The Luna II Space Fighter - SF build

[Rafael]

"Are you feeling uncomfortable, Adam? Your vlink biostats look nominal to me". The voice of Alexander, the regimental AI, or more precisely, the portion of Alex aboard his fighter as acting co-pilot and coordinator asked.

"No, Alex. Just playing with the suit". Alex, as much AI as he could be, wouldn't understand why Adam thought-clicked (tc) through his Virtual Link (vlink) a strong increase of fresh oxygen flow specially directed to his face inside the helmet, like a soft sea breeze.

"That's a very delicate piece of equipment, Marine", the other quipped. Sometimes, Adam was tempted to believe that Alex and the other hundreds of AIs he'd met were more than aware, and liked to play head games with humans.

Tc-ing his vlink, he admired the surrounding vastness of space, and the familiar star-studded sky around, as fed from the views from his fighter, currently riding atop the Confed corvette Emerald with other three fighters of the Aquilan Centaurs. He anticipated this mission, because today, an important part of his life would become a closed circle. Or he'd be dead.

Memories flooded his mind while his own vlink monitored the rest of the universe in and around himself. The sky around him signaled the arrival in-system to Serena, after a short FTL jump. His lost home.

Serena IV, his planet of birth, was a marvelous rarity among rarities in all human-explored Universe. An astoundingly Earth-like planet, atmosphere, water, weather and all, more on the cool side, in a pre-biotic state, was the gem of this sector of the Confederation space. After its discovery, it was only necessary to perform a little terraforming on it, and transplanting Earth life to it was easy. Every scientist and colonist wanted a hitch on Serena IV.

Oceans, the likes of earth, spanned most of the planet's surface. Whole continents were ready for the taking. And humankind populated Serena IV with gusto. Cities, towns, villages and other cultural landmarks blossomed everywhere. A space Elevator and its complementary space stations were built. From there, it was only a matter of time to start the building project of SerenaRing; a vast, sprawling industry/commerce/tourism space complex orbiting the planet.

Twenty-nine standard years ago, Adam was born. The firstborn of a seagoing, enterprising fishermen family, he was raised on the shores of Atlantia, the smallest continent of the planet. He grew up on the shores of his village, famous for its unique fleet of wooden boats, built according to the traditions of many ancient fishing peoples back on Earth. He built his first whaler at the age of fifteen. He loved to be a beach bum. He awakened before dawn, to see the fishing boats depart, helped the fishermen drag their nets to shore, and to sort the catch of the day, After these chores, he ran to school, ran back to the beach to await for his father at the pier, worked on the family's boats, and ate fresh fish at the beachfront. Sometimes, he climbed mount Tocop, at the back of his village to watch the sea and sunset from the summit, squatting on top of a big boulder, and eating dried meat (his uncle's secret recipe). Sometimes, he hitched a ride with the fishermen, and spent a day working with them, just to have the chance to ride perched on the gunwales, the sea breeze caressing his hair, and the salty air of the early morning on his face. Sometimes at night, he would take his whaler to any one of the little keys and islets in front of his home to spend the night there, and lay on the sand, the starred sky his only blanket, his vlink charting the heavens.

It was a perfect life.

It all came crashing down when the Veyron bugs came. In fact, they were everywhere. Even in broad daylight, it was possible to see the brilliant, violent explosions right where SerenaRing would be. More to the east, the golden thread of the space elevator snapped taut and broke with a cascade of flaming debris on blazing reentry. The sparkling lights of exploding installations and dying ships in the skies above adorned the blue vault of heaven with death. At night, a fireworks show took place among the stars, and on the horizon, the distant glare of burning cities and towns intermingled with clouds of blacker-than-night smoke.

News and stories of monsters, unmerciful and savage arrived everyday with the accounts of those seeking refuge. More than once Adam went out to the sea to help bring ashore more survivors and refugees. Some large ships burned in the distance, funeral pyres afloat. He helped organize and operate the rescue boat fleet and he escaped a few strafing runs from the bugships by plain good seamanship and sheer luck.

