The Republic-class light carriers were the first gravtech carriers America mass produced. Like other first generation gravtech ships, they lacked gravplating or any other form of modern artificial gravity. They could only generate gravity by acceleration, which burned too much fuel to be economical, or by rotating sections of the ship. We were quick to retire the class once gravplating became common and inexpensive. And we were quick to bring them back once The War started. Normandy is arguably the most famous of those ships. She guarded the Wolfenheim Project from all foes, Terran and Alien. She was pretty bad off when she was found, but she got better.
America’s space forces became as mixed as our ground forces during The War. We reactivated ships from boneyards, upgraded militia ships, and even scavenged the collected remains of old battles. We refabricated anything that ran on gravtech, and upgraded many older designs to use it. The result was very interesting to historians. Modern armored wedge gravtech designs fought next to old cylindrical rocket ships that had used rotation to generate gravity before their upgrades. One of my many operations involved an old Republic-class light carrier. She still had her rotating gravdeck, though the crew locked it in position. Modern gravplating made it unnecessary. What I loved about that ship was that everybody underestimated her because they “knew” what her class was capable of. She proved many people wrong.
Yosemite changed everything for me. The Shang killed my family and I wanted revenge. It was a pretty dark time in my life. That’s why I volunteered to fight. And that is why I chose the job I did. I knew that every pilot got a cybernetic partner. I knew from experience how fast they thought. I knew they would be deadly in a fight. So I went hunting a cybernetic partner. Someone who would help me kill them all. My story would have been the pretty typical revenge story if I’d gotten what I was looking for. But Betty was something else entirely. It’s amazing how much the people you spend time with can change your life.
The gangs of downtown Indianapolis broke and ran in the final episode of Twilight’s fourth season. And then the entire crew made a hard right turn to charge the convention center. AI avatars jumped through broken windows, armored vehicles smashed through concrete walls, and Twilight began her final assault on the true reason she had come to Indy. Hackers dove through the computer systems and locked them down to prevent erasure. The terrorists swept the wide-open corridors where gamers once walked in costumes with tripod-mounted miniguns. Rockets screamed through the gigantic halls. Explosions rocked the convention center and AIs and vehicles alike fell to the terrorist counterattack. But the AIs feared death less than even the terrorists, and they advanced without remorse. It was a sight that would chill America.
The ground forces that fought the Chinese in the Hyades Cluster were an odd lot. We used a mix of new construction and refabricated designs found in reserves or museums to put as many wheels, tracks, or wings into action along the widest front ever fought by anyone born on Earth. On world you could see ancient Abrams main battle tanks taking targeting information from a fresh Pershing scout tank. On another world a squadron of Lightning II fighters nearly as old earned honors for bringing down a major Chinese supply convoy and accelerating the fall of an entire star system. We used anything we could find and run through the fabricators. It made for an eclectic mix of designs fielded during The War.
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