The ride through atmosphere was bumpy as hell.
“Experiencing heavy turbulence.” The shuttle pilot called through the radio. “We are heading through a storm front.”
“Looks like we will be fighting in the rain, Commander.” Gunny said as he was checking his machine gun one last time.”
“Rough weather, reminds me of Japan.” I nodded.
“That’s what you get when you fight in the middle of the rainy season.”
“Landing zone should be right ahead!” The pilot called out to us once more. “Opening side doors.”
The alarm in the cabin beeped thrice before the doors of the shuttle slid open, revealing the outside to us. Most of the area was flat and vegetation had been burned recently. It didn’t take long for us to spot movement. It was an entire swarm of those bugs that was heading parallel to how we were flying.
“Deploying side guns.” The pilot said as a machine gun slid out of the side of the shuttle’s hull, which got immediately manned by one of the privates in our group.
“Give them hell, marine.” I tapped them on the shoulder and they opened fire on the group. Thanks to the gun’s rate of fire, the bugs dropped relatively quickly, even if it took multiple shots to finally find their weak spot.
The shuttle slowed down as we approached the compound in the distance. From the compound itself, laser beams shot out into the swarm, which apparently had managed to keep the bugs at bay. And luckily for us, they didn’t seem very interested in shooting at us.
“Putting her down.” Our pilot said, parking us on the roof of one of the building while keeping the firing arc for the side-machinegun intact.
Everyone immediately dismounted except for the private who kept handling the gun. After which, the shuttle took back off again to keep hitting the swarm.
“Okay, everyone, set up a firing time on this roof, I want Gunnery sergeant Taylor and Private Houston with me to meet up with the locals.”
“Aye aye ma’am!” The squad called out. A couple of soldiers set up a heavy machine gun on the corner of the roof, while the rest immediately assumed their positions and started firing. The three of us prepared to repel down to the ground, and it didn’t take long at all before we had our feet on solid ground. Lasers were still being shot out of the building, but we couldn’t really see inside. Nothing on the ground floor appeared to be open.
“What now?” Gunny asked.
“I guess we knock?” I pointed towards the big steel door in the center. It looked quite rusty and battle worn, but it looked like our best course of action.
We walked up to it and I banged the door three times with my right hand.
There was no response.
“Uhm…” I took a couple of steps back and looked at the building. “Are they all gone? Maybe the message was automated?”
“Maybe we should try to get in through the gaps on the other floors, where the lasers are firing from?” Gunny stepped back with me.
“I don’t really want to get shot by one of those though…”
We started to discuss different ways on how to enter the compound, but every idea either of us had just didn’t quite cut it. In the end, we were left in front of a closed door.
“Should we just pull out before the other shuttles land?”
“That might be for th-”
“Commander!” Private Houston called, they ran towards us. “The door! It’s opening!”
Gunny and I turned around and looked at the steel door behind us. It was indeed opening, slowly but surely. Once there was an opening of a meter or three, five figures suddenly rushed out towards us. The figures were tall, easily three heads taller than me, had four arms and two legs and wore some kind of metallic bronze-ish armour that covered their entire body. A blackened visor in front of their faces. With their four arms, they were carrying bulky weapons that were clearly trained on us.
They surrounded us in an instant, but no shots were fired.
“We are here to help.” I raised my arms, letting my weapon hang from its sling. Hoping the translator app did what it had to do.
The five figures looked at each other, seemingly confused.
One of them, the tallest of the group, poked me with the barrel of its weapon and said something. A second later, I got the translation. “You speak our language?”
I slowly pointed at my helmet. “We have a translation tool to help us understand. We deciphered your language in our ship.”
The figure tilted it’s head and then pointed one of its arms into the air. “Ship?”
“Yes, it’s in orbit.” I nodded. Quickly realizing afterwards that nodding might not be a sign that means the same in this culture.
The figure looked around for a second and then turned around towards the door.
“Come.”
The four others closed ranks behind us so as to coral us inside.
“Can we call in our other shuttles? To hold off the bugs.”
“Yes.” The figure replied as it walked forward.
That’s all I needed to hear. I opened the comms channel to contact the others. “Contact has been made with the local populace. You are cleared to land and commence defensive operations.”
The inside of the building was dark apart from a single light that was worked into the center of the floor. I saw other such fixtures, but they had been turned off.
“Where are you taking us?” I asked.
“Down, our leader is there.” The tall figure led us to the corner of the room, where a ramp led down to an even bigger area. This one was full of machinery, but only a fraction of it was working.
“Looks like a weapons factory.” Private Houston commented.