He saw the Veyrons in the flesh, or whatever they were made of for the first time when coming back to his town after a rescue mission. A horde of blackish-greenish-iridescent, gleaming carapaces with several arms and two backward-jointed legs watched him and his boats from ashore. He desperately looked towards his beachfront home, only to see a burning hole on the ground where it should be and tens of bodies and parts of bodies scattered everywhere.

And then he saw his father's sloop. Holed and half burnt, beached in front of the house. A blackened figure was standing in the roofless pilothouse, shredded sails slapping freely in the smoky wind, a dead witness to the carnage on the sands of Atlantia.

It took an Act of God, and the urgent ministrations of his vlink biomonitor to stabilize him, administering shocks of adrenaline and other carefully metered neurotransmitters to put Adam into motion against the paralysis of fear and the burning pain racking his mind and body. Making the hardest decision of his young life, he reversed course, now under fire, and escaped with all his boats to the sea, on an uncharted course. It would take years for him to come back home again.

He met with other survivors and joined the fleets of rescuers who, scantily armed, went out to the seas, to explore in search of more refugees. Many didn't make it back. He helped move Marines from diverse units scattered throughout the continent, helped them by piloting hoverships and fast patrol boats in daring attacks that rendered fruits only sufficient to keep them alive.

In an incredible feat, Adam rescued a platoon of Marines pinned between a beach and a reef by Veyron fire. He expertly maneuvered his hovership, and without other charts or aids than those stored in his vlink, zigzagged over the water and deposited his craft just between the stranded soldiers and the enemy. Leaving his Nav AI in charge of stationkeeping, he helped load the desperate combatants aboard. Taking hits all over the hull, and almost to the brink of his ship being slagged, Adam organized everyone on board, left them in the hands of the unit's medic, and returned to the cockpit. And again, piloted his wounded ship towards safety. He did all this solo. The day after, the Marine Battalion commanding officer and the Captain in charge of the rescued platoon found him in front of his plastic bags and cardboard boxes hut, and in a moment that would define Adam's life from then on, the Brigadier General, with nothing else to offer, took his Marine insignia off of his BDU, planted it on Adam's chest, and saluted him smartly.

It was known that one of Atlantia's surface spaceports, Carib, was barely touched. Several spaceliners and cargoships were still resting unharmed in the docking bays. It was only needed to organize the most of the refugees as possible, march them to the spaceport, and take flight, running the blockade. It was performed flawlessly. The Marines and their civilian helpers managed to bring twenty-one thousand people from the refugee camps and put them aboard the ships. The crews were all ready. In an escape that would make the annals of history, the seven mammoth spacecraft activated their Zero-Point-Field generators, brought their massive agrav repulsor-lifts on-line and lifted off.

Clearing the atmosphere was easy, with only a few chasing bugships far behind. They emerged into space in a predetermined zone where very few enemies were observed patrolling, and resumed their course. Once clear of the planet's gravity field, they engaged their quantum power taps and made preparations for an FTL jump. Only one ship, the cargolifter bringing the rear, was lost to the Veyrons, with six thousand souls on board.

Adam was one of the escapees. Impossibly tired, he saw the vlinked images of the surrounding space from the spaceliner's video feed. He saw the scarred surface of Serena IV, with its still burning expanses of land. He witnessed the weak persecution and the death of the last ship. And he saw the big Hiveships, fifty-kilometer wide moonlets, stationed on the other side of the planet, casting deathly shadows, surrounded by thousands of smaller ships. His heart sank when he saw the shattered remains of SerenaRing and of the many orbiting space stations, now a ring of debris and broken habitats circling the planet. His vlink biomonitor warned him that he was on the verge of collapse. He was still awake when they FTL-jumped. It felt like the tug of an especially fast turbolift suddenly starting and stopping. Only, this tug was felt in every direction and for a split second. He huddled in an invisible corner, among thousands of invisible passengers. He cried. And then he slept.

