Chapter 163 - Designing for Space

Three days after the duel between Ceres and Riker, Squad C had been coming together. They had already practised a few combat scenarios with each other through the VR server, coming closer as a squad.

Pris, the ‘primary’ exosuit repairer had completely lost all her ego after watching the replay of Ceres fighting Riker. It was one thing to be better than someone at performing exosuit design and repair, but it was another to actually fight with it.

Pris wasn’t exactly a very good fighter despite being a good exosuit repairer, something she saw as a weakness. Nevertheless, Ceres appreciated the change in Pris, noting that she had become a lot more manageable.

Ceres still was the secondary exosuit repairer, but in reality, he worked in tandem with Pris, sorting out the logistics and equipment necessary. They had various discussions on what the mission required, and though there were a few disagreements, Pris took it seriously and in a mature way.

Ceres never really figured out why was Pris so prickly in the first place. He chalked it up to a need for superiority, seeing that Pris has always been lauded as one of the best in the exosuit repair department, having been sent on high-rank missions as the sole exosuit repairer.

Her battlefield knowledge and experience still dwarfed Ceres despite being more than six years younger.

Right now, the two of them were standing opposite other, working through Victoria’s exosuit, one of the last to be upgraded. “Do we really need a sniper? The layout of the prison seems to be extremely tight and close quarters, there’s not much use for a sniper right?” Pris pointed out a holographic display of Haui’s Moon.

Ceres frowned, tapping the workbench with his index finger as he leaned forward on it with his palms. He too partially agreed - the prison was too enclosed or narrow for a sniper to act properly. “However, she can do a lot of damage on the surface itself. If we can improve her weapon to be spaceborne capable, we may be able to take out a lot of targets at extreme ranges.”

Ceres began drawing up plans to modify the rifle. “We have to change a lot of parts of the rifle to be able to hit further and harder…”

“How far are you planning to shoot?”

“Hmm… about fifty kilometres?”

Pris was surprised, but she soon realized why the ranges were so ridiculous and nodded. There was minimal air resistance on the surface of the asteroid, hence all Victoria had to do was account for gravitational influences. With the speed of the bullet, there was no way the meagre mass of Haui’s Moon could even affect it.

“If we increase the caliber of the rifle, we can then add on additional utility rounds, such as EMP rounds, bunker busters and so on. One of our mission targets is to disable the anti-ship turrets, so Victoria will be very useful in this.”

The entrance to the prison was heavily guarded by automated turrets meant to shoot down incoming starships and escaping prisoners. Squad C needed to neutralize as much as they could before they could even begin to enter the prison.

“This means Victoria will most likely have to spend a long time on her own. Until we capture the observation post, she has to hide indefinitely on the surface till the time is right. If we try to disable the turrets too early, we might risk a direct fight with the guards.” Pris pointed out.

“Yes. Our squad needs to slowly set up everything and hit in one single fell swoop. This is why the squad has very varied roles – we were never designed to have all of us attack a single objective, but rather to split up.” Ceres agreed.

They began drafting up the list of upgrades. Ceres focused on the rifle while Pris focused on building the exosuit armour and modules to be spaceborne capable. All the exosuits in the squad had to be airtight and manoeuvrable in zero-g combat, meaning that their thruster pack had to be significantly developed and refillable.

It didn’t take much to push someone in a certain direction in space, but it wasn’t speed that was king in zero-g combat – it was impulse acceleration.

The thrusters had to be able to deliver enough impulse in all directions to allow the wearer of the exosuit to be able to dodge effectively in space. Otherwise, the way to avoid being tracked and locked on by the enemy was to disable their sensors or render their sensors useless.

Ceres thought about the Mirage Gunner that was worn by Saater, realizing that it had some merit to it. However, it was unrealistic to rely on a smoke generator in space – the amount of material they needed to eject would be astronomical.

Ceres glanced over at Pris’s design, noticing she had placed significant amounts of metal plates on the back of every exosuit more so than the front. “Shouldn’t you be putting the metal plates at the front? The enemy is going to attack from there, are they not?”

Pris smirked, a hint of her egoistic streak returning. “First time in space? It’s not only the prison that requires a large radiator array, our exosuits need that too. Running a liquid coolant in the exosuit is okay, but it needs to be radiated out as waste heat.”

Ceres hadn’t really thought about it too much, himself never having designed an exosuit for space yet. It was true that the only way to reliably lose heat was through radiators. This meant every exosuit had to undergo thermal vacuum chamber testing to ensure it could maintain a reasonable thermal budget.

No one wanted to be cooked in space.

Even if they reduced the amount of movement and heat energy created by the exosuit, there was still the local star to account for, which was the main source of heat in the star system. The exosuit would naturally be exposed to the thermal radiation from the local star, causing it to heat up.

Ceres took a second look at his rifle design, realizing that it most likely would accumulate massive amount of heat in space. “Seems like this rifle needs to be a lot bigger than I expected if I want to actually survive in space.”

“If we had access to a wider supply network, we might be able to obtain some cooling exotics that increase the rate of radiation exponentially.” Pris showed Ceres a few examples of the cooling exotic material.

