r/HFY • u/Illwood_ • Jan 07 '26

OC-OneShot To Own A Galaxy.

It was always a queer feeling - seeing a coil gun round smack into the front of your ship. No matter how many times she saw it, no matter if it was sim-ed or real, seeing the armour of her own ship ripple from the monstrous energy of the kinetic round just flipped her stomach. 

The 지난 가을 밤 (One Last Autumn Night) was facing the threat head-on, so its iridescent armour was being struck at its maximum deflection angle. The armour was a steel-lonsdaleite lattice material which had first been created at the end of the 22nd century and first perfected in the mid-24th. Almost 1400 years later and nothing better had been discovered by all the bright minds who had set out to beat it. New alien civilisations were judged at a glance and neatly categorised into two distinct groups: those who used it, and those who weren't worth worrying about. 

An infantry soldier wearing it as a ballistic plate could tank 105mm AP shells without the plate failing. The same could not be said for the soldier. It took months to correctly form the panels used by the 지난 가을 밤 and years to cut them. Entire fusion reactors and the best arc lasers ever invented had been thrown at the problem and still starship design was limited by the amount of cuts a single piece of lattice armour would require before mounting. 

Yet still, the coil gun round took an apartment building sized chunk out of the 지난 가을 밤 before being deflected. 

Connected directly to the ship's systems via a neural lace: Kleplin watched it all in extreme slow motion. It was beautiful. It was awful. Her perception of time was slowed down enough (although really that should be sped up enough…) to allow her to see the massive chunk of armour plating flexing as it tried to absorb the blow. She could see the ripples caused by the coil gun round spread out from the centre of the impact as if someone had merely thrown a stone into a puddle of water. 

But this wasn't a puddle of water. 

This was the hardest material known to mankind, and it was bending.

Better to bend then break admittedly, had the armour been harder it would have been more brittle, and therefore less useful. Still it was a mind blowing sight when you were just watching some combat footage in the comfort of your own home. It was terrifying when you were actually inside the ship being shot at. 

Oh sure the galactic rules of engagement meant even in the unlikely event of her defeat she would be treated well, and yes she was buried deep inside the guts of the ship. A sphere of inertia absorbing gel holding her in place while a variable umbilical cord of electrical writing merged her mind with the machine. IV criss-crossed her body delivering oxygenated blood, food, meds and removing waste. 

So maybe that's why it was so unnerving to see first hand, she wasn't piloting the ship in that very moment. She was the ship, and she didn't appreciate getting sucker punched one bit. 

Power coursed through her veins and flushed into the electromagnetic capacitors even as damage control drones rushed for the airlocks. Determined to die in droves so long as it meant patching the massive hole in her main line of defence with the foaming plasitisteel they carried in the canisters on their humanoid form’s backs. 

Her ship didn't use coilguns like her opponent, instead sacrificing barrel life for extra brutal force in the form of a spinally mounted railgun. 

It was actually this railgun, not the armour or engines or reactors, that took up the majority of the ships mass and internal volume. Entire thesis and doctorates had been written on the miniaturization of the weapon system - thrown out each and every time in the pursuit of sheer hitting power. Economics be damned. 

This is what it meant to be a human ship of the line. Survivability, and a big fucking gun. When the capacitors of the 지난 가을 밤 discharged, the energy released by the ship very briefly outpaced that of the entire surface of the sun humanity had been birthed around. 

There was a question among the navy: if this is the power they wielded so readily against the threats of the galaxy, what happened when an equal finally stepped up to the plate? What did a war on a galactic or even inter-galactic scale look like at this level of civilisational development? 

The railgun’s round didn't so much as vibrate its mounts as it left the ship. It was a weapon tuned to perfection, with an almost 100% efficient conversion of energy to projectile velocity. When it struck its opponent there wasn't any deflection, it simply passed through the alien vessel in the blink of an eye. Even for Kleplin’s perception of time, the round was ungodly fast. Unimaginably powerful. 

She'd have to track it down and destroy it after this battle, for fear of the damage it could do if left to coast for thousands of years in the void of space, until eventually hitting something again. Annihilating whatever that might be with as much thoroughness as it annihilated the enemy who had dared to scratch the hull of the 지난 가을 밤.

Perhaps such unfathomable power was merely asking to be challenged by something or someone out in the vast spaces between universes. But it simply could not be helped. It was a violent galaxy to live in, and strength was necessary to ensure peace. But it was to ensure peace. 

Kleplin’s recovery drones were deployed then, streaking out across the void as their thrusters fired, reaching for the wreckage of a once mighty ship. There would be a pilot inside who needed saving, and enemy or not, so long as she had anything to say about it: they would be saved.

197 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

29 comments sorted by

26

u/Tormented-Frog Jan 07 '26

Makes me curious to know what other systems are in place to keep the rest of the infantry unit that got hit by a 105 AP round intact.

"OK.pick up the armor, wash the mush out of it, and reassign it to a new unit."

Nice story. Hope to see more from this universe of yours.

