After picking up their lunches, Ichigo and Nimura walked away to join Mara and Hinoto whom were seated at the larger table to the port side of the wardroom. There was a brief exchange of words between the four (or rather three, Nimura didn't utter a word at all) and seated themselves before starting to eat.
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Yukari, stuck in the bridge and at first thinking she was overworked, found the situation to be not so bad as it really seemed. Part of the innovations on the NH-29 included a much more streamlined operating system and that helped cope with all the multitasking she was handling.
SPINE, namely, was useful for not having to manually type everything and handle most of the tasks with the C-IES with... after-thoughts. That was rather convenient - convenient enough so that when Yukari got used to it that she could pay more attention to what Kotori had actually been working on.
Some of the material had actually been about studying yamataian law. Kotori had never really come around to getting her officer training, which meant she had to get everything she needed piecemeal. Yukari knew all that laready though; more interesting were the simulations themselves.
One set of simulations were based on the data gathered on the giant SMX flagship while they had been escaping Taiie. On one hand there was an evaluation of the amount of damage the big ship could absorb and how much punishment it could deliver to select targets, from Nozomi scouts to Chiharu flagships - either singles or multiples.
Anything not capital-class got chewed up very quickly, especially to the FTL nullifying field that impeded the KFY vessels' capability to make the super-luminal jumps to get away from harm. The Yuumi battleships could soak in some punishment, but apparently were totally outgunned. The Irims and Arashis fared better in terms of how much firepower they could deliver (especially the positron cannons on the Irims, which ignored the SMX flagship's starbase-grade shielding) but they did not have the staying power of the Yuumi.
The only ship that really seemed to fare better was the Chiharu since it had the shielding and weapons to stand its ground for a time and manage to hit back with its positron weapons, though that was only a short lived advantage since the SMX vessel's weaponry could still cut it to ribbons fairly quickly. So many of the Chiharu's weapons bounced off the giant vessel's shields that much of its offensive potential was spoiled.
Another simulation had KFY vessels go kamikaze on the larger mishhuvurthyar behemoth... but that only met with limited success. The big ship was apparently made of something like pure zesuaium underneath the many-quilled exterior. That made it extremely, unreasonably tough... though Kotori added the note that once it sustained heavy damage, the very advantages of zesuaium would force it for weeks, if not months, of drydock repairs to recover.
Another simulation seemed slightly whimsical: how many Chiharu flagships could sneak up in system and hide within the 54 moons of Tsuyosa III, and how detectable they would be if they remained in CFS stealth/silent running. CFS stealth was risky, but afforded complete concealment as long as one put up with the complete blindness too.
Another simulation focused on actually testing on what could crack the defenses on Melisson's big black vessel. Most torpedoes didn't seem to do squat to the shield since it took the yield of over 10 of them hitting at once to overwhelm the SMX flagship's shields. On the other hand, the Subspace Detonator AS-7 torpedo could still bring the shields and engines of the spiked monstrosity down just as it did to any other Star Army vessel... to which Kotori noted "That's what Melisson gets for copying us". The downside was that the Mishhu ship had enough scalar arrays to take down any other torpedoes that was fired on it while the CFS (and in turn the torpedoes going toward it) was down.
Another simulation seemed more up Yukari's alley, especially due to Kotori's note of "Can you do this Yuka?" The simulation took the Miharu as a model and pitted it against the Mishhu flagship with emphasis being to avoid the thousands of aetheric shots fired at it.
The simulation outlined several things: firstly, the mishhu ship had so many weapons all around it that only having one target facing it wasted a lot of its damage potential - that's why it had a tendency to do barrel rolls when facing single targets that required more firepower like Akina no Iori. Not only did this allow it to spread the damage it sustained from one source, but it allowed it to fire all its weapons on one facing while the others charged up for when the firing arc cycling would allow them to fire again.
According to the simulation, each quill took 15 seconds to charge. Kotori noted "Stick to one side of it, and it has much less opportunity to fire on you while you can concentrate damage on one specific area".
Then came with evading the beams proper. The quills fired beams which were limited to the speed of light. To a ship able to move at 0.8c, dodging their linear path if there was a certain distance wasn't much of a problem, especially with WARMS. The closer the distance, though, the less the time to reaction was. To increase the odds of hitting a single target that did evasive maneuvers with a system like WARMS, the black flagship had a tendency to fire its weapons in random and wide-spaced fan-like patterns, instead of concentrating its attacks to chew a tough target apart. The trick then became for a navigator to be able to navigate through the intricate lattice of several thousands deadly beams; dodging unscathed was harder, but sustaining only one hit versus several hundreds (or thousands) was significantly less deadly to a small vessel that wasn't a STL sitting duck.
Adding to the difficulty, however, were the hyperspace torpedoes, which could be fired anytime the interdiction field wasn't up and destroy the Miharu in one or two hits. WARMS would provide a one to three second warning about the launch before the torpedo would instantly cross the distance, which meant that the torpedoes had to be dodged in priority, despite the beam pattern that the navigator would have to be dodging at the time.
The Miharu's weapons actually fared better than Melisson's flagship under 2 AU. The main gun in line mode was accurate and, with time, could possibly bore through the shield. The AS-5 torpedoes would function fairly well within an interdiction field and the AS-7 would have little problem in the other case. Cracking the protective layer remained one of the main obstacles, along with the limited power reverses of the Miharu and the limited reaction time the crew would have to react to any change of tactics on the part of Melisson.
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In the medlab, Kotori did a relatively good job of seeming to ignore the conversation between Leutre and Miyoko, apparently self-absorbed in absently stroking her black hair while looking to the side.
Though she tried to seem unobstrusive, those neko ears probably picked up everything in the whole medlab, from Leutre's whispers to the hum of the ST backup reading device.
