Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1) (61 page)

Text copied from predecessor Organizations

— Human Marine Corps:- Detroit Base

— Category: equipment - personal weapons

— SA-71(h) carbine

— Firing options

The SA-71(h) assault carbine is designed to be the main assault weapon for space-borne humanoid troops. The (h) sub-variant has been adapted slightly to suit human physiology and responsibility level, but the ammunition and control systems are compatible with other weapons throughout the SA-70 range.

Humanoid planetary defense forces are generally equipped with the SA-72 rifle, which has a longer barrel, higher muzzle velocity, larger caliber rounds without sabots, and no energy beam or stealth capability.

The requirement to be suitable for use by space Marines gave the weapon designers a priority for robustness, endurance, and to reduce recoil, because in zero-g combat an uncanceled recoil kick will send a firer into an uncontrollable spin.

On any given day, an SA-71(h) might be shooting back at ambushers high in the jungle canopy of a hothouse world. The very next day, the same weapon might be in the vacuum of deep space, bathed in cosmic radiation and wielded by a marine encased in a battlesuit that would be his or her sole source of air, power, and ammunition for several days. The carbine has been designed to be reliable enough to cope with any environment without question.

As a result, the SA-71(h) has enormous power endurance, ammunition flexibility, and recoil absorption.

There are three main firing modes:

An electrical charge is applied to superconductor rails running along the gun barrel. The rails are arranged in a helical pattern to impart spin to the round as it leaves the muzzle, thus improving accuracy. The ammunition management system supplies a round of the type selected by the firer and fits it to a sabot created on the fly from the sabot resin reservoir. The sabot ensures optimum superconductance and mechanical fit to the rails. Sabots also permit the standard kinetic round to be much smaller than the railgun caliber thus allowing ammunition cartridges to hold many more rounds.

On full power, the railgun generates enormous heat and imparts a heavy recoil force at the breech of the weapon. Providing the recoil dampening system is not overcome by sustained fully automatic fire, this energy is automatically absorbed at up to 80% efficiency, being used both to heat the reservoir of sabot resin and to recharge the weapon’s power pack. In limited-gravity environments the motors in an ACE-series battlesuit can cancel most of the remaining recoil automatically. [See ‘Effect of combat environment on SA-71(h) carbine performance’.]

A phased array in the gun stock can emit lasered energy beams in the x-ray and visible bands.

The x-Ray beam
drains such a huge amount of energy that the maximum firing rate possible is approximately one shot per hour. The advantage and disadvantage of the x-ray beam is that it has limited interaction with physical matter. It is best employed in massed volleys against very large targets such as capital ships, space stations, and city-sized ground targets — although the usefulness is reduced for ground-based targets protected by planetary atmosphere. An x-ray beam volley can have a devastating impact, or none at all. It is the most unpredictable of all weapons available to the Human Marine Corps.

The visible laser beam
is the most common firing option for use in vacuum. Beam diffraction limits effective range to around 20 klicks, though unhardened sensors can be dazzled at much greater ranges. To maximize power effectiveness, the laser beam will operate in low-power targeting mode until the battlesuit AI detects a hit, at which point it will automatically up the power rate to maximum. In the timeframe of the human operator’s worldview, this shift from targeting to lethal power is instantaneous and requires no human intervention.

Specialist munitions may be slotted into the launch tube situated underneath the main barrel. Grenades are low accuracy and limited range specialist munitions powered by chemical explosive. Many Marine units are now discontinuing the grenade launcher, replacing the capability by an improved supply of specialist munitions fired through the railgun.

For close combat situations monofilament teeth can be extended from the end of the gun barrel. They can be rotated at 1000 rpm for maximum penetration. Care should be taken if the cutters are employed in a lateral, raking motion as the blades may snap off. As well as a melee weapon, the cutters have some limited capability to act as a general purpose drill or cutting tool, although the blades will blunt rapidly. Assault cutters are optimized for cutting through flesh; they are not suitable as an entrenching tool.

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This infopedia section was extracted from
humanlegion.com

Category: Strategic context:

— FTL communications

The principle behind faster-than-light (FTL) communication is 
quantum entanglement
allied with bit hybridization. Channel-linked paired particles (known as
chbits
) are split into two, but retain a ghostly connection between them that is unaffected by distance (but only when measured in the three main spatial dimensions). Although ‘FTL comms’ is the standard term, a better practical description would be
instantaneous
communication.

Tech specialists would decry both terms because the information transferred across the channel link is neither truly faster than lightspeed, and using the term
instantaneous
obscures the potential for this method to transmit information across entangled chbits that are separated not by distance but by time.

Whatever you call it, the key is that a tiny item of information can be passed from one particle to its entangled twin, and by using many particles, data can be transmitted along the channel in the same way as, for example, electrical pulses along a copper wire. The drawback is that in passing this information to its twin, both particles lose their entanglement.

For each particle, transmission and reception is strictly single-use only, but of course the solution is to have large blocks of entangled chbits that wear away gradually with each transmission.

However, producing entangled pairs of communication blocks is a very expensive process, and transporting one half of a block of entangled material to another star system is only possible at sub-light speeds, which can take decades. As a result, although there is no theoretical limitation, these practical considerations mean that FTL bandwidth is extremely restricted. An admiral could use FTL comms to issue orders and receive reports from a fleet 60 light years away, for example, but would not expect to receive detailed telemetry, nor remotely control combat drones.