It was an indigo-coloured powder called Thercial, which apparently could be adhered on any surface to increase its spectral emissive power. “It’s extremely hard to procure in the Loeric Empire though.” Pris added to cool down Ceres’s excitement.

Ceres himself had only ever worked with one exotic in bulk – Sturore in his previous heavy knight design. Sure, there were countless other ‘exotics’ or special chemicals involved in the manufacturing of the exosuit spine or the nerval jack and processor, but all those were part and parcel of normal exosuits now that they could almost no longer be considered exotics.

Many of the exotics were formed in unique environmental conditions. Ceres had even heard of exotics that could only be formed in the vicinity of a pulsar star due to the consistent radiation being emitted.

“Wait a minute – why don’t we use Floa in our exosuits to manoeuvre ourselves around in space?” Ceres asked, himself having no experience with anti-gravity exotics in exosuits.

“It is theoretically possible, but the activation of Floa generates a fair amount of heat that will build up over time in a vacuum. A continuous electrical current needs to be run through the Floa to lift, which strains both the mass and power budget.” Pris shook her head.

Floa may be laced in clothes to form anti-gravity clothing, but it worked in atmospheric conditions and closer to the planet’s surface. To achieve the same amount of lift in space, the amount of Floa would have to be increased, along with the amount of electrical current to activate it.

Most corvettes did not even have such a large stock of Floa inside them, though they kept a few kilograms to slow down their landing speed whenever they needed. With the advances made by humanity in impulse engines, it was much more efficient to move in space relying on gaseous release rather than Floa.

Also, Floa did not work when too far away from the influence of a gravitational body like planets and stars. With the warp beacons being situated at the Lagrange points of the star system, Floa was effectively useless.

The exotics that humanity came across were not omnipotent nor without flaws. Every exotic had its own unique use case, as well as downsides to them. Ceres gave up on the idea of lacing the exosuits with Floa. It was a highly complicated affair, and he could already predict the havoc it would wreck on the power budget of the exosuit.

The work continued on the design, with Ceres focusing on making sure the rifle worked. The metal 3D printer rapidly printed out prototype parts, with Ceres quickly assembling them and stuffing them into the thermal vacuum chamber.

The chamber hummed loudly with its air pumping system ramping up, but not as loud as the continuous din of hammering and welding that echoed through the factory.

Ceres checked the readings on the thermal probes attached to the surface of the rifle, checking the comparison of the simulation on his multi-terminal compared to the actual observation. While the simulation was extremely accurate, his multi-terminal had limited processing power so it was better to verify it with real-world results.

“If only I could test fire it inside the thermal vacuum chamber…” Ceres muttered to himself. He could already imagine the disaster it would cause if he tore a hole through the walls of the chamber. Thermal vacuum chambers were not easy to fix, so he refrained from doing so.

A few more hours passed as Ceres did a few more revisions, while Pris herself placed the modified exosuit into a leak testing chamber, pumping the internals of the exosuit with helium gas and checking the leaks. “Fuck, there are still a few minor gaps here…” Pris swore under her breath as she watched a visualization of the leaks.

Artificial night-time soon came around, with Pris obviously stretching beyond her ability to stay awake. Her eyes were visibly drooping, before a loud beep on the leak test startle her.

She glanced over at Ceres, who was still painstakingly retrofitting the rifle, trying to optimize the thermal budget. Ceres wasn’t experienced in performing ranged weapon upgrades, so he took a significantly longer time by referencing the designs of other existing ranged weapons.

“Are you not tired at all? I don’t think I ever saw you sleep once in the last five days since we met.” Pris asked with genuine confusion, seeing Ceres’s focused expression.

“I got insomnia, it’s tough.” Ceres blatantly lied as he rapidly sanded down a freshly printed 3D metal part, inspecting the edges and the surface to ensure Victoria didn’t get abrasion when using the rifle.

Pris stared at Ceres warily, before giving up. “Fine, acting all cool like that. I’m going to hit the sack, see you in the morning. We still got to work on the heavy knight exosuits for our two tanks – there’s only two days before we move out.”

“Then it’s a good thing I have insomnia, otherwise we wouldn’t make the cut.” Ceres joked.

With Pris leaving the exosuit factory while her eyes rolled into infinity at the joke, Ceres was now alone again as usual in the night shift.

And as usual, the night-shift exosuit repairers all paid very strict attention to him. The number of design improvements Ceres had made to the base frame of the Victorious Revolt sparks waves of arguments among the exosuit repairers.

“Are you crazy? You can’t really expect to customize the base frame for every single rebel agent! The battlefield repairs will be insane! The logistics team won’t be able to handle it! If we standardize the components, the repairs will be a lot faster than if we try to print the parts on demand!”

“Why don’t we just print out the exosuit parts beforehand? We still got more than a week till the offensive, we can easily print out three to four sets of parts.”

“Don’t be stupid! Some parts get more damaged than others, so you’ll end up not using more than 70% of the printed parts. How the hell are we even going to ship all of those redundant parts to the front anyway? Better to standardize and save logistical efforts!”

