Game Changer: Day 5

Word Count: 30,033

Summary of Events:

Hawk informed the General Secretary of the destruction of the Ozem fighters and was pleasantly surprised to hear that the range he'd been told by his computer had been corroborated by the second reconnaissance force. Later that day the General Secretary ordered a meeting of the officers in which he announced that the reconnaissance force — in spite of being completely cloaked the whole time — had been annihilated. Everyone was tasked with thinking up ideas for the next course of action, and Hawk spent much time over the next few days doing that . . .

Excerpt of the Day:

Hawk’s second idea was a much more daring, dangerous, and risky idea that Hawk had his suspicions no one was going to want to carry out aside from himself: to set out with cloaking and depart for Maarath, gradually descending until one could possibly pass underneath Maarath and attack the ships from the bottom, as not only was it highly unlikely that there would be guns down there, but who really thought about reinforcing the underside of their ship? 

Most ships were reinforced on the sides, and even the top to some extent, because those parts of the craft were where everyone was predisposed to attacking. Pretty much no one attacked from underneath; this not os much because they didn’t want to but because they probably didn’t think that they could.

The thing was, though, that if fighters were to go underneath the ships and attack the hopefully vulnerable underbellies they would have to fly straight upward, which could be dangerous if they got too close to the ship they were attacking before they undertook evasive manoeuvres, not that war didn’t entail casualties or anything like that.

Gunships had guns that they could point upwards without having to face that way for themselves, but fighters had fixed guns, often mounted forward of the cockpit; there was a little bit of left-right turn and the smallest of upward lift allowed — which somewhat disqualified them as true fixed guns — but generally the guns were forced to fire only at oncoming attackers.

Of course, that was suitable for fighter-to-fighter combat, or even for normal surprise attacks on gunships where cloaking provided cover before the gunship could detect them, leaving them able to get close enough to fire devastatingly on the ship.

Seeing as the Sons of Chesil had extraordinary gunships — at least when it came to range — they had to be attacked from underneath; and a person had to hope that they were genuinely vulnerable underneath so they would actually be harmed by the projectiles being fired at their undersides.

Of course, if their guns had super-long ranges then what was to say that their ships didn’t have super-strong protection? How could Hawk be sure that kind of a gamble would work?

He couldn’t, nor could he even hope that they might be able to bomb the Sons of Chesil because bombs only worked on Tamah, which had the gravity to pull them downward onto a target so that they could detonate as was desired.

Thanks to gravity on Tamah bombing could possibly even be done from a ten thousand kilometre height, one would hope, but yet the calculations to make sure a bomb dropped from that height would actually hit its target and detonate could be torturously difficult and complicated and could lead to a lot of failures before finally the first success would occur, by which time the Sons of Chesil would be well aware of their intentions and would have fired back or even possibly sent out challenging fighters.