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As you consider your situation, it dawns on you that you are alone. A supercarrier, without escort in the absolute middle of nowhere. Suddenly you find yourself fighting a feeling of rising heat gripped with a moment of indecision. Ships were passengers in their crews’ hands; you’d never had to be the captain before.

[1] No flight ops. You don’t hear any EM emissions coming from nearby, but there’s no sense in putting targets in the air if you can help it. Best to just choose a direction and sail, you’ll reach the edge of the atoll eventually and you can get out of the water on one of the islands that rings it.
[2] Minimal flight ops - you need to at least be able to listen for threats out in the open water beyond the atoll. (Helicopters only: up to 12x MH-60R Romeos, to fly low over the water and drop sonobuoys.)
[3] Full flight ops - your air wing is your only real defence, and is powerful enough to handle just about anything short of a carrier strike group. (4x MH-60R Romeos; 1x MH-60S Sierra; 1x E2-C Hawkeyes; 2x E/A-18G Growlers; BARCAP of 12x F-14E Super Tomcats and F/A-18E/F Super Hornets in 4 pairs; long-range patrol of 4 S-3B Vikings.)

AND

[A] Strict EMCON discipline - no broadcasts if at all possible.
[B] Moderate discipline - necessary broadcasts only, short-range VHF, commercial surface search radar. (If full flight ops are undertaken, this option means you will not need to use your onboard radar in lieu of your E2-C Hawkeye's, but your fighters will run nose-cold.)
[C] Call for help - make noise, try to get in contact with any friendlies that may be nearby. Free use of radar.

(Note that strict EMCON discipline does not prevent flight ops, but will complicate them, and will require much more advanced planning.)

>>6100560
>[1] No flight ops. / [2] Minimal flight ops
>[A] Strict EMCON discipline
I don't like the fact that we're standing in the middle of an evacuated nuke testing site
We should listen on passives and only throw something up if we need to get a better view of something out of range for now.

This does give us an opportunity to experience our maneuverability and being on land without anyone around.

>>6100560
>[2] Minimal flight ops - you need to at least be able to listen for threats out in the open water beyond the atoll. (Helicopters only: up to 12x MH-60R Romeos, to fly low over the water and drop sonobuoys.)
>[A] Strict EMCON discipline - no broadcasts if at all possible.

Interesting.

>>6100560
[2] Minimal flight ops - you need to at least be able to listen for threats out in the open water beyond the atoll. (Helicopters only: up to 12x MH-60R Romeos, to fly low over the water and drop sonobuoys.)

[A] Strict EMCON discipline - no broadcasts if at all possible.
Let's lay low for now. We don't know why we're here yet nor who's around. Extended planning time won't be an issue as we should have plenty of time on our hands as long as we keep a low profile.

>>6100560
>[2] Minimal flight ops - you need to at least be able to listen for threats out in the open water beyond the atoll. (Helicopters only: up to 12x MH-60R Romeos, to fly low over the water and drop sonobuoys.)

>[B] Moderate discipline - necessary broadcasts only, short-range VHF, commercial surface search radar. (If full flight ops are undertaken, this option means you will not need to use your onboard radar in lieu of your E2-C Hawkeye's, but your fighters will run nose-cold.)

The apparent lack of dedicated aerial refueling airframes within our airwing is probably going to fuck us at some point, soon (e.g. (E)KA-3B, KA-6D, MQ-25 etc.).

So anything we put up will be relying on bags and will have to come down, with limited ability to extend or via buddy tanking off the limited quantity of Super Hornets, which practically removes a significant chunk of our massed strike capabilities against Surface combatants so keeping Fighters in reserve will probably be necessary so we have endurance.

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>>6100613

Ah, the S-3Bs are capable of buddy tanking, and by the end of their service run that was a major portion of their work, as helicopter squadrons took over the role anti-sub and light surface attack. I forgot to mention that in the post. (Technically an anachronism as of the 2012 Carrier Air Wing as the S-3 left active service in '08, but you're also flying the F-14E, which don't exist at all, so some allowances can be made in that regard.)

That capability gap is a real problem for the Navy right now, though - sending up superbugs as tankers is an ineffecient use of airframes.

>>6100560
> [2] Minimal flight ops
> [B] Moderate discipline
Obviously full flight ops doesn't mean all jets in the air. The capability is there but we would be absolutely defenseless. So first priority is to find out where the strike group is. Second is who is around being so quiet.

> That capability gap is a real problem for the Navy right now
Loose lips sink ships. If I could assume you served on the Enterprise and you put up a 10s era flight roster, we might be safe as you're probably either not active duty or share intel whic's available to civvies as osint.

>>6100841

I'm an amateur pulling open information off the net, much of it from various Navy magazine articles. Carrier Air Wing compositions are have basically always been open knowledge, a benefit of having a defence apparatus accountable to the public. It's not like I'm pulling out precise performance specs of the hottest new kit.

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>>6100560

Silence reigns, and you feel it best not to be the one that breaks it.

Though caught by an initial impulse to get your air wing in gear, you realise that you have been cut off from military satellite networks owing to codes and keys now fifteen years out of date, meaning your ability to organise complex operations is severely constrained, and something you have no actual experience doing yourself to begin with. And that was saying nothing of your lack of weather information.

But you can operate helicopters with a little more freedom. They lack the range or endurance of your Vikings, but they can stay low on the water, as far below the radar horizon of any watchful eyes as possible.

Looking at your charts again, you see that you are in the southeastern corner of the atoll, a few nautical miles from Enyu Island, which is labelled as having a disused airstrip. It was as good a destination as any. The runway itself was useless to you - it was no doubt useless to anyone but a bush pilot, given that it was so long left to the tropical weeds and weather, and you were an aircraft carrier anyhow - but it there was a good chance of there being abandoned buildings there that might serve to hide you in a pinch.

With a return destination set for your choppers, you get ready to let them go, only to be confronted with the fact that you are a person now, not a ship, at least outwardly, and had no idea how to do ship things other than floating. Yet, as you're thinking about it, several items suddenly appear on or about your person. On your shoulders you see the boxy forms of rolling airframe missile and Sea Sparrow launchers and the domes of Phalanx guns. Your feet are enclosed in odd metal boots painted red and grey, with little rudders and screws on the heel like a cowboy's spurs. Hovering by your right hip is a quiver full of grey-fletched arrows and an asphalt-coloured compound bow that you realise must be your catapults, while by your left side stretching as tall as you is a floating shield in a shape of your flight deck, even painted with deck markings.

After taking a moment to get over the surprise of having apparently just performed honest-to-god magic, following some deep instinct, you hold out your hand, and exactly as the rest of your equipment did there materialises a miniature Romeo, which lofts into the air like a hummingbird. Then another, and another, and another. As they leave they grow, soon reaching their true size, and head off across the water in every direction. As their directional-broadcast Common Data Link comes online you find yourself with an extra sense - the link isn't high-enough bandwidth to stream video, but it still reports the location of contacts anything on the network sees, and is both short-range and narrowly-focused enough to minimise detection risks, and can be turned off except to give quick periodic updates.

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>>6100886

With that squared away, you allow yourself a tentative smile, and turn your attention to the matter of getting underway. You try sending power to your screws which sends them spinning to life, but you also find that when you move your legs, your body is pulled forward, and you can sustain the motion one step after the other in a motion not unlike ice skating. With a bit of trial and error you find it can only carry you along at about 7 knots, painfully slow for the fastest warship ever to sail, but with exceptional agility, and no screw noise to boot.

Fifteen minutes later, Enyu Island comes into view. Finding a concrete pier, you take a tentative step out of the water, dismissing your equipment to make walking easier, and make your way inland up the overgrown road.

The only sign of life here appears to be shorebirds. There are a few bits of old trash left about, but that’s all, certainly nothing more from recently than several years ago. Presently the road opens up into a wide weed-choked concrete pad the size of a small stadium. As hoped, there is indeed shelter to be had, in the form of the old airport building, a decaying structure of grey wood and peeling white paint. A tightness in your shoulders you hadn’t even realised was there eases at the sight, and you duck inside and find a seat on a wooden bench.

[1] Wait and listen. You have about half an hour before your first helicopters are scheduled back; in the meantime you should focus on the tactical picture around the island that’s emerging through their data links.
[2] Let your aircraft do their jobs. While you’re waiting, perhaps you should experiment a bit with this new body, see how it works. Everything about being a ship compressed into a human is new to you, and it’s best to get a handle on what you can do now rather than be surprised in an emergency.

>>6100887
> [2] Let your aircraft do their jobs
Nothing worse than a green crew. Until we can find the CSG we belong to, drill, then we can get the scene together and make a move.

>>6100887
>[2] Let your aircraft do their jobs. While you’re waiting, perhaps you should experiment a bit with this new body, see how it works. Everything about being a ship compressed into a human is new to you, and it’s best to get a handle on what you can do now rather than be surprised in an emergency.

>>6100887

Your attention drifts to the strange body you now possess. Outwardly, it really is human, and a quick peek under your clothes shows it has all the expected bits in the expected places. You could have spent hours gawking in fascination at yourself or at everything around you - fabric on your skin, the cool salty sea breeze or the warm light of the rising sun, the sound of the sea and your own voice, how sensitive certain parts of you were…

No. Later! You have work to do. The rest can be left for port call. For now, it was time to drill.

First things first: power. You were powered by eight small nuclear reactors connected to four steam turbines, which was a lot of energy and a decent level of redundancy. You order the crew to run a reactor at higher than normal power and hold it stable, then below normal and hold it, then raise it up again, and finally to scram it.

The fall of the hafnium control rods is like a stab of ice in your heart. You draw in a sharp breath and grip your chest involuntarily in shock.

Just two minutes later reactor #1 is back online and slowly being raised up to power. Though there are other tests you could run, you still feel strung out and thready from adrenaline, and your engineers do seem to know their business, so you’re not of a mind to try anything like that again unless you have to. God, would you die if you lost all power? Or would you just go unconscious? Certainly it would *feel* like you were dying, even if you turned out fine afterwards. Instead, you have your crew run fire and other dam-con drills as you think of what to do next.

Eventually you settle on practising scrambling aircraft. Even without launching, you could still exercise your ordnancemen and deck crews in the art of rapid arming, fuelling, and staging planes, and in the process try out your catapult-bow.

Summoning your ship gear again, you head back outside. The sun grows from warm to hot as you feel your crew scurry about the flight deck, though the wind is pleasantly cool. The whole process is quite rapid: they have a strike package of 12 fighters staged and the first three hooked up to catapults in under 5 minutes, with room for improvement. That was considerably faster than it had been as a full-sized ship.

Next, you find a suitable tree, and take your bow in hand. Using its laser rangefinder (which looks suspiciously like the guidance package off a Hellfire missile) you place yourself at 33 yards and pull out a normal arrow, knock it, draw it back, and loose it with a hiss and puff of steam. The arrow strikes the tree with a satisfying thump. 2.3 seconds from grabbing the arrow to firing, a far cry from the 30-40 it took to hook up a plane and get it off the deck, and your engineers tell you they can generate steam fast enough to keep that pace up all day.

