ON: Ayenee-Class Starbase, Nepleslian System
Clark Thompson was an ambitious man, a middle-aged Nepleslian who'd seen his fair share of war and figured that the fighting would never end. That's why he got into the shipbuilding industry, so that he could build his own private fortresses away from the chaos of the streets of Nepleslia. He'd ended up with Geshrinari Shipyards, a respectable, yet mob-connected producer of various starships, on a starbase that he himself had designed a few sections on. Space made him feel good, mainly the distance from all the idiots while at work. The unintelligent didn't build good starships, more make enough money to buy them, and so he didn't have to deal with them too much. But, Clark's career was about to take him into the realm of treason. Today he'd been assigned to design a battleship.
This battleship, his assignment papers noted, was allowed to use the restricted technology that Yamatai laws prohibited and guaranteed to punish the use of "harshly." So it was quite a surprise that a corporation usually concerned with staying so legitimate in Kyoto's eyes would take such a terrible risk. Something had to be going down, and whatever it was, it was probably good for business but bad for the people. Many death would follow as a result of this project; he was sure of it. Sitting down at the side of a large conference table, he laid out a bunch of paper notes, sketches, and print documents, looking them over until someone else entering got his attention.
Abdyel had found herself in Geshrinari Shipyards with a most curious assignment, a battleship. After the war with the angels had ended she was one of the skilled engineers who had been looked down upon and not given the proper promotions they deserved... or at least in her eyes she was. She was making enough money now to live comfortably, working for a company that before she was working her hardest to destroy. "Are you the other engineer for this project?" She asked as she entered the room, the light from the hallway outlining her fairly slim form and blending with her long blond hair, her short wings almost completely hidden behind her back.
"Yeah," Clark nodded, smiling. Plebian girls, to him, were adorable. Not only that, she was educated, too. He looked over her body briefly, he smile renewing as he silently joked to himself, "Try not to put the wrong curves in the ship design." He stood up from his chair and walked over to the plebe girl and offered his hand to her. "Clark Thompson," he introduced himself.
"Ah..." She said, quickly raising her hand to shake with his, making her breasts bounce slightly with the sudden movement. "I'm Abdyel, nice to meet you." Missing the comment about curves entirely she continued with business, holding an upright posture that had been drilled into her by her superiors during her time with the ECN. "What do you have so far?"
Clark was still mentally patting himself on the back for picking her off that jobs site. It was good for the both of them. She got out of the post-war poverty, and he got a sexy little assistant with brains. Maybe with a little smoothness, he thought, observing her lovely bosom and posture, he could get a little more for his money. With another smile, he pointed to his papers. "Just some brain-storming and a few elements I'd like to put in it. I'm still not sure exactly how big they want this thing, though. I'm thinking it'll be rather large, though, since the directions say it should be a match for Star Army ships if possible and to be a symbol of Nepleslian strength." He smiled, and cracked a little innuendo joke, nonchalantly asking, "You like 'em regular or extra large?"
"They had me working on small ships during the war, I'm afraid my experience with larger systems is limited to what I've read about," She said as she turned away from him and leaned on the table, bending over enough to get a good view of the papers that had been placed about the table. She didn't quite grasp the concept of Innuendo yet and was enjoying her freedom from the ECN to much to wear pants, her skirt riding up on her body only slightly as she looked at the papers, but not enough to expose a prime view of her body. "Are you planning on building the ship around the equipment or designing the hull first and squeezing the systems inside?"
The man chuckled, thinking about squeezing his equipment inside something entirely different. "Well, maybe we should do a little both," he said, moving behind her and a little to the left, so he could look at the papers too (and also those adorable fluffy wings). "Let's determine the major systems first, design a rough version, then do the hull and do the internal stuff and the smaller systems from there. For starters, I figure we're going to run this thing on a big old aether tap system and the bet power transfer and storage network systems we can find. If possible, I'd like to have its main weapons fire not just forward, but if it's a smaller ship we may have to settle for that so we get maximum firepower."
"Perhaps we should deal with power last? Once we have the shields, weapons, and control systems worked out we'll know exactly how much power we will need. If you want flexibility I think I can do that." She said, looking over the papers a bit more, "We could have one large main weapon running down the insides of the ship and the use a series of orbit weapons to bend the beams path to anywhere that it is needed. I heard the ECN was toying with that idea earlier. We could also have some sort of centralized main weapon that delegates its power to weapons spaced out on the hull." The angel was more familiar with the Angel's weapons than those of the YSA so naturally her thinking turned to those methods, "Also, what type of main weapon are we considering for use and what effects do we want it to have?" The girl paused to look at the man who was nearly on top of her, and feeling she had gotten something wrong she opened her mouth again, "Sorry, I just don't have a feel for how big you want your ship to be," Her large blue eyes looking up to him in hopes she hadn't offended him.