Ceres did not worry about the debate between standardizing and customizing. His squad was effectively a lone squad operating by themselves with no backup. There was no scenario in which a standardized loadout will lead to the highest combat effectiveness!

The rifle was finally completed. Ceres lifted up it up, checking the sights and scope attachment. The scope was digital, allowing the sniper to link its targeting system with other exosuits. The rifle could also deliver more firepower, with its increased caliber of rounds.

Ceres hoped that it would be a major improvement to Victoria’s current rifle. He could already tell that Victoria’s current rifle would not work in space, seeing as how outdated and damaged it was.

The only issue now was whether Victoria would adopt the new rifle. Ceres did not understand why Victoria was so attached to her current rifle, but it was his job to provide upgrades with either way.

He decided to look back on the upgrades and retrofits he had already done for the rest of the squad.

Riker’s Azure Tiger had a comprehensive structural upgrade, with the base frame being much more customized to Riker’s body. Ceres wanted to gloat over how he improved Ardan’s exosuit design, but the White Fang seemed to be holed up in his office, having never met Ceres for the last few days nor caring about the duel.

Josef was a commando, but his exosuit could be one of the most versatile out there. Ceres decided to jack it up with as much firepower as he could stuff in, without compromising the thermal budget. A few additional mounting points for heavy weapons were added to the exosuit, allowing Josef to change loadouts on the fly if necessary.

Tyson and Amelia both didn’t need an upgrade to their exosuit, with the former not even using one and the latter merely being the ship pilot. Thus, Ceres had been using the nights to focus more on his own exosuit design.

The Swift Storm worked well but had a lot of weaknesses when it came to space combat. For one, it was completely not air-tight at all. Ceres wondered if his black goo would actually be able to protect him from the vacuum, though he wasn’t about to rely on it.

Theoretically, he could step into the thermal vacuum chamber and give it a try right now, but he didn’t have a way to stop it from inside without breaking through the chamber itself. “Maybe I should ask Felicia if they have a remote control or something.

Also, Ceres could clearly tell the rest of the factory’s exosuit repairers were keeping a close eye on him now. Their curious eyes continuously glanced over at specifically timed intervals, as though they were waiting for the next exciting thing Ceres would show.

Sighing, Ceres decided to put that test on hold. Maybe he’ll try it when he made it into space.

Either way, overhauling the Swift Storm for space combat took a lot of effort. The exosuit was now airtight, but Ceres was still struggling with the arms. His original base frame design was meant for melee attacks, which didn’t require a lot of fine-tuned motions.

However, in space combat, Ceres wasn’t planning to solely rely on his warhammer. He needed a ranged weapon, such as an energy rifle or laser rifle. Accuracy was essential, and his lack of small motors that could precisely move the arm was a clear weakness.

Fighting in space at ranges of more than a few kilometres meant that a slight deviation or a twitch in his arms will cause the beam to miss by more than a few dozen metres.

Ceres was seriously contemplating whether he should rebuild the exosuit from scratch. The Swift Storm was now completely encased in armour, so disassembling and reassembling was going to take some time at the very least.

This was a bit of an oversight by Ceres – something common in engineering projects where one was too hasty and it resulted in having to backtrack progress. “Fuck it, I’ll just have to do it.”

Ceres dismantled the armour and life-support system of the exosuit, removing the two arms carefully over a few minutes. The dismantling was relatively easy, especially since Ceres hadn’t epoxied nor bolted down anything seriously with torque.

He began re-wiring and adding additional components into the arms to allow for fine aiming. The mechanical parts began to build up, with Ceres continuously checking the screen to visualize his mass budget as well as his centre of gravity.

If the arms were too heavy, he might end up with the same issue as the original Azure Tiger or even worse. He might just topple over or be flung into an endless spin in space every time he moved or swung. He added a few reaction wheels near the centre of mass, hoping to control the rotational momentum.

The arms took close to two hours to modify and test, with Ceres also having to bolster the support structure for the rest of the exosuit, repositioning a few components and balancing it out. The life-support, propulsion and coolant system had to be reconfigured, adding another hour or so to the work.

Reassembly then took another hour before Ceres was satisfied with the result. It was close to artificial daytime now, with the night-shift exosuit repairers still admiring Ceres’s work. It wasn’t the best, but it was definitely one of the better ones they had seen, especially considering the limited supply that the rebellion had in terms of exotics and advanced technology.

The Swift Storm now looked like a diving suit with a large thruster pack attached to the back. It was a bit bulkier than he would have liked, but it was a trade-off Ceres was willing to make for combat strength in space.

Ceres had placed additional armour and radiators to the rear thruster pack as well as the compressed air tank connected to his hips next to the backup battery. If either of these three were hit, it will be terrible for Ceres, so he tried his best to ensure as many defensive capabilities as he could. He attached a energy shield module as well, but he expect that to only provide a light defence.

With the Swift Storm exosuit completed, Ceres stood back and admired his work. Designing for space was never easy, and Ceres felt a big boost in accomplishment for what he had done.

Only two days remained till the start of Squad C’s mission.