>>6101676

A walking land-based aircraft carrier! You don’t bother trying not to cackle with glee at such a prospect.Hell, if you were only as heavy as a human, which seemed to be the case, you could even launch planes *out the side of a helicopter!* Though midair recovery would be a little tricky, to say the least, so maybe that wasn’t such a good idea…

After a few minutes more archery practise and an internal alpha strike drill, your first MH-60 makes its return, slowly approaching you and shrinking down until it’s bird-sized again, and lands on your palm to disappear and reappear on your internal extra-dimensional flight deck. Of the five you sent out, this one made for the centre of the atoll to listen for other ships that might be lurking close at hand, but hadn’t detected any clear sonar contacts. Nor had any of the others. That was encouraging, but far from definitive. The rest were loaded with enough fuel to stay on station for perhaps another 90 minutes or more.

>[1] Stay close - have your helos investigate the other islands around the atoll.
>[2] Venture a little further out - send scouts to Eniewetak, Rongelap, and Kwajalein. (If staying low on the deck, this will put your helos beyond contact for most of the trip.)
>[3] Send fixed-wing assets - launching from the land removes much of the vulnerability of steaming into the wind, and S-3Bs can stay low while three times the speed of a helicopter.

>>6101678
>[3] Send fixed-wing assets
Would the F-14's be set up with the TARPS-DI pods? They would at least be able to self-escort, retain supersonic dash, the APG-71 has DSB-SAR capabilities and retains A2A modes, TCS / TGP allows visual inspection of most contacts. if paired with an A2G setup (e.g. TGP, L-JDAM + HARM) that covers all of the potential target sets that aren't subsurface.

But what is the likelihood that any subs have SAM's in inventory, let alone run into one.

>>6101678
>[3] Send fixed-wing assets
S-3Bs are anti sub birds and their mission was supplanted by the F-18 (last good fighter we had) on 2008. Send up the Growlers with a fighter escort. Put on a SHARP and ATFLIR so that we have as much eyes on the surface as possible. Relax EMCON discipline, since there are no immediate threats and Growlers will be up if they do appear. Growlers need a fighter escort, 1 pair for each of them would do. Load the fighters for with a light mixed anti-air and anti-surface package. Instruct weps cold for now. The priority still is to find the strike group we belong to. The real defense of a carrier is her strike group.

> Crew is well-drilled
So we would be able to swim at full speed, scramble aircraft at a moment's notice and not be clumsy. Or did we pay with speed for land based capability and much faster aircraft lauch capability?

> *Exploring* her body
She's a lady and a soldier. Neither would think about *that* in the current situation. In Basic you learn focus and discipline. Growing up as a woman, you learn duty comes first and you come last. Men get that lesson in Basic.

>>6101788

For the purposes of this story I'm using the ST-21/2010 as elaborated here (https://www.twz.com/29653/this-is-what-grummans-proposed-f-14-super-tomcat-21-would-have-actually-looked-like) as a general model. In other words, like the F-18's E and F models, it was almost wholly rebuilt using technologies that were mature by the early 1990s and then gradually updated to the standards of 4th-gen aircraft circa 2010. This means among other capabilities it has improved engines with supersonic supercruise, a large and powerful AN/APG-64 AESA radar derived from the F-15E's, advanced IRST, helmet-mounted queueing for the high-off-boresight AIM-9x and AIM-120C, Sniper pods for ground attack, LANTIRN pods, and both towed and expendable decoys, on top of an improved AIM-54D, which has about the same range as the C model, but improved terminal performance.

They are indeed a powerful tool for surface attacks, and are certainly an option here. They do however lack either MAD or sonar capabilities, and the greatest threat to an unescorted carrier comes from the subsurface, so alone they leave something of a hole in coverage, one filled by helicopters and Vikings.

>>6101798

>She's a lady and a soldier

She's also been alive for all of about an hour - even with 50 years' existence being made of steel, something so completely new can still catch one-guard. Note that she did put quite promptly that all out of mind.

>>6101678
>>[3] Send fixed-wing assets - launching from the land removes much of the vulnerability of steaming into the wind, and S-3Bs can stay low while three times the speed of a helicopter.

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>>6101678

Given the apparent lack of either radio or sonar contacts and the fact that none of your scouts have been blown up yet, you decide that EMCON discipline can probably be relaxed somewhat, and your more powerful fixed-wing aircraft hazarded. You would need to practise actual recovery ops before long anyhow. Soon enough, 4 S-3s each escorted by a pair of F-14s are heading out north, south, east, and west, each running dog-leg paths to obscure their common point of origin, while a BARCAP of F-14s and 18s are orbiting overhead, aided by a Growler and an E2 running high and passive. Almost as an afterthought, you send out another Romeo to the north, to investigate Bikini Island proper. You’d already confirmed that there were no obvious large assets like ships in that direction but it couldn’t hurt to take a closer look.

Almost the moment it reaches the island however, it is painted by a powerful radar beam - one your E2 tentatively identifies as, of all things, that of an AN/SPG-62 fire control radar, the type used by Aegis-equipped ships. The beam appears to be coming from somewhere on the island among the various dilapidated houses strung along the southern side.

As adrenaline rushes into your veins in both nerves and excitement, the source of the radar hails you. “Unknown helicopter, US Navy ship Long Beach requesting identification, over,” the source says in a calm, professional clip.

Your eyebrows knit as you hear the words. Long Beach? Could it be? “Long Beach, this is US Navy ship Enterprise - this is one of my helicopters,” you reply.

The tone of the voice changes completely. “Enterprise- wait, E? CVN-65? You’re here too?”

“Long Beach, Enterprise: confirming, CVN-65,” you say. “And you are Long Beach, CGN-9?”

“The very same,” Long Beach says. “I have Bainbridge here with me too.”

You did not need to ask who she meant - the Bainbridge in question could only be CGN-25. In one of your first deployments all the way back in 1964 you had been sent as a trio all the way around the world in 90 days without resupply, one of your formative memories, and the three of you had served together many times since as part of the small nuclear surface fleet. The two of them had been commissioned around the same time as you, but when the USSR collapsed back in ‘96 and taken half the Navy’s budget with it there just hadn’t been any money or need for costly nuclear cruisers anymore. By 2003 both had been retired.

“I gotta say, it’s good to hear your voice,” she continues. “Hey, so, E, you got any idea what’s going on? One day I got scrapped, and now I’m a person.”

>>6101982

“I’m afraid not, no,” you reply. Confusing as all this may be, it was a relief beyond words that not only are you not alone, you are not unique. There are other magic ship people here. When Long Beach’s comms systems request a Link-16 connection you’re only too happy to accept, and a few seconds later their positions are added to your tac view, and your big-picture view to theirs.

It is at that moment that your dropped sonobuoys pick up something moving in the lagoon, just a couple of miles southwest of Bikini Island itself. Something *big,* with four heavy screws and a fuckton of horsepower. From a patch of water where, not five minutes ago, you had seen nothing. And it sounds as if it is headed for land.

[1] Tell Long Beach and Bainbridge to hold position and stay concealed while you vector aircraft to intercept.
[2] Tell them to get in the water and make best speed away from the island.

>>6101984
>[1] Tell Long Beach and Bainbridge to hold position and stay concealed while you vector aircraft to intercept.

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>>6101984

“What the hell…” Long Beach mutters as she notices the contact.

“Stand by and hold position,” you say.

“Roger that.”

As the helicopter you sent to the island turns back out and skims the water, a pair of F-18s shift in their orbit, positioning themselves for laser-guided Paveway drops in the event things went south.

What your chopper sees as the target comes into view is not a large ship, as its sonar signature suggests, but rather a human-size figure, but making 18 knots and kicking up a ship-sized wake. Another one like you and your new fleet-mates, it seems. When the newcomer notices you it fires up its own radar, one so primitive it must be of wartime vintage, or even older. Unlike Long Beach, this one does not initiate contact, and instead maintains course in wary silence.

“Unknown vessel, this is United States Navy ship Enterprise, please identify yourself, over.”

“Enterprise? I am the battleship Nagato, of the Imperial Japanese Navy,” the ship says, with an accent more upper-class English than Japanese. “We have met before, if I am not mistaken. I take it this… aircraft is one of yours?”

The *battleship Nagato*? That particular ship, in this of all places? This may require some diplomacy. “Nagato, Enterprise: you would have met my namesake,” you say. “I am the eighth ship by that name.”

“I see. Well met, Enterprise the Eighth. It seems I have been asleep for longer than I had anticipated.”

“Yes,” you reply dryly, declining to specify just how long it’s been. “Before you ask, I am also human-shaped, and no, I don’t know why. Also here are guided missile - er, air defence - cruisers Long Beach and Bainbridge, presently ahead of you on shore. Be advised: the disposition of the Marshall Islands is unknown, and we are out of contact with the fleet or mainland.”

“Understood, Enterprise.”

Despite everything that’s going on, you can’t help but feel a little encouraged. The local airspace is clear, the subsurface is quiet, and your first truly unknown contact hasn’t opened fire without warning.

>[1] Go meet with your new fleetmates to discuss what to do or where to go.
>[2] Stay dispersed, and wait until your fighters have completed their recon.
>[3] Other (write in).

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>>6102278

Note: scout groups and BARCAP fighters will return and need to land in around 1 hour, arriving over the course of about 30 minutes. Helicopters will arrive around 30 minutes later, assuming current fuel expenditure. The E2 can loiter for up to six hours on internal fuel.
Fixed-wing flight ops are normally flown in pulses or ‘events’ of 12-20 sorties, typically spaced 60-90 minutes apart, with around 10 events per day. Each event’s planes are prepped and staged while the previous one’s are in the air and the deck has more room for reconfiguring. Attempting to send up planes at will is a recipe for traffic jams, which can mean long delays for the cats or lost airframes and pilots if the wires aren’t cleared in time. A shipgirl has many advantages over a ship in that they are magic, but you must obey the laws of physical space in at least this regard.
Helicopters must work around the launching and landing schedule for safety reasons, but can operate at all hours of the day or night.

Current air wing (65 fixed-wing, 20 rotary):
24 F-14E Tomcats (12 committed)
12 F/A-18E Super Hornets (2 committed)
12 F/A-18F Super Hornets (2-seat var.) (2 committed)
5 E/A-18G Growlers (1 committed)
8 S-3B Vikings (4 committed)
4 E2-C Hawkeyes (1 committed)
8 MH-60S Sierras (0 committed)
12 MH-60R Romeos (5 committed)

>>6102278
>[1] Go meet with your new fleetmates to discuss what to do or where to go.

Our fastest route to reestablishing communications with the "National Command Authority" is probably to refresh our cryptographic keys, so we can use the existing Satellite infrastructure since we could detect traffic on the network (or just make our presence known even with outdated keys, since any activity is likely to draw rapid attention), the only problem is that that transfer likely needs to be performed in a secure location by trained personnel in person, with a physical handover assuming that the necessary infrastructure remains in service.

As a test a prudent thing to do would be to establish "Proof of Life" at a nearby population center, one within range (with an International Airport) would probably be Majuro.

