While there were grav thrusters all along the facets-even shields could be used as such in a pinch-the main drive was the last eight sections. The last eight were devoted to maneuvering and engineering.

The next five were general power systems, primary life support, command sections and crew areas including mess. The front three, besides supporting the side guns and defenses, were devoted to powering and managing the spinal gun. And the Rangora were apparently big on eights since there were sixteen sections. Humans had managed to determine from the chunks, some large, of previously defeated AVs that they were sectional. Armor lasted about a quarter of the time, so if a Defender stayed in the range of the AV’s main gun for as long as four seconds it was destroyed. While not a patch on the output of, say, Troy, much less SAPL, that would kill a Defenders screens in two point six seconds and a Constitutions in one point two. They knew that the spinal laser of the AV was rated at sixty petawatts. Thus the forty-nine laser point defense batteries, thirty-two short range mass drivers and, of course, the dual mode attack/defense main missiles. The only way through the screens was penetrator missiles.

For defense there were another thirty-two overlapping and interlocking shields, each three times as strong as those on an Aggressor and impenetrable to any laser on a human “light” platform such as the Constitutions and Defenders.

But they did know a few things about them besides that they were ten kilometers long, a kilometer wide, shaped sort of like a truncated Kentucky rifle barrel and absolute rat bastards to kill.Įach of the eight sides sported twenty-six missile launch tubes and twenty lasers identical to the spinal lasers of an Aggressor. So they didn’t know them as intimately as they did Aggressors.

The hot gate john ringo