“Is this where you made your weapons?” I decided to ask our host.
“Yes… more or less…” It replied. “But power is almost out.”
That definitely explains why they are saving on the lighting.
We took another path down that led to a smaller door, yet still sizeable, guarded by two other figures. They let us in without any issue.
Inside the room there were three figures bent over a table, they were discussing something, but they were a bit too quiet to really be understandable.
Our guard told us to wait for a bit as they walked over to the table.
The middle figure that was standing at the table looked up at us. “Are these the strangers?”
“Yes, they claim to want to help.”
The figure walked away from the table and approached us. This one was even taller than the guard that had accompanied us. Maybe size was how their hierarchy worked.
“Who are you?” The giant spoke to us.
“We are explorers.” I replied. “We are from a planet called Earth.”
“Why are you here?”
“We were… exploring… and came across this system, we then heard and deciphered your distress call. So we came to investigate.”
The figure stayed quiet for a bit before continuing. “We thought none would come. Did you defeat the ships?”
“You mean the bug ships in space?”
“Yes.”
“We destroyed them.”
“Then your ship must be mighty.”
I wasn’t sure if I should tell him that we quite easily defeated the ships in orbit. It might have been an insult to them, so I decided to keep quiet about that. But I did decide it was my turn to ask a couple of questions.
“If I may.” I raised my hand. “Why are you at war with these bugs? What happened?”
The figure walked towards the table and signaled us to follow. On the table was a map, etched into steel. On top of it were steel markers. I could quickly tell that the sole marker of its kind still on the board was where we were, and the others probably showed enemy forces.
“One day they came. Not that long ago.” The figure spoke. “They quickly cut us off from our colony.”
“The other planet?”
“Yes.” The translator application couldn’t convey emotions, but the body language of the figure betrayed some kind of sadness. “It was quickly wiped out. Then they came here. We fought back, but there was no end to them. They reproduce too fast. Positions run out of power. Only effective weapons we had were these welding tools. But without power… they die. We are the only ones left. But even our power is almost out.” This somehow makes me feel glad that we’ve come from a place of conflict… They had to fight these things off… with welding tools of all things… Although something did bug me a little.
“Why aren’t they throwing everything at you?” I asked. “There were a lot of bugs outside, but if they had conquered the entire planet… There should be a lot more of them”
“Not worth the effort. Bleed us dry slowly. Conserve their energy. They still have plenty of food…”
“I see…”
“But if you took out their ships, they should have nowhere to go… we will be the last of their victims. That’s good.”
“We have found them on a different planet before. So that’s not really a guarantee. And there were only two ships.”
The figure looked down on me. “Oh.”
I decided to quickly change the subject. “How many people do you have here?”
“Twenty.”
Twenty people is all that’s left from an entire civilization…
“We will get you out.” The decision was quickly made.
“You will?”
“We have plenty of space aboard.” I nodded.
“Thank you…”
I opened a com channel to the rest of the troops. “Okay, everyone, listen up. We are evacuating these folks. Make ready for extraction.”
Yay new friends❣️
yay!
If they are going to face more hostile encounters like this, then they should consider converting at least one shuttle into a full gunship. The advantages would include being able to bring much more heavy weapons to bear, and integrating better fire control systems.
By the sounds of it this weapon is based off the door guns of helicopter transports, and even then isn't using some of the most destructive options. I'd say the equivalent of a general purpose machine gun, (AKA a medium MG). HMGs are rarer options, as are automatic grenade launchers, and mini guns. Those options are more costly in a number of different ways (weight alone being an important one), and thus wouldn't necessarily be the preferred option even if they are more powerful.
A HMG would have made short work of those bugs, since I doubt they are more heavily armoured than light armoured vehicles. It does however have issues with vastly heavier weight, especially for the ammo. Going up in caliber drastically lowers the amount of rounds you can shoot. So you need to balance things out. A HMG would be a natural choice for a turreted weapon with a good FCS. Capable of damaging everything up to dedicated armour fighting vehicles (and even then it would be possible to damage things like sensors with a direct hit), and having deadly accuracy well beyond most small arms (HMG rounds are on par with antimaterial rifles).
Automatic grenade launchers have the obvious advantage of splash damage. Of course their ammo is much larger too, which cuts down on how much is carried. A less well known advantage is that the standard round isn't normally a pure HE round. It is a dual purpose round (HEDP) that contains elements from a high explosive anti-tank (HEAT) round like those fired from RPGs. Obviously it is a much smaller round, but it still has improved penetration on a direct hit. An option suitable for engaging a number of different threats, but lacking in velocity, and being costly to operate. As a side note the grenade launchers attached to rifles use similar rounds, but was less propellant to avoid the risk of breaking a soldier's arm.