Even the local fleet commander faces the problems of sub-light communications when maneuvering the forces at her disposal. A space battle is typically fought over an area up to a light minute across. If a targeting laser reports to its weapon system that it has a firing solution for an enemy cruiser one light minute away, what it is actually reporting is that it knows where the enemy used to be located one minute earlier. If the weapon responds by sending a lethal energy pulse at the target (taking another minute), then an enemy vessel at 0.2 lightspeed would have traveled over two million miles during the intervening two minutes.

One critical difference between FTL and conventional communications is that the equipment required by the former is so compact. There is no need for the kind of concave dishes, aerials, or power sources that might reveal the location of a transmitter to an enemy. Nor is it possible to intercept or jam the signal. A node in the quantum telegraph network could be small enough to embed inside a battlesuit, or bury deep within an unremarkable asteroid. Nonetheless, even passive FTL capable comms are detectable by patient and numerous observers. And such observers exist because at a microscopic scale, war is underway in all star systems in which minuscule spy robots from enemy powers try to evade detection and report back on the location of FTL communication nodes, amongst other intelligence.

If the FTL nodes are uncovered, an enemy might launch a raid, such as in the following scenario.

A fleet of raiders descends upon a lightly defended star system, overwhelming local military forces. This could be tens of light years behind a contested ‘frontier’ (there are no ‘front lines’ in space).

One of the first acts of the attackers is to destroy FTL communications facilities, because that immediately cuts the system off from the rest of the defending empire. Almost certainly the defenders will retain hidden assets within the defeated star system, reporting back on what the attackers are doing. These may be sentient observers but will also include nano spies dispersed throughout the star system. But if the invaders are successful in eliminating the FTL comms, any further reports will be limited to the speed of light. Given the typical distance separating inhabited systems, that means a gap of 10-20 Earth standard years during which the defending empire is completely blind.

Raiders will usually take a few months or years to plunder and refit before heading off for their next target, confident in the knowledge that any relief force from the defending empire would be decades away. History also records more imaginative uses of this blind period, such as using a raid to screen the arrival of a full invasion fleet that will use this blind period to construct battle cruisers deep inside enemy territory.

*
A note on the use of gender.
The Trans-Species Union recognizes four principal genders as well as a neuter state. Gender neutral literature will use all possible pronouns in such phrases as: “An admiral will use FTL comms to issue orders to his, her, sie, ser or its fleet.”

Within military organizations, language needs to be fast, concise and clear. Using all five gender pronouns every time is unthinkable. The convention developed within the Human Marine Corps, and inherited by the Human Legion, is to use the female pronouns – ‘her’ and ‘she’ — to represent gender neutrality. Most senior officers of the Jotun race are female, and this convention was adopted from them.

This infopedia section was extracted from
humanlegion.com

Start reading the second book in the annals of the Human Legion now…

Arun McEwan’s heart swelled with pride when he accessed the internal camera feeds, and saw himself lined up with the rest of Charlie Company in the
Beowulf’s
dorsal hangar. The Marines twitched with eagerness to emerge and take the fight to the enemy.

Whoever the frakk they might be.

But it was fear, not pride, that made Arun so impatient to launch. He was scared that in the action to come he would reveal himself. Fed a constant dose of combat drugs, even while in cryo sleep, all his other comrades were doped-out mental wrecks, left with as much initiative as the dumbest robot. Well, maybe not the slightly smaller armored figure to his left: Springer. Marine Phaedra Tremayne, known to Springer to anyone without a deathwish, was his best friend and fire team buddy. The drugs had less effect on her, as with their comrade, Umarov, but they all acted as if they were as doped as the others. Hidden conspiracies swirled around Arun like a persistent stink. He’d hoped all that had gone away when he left Tranquility System on the
Beowulf
, but here it was even worse and felt more urgent. Playing dumb now might just give Arun the edge he needed when the traitors made their move.

“Ready to launch on my mark,” ordered Staff Sergeant Bryant, on behalf of their silent alien officer, Captain Mhabali. Bryant had become an unexpected ally back on their depot planet of Tranquility, but now he had succumbed to the drugs along with almost all the other humans.

“Ten… nine… eight…”

From his camera feed, Arun watched the ACE-2 combat suits flick from field gray to matt black, shimmer and then disappear. Charlie Company had activated stealth mode.

“Seven… six…”

With the waiting over, Arun’s worries were draining away.

“Five… four…”

Arun McEwan had an advantage over everyone else in the company: his future had been foretold by the strange alien creatures known as Night Hummers. Unlike the others he had a destiny. The cause of human freedom would not let him die today.

“Three… two…”

Arun knew he would be coming back.

“One… go!”

Arun placed his life in the virtual hands of his battlesuit AI, Barney, who hurled him into space a split second after the hangar doors snapped open. The Marines emerged into a bloom of light across the electromagnetic spectrum as the
Beowulf
simultaneously launched a barrage of kinetic torpedoes and blew smoke, both intended to cover the real attack, a close assault by the stealthed Marines.