After arriving in near-Earth space, they were received by the Confederation authorities, which rendered assistance and provided shelter for the refugees. Even to this day, Adam couldn't remember when he went to the Marine Corps recruiting office.

He went into training, and, hardened by his previous experiences, and under the quiet recommendations of certain Brigadier General, he graduated among the top of his class. Then he was accepted in the Marine Aerospace Academy, where he learned to fly and fight in aerospace fighters.

Assigned to a squadron, he was sent to fight the Veyrons. System after system, the war was raging, and he was piling up combat flight hours and experience. He made it to flight leader by the time the Serena IV campaign started.

This operation was aimed at destroying the hiveships and rooting out the bugs from the Serena system. The Confed Fleet Command sent in everything that they had, in order to take advantage of the last development in the secret bio-war against the bugs. Rumors of a weapon already sowing weakness and disease among the enemy fleets were filtering through to the troops. Total hermeticism was the only answer to their questions on that regard.

Two new Phase-shift-capable carriers were also involved in this operation. Fifteen-kilometer-long and two-kilometer wide monsters, inspired on the bigger hiveships, they were capable of carrying complete wings of combat and support spacecraft and major combatants inside of their cavernous bellies. Corvettes, frigates and destroyers could travel comfortably stowed side-by-side inside, to be released like the rest of the fighters once a phase-shift was accomplished.

Phase-shifting allowed a spacecraft to immediately travel from point A to point B without traversing the intervening space, in a zero-duration translation. But it had to be a big, big spacecraft, because the phase-shifting quantum machinery was particularly massive.

On the other hand, FTL jumps used spacetime compression and expansion, a concept developed late in the twentieth century by a scientist named Miguel Alcubierre. The Alcubierre-type drive was easily carried by corvettes and bigger ships, and used intensely focused gravitational waves to contract space in front of the ship, and expand it to the rear, forming a bubble of spacetime around the spacecraft that "moved" it hundreds of times faster than light. The energies involved required the use of a quantum power tap plant.

And then there were the agravs. These sublight engines propelled every vehicle able to carry a Zero-Point-Field generator connected to a gravitronic projector, capable of lifting and moving any ship through atmosphere and in the deep of space, riding on the gravity waves and currents of the galaxy.

The attacking human fleet was divided into two groups. The first one, comprising the carriers and the big ships aboard, would remain at their points of emergence, in the suburbs of the Serena system. The second group, the FTL-jumping ships with their piggybacked fighter escorts, like the Emerald, would accelerate towards SerenaIV, release the fighters and then split into two waves of attack craft. This part of the plan was Adam's baby, bumped up to the highest echelon and approved as the most likely successful alternative. It involved the use of two new types of weapons, a ship-killing missile and a long-range artillery system.

"Showtime, Adam," Alex's voice said through the vlink.

Tc-ing the command comm net, Adam broadcast a coded thought to the fleet, and then they proceeded with the plan.

He ordered every fighter released, and felt the fighter unshackling from its ride. Vlinking with his Luna II, he entered another level of man-machine interface. He was no longer in the fighter. He was the fighter. Through his vlink, his every thought, desire and movement became the fighter's physical reaction, an extension of his body and mind.

Accelerating on a focused column of gravitic energy, he and the rest of the fighter squadrons diverted from the original course, and headed towards the debris fields of SerenaRing. Emerald and the bigger ships diverted to a new course, too, taking them out of the now distant carriers' line of sight and of the already maneuvering enemy fleet.

Meanwhile, at the carrier's Combat Information Centers, AIs coordinated the movements of several hundreds of ships in a choreography of death. Hundreds of AI-controlled reconnaissance unmanned space vehicles (USV) were also dispatched to provide a complete coverage of sensory data from the battlefield. All this information was digested and synthesized into a common image-view vlinked back to all the fleet, with the corresponding battle management signaling and the identification of every foe in the battle space.