Mini guns are purely used to provide more dakka. They can also compensate for low accuracy by throwing massive amounts of rounds at something until it scores a hit. They tend to be favoured when you can't use a good FCS (so a door gunner, or mounted to the side of a gunship and fixed to fire straight ahead, with the pilot lucky to get a crosshair painted on his viewport).
Autocannons are pretty much a scaled up version of an HMG, with the corresponding increase in range and power, at the cost of weight and size. They would be mounted on a gunship in either a turret, or fixed with some sort of FCS to aid with targeting. Rarely they would be used like a scaled up MG where poor accuracy is over come by throwing enough rounds at the problem. Basically this is what something like the Apache, and similar helicopters use in their turrets, and most planes use (some older planes used smaller MGs as their primary weapons, but has fallen out of use due to the distances involved as jets became a thing). Such a weapon could do serious to catastrophe damage based on how it is designed (the A-10 for example is built around a large autocannon used for tank hunting).
Unguided missiles (I'll use the term rockets to make it easier) can easily be mounted in a similar manner to MGs, however the back blast renders them unusable for door guns. Even transport helicopters can be fitted with rocket pods to provide fire support. They might be a viable option to create for future use now that the crew knows they might encounter more hot LZs. They can easily be mounted on bare bones pylons with a simple link so the pilot can fire them. Such structures would also be easy to remove when not needed, and could be further modified to carry other mission specific gear like external fuel tanks, or additional sensors.
Guided missiles (I'll just call them missiles from now one) are a much more complicated matter. The most basic are self guided like the good old heat seekers. They can be blind fired like rockets if they are capable of locking on to a target in mid flight, but generally it would be better if the gunner had some sort of feedback that the missile was at least locked on a target. Better systems would provide more information on what target it is locking on to. However to truly take advantage of missiles the gunship's own sensors should be linked in to help pick targets. This of course requires the gunship to actually have the relevant sensors, and for them to be accurate enough to be useful (less of an issue in the future, but a noticable one in modern times where radar and FLIR, are not standard issue for everything). I mean it is kind of useless to have a missile that targets radar emissions when you can't even tell if there are any sources in the area.
The second type of missiles get feed information to correct their flight as they go. Wire guided missiles (yes there are literally wires connecting the missile to its launcher) are common examples of this that see heavy use on the ground with anti-tank systems like the TOW. They are the most basic, but the principals carry over to things like laser, or other systems. These can often be manually controlled from the launcher mid flight to compensate for things like the target moving. For these a sensor suite is a must for the launcher even if it is just the mark one eyeball of the operator.
Generally the more advanced the missile the more likely it will use a mix of the two methods, or be able to operate in different settings. Regardless they are costly, so they tend to be used for more high value targets, and are thus only fitted to larger projectiles.
I think this comment actually contains more text than the chapter xD
They could indeed turn one of their shuttles into a designated gunship but that will come with the disadvantage of also not being able to land us much troops in one go. But then again. They probably could retrofit their shuttles back into normal shuttles if need be. :)
@FieryKathy Well it would still have space to carry troops since a conversion would likely be able to only add external weapons. That means much of the internal space would still be available to transport. The bigger issue would be added weight and stress on modified areas of the hull.
To be honest there is likely consideration in the shuttle's design for the possibility of a conversion. Unless the shuttle is a totally unique design that will never be used in any other circumstances, alternative options would have been worked on from very beginning. A gunship escort variant likely already exists back in the Sol system, but there didn't seem to be a need for something like that for an exploration mission.
The crew would have likely been able to do a bit more to prepare if they had knowledge that they were entering a war zone, and would need to land in a hot LZ. They got caught a bit off guard with the distress call, so they didn't have time to prepare, nor did they even know what they were facing.
Speaking of what they were facing, those bugs are a laughable threat to any actual military. Melee is all they seem able to do, so a properly prepared force could kill them by the thousand. The bugs seem more like opportunistic bandits than an actual threat like the zerg, tyranids, or similar swarms of alien terrors.
@SuperBort Until you run out of ammo :p + We've not yet seen the bugs at full force :))
@FieryKathy It takes far more resources to make each bug than each bullet. That armour for example has to be made out of something hard, and energy has to be spent shaping it. That implies some form of large scale resource gathering like mining useful metals. There would also be large scale energy creation, transportation, and manipulation. A vast amount more resources are spent and lost by the bugs than their opponents, so they can only win when they vastly out number their opponents and can force them into a fight.