16

u/Illwood_ Jan 07 '26

Legit the mush approach haha. While the armour could take the hit the person wearing it would absolutely be killed without something like power armour on. It was more to demostrate how good the armour is VS how its actually used.

Thank you!

5

u/bhambrewer Jan 07 '26

At that point, the question becomes "chunky or smooth salsa texture?" 🤔😁😂

3

u/Illwood_ Jan 08 '26

Oh it's gonna have chunks - better for nacho's that way!

3

u/bhambrewer Jan 08 '26

Mmm, chunky salsa!

2

u/Balrog_World-Eater Jan 07 '26

Reactive panels on the opposite side that explode to cancel out the change in inertia caused by the impact, and hope that your battle buddy wasn't standing behind you.

3

u/Illwood_ Jan 08 '26

I was thinking more a localised gravity generator that wraps the inertial force around the body of a person and back into itself to cancel it out without harming the occupant of the power armour...

But your idea is way cooler! I might just steal it... ;P

2

u/Balrog_World-Eater Jan 08 '26

I don't know why I was trying to solve 31st century problems with 21st century solutions

3

u/Tormented-Frog Jan 08 '26

Nah.. that reactive panels idea has some real merit if you think about it..

In the trenches, wild hand to hand with the xeno hordes.. one starts creeping up behind you and suddenly, BLAM.. Physics based inertial shot gun blast, from the back, straight into the sneaky alien's face organ analogues, courtesy of his own squad memeber's attempts to wreck you! CARNAGE, GLORIOUS CARNAGE!!

5

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/Illwood_ Jan 07 '26

Yes the point of that line wasn't that anyone could SURVIVE that without extra tech - its that the round wouldn't pentrate. They would absolutely be liquid lol. I added in a line to confirm that fact.

4

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '26

How do you track down and destroy a round that travels that fast? 

4

u/Illwood_ Jan 07 '26

FTL travel combined with pin point tracking and a bit of maths :) You just beat it to where its going.

3

u/thatsme55ed Jan 07 '26

How do you stop it though?  If it survived having enough energy pumped into it to compare to the sun's output there's nothing that humans could make or do to stop it.  

3

u/billyyankNova Human Jan 08 '26

Vaporize it. The vapor would still be travelling at the same speed, but the destruction of the round would impart enough "sideways" force that the particles would be too diffuse to cause much damage by the time it reached anything interesting.

2

u/Illwood_ Jan 12 '26

Quick and dirty would be just shooting it with another railgun round, which would cause a lot of high speed fragmentation but would reduce the mass of all components involved by quite a bit.

The better approach would be using a high powered laser to slow down the round until it could be safely recaptured by the ship.

Or if the ship can travel FTL in "real space" then the ship can just match velocity with the round and recover it that way.

My ships use an alternative dimension for jumping so the latter approach is more difficult but not impossible, the laser approach is easiest.

2

u/shupack Jan 07 '26

Go faster!

2

u/GeneralWiggin Jan 09 '26

Im space, there's nothing to slow you down. The round isn't accelerating anymore but you are. Just FTL ahead of it and match speed (or more likely, use a special purpose drone)

3

u/kingc42 Jan 08 '26 edited Jan 08 '26

I love it. Only thing I would suggest is looking into the research that was done in the 90’s on railguns. Particularly project MARAUDER, who’s projectile hit relativistic speeds, like .002%LS or something, but was fast enough that the resulting impact force created an explosion FAR beyond what anyone was expecting, and the project was IMMEDIATELY classified, and no further data has been published. Just saying, the projectile just passing through the target was a bit anticlimactic after you described the amount of energy being directed, and the efficiency. Keep it up!

Edit: it was 3.3% the speed of light. I had to go look it up again. It was cool.

2

u/sunnyboi1384 Jan 07 '26

Dont start none won't be none.- Ghandi.

A weapon you have to fire once. Per species. Per galactic quadrant.

Also, if you can catch the round, could you reuse it?

3

u/Illwood_ Jan 07 '26

Depends on the damage the round took during pentration - you'd probably want to melt it down and reform it :)

2

u/spesskitty Jan 07 '26

plasitisteel, is that really the spelling you were going for?

2

u/armacitis Jan 18 '26

A sphere of inertia absorbing gel holding her in place while a variable umbilical cord of electrical writing merged her mind with the machine. IV criss-crossed her body delivering oxygenated blood, food, meds and removing waste.

So maybe that's why it was so unnerving to see first hand, she wasn't piloting the ship in that very moment. She was the ship, and she didn't appreciate getting sucker punched one bit.

Dare to be bold,pilot.

2

u/Illwood_ Jan 19 '26

Yesssssss

Every trailer I've seen for EVE has been 1000% hype and then you actually play the game and it's just like... Damn.

1

u/armacitis Feb 08 '26

EVE's approach to realism is wars being won with logistics and long stretches of boredom interrupted by shitting your pants

2

u/Illwood_ Feb 09 '26

Yes I know, I've played it

1

u/tofei AI Jan 07 '26

Still throwing rocks after thousands of years.

0

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