"Does one kilometer sound alright?" Clark asked, noting how nice she smelled. She must've been just out of the shower. He, on the other hand, smelled good, but it was a musky man smell, the kind that you get when you think about sensual things. "Maybe we can have some sort of central energy conduit in which we can build up raw power for the main weapons, which could be in turrets of some sort. We'd make the energy systems modular so that more or newer types could be added along the main conduit as need later down the road in case the turrets were replaced. In fact, we could make the turrets large scale subspace encased relativistic positron guns, like the Chiharu class crossed with SMX ships. The central conduit would be an immense reserve of anti-matter."
"Alright... one kilometer it is," She said in confirmation as she looked back down at the plans, choosing not to explain her nervousness at talking, "But wouldn't large cannons like that be more suitable for a secondary weapon when most ships can field wide area effect beams? He had actually managed to guess spot on about the shower. Her hair was no longer wet and she had made sure her wings had not gotten any water on them although her body had been freshly shaved, leaving her silky to the touch on her legs and "Maybe we could use the FTL system to move the anti-matter directly to the ships we want to target? That way we wouldn't need turrets at all, could hit ships at almost any distance with near perfect accuracy and surgically remove targets close to the ship?" He was rather close to her, so she flattened her small white wings against her back to give her more room to move around.
"I don't think we have the technology to do that, but it's a neat idea. Hmm...actually, do you think it would be possible for us to use wormholes for that? We could have the turrets have linear wormhole generators built it that would set the range to the targets so that range would be nearly point blank each time. The wormholes would flash into existence only for a moment and have enough time to collapse so the turret wouldn't be damaged. As a backup system, the turrets could be used without wormholes too."
He paused for a moment, looking at her face, "Maybe we could use a large wormhole at the end of the main conduit for an anti-fleet weapon that wouldn't have to be exposed at the front of the ship."
"That would work, backups are a good thing to have. If we used a large anti-fleet weapon like that it could open up directly into the ship‘s anti-matter power core because the wormhole device would prevent weapons fire from penetrating inside the ship through a turret which might otherwise be a vulnerability, perhaps antimatter plasma for the reactor? We could even use refined anti-matter to cut down on overall size" She paused and thought for a moment before asking, "Is this the only main weapon that the ship will have? Or is there going to be something else? Also, what will the ship have along the lines of smaller point defense weapons?" His sent started to get picked up by her small nose. It aroused her curiosity as the Arch-angels that supervised her did not smell exactly the same way.
"Let's worry about the point defense weapons later, alright?" he smiled, "We could use NDI-style quantum gravitic reactors that generate anti-plasma as a byproduct for power. We can probably sacrifice sublight speed for a high-speed hyperdrive system, too. I hear there's ones that can pull twelve light-years a minute these days." He picked up a clipboard with a print-out of the reactors on the market so they could both look at it. A lightweight ballpoint, the kind with the clicky button on the top, pen fell out of the top part of the clipboard and bounced off the table and her belly, onto the floor. There was some sort of colorful product logo on the side of it; probably a promotional item.
"I'm afraid I'm not familiar with the NDI equipment, you'd have to show me what its like," She said as she instinctively turned away from the table and bent over to pick up the pen he had dropped. In the process she ended up flashing him, freedom and skirts were apparently new concepts to her. As she stood up and faced him he was gifted with a view of her smooth inner thighs and small rear end which was covered by panties with a hard to see logo on them and cute little red hearts on a white background. She took a look at the Pen's logo, the color's drawing away her attention for a moment before a red blush crept across her face, "Is this our company's logo? I don't think I've ever seen it before."
Clark savored the view, enjoying it immensely. He had a smile on his face when she turned back towards him. "By the way, I love your outfit," he complimented her, pointing in the general direction of her waist. "It's very fashionable, reminds me of the girls in those Yamataian video magazines where they introduce the latest peronsal gadgets." The pen's label read, "Heatlube Personal."
