was that whatever created it made it must be much smaller. The tiny amount of static electricity generated by the field emitter bearing was a start, but he needed to figure out some way to store that static charge and have it deploy when needed instead of constantly having it discharge.

The second issue was that he needed the field to activate nearly instantaneously when it detected an incoming threat. He had an idea of how his body determined that, so he had a decent starting point there, but it was going to take some thought to figure out how to add that to the finished device.

Alexander started a new project in his design software and pulled up the bearing design. It wasn't necessary; he knew the specs from memory, but he found looking at them helped when he was working.

The tolerances were extremely tight, almost too tight. Thermal expansion and contraction had to be accounted for when he designed the bearingless motor. That being said, he could sort of cheat by ensuring he used the most thermally stable metal he had access to.

Alexander pushed that design off to the side as he created a capacitor made from carbon nanotubes. Based on the cross-section of the hull he had removed from the alien ship, he was pretty sure that was how his body stored the massive charge of static electricity. Perhaps the ship had something like an actual forcefield, with the entire rear section missing; he would never know for sure.

He shaped the capacitor into a sphere about the size of a softball. Not exactly small and easy to hide, but it was a first step. He would worry about miniaturizing the design once he had a working prototype.

A pole ran through the center of the nano-tube capacitor and would act as the support for the next parts, as well as the path for the static electricity to escape when activated.

The negatively charged field emitter went in next in the form of a ring that wrapped around the outside of the central sphere, similar to a gyroscope in design, because it would act similarly to one once it was finished.

The positive charge field emitter went on next, just outside the previous one. Powering the device was a bit tricky, but Alexander decided to go a very simple route and use a similar concept to how a radiometer functioned, since the small emitters didn't actually require a whole lot of power to function.

That was why he had been able to build small satellites with the emitters. Those ran on solar power and batteries. It wasn't until you got into ship-scale ones that you needed to tie into a reactor, and that was because the fields were so inefficiently designed. Alexander's upgraded designs were much more energy efficient.

His design choice would require the end result to receive external heating or cooling, but that shouldn't be an issue.

He wrapped the finished product in a diamond sphere designed to slightly amplify any incoming light onto the black carbon nanotube sphere at the center, providing a boost to the heat that accumulated inside.

Once the design was complete, he sent it to his nano-assembler, which was the only machine accurate enough to print the device. The fact that it was also able to print in a vacuum helped, since the entire inside of the sphere needed to be devoid of gases to operate correctly.

Alexander didn't know if this design was how his defensive field operated, but it didn't matter. He only needed to recreate the properties of the field.

The sphere took over three hours to print, but once it was complete, Alexander plucked it from the machine and smiled.

The rings inside were already slowly moving, proving the concept would work. As he looked inside, he could see purplish-pink arcs of plasma dancing between the fields as they crossed over each other. That energy arced to the capacitor held in the center occasionally, causing it to start glowing slightly. It almost looked like Chernenkov radiation, but instead of the pale blue, it was a rose hue. It was actually quite beautiful to look at, but he decided to check to ensure it wasn't releasing actual radiation before continuing.

Thankfully, it wasn't at least none that was dangerous. There was a bit of thermal radiation leaking from the orb, but that was to be expected given the design. It left the orb feeling slightly warm to the touch, and that was it.

Now he just had to figure out how to release that energy when it was required.

The prototype went up on one of his shelves, and he went back to the design software to figure out how to add sensors to the orb.

A pseudo-computronic cube would have been ideal for such a task, but there was no way he was going to be able to fit something like that in his current design, let alone what he had in mind for the finished product.

Motion sensors were what he came up with. They would not have been a viable option back during his time, but the motion sensors of the current day were practically hair-thin and could be optimized to detect motion within a specific range.

That meant he could prevent the field from activating by accident every time the orb moved.

Despite the small size of the sensors, they were still too big to fit inside the sphere, which meant the sphere needed to be attached to something else to function. That was fine. Alexander had planned to have it do just that.

He pulled up his design for the combat variant of his augment suits. They already had a variety of sensors woven through the material of the armor, they even had motion sensors already built in for some of the other suit's features.