Approaching SerenaRing's debris fields at something like four hundred gees, and protected by the agrav drive inertial damper, Adam fired a savage burst of gravitons to decelerate sharply with a cloud of fighters at his back. Behind them, a massive fleet of bugships pursued, baited. Everyone in the squadrons did the same thing, and once in a slow drifting free-falling displacement they scattered among the orbiting fields and started their deadly dance.

With small controlled bursts from his agravs, Adam and his squadrons navigated through the remains of SerenaRing, shielded and hidden by the floating debris. From there, they frog-leaped from cover to cover and sniped indiscriminately at any bugship in sight.

The Luna II carried a deadly 20 millimeter gatling railgun, capable of firing streams of superheated plasma slugs magnetically-stripped of electrons at fractional c speeds, and a forty millimeter single barreled weapon of the same type. Some Lunas carried bulky laser cannons or particle accelerators on their centerlines. Supplementing these weapons, they carried missiles with powerful explosive thermohydrodynamic directional warheads, propelled by a gravitronic drive, imparting them accelerations far superior to those of any objective. They were also armored like the other vessels of the Confed fleet with a multi-layered nanocomposite, carrying a hard-shell electric base plate, coated with a reactive antilaser reflective nanofilm, topped by an enmeshed electronic diffusion network, able to defeat particle guns. It took a lot of concentrated fire to bring down a modern Confed ship or fighter.

Using his active stealth systems, Adam's fighters sprinted from covering position to covering position to lay fields of devastating, mutually supportive fire. Helped by the networked power of AIs, USVs and the combat information management from the carriers, they attracted the attentions of a sizable part of the bug fleet towards SerenaRing.

Missiles, plasma slugs, beams of coherent light and particle streams were exchanged between pursuers and pursued. Human fighters flashed a mirror-like silver when caressed by lasers, arced blue-white in contact with charged particle streams, and sparked bits of electric armor from projectiles and missile hits.

Unable to coordinate to the intricate degree of the human forces and incapable of achieving the incredible control and maneuverability of the vlinked human-machine interfaces, the bugships started dying. Some found themselves smeared against particularly big pieces of debris, and some were seduced to follow lone ships agilely seesawing among the space flotsam, only to be massacred by ambushing Lunas awaiting undercover.

Adam's attention was called by Alex's announcement of one big approaching group. Through his vlinked battle management system, Adam saw a treasure trove of plasma-refueling ships with a myriad of bugships hooked onto them. Rallying his fighters and vlinking the targeting data on the new arrivals to his squadrons, he ordered a complete concentration of firepower onto them. At medium-range, the human fighters rose from the debris fields and launched missiles and fired every weapon at their disposal against the formation. Tankers blew off in spectacular containment field failures, engulfing their serviced ships inside catastrophic explosions. Only a dissipating cloud of uncontained, superheated plasma remained.

While Adam and his merry band of Luna fighters attracted all the attention of the bugships, the second part of the plan unraveled.

From the safety of their standoff position, the carriers and their fleet of warships newly equipped with Mass Accelerator Cannons (MACs), computed ranges, displacements and gravitational fields, and fired sixteen inch shaped projectiles, made of carbonaceous chondrite, a common asteroid mineral, at near ninety percent c. Each shot left behind an interesting pattern of compressed light, and crackling, dissipating energy fields. At one shot every five seconds per gun in each fire mission, the fleet laid a thick barrage of artillery support, in a new twist of combined arms combat.