"Thank you..." she said as she tried to think of the magazines she had seen before. Most had lines of text and diagrams of machinery, leaving her mind to come up with a blank as to what girls he meant, "Heaetlube Personal..." she read out loud after squinting at the label. "Ah, for personal machines and small gear maintenance right?" She asked as she reached out to hand the pen back to him, the quick movement of her arm making her handfuls of breasts bounce slightly, "I'm always interested in seeing new things, you'll have to show me those magazines sometime,"
"Not exactly. It's more like a cream than oil," he said, gladly taking the pen. "It heats up nice and warm when you use it, so that it feels especially nice. I've never seen it used in a machine," he laughed, amused. "I suppose that's one of the unnecessary amenities you didn't have much of back home. Anyway, I'll show you those magazines later. They've got some great stuff in them like self-adhesive transparent video screen patches you can put on your skin, for instance. I get issues free since Geshrinari has an ad in them for our design services." He leaned his firm buns back against the edge of the table, arms supporting him as he leaned back, setting down the pen with one hand.
"Hmm, we didn't get cream like that," She said, her body moving back to a more familiar posture, her legs and waist upright with her back arched slightly. Old habits did indeed die hard, "There is so much cool stuff you can get outside the ECN... Well I saw a few archangels with luxury items like that but none ever came my way." She turned back to the table, "So we have our weapons, what about shields? Did you want to focus on kinetic energy barriers or something a bit more fancy like space distortion and the like?"
"Well, combined distortion fields seem to be the thing these days, ever since KFY introduced them on the Nozomi. Their new gunship has it, I think too...though nobody really knows too much about its actual performance stats but the test crew. I know NovaCorp somehow got the tech for their Mersina-class too. It's nice not having to worry about shield interference. On the other hand, we could probably get production going faster if we used conventional stuff. I imagine this ship's going to have very thick armor, too." He slid further back onto the table, so he was now sitting on it, facing Abdyel.
"Well, we can decide on what materials we want the armor to be made out of once we know the exact shape," She said, maintaining her pose in front of him, "What about something entirely new for the defensive system?" She asked, looking away from him and down to the papers on the desk again, "Something new could give this ship an edge in combat until the opponent adjusts to the new system. Maybe sense we are already using wormholes in the weapons we could adapt it as a shielding system and FTL drive as well?" She leaned over the table again, her wings fluttering a bit as she looked through more and more of the papers to try and find inspiration. This turned the slim outline of her sides to her partner.
Clark again checked her out. He was impressed with her upper body. It wasn't common for a plebian to be so well endowed in that department. "True, I suppose we could do that. The problem is we can't exactly make a wormhole that covers the whole ship. Hmm...though we could always try to layer a bunch of them to surround the ship. Would be weird though. I think covering our ship's outer hull with wormhole generators would be awkward. The FTL system is good though. I know the Nerimian ships use wormholes to get around."
"AH!" she said, snapping upright and turning to face him, "We could use the FTL system to generate a subspace bubble around the ship that when pierced triggers a distortion that bends the space of the main reactor to the point of penetration, to make it shoot forth a jet of anti-matter plasma. Something along those lines could all but eliminate solid projectiles, even those with energy encapsulation if we could make the plasma well up through many levels of hyperspace and subspace... it would be tricky though and a different system might be more practical..." she started to talk herself down from the idea even before it had come out of her mouth. "Maybe we can work on the shields later, we still have a computer system to consider and hull design." She looked around a bit, "Um, I didn't bring a data pad with me. Is there one around here I could write down my thoughts on?" she asked, her mind working on several curiosities at once, "And why is it we are trying to match this up against ships from the star army? Wouldn't it make more sense to match them up against the SMX ships?"
"I assume its because the Star Army has the best ships and we're competing with them," Clark shrugged. "Though the SMX ships are pretty advanced, too. Your shield idea is interesting, but um, can you imagine if another ship fired a high-powered energy weapon and it went through the plasma right into the reactors?" He handed his clipboard from earlier to her after replacing the generator stats with a pad of lightly lined paper. He also gave her back the pen with the charming little lubricant logo on it. He considered dropped the pen again, this time deliberately, but decided not to.
"I guess that makes sense," She said, "and yes, that idea is a bit less than realistic at the moment." She took the pen and clipboard and put it down on the table, occasionally scribbling random ideas as they came to her during their discussion, "Maybe some sort of distortion bubble that actively pushes the ship away as weapons fire pierces it?" A warm feeling passed through her body as she thought about the lubricant. Something like that would have been nice to have for the aches and pains she suffered in the ECN. She returned to bending over the table as she scribbled on the paper.