Alexander made a gesture, and the small power pack on the back of the armor exploded open in his design software. He completely reconfigured it and added a cradle for the defensive field orb. The change did necessitate a larger pack on the back that looked a bit ridiculous, but he hoped to fix that later.

The sensors were plugged into the top and bottom of the sphere, where Alexander added connections. He also passed those connections to a tiny metal ball in the exact center of the nano-tube supercapacitor inside.

Once the sensors were triggered, tiny metal feet would shoot out from the ball to contact the capacitor and hopefully discharge the stored energy properly.

Alexander had to make a few guesses and assumptions with his design since he had never built anything like it.

He was about to complete the design when he heard a strange buzzing sound.

Looking for the source, he quickly located it. The first prototype orb was literally vibrating against the shelf he had placed it.

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He walked over to pick it up, but only made it about halfway before there was a soft *pop*

The next thing he knew, he was flying across his workshop, and his mind space was throwing up all kinds of red messages along with a combat notice and an activation of his own defensive field.

The defensive field did cushion his blow as he slammed against the far wall of his workshop, but it didn't stop it entirely.

There was a sizable dent where his body impacted the wall, and a whole lot of debris caught in his defensive field.

He picked himself up off the floor and looked around with a frown. His workshop was a mess, but it seemed like only loose objects were thrown away from where the orb had resided. Everything else, including the machines, was fine.

Alexander checked himself over but didn't find any damage to his body. That was surprising given the force at which he had been thrown against the wall, but he would take the small victory.

A moment later, his hallway sensors activated as guards rushed to see what the commotion was about. Alexander secured the design he had been working on moments before the guards burst in.

The guards paused as they saw the mess. "Is everything okay in here?" one of the men asked.

"It's fine," Alexander stated. "Just a bit of an accident with an experiment I was running. Thank you for checking on me, though."

The pair of guards nodded and excused themselves.

Once they were gone, Alexander picked through the remains of the metal shelf until he found the two halves of the prototype sphere.

The diamond outer coating had split exactly at the point where the two poles connected the interior to the exterior shell.

The resulting air rushing in must have released the stored energy. It was far more static electricity than Alexander had expected it to contain in such a short amount of time.

It seemed he would have to tweak the power a bit and maybe add a system to bleed off energy so it didn't overload.

***

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Alexander stood next to Lucas in The Pit.

"Now that we are here, are you going to tell me why you woke me up in the middle of my sleep?" Lucas asked with a yawn. "I'm all for testing your defensive field some more, but not if it means the loss of my beauty rest."

Alexander chuckled at that. "Sorry for waking you like I did, and being cryptic about this test, but I can assure you, it was necessary. I made a breakthrough in creating the defensive field."

That perked the programmer up. "You did? When?"

"Yesterday. I wanted to wait, but Eden's End is going into its night cycle soon, and I didn't want to wait another week until we had enough sun to do this test."

"Fair enough," Lucas grunted and stretched. "Let's see this prototype."

Alexander wheeled out the large case from the ship and opened it up.

Lucas peered inside before glancing up at Alexander. "An augment suit?"

Alexander nodded. "I integrated it into the suit to use the sensors."

With hardly any effort, Alexander lifted the suit and the stand out from the crate and carried them to the far end of the range.

There was a bit of extra setup Alexander needed to do while Lucas prepared the weapons. He hadn't figured out an ideal way to keep the orb from overcharging yet, and since there was no on or off switch, he was forced to add a sort of safety. In this case, it was just a connector that replaced one of the suit connectors and kept the discharge probes connected to the capacitor.

He pulled the probe out, which had a handy tag labeled 'remove before use' on it, and plugged in the second suit connector. The orb had already begun spinning slowly and building a charge.

Next, he powered on the suit.

The added heat from the battery caused the orb to start charging faster, but Alexander had taken that into account. He estimated they had just over two hours before the orb would overload.

The problem was that he had no idea how long it would take to create a charge strong enough to do what his defensive field did.

That was one of the things they were out here to discover.

By the time Alexander made it back to the staging area, Lucas had three weapons set up and ready to go. The first was the flechette rifle, which would be used for the initial time testing. The second was the grenade launcher. Last but not least was a new FE rifle Alexander had created.

