Chapter 514 - Far Future Ch 224 – Tech Levels, Pentagons, and Spiders (1/2)

Fuzzy was off to the stars with his own fleet... a fleet that was constantly growing as the Tribute made more. All it needed was raw supplies at this point.

We were in a flurry of activity with the constant upgrades. TL 13 stuff making the stuff that could make TL 14 stuff, which could then make the stuff that made TL 15 stuff. Fabbers could only make stuff two TL lower, so having devoted systems able to make your current tech level was a thing.

The fabricators of the Celestial Tribute could reach TL 15, which meant the first upgrades could happen very quickly. Of course, us having access to TL 15 was one of those things that we didn't tell anybody, especially the Mekkers salivating after functioning tech of that level.

Of course, the fact that TL 15 was mere bridge tech to what we actually wanted would have dumbfounded them. It was basically a truism to them that organics couldn't comprehend TL 17 tech, completely ignoring the evidence to the contrary. That we were doing so meant we had to be dealing with the Warp or aliens or infected by some outside force, enabling us to do such things...

The fabbers could make TL 15 tech, or they could make systems that could make the TL 15 tech, and potentially TL 16 tech. There was no doubt what the proper way to go was, and Fuzzy was now out there visiting the worlds we had settled and mining, scooping up megatons of raw materials, turning them into technology, and disseminating them to our people.

Our greatest vulnerability was, of course, our lack of armed forces to defend all the places we were spread out into, so we could only rely on Sources determining Fate, Nulls that couldn't readily be traced, and a whole lot of secrecy. The systems we were in were not visited for reasons, and as long as those reasons continued, we wouldn't have a problem.

At the same time, if alien forces found those systems, we couldn't call on the Empire to save them, only our private strength. Granted that strength was impressive on an individual level, as our ships were literally the finest being produced in series right now, but on a macro level, it was miniscule. We were just heavily outnumbered by lower tech ships that could simply overwhelm ours when acting in concert.

Fuzzy's flotilla being able to move between our worlds at increasingly fast speeds along the Phlos was a big step forward, but he couldn't be everywhere at once. We had to scale up, there was no helping it, and the sheer amount of scaling up we had to do was just mindboggling.

Even here, on the other side of the Rift, the number of systems occupied by the Empire was at least a million, and while not every system even had a capital ship, a very good chunk of them did, and certain of them had massive fleets just waiting to be dispatched.

Unless you just had numbers to throw away, nobody could possibly maintain a strong protective force in every system. Worlds had to be important to be allocated a standing cruiser, and Very Important to have a functional System Fleet. Even then, their fleet often wasn't strong enough to stand up against a devoted piratical raid from another race, and certainly couldn't deal with an actual invasion.

Thus, standard Fleet procedure was delay, delay, delay, while a force from one of the hub systems was dispatched to deal with the threat. Sometimes that was possible, sometimes it wasn't, and sometimes planets died. Normally what happened with a full-on invading force was it took out two or three system entirely, before being caught by the incoming fleet, and either fought to a standstill or was eradicated, shattering into small elements that fled in every direction and had to be hunted down, consuming more years of time and keeping the Imperial Fleet busybusybusy.

The Tachyon Drive and the Harmonic Drive, especially the upgraded ones, were starting to turn that required strategic emplacement on its head.

Because Helldiving required coming in from the edge of the system or randomly placed gravity well intersections, there was a considerable amount of time used up normally just entering the inner systems where all the goodies were, ranging from hours to days. Getting word out, mustering a fleet, and then Helldiving towards the afflicted system consumed a lot of time, and when they arrived, they'd be at the edge of the system, having to follow the same course as the attackers, meaning they were yet further behind.

The Tachyon Drive made running off to nearby systems a very quick thing, and the Harmonic Drive was now the fastest in-system sublight drive system around, save for the inertialess stuff from the Tekrons, able to rival all but the fastest of the Elvar Sunsails.

Outsystem, we were up into parsecs per hour easy coasting, and could start on orders of magnitude now, with the tech increasing as it did. That meant systems from an increasing range could converge on trouble spots, as opposed to one massive fleet dispatched from a central location, and having to deal with the uncertain chronal effects of traveling through the Warp.

Markspace meant communication of threats was instantaneous across galactic distances. There were no worries about astropathic jamming or distortions in the Warp cutting off communication with other systems, so all that remained was getting the ships there in time to be of use.

That communication system, and the continual expansion of our sphere of awareness, also meant that we had the single best strategic view of forces in the galaxy in real time, bar none!

It was possible that the elvar, drow, and high strategists on Tellus had access to knowledge of forces of other races and what systems they held and where their forces were... but they would be inevitably out of date, and certainly tracking the shifting courses of them in real time was impossible. Everything was lost track of, given the distances, the vagaries of the Warp, and the violence endemic to the galaxy.

One Marked in the right position – say, planetary traffic control – could basically provide real time information for an entire system. This got even better if they could work in the Umbran or Coronal data centers.

Information from so many sources, increasing rapidly in complexity, necessitated a change in how we ran our own operations. The kids put up ideas, and I let them run with it.

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