"The important thing I think is to concentrate on protecting the ship from other ship's main weapons. The smaller guns we can afford to let penetrate, but if an anti-fleet weapon can wipe this ship out, there's not a lot of point in designing it," Thompson said. "So I think we need to look at the big guns out there and see if we can come up with a way to counter most of them in one shield. Mostly, that's energy and spatial stuff, not a lot of solid-ammo main weapons out there." He looked down over her shoulder looking at her notes, then caught a quick glance down her back at her well-formed behind. "Hmm..." she said, taping the pen on the paper. Her shirt fit loosely over her body, the shallow V neck cut of the collar hanging off her body just enough to allow someone at the right angle to see the tops of her breasts constrained in a white bra, also decorated with little cute red hearts. Her white skirt was fairly flat against her backside and he already had a good look at her lean posterior earlier. With the way he was sizing her up there wouldn't be much more left for him to look at by the end of the day, "So how do we counter the energy weapons? Could we use energy sheathing like the kind missiles use to penetrate subspace shields? That kind of penetration might help displace the energy effects around the ship."
She turned her head to him, "Do we have the specs on how the Star Army anti-fleet weapons work?"
"Well," he looked down into her pretty blue eyes, "We have enough general information on the principles they work on, I think. The main ones are transposition cannons, aether shock cannons, quantum detonators, and super-heavy particle beams." He smiled, showing nice white teeth that were surprisingly aligned for a Nepleslian.
"Well... " She thought, "If we re-enforced subspace and made it harder for spacial distortion effects to occur wouldn't transposition and aether effects be lessened?"
"I suppose," he nodded. "Hrm."
Her mouth opened and closed as she talked, showing that her teeth were fairly well taken care of now and although they weren't perfect they were still pleasant to look at. She wasn't even thinking about it but her teeth were probably not the most interesting part of her anatomy to him. "Perhaps we could use a spatial anchor of some sort then as part of the shielding? We'd still need to counter the Quantum Detonator and particle beams."
"Aether shock," Clark pointed out, "is basically a linear form of it. Sorry if you're not familiar with it, during the Elysian wars the Star Army never used any on the Elysian forces. It essentially turns a huge region of space into an aether tap, flooding it with a nearly infinite amount of transient energy. Real nasty stuff. The aether shock cannon is like a concentrated version of it. The particle beams, we might be able to use subspace shields against them too. Look like the standard shielding, but beefier, might be the best way to go." He leaned a little further back over the table, stretching his back a little.
"Ah..." she said, "So that about does it for the shields then?" Her head turned down towards the papers again. Leaning further back gave him a better view down collar and at the bra holding up her breasts. Despite its cuteness factor he would probably recognize the design of the undergarment as the type that hooks in the back, using the elastic in the bra to hold her breasts fairly tight against her chest. "So on to FTL and STL systems?" she asked.
She had gorgeous mammaries, he noted, starting to get a mild erection from all the thoughts of things he was going to doing to her given the chance. "Hyperspace, primarily, a distortion system, and a backup that could use the central anti-plasma?"
"That sounds good, FTL systems weren't my forte. Are you considering using standard drive systems to channel the anti-plasma out of the ship or linear wormholes directly from the ship's core?" She was still looking down at the papers, unaware of his spying on her as she folded her arms under her breasts, pushing them up and out, to make a more comfortable spot to lean against on the table, "Maneuvering might be a bit easier using the wormholes, but you'd need at least two points of wormhole generation if we use linear wormholes to turn the ship. It would save a lot of time in designing a system to channel the drive plasma out the back for STL fight."
"Standard, but they'll be auxiliary so normally they'll be sealed by armored cutoffs. Using wormholes wouldn't do us any more good than conventional system as far as defense goes, and the anti-plasma wouldn't have anything to push off of if we were to use it anywhere else but the engines for maneuverability. Besides, it wouldn't do to have the anti-plasma come in contact with the hull." He smiled. "Say, we've been at it for a while now. Would you like to go out for lunch?" he offered. "It's on me."
She looked at him and gave a smile, "Yes, I'd like that. This does seem like a good place to pause for the time being. Where are we going for lunch?" In the process of asking she stood up again, resuming her upright posture that seemed almost out of place with how casual the two were getting. This of course ruined his view of her bra and the orbs of flesh it covered for the moment as the shirt resumed pressing against her body and obscuring his sight.
"There's a great bakery I know near hear. They have the freshest bread and soups, plus some great iced coffee..."