As for our grander options, we could;

Head West to Guam ( ~1350Nmi, about two days travel at 30 kts), then North along the Island Chain of the Philippines and then the East Coast of Japan (Potentialy Via Iwo Jima) and then transit the Bering Sea to the East Coast of the US, which might be needed due to Fuel constrains (Nagato) due to lack of prearranged supply underway or attached Fleet Oiler. , as this would probably take about two to three weeks for the entire round trip.

Head North to Wake Island (~ 450Nmi, 1/2 day at 30kts), then East to Midway ( ~1000 Nmi, 1 & 1/2 days at 30kts) & Hawaii to Check in on Pearl Harbor (~1000 Nmi, 1 & 1/2 days at 30kts) and onwards to the East Coast (Though if something were to be "up" we'd probably find out in short order)

Head South East towards Australia (potentially via Ironbottom Sound), since there "should" be a "significant" US presence at Darwin, Or Brisbane, Or Pine Gap.


Or head East to Diago Garcea via Singapore for refueling (about 5700 Nmi so would take a week).

Do we know if we have "Special" ordnance aboard?

>>6102278
>>[1] Go meet with your new fleetmates to discuss what to do or where to go.

>>6102278
>[1] Go meet with your new fleetmates to discuss what to do or where to go.

>>6102278
>[1] Go meet with your new fleetmates to discuss what to do or where to go.

>>6102330
I say go to Kwajalein first, as it would be the closest and the place is absolutely lousy with US Military and sans the mass public confusion just rocking up at Majuro would cause. The base on Roi-Namur is only 200mi away, the big base at Kwajalein proper ~250mi.

>>6102718
>I say go to Kwajalein first.
It's certainly not a bad idea (might even potentially run into a certain German BC) So it wouldn't be a complete write-off.

>sans the mass public confusion just rocking up at Majuro would cause.

The idea would be to perform aerial recon, looking for signs of activity at the "International" airport (we haven't heard anything on ADS-B, which is slightly concerning, though this is the middle of the pacific, so overflights are likely to be rare even if nothing has happened) or signs of power generation (e.g, a significant IR signature) at local power plants.

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>>6102280

Land might mean safety from undersea threats, but you were a ship, and water is where you were meant to be. Stepping back into the surf is to you what a breath of fresh air after spending hours below-deck might be for a human - and comes with the benefit of wind-over-deck, a welcome relief from a tropical morning growing warmer by the minute.

Now confident you can make noise safely, you turn out into the bay and tell your engineers to open the throttles. And they do. In just two minutes you’re pushing past 34 knots and kicking up a hell of a rooster tail. You might be no powerboat but that was a lot more acceleration than you’d had as a normal ship. You knew you could go faster still, and your propulsion engineers suggested they might be able to provide faster acceleration too, but they were playing it by the book for now. A few experimental turns at speed demonstrated that you were much more manoeuvrable than before, which made sense, as you could lean into turns like a skater and weren’t fighting the inertia or lever arm of a real hull. Whatever magical forces now drove you also seemed to work independently of how your body was oriented, but trying to sail sideways almost dropped you flat on your ass, so that was something that would take practise.

On the other hand, a check in with your catapult specialists and air boss suggests that you don’t have the same endless power supply or internal freedom of movement while underway as you’d have on land. Between that and 'traffic,' as they put it, you'd be limited to slower sortie generation; events might take 10 to 15 minutes to set up and another 10 or so to launch or recover. Nor would sustained operations at scale be as rapid-fire as your first impromptu launches.

Hardly have you gotten up to speed before you have to slow down again and head to shore. Waiting for you on the white sands is a girl who you know somehow without asking to be Bainbridge. The girl herself is short, or at least she's a full foot shorter than you, with pale freckled skin and a wild thicket of red curls, and is dressed in a white T-shirt, blue NWU pants, and a cover decorated with miniaturised AN/SPY-1 radar arrays. Where your visible ship parts are fairly minimal Bainbridge is bristling with weapons: torpedo tubes on her thighs, a 5'' six-shooter tucked in her belt, a harpoon gun on her back loaded with Harpoon, Tomahawk, and ASROC missiles, and a double-barrelled pump-action shot gun in her hands that was probably her VLS batteries judging by how the barrels were square.

"Having fun out there, are we?" she says. Her voice is rich with the sounds of South Boston.

"It's good to see you too, old friend," you reply with a smile.

"Come on. They're waitin' for ya." Bainbridge turns almost the moment your feet touch the sand and heads back into the little village. You follow her through weed-strewn lawns and down the lone dirt road to an old garage surrounded by rotting boats.

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>>6103653

"… we have guns, yeah, but those don't really cut it anymore," Long Beach is explaining as you walk in, sitting on a table next to a rusted-out engine block. "Missiles just go so much further. I mean, Bainbridge went twenty years without even having- hey!"

The moment she sees you she jumps off the table, rushes over, and pulls you into a death-grip hug. Her head reached nowhere near your chin. "Nice to have you back, E."

"Good to see you too, Long Beach," you say, patting her awkwardly on the back. "Um, this is rather improper, you know."

"Oh, right. Sorry." She is Asian-American, you see as pulls away, perhaps an inch taller than Bainbridge, with long black hair, big brown eyes, and an easy smile. Her ship parts aren't visible, but her clothes are civvies, an open white sailor top with a white undershirt and a pleated black skirt. "Long Beach, CGN-9, reporting for duty!"

"At ease. And you must be Nagato," you say, looking to the other figure in the room.

In sharp contrast to Long Beach's easy posture, the battleship stands straight, arms crossed over her chest. She is taller than the two cruisers by a good five or six inches and is built like a champion boxer, an impression complemented by an angular face and sharp eyes more red than brown that gave the impression of a bird of prey. Her clothes were... rather more at home in a boxing match, or maybe a drunken costume party, consisting of a black and white halter top that showed her shoulders and toned stomach in full and a skirt that barely reached mid-thigh worn over dark red leggings and knee-high boots. Atop her head is a curious headband with brass horn-like projections whose purpose you could not deduce. "Former flagship and last and only ship of the Imperial Navy, the battleship Nagato," she says with a stiff bow.

“As strange as this all may be, I promise you we will do everything in our power to see you home."

Nagato’s expression is tightly neutral, but the clench of her jaw suggests that this isn’t quite what she wanted to hear. “I will follow where you lead,” she says tersely, not quite meeting your eye.

“Well, you’re a free woman. That’s your choice.”

“I… thank you, Enterprise.”

“Hey so, boss, it’s nice that the gang’s back together and we’re makin’ friends and all,” Bainbridge interjects, “but what’s the plan? Are we just gonna sit here on our asses, havin’ a chat?”

“That’s what I’m here to discuss. Have you had any luck with satcomms?”

“You’d know if we did. We ain’t got dick.”

>>6103656

“We should keep trying. I can’t imagine we’ll go unnoticed for long. Otherwise, we should try to find the nearest airport or navy base - that would be Majuro and Kwajalein, respectively. My planes should have scopes on Kwajalein shortly. The thing is, I haven’t heard a whisper of a radio wave that didn’t come from space, lightning, or the three of you since I woke up here, and I don’t know what that means, but I can’t imagine it’s a surprise party. We should consider alternatives if we find the Marshalls have been evacuated.” Or worse.

“I vote Pearl,” Bainbridge says at once.

“Guam’s only half as far,” Long Beach points out. “Actually, Wake’s even closer.”

“And Yokosuka is just about as far away as Hawaii,” you say. “But if all we need is an international airport there are closer ones in Micronesia and Kiribati.”

“Well, it’s days at sea no matter how you slice it. Unless, hey, boss, can those helicopters of yours carry us?”

You consider the prospect internally, but your CAG only asks you something to the effect of, ‘have you ever *seen* an aircraft carry a ship?’ “Ah, somehow I don’t think that will work.”

“Darn.”

“On the other hand- ah, hold that thought, my planes are in position now. Oh. That’s… oh dear.”

Long Beach cocks her head. “What is it?”

“Look at this.” You show them the feed off your F-14s’ Sniper pods. The landscape they reveal more resembles the surface of the Moon than a tropic isle. Of the base on Roi-Namur, there is no evidence; even the airstrip is visible only in outline. On Enubirr there are hardly two planks to be found still nailed together anywhere. Nowhere is even a single tree left standing.

“Gentlemen, I fear the United States may be at war.”

“Fuckin’, with who?” Bainbridge blurts. “The Russians?”

“China,” you say after some thought.

“What? Are you serious?”

“They were in the middle of the fastest naval buildup since the dreadnought race, last I heard. The president announced a forces-wide ‘Pivot to Asia’ about the time I was inactivated.”

“Huh.”

Though, as you look closer, there’s something about the scene that makes you think otherwise. A Chinese attack here would have to be with either submarine- or bomber-launched cruise missiles, and a cruise missile attack would have hit critical sites like radar arrays, hangars, and fuel depots with medium-sized warheads while leaving mos of the islands. But these islands had been absolutely plastered. If you didn’t know you were seeing this in greyscale mid-wave IR, well, you might have assumed you were seeing a black and white film reel from the 1940s. “Does this look like an old-school shore bombardment to you?”

File: Wo class on rocks.jpg (69 KB, 728x471)

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>>6103657

“Shore bombardment?” Nagato asks.

“Oh. Right.” It was all too easy to take the battle network for granted. “Actually, why don’t you take a look? A battleship might be the expert here.” You try asking your intel officers for a print still from the feed, and a minute later you’ve got one in hand and are holding it out to Nagato.

“What is the scale on these craters?”

“15 to 30 feet. 4 to 10 metres.”

“Then it was not a battleship’s main guns. A heavy cruiser, perhaps. These are larger than the marks of 15-centimetre guns.”

“Yeah, uh, nobody’s put a gun larger than that on a cruiser since the 1940s,” Bainbridge says. She looks back at you. “You sure that’s not a carpet bombing?”

“Not unless China or some else managed to build carriers capable of getting through the USN in open water in the last fifteen years.”

“Then, we’re lookin’ for some kind of new gunboat?”

“Or an old one,” Long Beach says quietly.

“Old? Like, a ghost ship? Are you serious?”

“Another ghost ship, you mean. Besides us.”

No one speaks a long moment after that.

Be it a carrier or cruiser, old ship or new, the seas are no longer free.

>[1] Your scouts have enough fuel to take a look at Majuro, and pass over a few smaller atolls in the process. Have a look there too to see what you can see before doing anything.
>[2] Recall your current planes early and have the next wave armed for bear.

AND

>[A] Maintain current emissions - fighter noses cold, E2 and sonar in passive.
>[B] All arrays hot, active radar and sonar - leave nothing to chance. Put out a call for survivors or help on all frequencies.

(Incidentally, sorry about the delay, and also the wall of text - I had to rewrite this three times to and I'm still not really happy, but here it is.)

>>6103660

>warheads while leaving mos of the islands.

>I had to rewrite this three times to and

Apparently I also suck at proofreading. I'll try to work on that one in the next update.

>>6103660
>[2] Recall your current planes early and have the next wave armed for bear.
>[A] Maintain current emissions - fighter noses cold, E2 and sonar in passive.