That's the other thing, a group equipped properly could easily disengage and retreat any time the bugs got close to being a threat. Targeting high value targets like supply depots, or space capable ships, would allow the bugs to be crippled without ever having to fight them in the field.
@SuperBort Dude... Theyre bugs. Armored Exoskeleton formed likely from Calcium and Iron. Its seems weak to US, but if you took, for example, A Scorpion and made it the size of a Mastiff, Its Exoskeleton couls stop bullets, Because its density, Toughness, And Tensile strength directly corresponds to size. A Sahara Scorpion is a lot harder than an Arizona Scorpionfor that exact reason. And look at Crustaceans, like lobster or crab... they eat other Shellfish, And thats what makes their own shells hard...
My point is, One Queen lays thousands of eggs. Assuming a size roughly similar to a bull mastiff, These bugs may not even be fully grown... Worse yet, They seem to be shock Troopers, likely mass bred, with each Clutch containing 1-3 thousand of them. Assuming Average insect growth rates, Thats About four to sixteen weeks to mature from a larval stage... And the way the ships Calcified upon defeat? That Exoskeleton is pure, Natural, Hardened Calcium or Keratin. Like a Wolverine or Tasmanian Devils Teeth, which can snap a 2 inch thich steel rod... No matter the inspiration, These are closer to Starship Troopers Arachnid than The Formics, Rach'ni, Hive, Or Swarm... Or any other Alien Space-bug... So no, They likely do not take Months or years of development using precious metals... They're just big bugs. Au Naturale.
@Darkakuahebi I never implied that they were actually weak on an individual level. What I was saying is that the literal matter and energy that makes each bug has to come from somewhere. Shaping those "thousands of eggs" isn't free. So on a strategic level they can't magically produce an infinite horde. They also can't just eat everything, or they would swiftly cause an ecosystem collapse, and then just all starve.
Think of it this way, to build a bug as strong as a tank is going to cost a similar amount to a tank. Now on top of that the bug tank can only hit things, let's say 5m away. Now the human tank can hit something more than 5+km away without issue. So unless the bug can close to melee range by running much faster than a car on a highway plus faster than however fast the human tank can withdraw, it won't be able to even attack before getting killed.
Some insects can enter a period of dormancy.as for Resources, WHY do you think theyre invading other planets? Its likely the Bugs planet is long hollowed, Dead from overconsumption... but being Insects, They dont learn, cant stop breeding more and more... Is it sustainable? f*ck no, But is it a motivation for invasion? Yes it is... They dont negotiate, They take no prisoners... They swarm like locust, Eating until everything is gone, Then return to the hive-ships, and sleep until the next target is reached... Probably a Hive-mind as well, with only the queen actually having a fully functional brain... Think of it like a virus... Or Humanity... Expand, devour, destroy, repeat. The resources for breeding?They take it from others. Your argument,while sound, is meaningless when you take into account they aren't Invaders, Theyre Destroyers. Now imagine a Bio-energy Link with their Queen, She can draw energy from any of her drones, soldiers, etc... so when they eat, She lays... the eggs then lay dormant until a bug dies, Then its replaced... Possibly born fully grown... Unlimited Wave Tactics. unless you take out the queen, Theres no end. Reminds me of the N64 game Armorines:Project Swarm... closest we'll get to a starship Troopers game...
@Darkakuahebi Do try to keep the conversation not that serious, its just a story :p
@FieryKathy Sorry... just makes me mad when someone Criticizes Somebody else's Hard Work because they dont agree with THE AUTHORS DECISION. You worked Hard on this, and all That Person does is Criticize the most UNIMPORTANT little things. Does ANY Sci-fi Story gives deep details on the logistics of the enemies reproductive capabilities, Upgrade Capabilities, AND Backstory? No. Not until much later... Heck, in the Ender Novels, you dont even find out the WHY behind the Formics Until the SEQUEL to Ender's Game... way at the end...
My point is, Nobody cares about the bugs Logistics in Starship Troopers, They just know that the bugs are the enemy, and that's all they really needed to know.
Again, You Worked hard on this. They think they can do better? Lets see it then? No better place Than Scribblehub.
Thank you for the EXCELLENT Work, Iove the series so far.
@Darkakuahebi Bort always does in-depth comments (a bit like you do :D) I don't see it as criticism, more like a small difference in opinion. + It's always interesting to read comments like that, you often learn things from it too.
Thank you for reading! I'm glad you like it :)