Clark Thompson was an ambitious man, a middle-aged Nepleslian who'd seen his fair share of war and figured that the fighting would never end. That's why he got into the shipbuilding industry, so that he could build his own private fortresses away from the chaos of the streets of Nepleslia. He'd ended up with Geshrinari Shipyards, a respectable, yet mob-connected producer of various starships, on a starbase that he himself had designed a few sections on. Space made him feel good, mainly the distance from all the idiots while at work. The unintelligent didn't build good starships, more make enough money to buy them, and so he didn't have to deal with them too much. But, Clark's career was about to take him into the realm of treason. Today he'd been assigned to design a battleship.
This battleship, his assignment papers noted, was allowed to use the restricted technology that Yamatai laws prohibited and guaranteed to punish the use of "harshly." So it was quite a surprise that a corporation usually concerned with staying so legitimate in Kyoto's eyes would take such a terrible risk. Something had to be going down, and whatever it was, it was probably good for business but bad for the people. Many death would follow as a result of this project; he was sure of it. Sitting down at the side of a large conference table, he laid out a bunch of paper notes, sketches, and print documents, looking them over until someone else entering got his attention.
Abdyel had found herself in Geshrinari Shipyards with a most curious assignment, a battleship. After the war with the angels had ended she was one of the skilled engineers who had been looked down upon and not given the proper promotions they deserved... or at least in her eyes she was. She was making enough money now to live comfortably, working for a company that before she was working her hardest to destroy. "Are you the other engineer for this project?" She asked as she entered the room, the light from the hallway outlining her fairly slim form and blending with her long blond hair, her short wings almost completely hidden behind her back.
"Yeah," Clark nodded, smiling. Plebian girls, to him, were adorable. Not only that, she was educated, too. He looked over her body briefly, he smile renewing as he silently joked to himself, "Try not to put the wrong curves in the ship design." He stood up from his chair and walked over to the plebe girl and offered his hand to her. "Clark Thompson," he introduced himself.
"Ah..." She said, quickly raising her hand to shake with his, making her breasts bounce slightly with the sudden movement. "I'm Abdyel, nice to meet you." Missing the comment about curves entirely she continued with business, holding an upright posture that had been drilled into her by her superiors during her time with the ECN. "What do you have so far?"
Clark was still mentally patting himself on the back for picking her off that jobs site. It was good for the both of them. She got out of the post-war poverty, and he got a sexy little assistant with brains. Maybe with a little smoothness, he thought, observing her lovely bosom and posture, he could get a little more for his money. With another smile, he pointed to his papers. "Just some brain-storming and a few elements I'd like to put in it. I'm still not sure exactly how big they want this thing, though. I'm thinking it'll be rather large, though, since the directions say it should be a match for Star Army ships if possible and to be a symbol of Nepleslian strength." He smiled, and cracked a little innuendo joke, nonchalantly asking, "You like 'em regular or extra large?"
"They had me working on small ships during the war, I'm afraid my experience with larger systems is limited to what I've read about," She said as she turned away from him and leaned on the table, bending over enough to get a good view of the papers that had been placed about the table. She didn't quite grasp the concept of Innuendo yet and was enjoying her freedom from the ECN to much to wear pants, her skirt riding up on her body only slightly as she looked at the papers, but not enough to expose a prime view of her body. "Are you planning on building the ship around the equipment or designing the hull first and squeezing the systems inside?"
The man chuckled, thinking about squeezing his equipment inside something entirely different. "Well, maybe we should do a little both," he said, moving behind her and a little to the left, so he could look at the papers too (and also those adorable fluffy wings). "Let's determine the major systems first, design a rough version, then do the hull and do the internal stuff and the smaller systems from there. For starters, I figure we're going to run this thing on a big old aether tap system and the bet power transfer and storage network systems we can find. If possible, I'd like to have its main weapons fire not just forward, but if it's a smaller ship we may have to settle for that so we get maximum firepower."
"Perhaps we should deal with power last? Once we have the shields, weapons, and control systems worked out we'll know exactly how much power we will need. If you want flexibility I think I can do that." She said, looking over the papers a bit more, "We could have one large main weapon running down the insides of the ship and the use a series of orbit weapons to bend the beams path to anywhere that it is needed. I heard the ECN was toying with that idea earlier. We could also have some sort of centralized main weapon that delegates its power to weapons spaced out on the hull." The angel was more familiar with the Angel's weapons than those of the YSA so naturally her thinking turned to those methods, "Also, what type of main weapon are we considering for use and what effects do we want it to have?" The girl paused to look at the man who was nearly on top of her, and feeling she had gotten something wrong she opened her mouth again, "Sorry, I just don't have a feel for how big you want your ship to be," Her large blue eyes looking up to him in hopes she hadn't offended him.