>>6103660
>>[1] Your scouts have enough fuel to take a look at Majuro, and pass over a few smaller atolls in the process. Have a look there too to see what you can see before doing anything.
>[A] Maintain current emissions - fighter noses cold, E2 and sonar in passive.

>>6103660
>[2] Recall your current planes early and have the next wave armed for bear.
>[A] Maintain current emissions - fighter noses cold, E2 and sonar in passive.

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>>6103660

“… I suppose we should get this show on the road,” you say at length. “We’ll make for Pearl, once we’ve cleared the area. I’ll send a flight in range of Wake to take a listen, but if something like this could happen to Kwajalein, well. Let’s not count on help there. Nagato, what’s your best speed?”

“I am rated for 26.5 knots.”

“And your cruising speed and range?”

“5,500 miles at 16 knots.”

“Hawaii is over 2,100 miles away, and we have no expectation of resupply; do you think you can make that at over 20?”

“I believe so, yes, though at much over it will be close.”

“Hmm. 18, then. Faster if it proves feasible. Long Beach, Bainbridge, maintain a separation of 12 miles. Nagato, stick close to me. Emissions will be at absolute minimum, intermittent and directional only. As for rules of engagement, you are weapons-free effective immediately until I saw otherwise. Do try to make contact first, but the enemy is persons and parties unknown - maybe it’s the Chinese, or the vengeful ghosts of the IJN, or all the devils of hell. Whatever the case, I intend that we will make Honolulu alive and intact.”

“Roger that.”

“Got it, boss.”

“Ryoukai!”

An hour later you are standing on the beach as the last of your second wave of fighters is reaching its BARCAP station about 200 miles out, and the last back of the first event has safely landed. Two S-3s scouted ahead along your intended path, a second set of helicopters was warming up to take the place of the first, and waiting on your forward deck were eight F-18s loaded down with two Harpoon anti-ship missiles and four 1000-pound laser-guided bombs apiece, with four more on tanking duty and four Tomcats ready to fly escort for the laden bugs.

Your two cruiser escorts, not ones to sit around, were already out in the water snooping around with towed sonar, but Nagato is standing next to you, watching the proceedings wordlessly. Despite her stoic demeanour it’s not hard to see that she’s conflicted about something.

“What’s on your mind?”

She gives you a distant look. “Where will I go?”

“After, you mean?”

“My… Enterprise, my home is gone,” she says, voice tight.

“Japan still exists, though? It’s actually quite peaceful and prosperous. They haven’t had a war since the last one.”

“The Empire is gone.”

“Akihito reigns, last I heard. The Heisei Emperor.”

That catches Nagato off-guard. “That little brat?”

“You knew him?”

“He toured me once, with his father. He was seven. Truly? He still lives?”

“Well, fifteen years ago. Things are fuzzy after I was inactivated, so maybe his son is on the throne now.”

>>6104332

Nagato shakes her head. “Emperor or no, the Empire is gone. The nation that built me died long before you Americans dealt the final blow. And you say that was more than eighty years ago. I imagine they’ve long since forgotten me and moved on by now. Even if Japan remains, I have nowhere to return to.”

>[1] Do you think they’ve forgotten Mikasa?
>[2] Home is where you make it. Stick with me; I’ll help you find one.
>[3] Other (write-in).

>>6104334
Oh. Ouch, yeah. Surviving WWII only to get slowly sunk in a nuke test is an ignominious way to go. I'm sure more of the Crossroads Club will turn up soon to commiserate with.

You know what, Nag? While you may have served the Empire, it was the Japanese people who drew your plans, drove your rivets and fired your boilers, and they did it with all of their pride and their soul. While politics has come and gone, that hasn't changed and the great Imperial ships still carry that legacy and while Japan had to move on, the mark you and your sisters left in their memory was indelible. We're all sisters here now.
AND WE'RE ALL ADRIFT TOGETHERRRRR, TOGETHERRRRR

If the Nagato doesn't have the fuel, the CGNs could probably take her under tow with some finagling.

>>6104334
>[1] Do you think they’ve forgotten Mikasa?
Or any other museum ship / installation for that matter?

>>6104403
>take her under tow with some finagling.
With how common "Fuel oil" still is (a potential issue exists with "Low sulfur content" mandates, which is known to cause issues), and the prevalence of underground tanks it should be possible to procure most of what she might need on route if we island hop a little or find locations that haven't been entirely leveled since older vessels still use it, and to some degree practically any other formulation, or flammable liquid would work due to the use of a boiler instead of an "ICE" only that performance may be degraded and maintenance requirements / wear are increased. So at least in the medium term it won't present issues that can't be mitigated by route planning, though that does cause issues with ocean transit.

What would be much harder to find is the Coal that some of her burners use, so reduced performance is likely after a point to some degree.

>>6104403
>>6104430
I haven't actually watched any shipgirl anime. Do they need literal fuel/munitions to restock, or will food/rest magic them back resources?
inb4 hand holding required to share supplies

>>6104334
>[1] Do you think they’ve forgotten Mikasa?
>[2] Home is where you make it. Stick with me; I’ll help you find one.
She shouldn't feel abandoned, but she doesn't have to make that choice now. She can hang until she's ready

>>6104466
That makes the two of us lmao. I guess it'll be an in-character learning experience!

>>6104466
>Do they need literal fuel/munitions to restock
Depends on the QM's implementation.

In "the" game things are abstracted into; Fuel, Ammo, Steel, and Bauxite(Alumina oxide). Though the Supply ship NPCs can provide food as a gift which increases morale.
https://en.kancollewiki.net/Morale_and_Fatigue#Gifting

Other media has various characters doing things differently since they can't really represent inventory / supply management in the same way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kantai_Collection

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>>6104430
>What would be much harder to find is the Coal that some of her burners use, so reduced performance is likely after a point to some degree.

That's Nagato's as-built configuration. Nagato and Mutsu's original propulsion systems were replaced with ten oil-fired boilers and more advanced steam turbines during their 1924 refit. Nagato later also received some basic radar sets, a battery of much improved (if still ineffective) Type 96 AA guns, greatly increased armour over her guns and vital spaces, and some other upgrades.

For most purposes in this story I will be using a ship's final or ultimate configuration, hence why Enterprise has a 2010s air wing rather than a 1960s one and Long Beach and Bainbridge have Aegis rather than Mk 13 launchers and Talos missiles. This won't be true for every ship, but as a reader you may make that assumption until otherwise specified.

>>6104827

>during their 1924 refit
Actually, correction, it was at an unspecified time in the 1930s; the '24 refit was an unsuccessful attempt to fix the problem of the forward stack blowing smoke into the mast.

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>>6104334

You look - really look - at the battleship for the first time, and think about everything she has seen in her service. She had been born one of the mightiest warships afloat, among the first to ever carry 16’’ guns, and until Yamato and Musashi had been the pride of the Empire. She was born to a nation full of pride and hope and ambition, only to watch as frustration slowly transformed into paranoia, then rage, then genocidal and ultimately suicidal insanity. The Pacific War had started on her bridge. She had been there to witness the last embers of hope snuffed out beneath the waves at Midway, then spent the next three years watching as her sisters sank one by one, sacrificed or just straight up sent to their deaths against the inexorable titan of American industry. Her country had burned while she watched helplessly from her berth, crippled and without even the fuel to sortie, and after the war had been carted off as a prize to be used as target practice.

To you, who had served for so long and with such great esteem, such a life was unimaginable. It was almost a wonder she wasn’t wallowing in abject despair.

“They haven’t forgotten Mikasa,” you say at length.

Nagato gives you a confused look.

“They made Mikasa a museum. She was all but wrecked during the war, but she was restored, and now she rests on the hard in Yokosuka with a nice view of the sea. Humans love their ships, Nagato. They remember. The US kept the Iowas in service on and off well into the 1990s because we couldn’t just let them go. I served with two of them. And even after, when they became museums, congress forced the navy to keep them in restorable condition against all sense and reason because we loved them so much. And it’s not just the Iowas: there’s Texas, North Carolina, Alabama, Hornet, Intrepid, Lexington, Midway- hell, they planted a whole forest just to serve the Constitution. They would have made me a museum too if I hadn’t been so radioactive. I think they saved my island, at least. So, no, you have not forgotten, and I don’t think you’ll be turned away.”

Nagato turns away, staring out over the water. “You speak truly?” she says quietly.

“Every word. And hey, if Japan doesn’t appreciate, you, that’s *their* loss, not yours.”

“Still, I am a battleship. The very last.” She frowns forlornly. “I was obsolete long ago. What am I to do now?”

“Start a restaurant,” you suggest. “Start a band. Buy a ranch out west and ride horses through the Rockies. Go to college. Write a book. Tour Mongolia on a motorbike. Find some bland dude named Mark, settle down, get a dog, and launch a fleet of little boats. That’s the kind of thing my crew thought about, at any rate.”

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>>6104931

Several complicated expressions flash across her face. She looks down at her now-living hands, then clenches them, flexing her well-defined muscles. “I am a *battleship,*” she declares with determination. “If war has come, I shall give battle. Does Japan still have a navy?”

“They call it the ‘Maritime Self-Defence Force,’ and promise that it’s just a coast guard despite being one of the strongest fleets in the world.”

“I shall take the measure of this ‘Self-Defence Force,’ then.”

“I’ve run exercises with the JMSDF on occasion. They’re a quiet, professional sort.”

A hurried report comes from Gamma 2, one of your BARCAP fighters. Aerial contact, distance 44, bearing 140; target speed 152, bearing 310.

“Um, pardon me,” you say, as you examine the feed from their scopes.

This far out the target is a blob a few pixels across. It was probably smaller than a fighter, relatively cold on IR, and with how slow it was seemed likely to be either a Cessna or recon drone. It was still far off - its position put it somewhere between Kwajalein and Wotje - but it was still headed northwest, vaguely towards your position.

“It looks like we have company.”

>[1] Observe from a distance. It’s not changing course, and hasn’t noticed Gamma Flight yet.
>[2] Intercept it. No one flies anywhere near your airspace without an appropriate escort, and with any luck whoever it is might even be interested in talking.

>>6104934
>Intercept it. No one flies anywhere near your airspace without an appropriate escort, and with any luck whoever it is might even be interested in talking.
I'm thinking it might be a recon floatplane from another WWII bote. Probably doing the same thing we are. If they're unfriendly, we can shoot it down they still won't know where we are.

>>6104934
>[2] Intercept it. No one flies anywhere near your airspace without an appropriate escort, and with any luck whoever it is might even be interested in talking.

We should close the distance in an attempt to Visually Identify the contact before deciding to raise them on radio, the F-14's TCS, F/A-18's TGP (USN or USMC use different pods; ATFLIR, LITENING or Nite-Hawk) should help, get a better idea of what it is.

Though considering there has been no obvious sign of them responding to the radar emissions, it likely lacks an RWR so isn't particularly modern, or is too dumb to to be worth the installation cost.

File: Sniper pod.jpg (2.76 MB, 2056x3648)

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>>6104977
>no obvious sign of them responding to the radar emissions

As a reminder, all units are currently noses-cold except for attempts at satcomms, which are directed upwards, so there have been no radar emissions except for brief pulses by Nagato and Long Beach around 2 hours ago. The mystery contact was detected by FLIR.