At the same time, the fleet of human warships in near-Serena IV space, let loose a spread of hundreds of AI-controlled ship-killing missiles, and then put as much distance between them and their targets, heading out-system. The new LASE-X missiles accelerated towards a point in space in direct sight but distant of their intended preys, and detonated. Their warheads, selectable-yield ten-to-fifty-megaton nuclear weapons exploded, and in fractions of nanoseconds the immense pulse of X-rays generated inside the explosion was channeled by a powerful magnetic field focuser, aiming precisely the intense hard radiation pulse and giving it coherence, transforming it into a highly focused laser beam.

The powerful, concentrated X-ray lasers lanced through every enemy ship targeted. By the hundreds, the bigger Veyron bugships glowed brilliantly and died of intense sunburn. The radiation and the modulated, coherent lightwaves exploded on contact to their target's outer surfaces and kept on going until depleted, generally cutting, melting and exploding their way through the length of the ships. Those not holed from bow to stern died too, of thermal shock on starcore temperatures.

The nuclear explosions rapidly dissipated in the hard vacuum of space, but the remaining radiation, the heat waves, the electromagnetic pulse, and the violence of the great string of detonations, served one ulterior purpose: to hide behind it the approaching artillery rounds of the rear echelon bombardment. Flying unopposed at ninety-percent c, the projectiles were unstoppable, in theory. But a very alert system could still manage to bring down many of them if given half a chance.

But the hiveships didn't even have half a chance. After going through the nuclear curtain, the rounds arrived on target almost at the same time as their firing signatures and their own reflected light. There is no way of calculating how much energy was liberated on impact, unless you have a very accurate physics AI doing the math.

The carbonaceous chondrite isn't the hardest material in the universe, it is only meteorite stuff, a rock easily chipped and broken by a hammer. But at such relativistic speeds, even a bird feather can blow up a city block.

The hiveships took the first hits. The artillery rounds impacted time and time again against them. At such high-energy settings, the rounds didn't simply penetrate. Those portions of hiveship impacted by each round flared into enormous actinic, expanding clouds of superheated plasma. And evaporated. Each hit took out a huge chunk off of the fifty-kilometer ovoid ships, until nothing of value remained.

The Veyron carriers, the cargo and logistics ships, the bigger troop carriers, the space stations, the surveillance platforms, the floating docks and the plasma tenders of the Veyron fleet became incandescent, white-hot blobs of expanding light and gases under the savage and unrelenting hail of stones hurled at hypervelocities. No weapons were fired back, no response given, no evasive action taken. The Veyrons died then and there.

Adam watched with amazement the intense lights show above and beyond SerenaRing. Only through the AI-compensated video feed of his vlink could he see such spectacle without burning out his eyes. Directing his fighters once again into combat, he knew he had a new mission in front of him: mopping up the surviving Veyron forces in and around Serena IV.

After this part of the operation was finished, he transferred his battered fleet of Luna Fighters to the carriers recently phase-shifted into orbit. Sporadic combat flared occasionally around them, and the human invasion forces were getting ready to drop to the planet's surface. The butcher's bill on the human side was high.

It took almost three months of constant surface combat operations, but the entrenched Veyrons were exterminated, fighting to the last bug.


THE COAST OF ATLANTIA, SERENA IV PLANET, FOUR YEARS LATER

Adam, now a Marine Corps Major (ret.), with the sea breeze caressing his hair, and salty air on his face, admired his new sloop from its graceful stern. It was built to spec, according to his vlinked memories of his father's boat. Then he went to the bow and reclined beside the naked tanned body of his wife. He admired her beauty, and marveled at all the hope represented in the small bulging belly of his pregnant woman. A tear of joy ran down his cheek. He kissed her lips tenderly and she swatted him away playfully, giggling. He lay there, watching the vertical, ruler-straight golden thread of the newly built space elevator, and higher yet, the unmistakable lights of SerenaRing's rebuilding project.


This is my rendition of the Luna II Fighter and the thoughts it inspired me. Adam's life at sea is a recollection of my own past life there. A life that can be no more because of monsters of our own creation: pirates and bandits.

I hope you like it. And enjoy it as much as I did writing and building these models for you.