"Does one kilometer sound alright?" Clark asked, noting how nice she smelled. She must've been just out of the shower. He, on the other hand, smelled good, but it was a musky man smell, the kind that you get when you think about sensual things. "Maybe we can have some sort of central energy conduit in which we can build up raw power for the main weapons, which could be in turrets of some sort. We'd make the energy systems modular so that more or newer types could be added along the main conduit as need later down the road in case the turrets were replaced. In fact, we could make the turrets large scale subspace encased relativistic positron guns, like the Chiharu class crossed with SMX ships. The central conduit would be an immense reserve of anti-matter."
"Alright... one kilometer it is," She said in confirmation as she looked back down at the plans, choosing not to explain her nervousness at talking, "But wouldn't large cannons like that be more suitable for a secondary weapon when most ships can field wide area effect beams? He had actually managed to guess spot on about the shower. Her hair was no longer wet and she had made sure her wings had not gotten any water on them although her body had been freshly shaved, leaving her silky to the touch on her legs and "Maybe we could use the FTL system to move the anti-matter directly to the ships we want to target? That way we wouldn't need turrets at all, could hit ships at almost any distance with near perfect accuracy and surgically remove targets close to the ship?" He was rather close to her, so she flattened her small white wings against her back to give her more room to move around.
"I don't think we have the technology to do that, but it's a neat idea. Hmm...actually, do you think it would be possible for us to use wormholes for that? We could have the turrets have linear wormhole generators built it that would set the range to the targets so that range would be nearly point blank each time. The wormholes would flash into existence only for a moment and have enough time to collapse so the turret wouldn't be damaged. As a backup system, the turrets could be used without wormholes too."
He paused for a moment, looking at her face, "Maybe we could use a large wormhole at the end of the main conduit for an anti-fleet weapon that wouldn't have to be exposed at the front of the ship."
"That would work, backups are a good thing to have. If we used a large anti-fleet weapon like that it could open up directly into the ship‘s anti-matter power core because the wormhole device would prevent weapons fire from penetrating inside the ship through a turret which might otherwise be a vulnerability, perhaps antimatter plasma for the reactor? We could even use refined anti-matter to cut down on overall size" She paused and thought for a moment before asking, "Is this the only main weapon that the ship will have? Or is there going to be something else? Also, what will the ship have along the lines of smaller point defense weapons?" His sent started to get picked up by her small nose. It aroused her curiosity as the Arch-angels that supervised her did not smell exactly the same way.
"Let's worry about the point defense weapons later, alright?" he smiled, "We could use NDI-style quantum gravitic reactors that generate anti-plasma as a byproduct for power. We can probably sacrifice sublight speed for a high-speed hyperdrive system, too. I hear there's ones that can pull twelve light-years a minute these days." He picked up a clipboard with a print-out of the reactors on the market so they could both look at it. A lightweight ballpoint, the kind with the clicky button on the top, pen fell out of the top part of the clipboard and bounced off the table and her belly, onto the floor. There was some sort of colorful product logo on the side of it; probably a promotional item.
"I'm afraid I'm not familiar with the NDI equipment, you'd have to show me what its like," She said as she instinctively turned away from the table and bent over to pick up the pen he had dropped. In the process she ended up flashing him, freedom and skirts were apparently new concepts to her. As she stood up and faced him he was gifted with a view of her smooth inner thighs and small rear end which was covered by panties with a hard to see logo on them and cute little red hearts on a white background. She took a look at the Pen's logo, the color's drawing away her attention for a moment before a red blush crept across her face, "Is this our company's logo? I don't think I've ever seen it before."
Clark savored the view, enjoying it immensely. He had a smile on his face when she turned back towards him. "By the way, I love your outfit," he complimented her, pointing in the general direction of her waist. "It's very fashionable, reminds me of the girls in those Yamataian video magazines where they introduce the latest peronsal gadgets." The pen's label read, "Heatlube Personal."