>>6104989
>except for attempts at satcomms

Oh, also narrow-beam radio for datalink capabilities. An intermittent beam a couple degrees across is not as good for low-emissions as pure satellite uplink but it's a lot better than either nothing or omni-directional emissions.

(I don't know to what extent this is a real capability or how narrow-beam broadcasts actually work, but it seems likely the DoD would have something to reduce satellite dependence, so I've included it for this story's purposes.)

>>6104934
>[2] Intercept it. No one flies anywhere near your airspace without an appropriate escort, and with any luck whoever it is might even be interested in talking.

Hopefully its another ship girl and if it is our first hostile, the aged plane means that shouldn't be too difficult a fight

>>6104934
>>[2] Intercept it. No one flies anywhere near your airspace without an appropriate escort, and with any luck whoever it is might even be interested in talking.

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>>6104934

Your two F-14s turn towards the curious contact, it quickly comes into focus. It is a floatplane. One which appears to be decorated with the Kriegsmarine cross.

“Nagato?”

“Yes, Enterprise?”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but there was a German ship here during Operation Crossroads, yes?”

“Prinz Eugen. I remember her. They towed her away after the second bomb, though I couldn’t say where to.”

“Well, it doesn’t look like they took her far, if this Kriegsmarine floatplane is anything to go by.”

“She’s here? She’s alive?”

“So it would seem.”

The two F-14s of Gamma Flight turn towards the floatplane and circle around to it tail, opening their wings all the way and slowing to 300 knots, but even at such relatively low speeds for a fighter the little plane appears to be standing still, so your pilots settle into high loops around it. The plane doesn’t change course, but after a few minutes, whoever is directing it decides you’re at least not going to shoot it down without warning, and you hear a voice call over radio channel 16 coming from the plane.

“Hello?”

“United States Navy ship Enterprise, Gamma Flight, to unknown floatplane,” you say. “Please identify, over.”

It occurs to you distantly that for some reason your pilots don’t seem to speak in words, any more than the rest of your crew has with you so far; that would be a serious problem the moment you have to coordinate with another air force or air defence network. Perhaps they could be taught to send text messages. Then again, you didn’t need to use your radios to send them information or give orders or feel where they were in relation to you, nor did you need to use your own radio to use the comms equipment on their planes. Even if they did need datalinks to send you information from their planes’ sensors, that was a huge advantage that you hadn’t noticed previously, what with everything else that was happening immediately after your waking.

Still, telepathy likely wouldn’t cut it unless you could have hundreds of conversations at the same time. Which was hard to imagine, but not entirely implausible - you weren’t opening your mouth to have conversations over the radio, so maybe whatever magic made you work in the first place could accommodate that. One more experiment to add to the list.

“Enterprise!?” the voice squeaks. “Gott sei Dank! I am United States ship Prinz Eugen! Where are you? What’s going on?”

“Prinz Eugen, Enterprise, be advised, threat environment is unknown; proceed with utmost caution. Maintain heading and have your plane lead us to you. Acknowledge and cease all broadcasts and radio emissions. Over.”

“Jawohl! I mean, roger! Over and out!”

The floatplane turns more or less directly around and begins leading your planes painfully slowly back towards its mothership.

“Well, it’s her,” you tell Nagato.

>>6106006

With nothing else left to do here, the two of you cross to the seaward face of the Bikini Island and step into the surf, skating out into the open Pacific.

When Nagato summons her ship parts, you see that a battleship’s armaments make even the well-armed Bainbridge’s weapons feel paltry, despite vast technical inferiority. A black steel exoskeleton encloses her everywhere except her face (and for whatever reason her stomach) in the manner of a mediaeval knight, replete with a helmet half samurai and half pagoda mast that should have looked ridiculous but which somehow suited her perfectly. The main event, her eight 16’’ guns in four double mounts the size of small tank turrets, were carried beside her by armatures attached to her lower back. She did not seem to feel their weight. On her arms sprouted a veritable forest of 5’’ secondaries and little AA guns - the Type 96, you recalled, anaemic even by 1930s standards; she could benefit from your cruisers’ modern air-defence umbrella for the time being, but something would need to be done about that, and soon. On her waist was a crossbow, with a tiny floatplane on the tip of the loaded bolt.

You check the time as you summon your own flight deck. 1158. Right on schedule. The sun is high and hot, the sky is clear of both clouds and danger, and the water is cool against your feet. A pair of frigatebirds circle overhead with their broad black wings. Apparent wind 20 knots east-south-east. Speed, ahead standard.

Presently the planes of Gamma flight spot the tell-tale shipless wake of a ship-person cruising northward through the eastern Marshalls. The floatplane drops, circles, and then hits the water next to the wake, where it disappears from the scope, no doubt having shrunk back down to toy size for retrieval. Gamma 1 stays at five thousand feet while 2 drops close on the deck to visually inspect the newcomer. Prinz Eugen is a small woman, perhaps the same height as Long Beach, and is dressed in a grey side-buttoned jacket and a skirt that only extends about 5% further down her body than the coat does. Her hair is light and tied in two low ponytails and covered with a grey cap. Like Nagato, she has four turrets extending from her back and an array of smaller guns on her arms and shoulders. She waves tentatively at the unfamiliar aircraft roaring like thunder over her head. No doubt your F-14 must seem like an alien spacecraft.

“Establish 3-6-0 degrees, speed 18 knots,” you say. “Acknowledge visually, but do not respond.”

Prinz Eugen cocks her head, then salutes, and her course shifts from north-east to due north.

“I’m sending her this way,” you say to Nagato. “We should meet her east of Rongelap in around ten hours.”

The stoic battleship nods. What she thinks about the prospect, her face doesn’t show.

>>6106008

It is when you take a look back, just as Gamma 2 is circling around to gain height again, that you notice the little trails of bubbles coming from behind Prinz Eugen. Just moments before she does, and just moments after it is too late.

Your heart stops as Prinz Eugen vanishes behind a towering pillar of white. Yet, a moment later, she reappears, though visibly slower than before and listing to starboard, favouring a leg.

“Prinz Eugen, Enterprise, report!” you call, chest tight. Your sinking feeling deepens when she doesn’t answer immediately, but eventually you hear her voice again.

“Torpedo hit! Screw #3 lost, turbine 3 offline! Minor flooding in rear compartments! I still have steering!”

“What is your best speed?”

“I don’t know how much my boilers can take … 19 knots?”

“Make it! Whatever you can!”

Your fighters hurriedly scour the ocean for signs of whatever had launched the attack. There were no obvious signs of surface ships in range of their sensors, not even the phantom wake of a ship-person, which could only mean one thing: submarines. And, armed for heavy anti-air and lacking torpedoes or sonar or any other ASW tools, your F-14s can’t effectively answer the threat; their FLIR and IRST could still spot periscopes, as could surface search radar should you decide to risk it, but you really needed helicopters on station.

Yet, the fact that Prinz was still afloat meant that it had not been a modern keel-cracking wire-guided torpedo. That much had saved her life. That meant it was unlikely to be a particularly modern submarine, or if so if it had intentionally held back from a lethal shot for whatever reason.

Perhaps it was a freshly-returned wartime model? If that’s the case, Prinz Eugen had been a formidable sub hunter in her day, so she’s far from defenceless, especially if you provide S-3 or helicopter air cover on top of it.

Then again, that was assuming that it even worked like a real diesel boat. You had encountered enough differences between your previous ship form and new living body to know that it wasn’t an entirely safe assumption to make.

“What’s happening?” Nagato asks, seeing the tension on your face.

“Submarine attack,” you explain tersely. “Prinz Eugen took a hit, she’s down a screw. It may be a returned sub. Not a nuke boat, I don’t think.”

And then you see it. Still stupidly at periscope depth, its great bulk outlined by the noonday sun, trundling along in plain sight almost as if to mock you for your momentary helplessness.

“Eugen! Off your starboard quarter, 12,000 metres!”

“Enterprise, I can hear it!”

>>6106009

She begins firing almost immediately, four splashes crashing down a bit short of the sub, but it’s no use; even with sonar, she has neither visual nor radar contact, and soon the boat will be too deep for shells. And sure enough, it dives. But it doesn’t just dive. This thing breaches and breathes like a colossal fucking whale, belching black smoke and white spray, then twists along its length, making a slithering crash dive into the deep and disappearing with a splash from its pitch-black tail flukes.

What the fuck *was* that?

>[1] Have Prinz Eugen chase this fucker down while your planes get into position. She still has control authority, a good sonar system, and no shortage of depth charges and torpedoes of her own, and if this is anything but a nuke boat, she’s still faster; she has the advantage.
>[2] Have Prinz Eugen hold her course. She’s still got speed on her side, probably, and you can have two Vikings aloft and on the scene inside of 40 minutes. You don’t want her facing this his monster… fucking… *thing* alone for a second longer than she has to.

File: Prinz Eugen.jpg (197 KB, 850x1893)

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>>6106008

Forgot this

>>6106010
>[2] Have Prinz Eugen hold her course. She’s still got speed on her side, probably, and you can have two Vikings aloft and on the scene inside of 40 minutes. You don’t want her facing this his monster… fucking… *thing* alone for a second longer than she has to.
Dangerous to do sprint-and-drift alone and damaged.

>>6106010
>[2] Have Prinz Eugen hold her course. She’s still got speed on her side, probably, and you can have two Vikings aloft and on the scene inside of 40 minutes. You don’t want her facing this his monster… fucking… *thing* alone for a second longer than she has to.

I'm not sure the sub would even be able to outrun a Mk 34, let alone a Mk 54.

>>6106010
>Have Prinz Eugen hold her course. She’s still got speed on her side, probably, and you can have two Vikings aloft and on the scene inside of 40 minutes. You don’t want her facing this his monster… fucking… *thing* alone for a second longer than she has to.
What sort of submarine even makes black smoke? A K-class?
Also interesting that she called herself a USS despite only having been owned by the USN for a year. Someone's trying to integrate.

>>6106010
>[2] Have Prinz Eugen hold her course. She’s still got speed on her side, probably, and you can have two Vikings aloft and on the scene inside of 40 minutes. You don’t want her facing this his monster… fucking… *thing* alone for a second longer than she has to.

If the submarine attacks the same way the second time, it should have to first return to periscope depth, giving the Prinz Eugen another opportunity to attack even if we maintain course to rendezvous

>>6106010
>>[2] Have Prinz Eugen hold her course. She’s still got speed on her side, probably, and you can have two Vikings aloft and on the scene inside of 40 minutes. You don’t want her facing this his monster… fucking… *thing* alone for a second longer than she has to.

>>6106010
>[2] Have Prinz Eugen hold her course. She’s still got speed on her side, probably, and you can have two Vikings aloft and on the scene inside of 40 minutes. You don’t want her facing this his monster… fucking… *thing* alone for a second longer than she has to.

Holy shit, a Kancolle quest in the year of our lord 2024. Reminds me a bit of a certain other one.

That you plangfag?


>>6106199
Sounds like our first encounter with an Abyssal.

>>6106576
>That you planefag?

Definitely an inspiration, but no, I'm afraid not. If only I could be that good.