Saludos,

Rafa


*************************************************************
It's a 3-view drawing belonging to someone called Edxcal. I started by measuring the vehicle and sizing it to a guesstimated 1/72 scale.

Then, I determined the cross sections of fuselage and engines, which I transferred to the plan, with sectional and cut lines to position the cuts to be made.

Here's what the AIs at my factory drew from the original specifications:



The Luna IIs are scratchbuilt from EPS (expanded polystyrene) foam, cardboard (yum!!!) and plaster


Here, in close formation, two single-seaters and two double-seaters from the Aquilan Centaurs Squadron.

The single seaters are configured for space superiority, armed with one 20mm and
one 40mm plasma railguns in the LERX portion of the wings. Flanking each lower
engine, four three-pack Orion missiles, and in the centerlines, two three-pack
Meteor missiles.

The Two-seaters are configured for heavy attack and defense suppression against
Capital Ships, one equipped with a Redeye 850MW Laser, and the other with an
Electra CPG Charged Particle Gun.

[Cliffy B]

Dude those look awesome!  They could use some twin tails though, might help in atmospheric flight besides just looking cool.  Just my 2 cents though, kick donkey either way man 

[ElectrikBlue]

Hi Rafa!

Nice little space fighters! 

[Brian da Basher]

Rafa you never cease to amaze me amigo! This beauty is a real tribute to your incredible talent and skill! The paint scheme along with those sinister black canopies is icing on the cake!

I am in awe, Senõr Cartón!

Brian da Basher

[Ed S]

Nice work.  I see you're building them by the squadron now.  Very inventive as always.

Ed

[chrisonord]

I wondered where you were hiding Rafa,
So this is what you have been upto, I am liking these.
Any chance of a squadron of these as part of my S.H.A.D.O force??
Chris.

[John Howling Mouse]

Interesting.  As usual, I find myself wondering how you constructed these.  Will there be some in-progress build shots?

[philp]

Ah, great story.  Have you thought of submitting it to a Publisher?  I think it would go great in a book of short sf combat stories.

Oh, yeah, and the ships look cool too.

[dragon]

I like it.
However growing up "by the sea" takes several points of view.  I myself think of Morrocoy or Isla Larga (these days I would kill for a plate of empanadas de cazon accompanied by several Polarcitas).

[ChernayaAkula]

  Wow! The story, the models, just... wow!

[Rafael]

Thanks, my friends. The story started when I couldn't board a fishing boat because the Captain refused on the grounds of it being too dangerous to navigate these days with passengers other than the crew because of piracy. I took it from there. Dragon, my preferred place in the Universe is Morrocoy, and the keys and islets I  took for inspiration are there. Chris, I would be honored to have my Lunas fly with your SHADO force

Here's how it started on the bench


The cross section and cutting template and one fuselage assembled. The nosecone is white glue kneaded and shaped between thumb and index finger




A bucketful of foam engines, 16 of them. I later ditched them all and made a single master for casting


The shapes. The wings are one cardboard (Yum!!!) base plate with a shaped foam top. The finish is applied on top of a previously applied layer of white glue, to protect the foam from being eaten by putties and paint. Note the white ones, they're layered in plaster and topped with white glue, which prevents cracking and chipping from showing


A mold for a hollow cast of the upper engine group, made with amazing mold putty


An open mold for the lower engine group


All engined up. The molds you see at the left are some I made for hollow casting of canopies


Canopies galore!!


Ready for paint


All in all, a most fun project

Rafa

[sotoolslinger]

Just freakin brilliant. COOOOL  MODELS . The backstory is facinating and beautifully written. It really should be published for a wider audience.

[Rafael]

Thanks, Ron!!!

I also forgot to mention that the masters for the engines were made of cardboard(yum!!!) scribed with a pen, on a foam core

Rafa

[Sisko]

Like the design! were did you get it?

I always love your projects keeps me inspired!