The weapon had come about thanks to his tests with the field emitters to create bearingless motors. Once Alexander realized the fields could operate in an atmosphere so long as they were close enough to the oppositely charged object, he just needed to move them to the inside of the barrel to take advantage of that interaction. He had no plans of modifying the ship cannons to do the same thing. The tolerances required simply weren't worth the effort. At the moment, he had to use his nano-assembler to print the flechettes for the gun to ensure they all remained the same size. He was going to have to come up with a molding process that ensured the same accuracy.

You could call this trip to The Pit a test for the new rifle as well. If it worked well, he would be phasing out the flechette minigun for the new rifle. The FE rifle may have used the same-sized flechettes, but it didn't carry as many rounds as the minigun did. Unlike the minigun, however, the FE rifle could adjust the velocity of its shots from subsonic–like the miniguns' were–to that of a railgun, making it far more versatile in combat, especially against armored foes. He made sure to notify Krieger of this test, but the man was on patrol and unable to attend in person. That's what the camera feed to the comm node inside the shuttle was for.

After another half an hour of sitting around, Alexander's watch beeped. "Initiate test one."

Lucas stood from the crate he had been sitting on and hefted the minigun. "Firing!"

Lucas sent one round down-range. His shot was off target as per Alexander's request, but the field was still activated. He could see that from the cameras set up near the test site.

He would need to tweak the sensors a bit more, but for now, that was fine.

The round was noticeably slowed, but it wasn't stopped, and soon it impacted the target behind the suit.

Alexander wondered if that was just because it passed through a weaker section of the field or because the field generator took longer than half an hour to reach full strength.

Over the next six hours, they were able to determine it was a bit of both.

If the projectile wasn't heading directly toward the generator, the field was not as effective on the rounds, which made sense.

"Alright, time to fire as many flechettes as you can on target."

"Don't have to tell me twice," Lucas replied happily.

The man pulled the trigger and held it as the gun spat the tiny metal slivers downrange. The field engaged once again, and about two feet out from the target, a wall of silver started to form as the darts were stopped dead.

That lasted for about three seconds, then the field collapsed, and the rest of the rounds slammed against the armored surface of the suit.

He could see from the camera feed that the field kept trying to sputter back to life, but it simply didn't have any energy left to support itself.

There was a series of clicks as Lucas' minigun finally ran out of ammo.

"Well, how did it go?" the man asked.

"About three seconds," Alexander stated.

"Hmm. Enough to move someone to safety if needed."

Alexander agreed, but he still found it less than ideal. "Alright, I need to swap the battery pack out in the armor. Then we'll wait for the field generator to recharge and try it with the grenade launcher." He stopped the man before he could happily pick up the next weapon. "It's not holding blanks, so be careful."

Lucas nodded and set the weapon back down.

The test with the grenade launcher went the same. The rounds were stopped, but as soon as the field collapsed, they hit the ground and exploded, sending the armor and stand tumbling.

It wasn't really a surprise. He doubted most people would be fast enough to grab the projectiles from the air and toss them away in such a situation. It would give them time to dive for cover and hope the armor protected them, however.

The explosion damaged the sensors on the front of the armor, so Alexander was forced to face the back of the armor toward the staging area for the final test.

Lucas was getting a feel for the FE rifle when he returned. Much like his original test with the FE cannon, the rifle was attached to a stand that was weighted down with sandbags.

"Alright, I would suggest testing all the modes of the gun, but I don't want to wait around another three hours for the suit to recharge." He should have brought more than one suit. "Might as well go wild. Turn the gun up to full power and hold the trigger down."

Lucas grinned widely at that and shouldered the weapon before taking aim at the target.

The gun recoiled into the man's shoulder as the weapon dampened each successive shot. The only sound was a quiet metallic pinging that turned into a high-pitched ring before the entire one-hundred-round magazine was spent in less than five seconds.

Alexander had his focus split, with one part on the gun and the other on the target.

The FE rifle was turning out to be a bit much for his prototype defensive field. The rounds were impacting the armor and mushrooming despite the field slowing them, but they weren't able to penetrate the material as they were losing most of their velocity. As soon as the field collapsed, the final forty rounds punched straight through the armor, leaving glowing trails as the friction-heated projectiles punched through the far side.

While the outcome was less than ideal, he now had an upper limit to the effectiveness of the field generator. He needed to improve that.