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>>6106598
>If only I could be that good.

Well you are good enough to get another player in me, for what it is worth. Some of the vibes do really remind me of his boat quest, so that is fun nostalgia.

I will keep an eye on this; I do like both boats and girls.

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>>6106010

“Prinz Eugen, take evasive action but maintain heading!” you instruct your injured fleetmate. “I’m vectoring ASW aircraft your way!”

“Roger!” Then, a moment later, “I’ve lost contact!”

It had probably gotten below the thermocline, then, or gone far enough in the opposite direction to get out of range of her sonar. “Keep going. My planes will be there ASAP.”

Already fuelled and armed with a pair of Mk 54 torpedoes each, your two readied Vikings are able to scramble off the deck with all haste. The four Romeo helicopters will take longer to get there, but will have the advantage of low speed chasing and hovering, and you have more Romeos available than S-3s at any given moment.

“That,” you tell Nagato once your birds are away, “was *not* a normal submarine.”

“An unfamiliar model?”

“More like a coal-fired sea serpent. That thing looked alive. And not the way we are, I don’t think. Unless, Nagato, you’re actually a dragon, and haven’t told us yet?”

“I am not, I’m afraid to report.” She considers the notion. “Though, I suppose a battleship is long, armless, scaly, and fire-breathing, after a fashion.”

You blink. “Was that a joke?”

“Perhaps it was not a good one?”

“No, no, just… unexpected.”

And so you find yourself settling in to wait. Again. A submarine’s greatest weapon after stealth was patience; chasing them down was a matter of relentless scouring over hours or days. It was never easy. There were some facts that worked in your favour, at least: it was air-breathing, for one, not a nuke boat, that was clear enough, so it would have to surface eventually. It was unlikely to have most modern quieting methods, although if it was a monster it might have some kind of sound-absorbing blubber. It was unlikely to be able to dive as deep as modern boats, but that wasn’t certain. It wouldn’t be fast, at least not for long, on batteries. It had needed - or at least it had chosen to - attack Prinz Eugen from the surface, so hopefully it would need to do so to attack again, even if it was somehow able to keep pace while undetected. It seemed to be firing comparatively limited torpedoes with trails clearly visible from the surface, and Prinz Eugen was not without passive structural defences against such weapons.

The biggest problem was probably going to be lack of noise. It had no screws that you could see, and neither you nor your fleet-mates made any machinery noise except heartbeats; it stood to reason this thing might not either. Prinz Eugen said she could hear it, but there was no way to know how much noise the fucker did or didn’t make normally. If it were confident that it could stay safe by staying still, then like a modern diesel or AIP sub it could easily remain submerged until after you were in Honolulu.

A difficult but not limitless enemy, this one.

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>>6106649

More concerningly, though- “I fear we’ve been made,” you say at length.

“Pardon?”

“I’ve been talking to Prinz Eugen in the clear. No way around that for the moment. Any ELINT platform anywhere nearby - ah, that’s electronic intelligence, listening for radio waves - knows where she is, and that there is an American Carrier Strike Group somewhere in the Marshalls. Let’s hope whoever’s out there takes that as a sign to leave and not to hunt. And that they don’t have any nuclear boats.”

Nagato’s face suggests she shares the sentiment. “Do ships truly fire nuclear torpedoes in modern wars? Or do they use these 'guided missiles’ you describe?”

“Uh, both, but actually neither. I mean, they can. It’s not their weapons that are the issue, but their propulsion. A ship powered by a nuclear reactor only needs to refuel every couple of decades. I served for fifty years and only needed to be once, during my mid-life refit. A nuclear submarine has the energy to stay submerged for as long as the coffee supply lasts, during which time the submarine might not surface at all. And they’re *fast* too, faster underwater than a lot of ships are on the surface, while running almost as quiet as the grave. Every development in naval technology in the last century has only made them more and more dangerous. They’re the main weapons of modern navies, in truth; we carriers might get all the attention, but that’s just how the silent service likes it.”

She looks at you with horror as she processes everything you just said. “You say you are powered by one of these ‘nuclear reactors’ as well?”

You wince. “I am. Eight, actually, two for each steam generator. I think you might understand why I didn’t broadcast that fact before.”

“Are all modern warships powered by nuclear reactors?”

“No. Just long-endurance subs and the largest supercarriers, like me. And also Long Beach and Bainbridge here, and a few others, but those are all special cases. For surface combatants under about 45,000 tons the costs of reactors aren’t worth it. It didn’t make us popular at foreign ports, either.”

“I see. I am still curious, then, how are such weapons actually used?”

You give Nagato a hard look. A focused woman, this one. Yet there was nothing but honest, if morbid, curiosity in her expression. “The answer is, they aren’t, not really. As tactical weapons they’re an expensive white elephant. Instead major powers put their warheads on the tips of ballistic missiles and point them at everyone else as a warning. Not once have they been used in war since 1945.”

“Not once?” she repeats, taken aback.

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>>6106651

“Not once,” you confirm. “We don’t even test live warheads anymore. If it helps to know, Operation Crossroads actually helped make that the case. It turns out it’s really hard to put a whole dispersed fleet out of action at once, even with nuclear bombs.” That was a terribly generous interpretation of the truth, but not quite so technically incorrect as to be a lie.

“The way your sailors talked about it, I had always assumed that the atomic bomb would be the weapon of the future, for better or worse,” Nagato says pensively.

“Cooler heads prevailed. Barely. The real weapons of the future are standoff range, speed, and concealment. First look, first shot, first kill.”

“That sounds like something a submarine would say.”

“That’s from the Air Force, but same idea. Ah, speaking of first look, Gamma Flight may have something for us. Another aerial contact.”

This one is travelling rather faster than a floatplane, though, making 480 knots at 35,000 feet, with a heading of roughly 280°. That was an intercept course, more or less - it would cross your path in about 4 minutes. The picture from FLIR doesn’t show much other detail.

You’re just seconds from ordering Gamma 1 to intercept it first when it decides to instead turn hard away and head back the way it came, due eastward.

>[1] Attempt to hail the contact.
>[2] Follow it. (Gamma 1 and 2 have about 200 extra miles of fuel budget before they’ll need a tanking sortie to get them safely landed.)
>[3] Both.

>>6106657
>[3] Both.

Hopefully it's another shipgirl, but we should follow in case it isn't

>>6106657
>[3] Both.

It might be worth it to also launch the alert fighters if we have any to spare in order to allow them to relive Gamma flight if things go south, since a protracted fight would leave them lighter than we probably want on gas, if we intend to recover them.

>>6106657
>[3] Both.

We are already made. At that speed it is either an old school prop plane or a modern specialty one and if shit has gone down, yesterday's enemy is probably today's friend. Gamma is fast enough to chase it down, ID them and modern enough to evade old school fighters if it is another old ship girl.

I feel like this might be a modern or semi modern ship since it was still pretty far away when it turned, and we are probably hard to detect at range due to being human sized.

>>6106675

Currently in the air:

8/24 F-14E For BARCAP (16 on deck 2x Sidewinders, 2x AMRAAM, 4x Phoenix each)
4/24 F-18E/F In air armed for BARCAP (8 on deck armed for heavy ground/anti-ship attack with 4x 1000-lbs laser-guided bombs, 2x Harpoons, 2x AMRAAMs, and 2x Sidewinders each, 4 prepped for tanking)
2/8 S-3B Scouting ahead (6 on deck with 2x Mk 54 torpedoes each)
1/4 E2-C Keeping watch
4/12 MH-60R Scouting nearby (8 on deck armed with 1x Mk 54 torpedo each)
0/8 MH-60S (armed with 4x Hellfires each for light surface strike)

Rearming cannot be done during active flight ops for safety reasons, so any changes should be made before you need to launch or recover.

>>6106657

“Unknown aircraft, this a plane of the United States ship Enterprise, please respond,” you say.

That doesn’t seem to get its attention. You try a few different channels, but without response.

As the target’s distance grows, you consider the positions and fuel states of your forces again. Lambda Flight was close enough to Prinz Eugen they could be vectored over to provide air cover in a few minutes, it looked like, and your S-3s would be on station even sooner. Follow it, you order Gamma Flight.

As your Tomcats put on the smoke to catch up with the mystery contact, closing to as little as just a dozen metres, the thing comes into view.

It is a monster.

The demented offspring of an A-6 Intruder and a manta ray, the thing is pitch black and all smooth organic curves. No human hands had ever touched this creature. You can feel it regarding your planes coolly despite no evidence of eyes. As you look back into where its cockpit should be, a deep, instinctive revulsion comes over you, the same archaic hackles-raising reflex primates have against snakes. This thing is *wrong.* Wrong on some fundamental level you struggle to find words to describe.

It’s… like staring into the endless cold abyss, and feeling the deep stare back, stare with hunger and hate.

This is the Enemy. There is no doubt in your heart about that.

>[1] Shoot it down now - it’s probably leading you into a trap, into the teeth of its fleet defences.
>[2] Keep following it until you reach its base or fleet. It’s worth risking two planes to find the Enemy before they find you, especially as you have a heavy strike package already prepared on deck.

AND

>[A] Stay quiet. No reason to give away any more information than you have already.
>[B] You have been discovered, and the battle is about to be joined - now would be a good time to have the full AWACS coverage with a Hawkeye or two, which can sweep a patch of sea and sky 500 miles across and transmit their tac view to all friendly units without revealing the positions of said friendlies to the foe.
>[C] No sense giving up the advantage of radar. Forward units, noses hot - full AWACS and Growler support. Your F-14s have one of the most powerful AESA radars ever fitted to a tactical aircraft; Gamma Flight alone could probably find the whole enemy fleet in seconds of scanning and give that information to all other units.

>>6106699
>[1] Shoot it down now - it’s probably leading you into a trap, into the teeth of its fleet defenses.

Conserve the AIM-54's if possible, their ability to go after Cruise missiles / drones may be important shortly. and the comparatively reduced Time to Target of AMRAAMs (120-C5 or later) should reduce the Contact's ability to evade / escape distance.

It be with seeing if the escape track correlates with any known Islands or installations, since that should give us an expected arrival time

>[B] You have been discovered, and the battle is about to be joined - now would be a good time to have the full AWACS coverage with a Hawkeye or two, which can sweep a patch of sea and sky 500 miles across and transmit their tac view to all friendly units without revealing the positions of said friendlies to the foe.

We really need to get the Radar Picket set up ASAP, hopefully the VLS cells & magazines of our compatriots are well stocked.

>>6106699
>[1] Shoot it down now - it’s probably leading you into a trap, into the teeth of its fleet defences.
>[C] No sense giving up the advantage of radar. Forward units, noses hot - full AWACS and Growler support. Your F-14s have one of the most powerful AESA radars ever fitted to a tactical aircraft; Gamma Flight alone could probably find the whole enemy fleet in seconds of scanning and give that information to all other units.

>>6106699
>[2] Keep following it until you reach its base or fleet. It’s worth risking two planes to find the Enemy before they find you, especially as you have a heavy strike package already prepared on deck.
>[C] No sense giving up the advantage of radar. Forward units, noses hot - full AWACS and Growler support. Your F-14s have one of the most powerful AESA radars ever fitted to a tactical aircraft; Gamma Flight alone could probably find the whole enemy fleet in seconds of scanning and give that information to all other units.