"Thank you..." she said as she tried to think of the magazines she had seen before. Most had lines of text and diagrams of machinery, leaving her mind to come up with a blank as to what girls he meant, "Heaetlube Personal..." she read out loud after squinting at the label. "Ah, for personal machines and small gear maintenance right?" She asked as she reached out to hand the pen back to him, the quick movement of her arm making her handfuls of breasts bounce slightly, "I'm always interested in seeing new things, you'll have to show me those magazines sometime,"
"Not exactly. It's more like a cream than oil," he said, gladly taking the pen. "It heats up nice and warm when you use it, so that it feels especially nice. I've never seen it used in a machine," he laughed, amused. "I suppose that's one of the unnecessary amenities you didn't have much of back home. Anyway, I'll show you those magazines later. They've got some great stuff in them like self-adhesive transparent video screen patches you can put on your skin, for instance. I get issues free since Geshrinari has an ad in them for our design services." He leaned his firm buns back against the edge of the table, arms supporting him as he leaned back, setting down the pen with one hand.
"Hmm, we didn't get cream like that," She said, her body moving back to a more familiar posture, her legs and waist upright with her back arched slightly. Old habits did indeed die hard, "There is so much cool stuff you can get outside the ECN... Well I saw a few archangels with luxury items like that but none ever came my way." She turned back to the table, "So we have our weapons, what about shields? Did you want to focus on kinetic energy barriers or something a bit more fancy like space distortion and the like?"
"Well, combined distortion fields seem to be the thing these days, ever since KFY introduced them on the Nozomi. Their new gunship has it, I think too...though nobody really knows too much about its actual performance stats but the test crew. I know NovaCorp somehow got the tech for their Mersina-class too. It's nice not having to worry about shield interference. On the other hand, we could probably get production going faster if we used conventional stuff. I imagine this ship's going to have very thick armor, too." He slid further back onto the table, so he was now sitting on it, facing Abdyel.
"Well, we can decide on what materials we want the armor to be made out of once we know the exact shape," She said, maintaining her pose in front of him, "What about something entirely new for the defensive system?" She asked, looking away from him and down to the papers on the desk again, "Something new could give this ship an edge in combat until the opponent adjusts to the new system. Maybe sense we are already using wormholes in the weapons we could adapt it as a shielding system and FTL drive as well?" She leaned over the table again, her wings fluttering a bit as she looked through more and more of the papers to try and find inspiration. This turned the slim outline of her sides to her partner.
Clark again checked her out. He was impressed with her upper body. It wasn't common for a plebian to be so well endowed in that department. "True, I suppose we could do that. The problem is we can't exactly make a wormhole that covers the whole ship. Hmm...though we could always try to layer a bunch of them to surround the ship. Would be weird though. I think covering our ship's outer hull with wormhole generators would be awkward. The FTL system is good though. I know the Nerimian ships use wormholes to get around."
"AH!" she said, snapping upright and turning to face him, "We could use the FTL system to generate a subspace bubble around the ship that when pierced triggers a distortion that bends the space of the main reactor to the point of penetration, to make it shoot forth a jet of anti-matter plasma. Something along those lines could all but eliminate solid projectiles, even those with energy encapsulation if we could make the plasma well up through many levels of hyperspace and subspace... it would be tricky though and a different system might be more practical..." she started to talk herself down from the idea even before it had come out of her mouth. "Maybe we can work on the shields later, we still have a computer system to consider and hull design." She looked around a bit, "Um, I didn't bring a data pad with me. Is there one around here I could write down my thoughts on?" she asked, her mind working on several curiosities at once, "And why is it we are trying to match this up against ships from the star army? Wouldn't it make more sense to match them up against the SMX ships?"
"I assume its because the Star Army has the best ships and we're competing with them," Clark shrugged. "Though the SMX ships are pretty advanced, too. Your shield idea is interesting, but um, can you imagine if another ship fired a high-powered energy weapon and it went through the plasma right into the reactors?" He handed his clipboard from earlier to her after replacing the generator stats with a pad of lightly lined paper. He also gave her back the pen with the charming little lubricant logo on it. He considered dropped the pen again, this time deliberately, but decided not to.
"I guess that makes sense," She said, "and yes, that idea is a bit less than realistic at the moment." She took the pen and clipboard and put it down on the table, occasionally scribbling random ideas as they came to her during their discussion, "Maybe some sort of distortion bubble that actively pushes the ship away as weapons fire pierces it?" A warm feeling passed through her body as she thought about the lubricant. Something like that would have been nice to have for the aches and pains she suffered in the ECN. She returned to bending over the table as she scribbled on the paper.