>>6106711
I doubt Bainbridge and Long Beach have VLS. They were old ships, unless Long Beach received that Aegis Strike Cruiser refit in this timeline.

>>6106699

>[1] Shoot it down now - it’s probably leading you into a trap, into the teeth of its fleet defences.

I agree with this anon >>6106711 to try to determine likely destination from heading

I don't understand the tactical difference between B and C. Will C display our location to the enemy?

>>6106739
>tactical difference
The first thing is that they both should at least provide some indication that we're around, and in effect our heading since we know we're assuming that the call went out this is less of an issue, but guarantees that a strike will find its way its way to us. Depending on the Threat's order of battle, this could amount to a "fuck you" massed quantity of AShMs / Cruise missiles or Air launched Torpedos if the A-6 lookalike is anything to go by, or a Submarine Wolfpack turning up.

The basic assumption behind B is that we try to "find and fix" the threat before we try to set up the "kill chain" so we can be optimally efficient with our forces for maximum effect, but would set us back somewhat if a strike package is already on its way to us.

C on the other hand is basically fully "defensive" in nature and is leveraging our local advantages in Quality and Quantity of airframes / sortie generation to hopefully counter-strike threat forces with whatever we can get in the air, then roll up the opponent as fast as we can once we find them.

TL;DR:
B is waiting to see what turns up then ambushing them while holding forces in reserve.
C is is practically shooting your way out of the fight.

Both have fairly obvious counterplays,
With B likely to have useful airframes caught on deck if we fail to stop the First strike.
and C defeated by sequential waves that arrive after our forces are committed.

>>6106753
Thank you so much for that explanation anon. I understand now

>[B] You have been discovered, and the battle is about to be joined - now would be a good time to have the full AWACS coverage with a Hawkeye or two, which can sweep a patch of sea and sky 500 miles across and transmit their tac view to all friendly units without revealing the positions of said friendlies to the foe.

>>6106738
>I doubt Bainbridge and Long Beach have VLS. They were old ships, unless Long Beach received that Aegis Strike Cruiser refit in this timeline.

Was reading up on the wrong Bainbridge (DDG-96, not CGN-25) Why does the USN reuse names so frequently?

Well, at least the AN/SPG-55B should support the SM-1ER & -2ER, so things aren't a complete write-off Since they have significant range advantage vs anything that isn't a Backfire or Bear analog. Just means that the long range sector of the Surface to Air engagement capacity pie is a fraction of what I though it was so will be more easily overwhelmed.

With independent Search and track antenna at least means that missiles can effectively be pipelined with downtime reduced to that of slewing the tracking antenna to the next target and incurs no loss of Situational awareness, unlike "conventional" coaxial systems. Though only being able to facilitate a single engagement at a time isn't great. (Long Beach isn't much better at "only" up to Four at a time due to the use of SARH guidance).

If only Bainbridge had retained the pair of 3" guns since 2 x 50RPM HE-VT would dumpster just about everything we could reasonably expect to come across, at a reasonable distance too. Though Phalanx CIWS isn't bad just has significantly reduced engagement range due to the use of 20mm APDS, GoalKeeper or SeaRAM would have been better for our purposes, but were only coming online at the time of said ship's decommission But Long Beach at least retains the 5" gun so we don't completely lack HE-VT. Which sorts out "pop up" & Sea-Skimming type AShMs.

Also if we don't particularly care about "conserving the magazine", we have a pretty good organic "massed" Long range precision Surface to Surface capability with the combined mass of both Surface launched Harpoon and Nuclear Tomahawk. and that doesn't even count what our air wing may have access to, or the other members of our ?Task Force? in terms of Sustained Surface bombardment or timed fuses to clean up or dig out static positions.

>>6106820
>>I doubt Bainbridge and Long Beach have VLS. They were old ships, unless Long Beach received that Aegis Strike Cruiser refit in this timeline.

Long Beach and Bainbridge both did. The Cold War was in full swing until early 1995 in this timeline, which is why the Tomcat and Phoenix got the Super Hornet treatment. All nine nuclear cruisers were rebuilt from the waterlines up to be Aegis cruisers (although Bainbridge is closer in size to a Burke), which probably would have happened in the real world if the Navy was keeping a 600-ship fleet for longer and needed to update every hull they had on the water, and work was completed pretty much exactly as the USSR got ash-heap-of-history'd. They were retired around 2000 but would have been more or less up to date at the time. Bainbridge was also given a 5'' gun after spending 20 years without any gun at all.

(Incidentally, the timeline change came first in planning for this story, not the upgrades for the ships or Tomcats - I wanted a small difference that would keep the Cold War and recent history close enough for government work but different enough not to get into the weeds of recent events. Everything else came as I read more about the defence environment of the late '80s and the many plans that never quite came to fruition.)

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>>6106882
Pretty cool you thought this out to that degree and it being slightly alt history is cool, gives some options. Also yeah, I come her to have fun not consider current events along with my ship people, magic high schoolers, fantasy crusaders, ect. I also come to be casually racist.

Wish I still had my old hard drive from back in the day with all my kancolle pics on it; only pics on current drive would get me banned.

Also quest need more Shimakaze Yes I know I am basic but she is hot and the design of her is iconic enough even people who know nothing about kancolle recognizer her.

>>6106699
>[2] Keep following it until you reach its base or fleet. It’s worth risking two planes to find the Enemy before they find you, especially as you have a heavy strike package already prepared on deck.

>[C] No sense giving up the advantage of radar. Forward units, noses hot - full AWACS and Growler support. Your F-14s have one of the most powerful AESA radars ever fitted to a tactical aircraft; Gamma Flight alone could probably find the whole enemy fleet in seconds of scanning and give that information to all other units.

Fuck it, we ball.

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>>6106902
>Also quest need more Shimakaze

Oh, don't you worry. Enterprise is the fastest warship ever to sail - eight reactors, none faster, went the saying - and her service coincided with the 3rd and 4th generations of fighters when speed and thrust were life. She might be well-educated in modern days of stealth and information war, but deep in her heart she has the NEED FOR SPEED. I imagine she and Shimakaze will get along famously.

>>6106913
>she has the NEED FOR SPEED

Kek. I have a couple of characters with that exact term in their character sheet. Maybe it is a common theme/ turn on for me. I did have a turbocharged NISMO 370z that I maxed out a few times at the racetrack. And on the highway a few times.

>>6106882
Did Long Beach get that Mark 71 8-inch gun turret? If not, it would be fun to run into a Des Moines-class shipgirl. Autoloading 8-inchers are fun.

>>6107224

I'm afraid not, no, but she and Bainbridge did receive the standard 5''/54 Mark 45s used on most other warships to simplify maintenance and logistics for the fleet, replacing her older Mark 12 5''/38s

>>6106699
>[1] Shoot it down now - it’s probably leading you into a trap, into the teeth of its fleet defences.
>[C] No sense giving up the advantage of radar. Forward units, noses hot - full AWACS and Growler support. Your F-14s have one of the most powerful AESA radars ever fitted to a tactical aircraft; Gamma Flight alone could probably find the whole enemy fleet in seconds of scanning and give that information to all other units.

>>6106680
>Currently in the air:
>2/8 S-3B Scouting ahead (6 on deck with 2x Mk 54 torpedoes each)
>4/12 MH-60R Scouting nearby (8 on deck armed with 1x Mk 54 torpedo each)

Disregard, numbers are inaccurate. Real numbers:
8/24 F-14E For BARCAP (16 on deck 2x Sidewinders, 2x AMRAAM, 4x Phoenix each)
4/24 F-18E/F In air armed for BARCAP (8 on deck armed for heavy ground/anti-ship attack with 4x 1000-lbs laser-guided bombs, 2x Harpoons, 2x AMRAAMs, and 2x Sidewinders each, 4 prepped for tanking; remaining 8 armed with 4x AMRAAMs and 2x Sidewinders each)
4/8 S-3B: 2 scouting ahead, 2 headed for Prinz Eugen, 4 more on deck from previous launch (all armed with 1x Mk 54 torpedo each)
1/4 E-2C
8/12 MH-60R: 4 scouting around strike group with 4 more headed for Prinz Eugen
0/8 MH-60S (armed with 4x Hellfires each for light surface strike)

(Just keeping track for transparency)

>>6107762
No Growlers? And I guess the A-12 still got cancelled. I worked with someone who worked on that program; he insisted that they were just about ready to go into production. Every project is 99% complete 90% of the time.

>>6108382
Shoot, I knew I forgot to list something. There should be 5 E/A-18G with none in the air at present.

>>6106699
>[1] Shoot it down now - it’s probably leading you into a trap, into the teeth of its fleet defences
>[B] You have been discovered, and the battle is about to be joined - now would be a good time to have the full AWACS coverage with a Hawkeye or two, which can sweep a patch of sea and sky 500 miles across and transmit their tac view to all friendly units without revealing the positions of said friendlies to the foe
Fire away boys.

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I am alive! This update kicked my ass, for some reason. But here it is.

>>6106699

This Thing needs to die.

And it needs to die *now,* before it leads your fighters into the teeth of its fleet’s air defences. Queued to action without a word or radio wave, Gamma 1 and 2 begin to pull back from the monster and put some distance between each other. They would need only enough separation to put an AIM-9X up its exhaust pipe.

But the Thing is not blind to the less-than-friendly implications of the two fighters leaving its 3 and 9, and snaps into a hard left-hand turn. Gamma 2 is quick to react and pulls hard to the right, taking the Thing one-circle, while Gamma 1 hits the smoke to get above the fray.

And then the Thing screams.

The broken-jet-engine screech of murder and rage erupts from the speakers of Gamma Flight’s radios. For a moment you find yourself cringing away from the sensor feeds and covering your ears uselessly, but force yourself to look back. The scream keeps going, even with the radios in the planes turned off, apparently inducing current in the wires. Gamma Flight are fighting for their lives as the rest of the avionics in their planes freak out, screens flashing on and off and flight controls twitching without input. From where the Thing’s cockpit would be a blindingly-bright spotlight flashes into Gamma 2’s cockpit, forcing (him? her? it?) to squint and look away, and a flash of green-glowing tracer rounds emit from the monster’s nose, but miss, passing far behind Gamma 2’s tail.

While Gamma 2 is hard put, Gamma 1 manages to regain control and get tone, and a pair of Sidewinders come off the rails. The Thing notices them and flashes its searchlight at the two missiles. One veers hard off course and begins flying in circles, but the other is coming in too fast for the same countermeasure to work a second time. The detonation of its small warhead sends a spray of supersonic titanium rods through the creature’s tail. Its scream turns to a roar, then a growl, then a whine as it struggles to maintain control. Gamma 2 manages to get in position and takes a gun shot of their own which saws the Thing’s left wing right off. Its bestial wail continues as it falls, only ending amidst a splash of white and black and fiery red 20,000 feet below.

When you pull back again, you find you’re breathing hard.

Nagato is looking at you with deep concern. She’s sailing just feet from you, as close as she safely can at 18 knots. “Are you quite alright?” she asks.