"The important thing I think is to concentrate on protecting the ship from other ship's main weapons. The smaller guns we can afford to let penetrate, but if an anti-fleet weapon can wipe this ship out, there's not a lot of point in designing it," Thompson said. "So I think we need to look at the big guns out there and see if we can come up with a way to counter most of them in one shield. Mostly, that's energy and spatial stuff, not a lot of solid-ammo main weapons out there." He looked down over her shoulder looking at her notes, then caught a quick glance down her back at her well-formed behind. "Hmm..." she said, taping the pen on the paper. Her shirt fit loosely over her body, the shallow V neck cut of the collar hanging off her body just enough to allow someone at the right angle to see the tops of her breasts constrained in a white bra, also decorated with little cute red hearts. Her white skirt was fairly flat against her backside and he already had a good look at her lean posterior earlier. With the way he was sizing her up there wouldn't be much more left for him to look at by the end of the day, "So how do we counter the energy weapons? Could we use energy sheathing like the kind missiles use to penetrate subspace shields? That kind of penetration might help displace the energy effects around the ship."
She turned her head to him, "Do we have the specs on how the Star Army anti-fleet weapons work?"
"Well," he looked down into her pretty blue eyes, "We have enough general information on the principles they work on, I think. The main ones are transposition cannons, aether shock cannons, quantum detonators, and super-heavy particle beams." He smiled, showing nice white teeth that were surprisingly aligned for a Nepleslian.
"Well... " She thought, "If we re-enforced subspace and made it harder for spacial distortion effects to occur wouldn't transposition and aether effects be lessened?"
"I suppose," he nodded. "Hrm."
Her mouth opened and closed as she talked, showing that her teeth were fairly well taken care of now and although they weren't perfect they were still pleasant to look at. She wasn't even thinking about it but her teeth were probably not the most interesting part of her anatomy to him. "Perhaps we could use a spatial anchor of some sort then as part of the shielding? We'd still need to counter the Quantum Detonator and particle beams."
"Aether shock," Clark pointed out, "is basically a linear form of it. Sorry if you're not familiar with it, during the Elysian wars the Star Army never used any on the Elysian forces. It essentially turns a huge region of space into an aether tap, flooding it with a nearly infinite amount of transient energy. Real nasty stuff. The aether shock cannon is like a concentrated version of it. The particle beams, we might be able to use subspace shields against them too. Look like the standard shielding, but beefier, might be the best way to go." He leaned a little further back over the table, stretching his back a little.
"Ah..." she said, "So that about does it for the shields then?" Her head turned down towards the papers again. Leaning further back gave him a better view down collar and at the bra holding up her breasts. Despite its cuteness factor he would probably recognize the design of the undergarment as the type that hooks in the back, using the elastic in the bra to hold her breasts fairly tight against her chest. "So on to FTL and STL systems?" she asked.
She had gorgeous mammaries, he noted, starting to get a mild erection from all the thoughts of things he was going to doing to her given the chance. "Hyperspace, primarily, a distortion system, and a backup that could use the central anti-plasma?"
"That sounds good, FTL systems weren't my forte. Are you considering using standard drive systems to channel the anti-plasma out of the ship or linear wormholes directly from the ship's core?" She was still looking down at the papers, unaware of his spying on her as she folded her arms under her breasts, pushing them up and out, to make a more comfortable spot to lean against on the table, "Maneuvering might be a bit easier using the wormholes, but you'd need at least two points of wormhole generation if we use linear wormholes to turn the ship. It would save a lot of time in designing a system to channel the drive plasma out the back for STL fight."
"Standard, but they'll be auxiliary so normally they'll be sealed by armored cutoffs. Using wormholes wouldn't do us any more good than conventional system as far as defense goes, and the anti-plasma wouldn't have anything to push off of if we were to use it anywhere else but the engines for maneuverability. Besides, it wouldn't do to have the anti-plasma come in contact with the hull." He smiled. "Say, we've been at it for a while now. Would you like to go out for lunch?" he offered. "It's on me."
She looked at him and gave a smile, "Yes, I'd like that. This does seem like a good place to pause for the time being. Where are we going for lunch?" In the process of asking she stood up again, resuming her upright posture that seemed almost out of place with how casual the two were getting. This of course ruined his view of her bra and the orbs of flesh it covered for the moment as the shirt resumed pressing against her body and obscuring his sight.
"There's a great bakery I know near hear. They have the freshest bread and soups, plus some great iced coffee..."