“Well, I found one,” you answer, as you catch your breath.

“Of what?”

“Of *them.* The monsters. The Enemy. It was a scout plane of some sort. I shot it down, but… that thing screamed and did something to my fighters, nearly knocked them out of the sky. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

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>>6109602

Just to make the whole experience even stranger, the crew of Searchlight, your orbiting Hawkeye, tell you they detected no radiation at all, despite being no more than 180 miles from the scene of the action, well above the radio horizon. The scream wasn't EW - the electronic interference had been an entirely local effect.

Given Gamma Flight’s experience with just one of the damn things, on top of their questionable fuel state and lack of air-to-ground weapons you decide it's probably better to recall them. But the aviators in question request permission to press on for another two hundred miles along the monster's last known heading. Despite your misgivings, you ultimately give them the go-ahead.

Though, after some further consideration, you give them permission to go noses-hot. It was past the time to be hiding. Your existence has been revealed. The jig is up, the news is out; now comes the masquerade, the dance of decoys and countermeasures and counter-countermeasures. The key will be to give the enemy an irresistible target and trick them into revealing their hand.

First things first, however, you need some proper eyes in the sky.

With a silent command, your orbiting Hawkeye radiates, illuminating everything there is to see across the northern Marshall Islands and a swathe of ocean larger than Texas. You take a moment to examine the tactical picture your Hawkeye was putting together, hoping against hope that it had discovered your foes-

And find you can only stare in astonishment. Because it. Can’t. See. You. Well, sort of. At 180 miles, both your little strike group and Prinz Eugen are vanishingly tiny points on the surface, contacts that the E-2’s computers might have discounted had the operators not both consciously changed the filters and known where to look. Being a living breathing land-walking aircraft carrier was one thing. But a stealth aircraft carrier? That was something that really drove the point home, in a manner you had long experience as a ship to understand. You’d experienced a literal *million-fold* reduction in radar cross-section or even more.

After a few minutes’ thinking, you decide to try something, and tell every airframe but Searchlight to shut off their directional data uplinks. As you concentrate, you find you can still talk to every aircrew, no emissions needed; even now you could feel not just Gamma Flight’s position and heading, as was being pushed to you by Searchlight, but also what the pilots and RIOs were seeing off their sensors. After a few minutes you give permission for the links to be restored.

Still, that was… you could conceivably conduct entire battles telepathically, zero emissions ever. The possibilities were limitless.

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>>6109609

And you might have an opportunity to test that theory sooner rather than later. For it looks as if Gamma Flight may have found something after all. Surface contacts, at the extreme end of their radar detection range, five or six total. There were a few small aerial contacts overhead. That sounds so very much like a carrier strike group. And given that it lay along the same heading as the scout monster, well. You have both escort fighters and an anti-ship strike package prepared on deck for just such an occasion, and it wouldn’t take all that long to double that strike mission’s numbers. More, even, if you were willing to cut into your next CAP…

Just as you’re putting together the logistics of an attack in your head, Gamma Flight puts in a request that drives a spanner in the works: to launch their Phoenix missiles at the contacts.

The Phoenix is an air-to-air missile, but its large and sophisticated seeker designed to keep lock on targets like Soviet supersonic bombers gave it some not inconsiderable secondary air-to-ground uses. It could track large metallic objects like ships against the backdrop of a calm sea, or chase down emissions like an anti-radiation missile, though it wasn’t as good as purpose-built weapons in either of those roles. Looking at the strike parameters, it was a risk. Gamma 1 and 2 carried eight Phoenixes between them, just over one missile per enemy. Though they’d do no structural damage to the enemy, even a small warhead could destroy all the delicate sensory equipment that actually made a warship anything but a target.

But a failed strike? If the missiles were intercepted? The enemy would need to turn on their air-defence suites to defeat them, and against an alerted and intact CSG’s AD network your strike mission would have a very low probability of success. Worse, they might send planes to follow Gamma Flight.

And you would need to make a decision fast. A Tomcat’s AESA radar is quiet but not silent, and the difference between the enemy aircraft never seeing them and burning to intercept may be as little as a few more seconds.

>[1] Fire. If they can blind the enemy task force it’ll be worth it. You’ll have time to put together a heavier attack mission against them this way.
>[2] The best chance of a successful attack will be the sea-skimming Harpoons of your main strike mission. Recall Gamma Flight before the enemy’s aircraft give chase.

>>6109602
>This update kicked my ass, for some reason.

I feel you I have been staring off and on at a half written one for 2 days. Didn't help that I chose to go be social, do some celebrating this weekend. Glad you are alive.

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>>6109619

I wrote like four or five different version, then rewrote the final version twice. Every time I got done I had to go and check the performance some weapon system or other (it me hours of diving through forums to actually get a reliable number for Nagato's radar arrays, for example, beyond just a vague indication of range) and realised that everything I just wrote didn't work. I think I have a better idea where this going now though.

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>>6109626
Your shit sounds like a pain. I am pretty well-read about war and weapons systems in general, focused of history of modern war when I got my history degree, but a ton of it has faded of the last 10 years. Nice work on that stuff.

All I have to do is write about magical high school girls, and the setting gives me a good about of wiggle room to play stuff by ear.

And I feel you, man. Not in my game but when writing some of the 20-ish lewd and altfics for DHQ, I have deleted like a half dozen pages because I didn't like them when I re-read them. Spent probably half as much time re-writing and editing old as writing for when I stick them in a zip file for anyone who wants to keep them after the other quest ends.

I will now stop being off topic and start considering what I want to vote for.

Once more good job with the quest, I am enjoying it quite well so far! Nice job bossman.

>>6109612
>[2] The best chance of a successful attack will be the sea-skimming Harpoons of your main strike mission. Recall Gamma Flight before the enemy’s aircraft give chase.

We have a general fix on the heading of the opposition and a hull count, no reason not to flatten them at this point. We can clean up the aerial contacts later.

Near simultaneous arrival of a massed quantity of Harpoons along the track is probably has the highest Pk.

If they have the range, the boxed launchers are probably preferable to the Air-launched variant though they could supplement the strike if needed to generate the quantity needed to penetrate defenses .

>>6109612

>[1] Fire. If they can blind the enemy task force it’ll be worth it. You’ll have time to put together a heavier attack mission against them this way.

Even if they cant knock out the sensor suites, even partial damage to the deck of a carrier, if their is one present will reduce their ability to sortie, send their own planes out. We are pretty much dedicated to a brawl now and he who strikes first has a better chance in the end. They likely know we are they roughly. Know where Prinz is certainly.

The planes will need to be refueled regardless when they return so it doesn't matter if they burn their arms.

Might want to be prepared to send a small CAP wing to cover Prinz depending on if they send a strike team to try and finish her off.

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>>6109612

Just in case anyone's getting lost, here's a tactical map I threw together.

For a sense of timing, 500-600 knots is around 10 nautical miles per minute.

The current time is 12:38 MHT (UTC +12). Prinz Eugen will reach you by around 2230 hours assuming no major diversions or further damage to her propulsion. Time to Hawaii at 2100nmi away by sea, perhaps 5 days.

>>6109746
Nice. You really are putting a bunch of time, thought, and effort into this. Awesome bro.

I want to "refuel" Prinz. Manually.[ Fill her up./spoiler]

>>6109612
>[2] The best chance of a successful attack will be the sea-skimming Harpoons of your main strike mission. Recall Gamma Flight before the enemy’s aircraft give chase.

>>6109612
>[2] The best chance of a successful attack will be the sea-skimming Harpoons of your main strike mission. Recall Gamma Flight before the enemy’s aircraft give chase.

>>6109612
>[1] Fire. If they can blind the enemy task force it’ll be worth it. You’ll have time to put together a heavier attack mission against them this way.

>>6109612
>>[1] Fire. If they can blind the enemy task force it’ll be worth it. You’ll have time to put together a heavier attack mission against them this way.

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>>6109752
She does have a rather shapely stern, doesn't she?

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>>6110268
Indeed. Love the aesthetic of a lot of inter war and early ww2 era boats. Now everything largely looks... sterile. I to like the way Burke's look well and some current ear foreign boats though.

And besides the thinner a ship girl's belt armor the easier the are to "penetrate. Shimakaze must be like the town bike, kek.

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>>6110288
>Now everything largely looks... sterile. I to like the way Burke's look well and some current year foreign boats though.

The big problem nowadays is that all modern guided-missile ships have basically the same role and end up looking like fishing trawlers with pea-shooters. Also the hull forms of modern ships are generally scaled-up destroyer hulls. The last true cruiser the US ever built was Long Beach, with a distinctly long and gracile shape made for sea-keeping rather than absolute top speed, and it shows.

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>>6110292
True. Form over function and with the war and actual shooting war a sea vs just maritine policing of sitting abound the carrier while we shredded what ever 3rd world shit holes air force and take out important targets after.

Still, got to love the stuff you saw way back while we figured out what worked and didn't as modern naval doctrine developed, though my focuse was never really so muck on boats.

Have a planegirl.

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Alright, votes called, writing. It's a tie 3-3, so I flipped a coin, and came up with option 1.

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>>6109612

You consider the situation as carefully as you can in the brief moments before time forces your hand. A limited AIM-54 attack had a very good chance of mission-killing several enemy ships. And right now, you have the initiative. Against an opposing CSG that was not going to last. You have won this small battle in the information war. Here, in this moment, fortune favours the bold.

Fire.

Once their targets are designated, Gamma Flight’s radars go cold before the missiles have even left the rail, removing the only trace of their distant passage. You watch through their scopes as their eight birds ignite and the two planes turn hard to make for home.

Though you cannot see the missiles except as slowly diminishing points on the E-2’s display, you know intimately every detail of what is about to unfold. The AIM-54D, much like the F-14E from which it was launched, was related only in name and purpose to the models which preceded it; though its general dimensions were comparable, the dramatic advances in seeker and propulsion technology between the late ‘60s and early ‘90s allowed a vastly more powerful weapon to be packed into the same package.

The first phase of flight when used against a ship is entirely inertial. A ship moving at 16 knots will move less than a mile in the time it takes for the missiles to arrive; there is no need for guidance from the launching aircraft. A solid rocket booster first carries the main stage far above the clouds and accelerates it to over Mach 4, where it flies a high arcing path until it’s all but directly over the designated target. Once in position, the booster stage separates and the main stage dives hard, turning on its radar only in the last few seconds before impact for terminal guidance. The target ship would have barely enough time to turn on their fire-control radars before it was too late. From the wrong angle or from too close in even a successful interception could end in collateral damage to a ship’s fragile topside.

There should have been little chance of success. Even putting aside the unforgivable recklessness of firing a fully autonomous missile from 150 miles away into an environment where in any other circumstances civilian vessels may be present, everything would need to go exactly right.

Had the enemy been alerted to the incoming threat in any way they would have every opportunity to take out the incoming missiles from a safe distance, and to gain the advantage of active defences in the process; yet evidently they remained oblivious. No doubt the monsters were even now listening intently to the radiation from your E-2 from just beyond its effective detection range and working hard not to draw its attention. Likely they had detected Gamma Flight’s emissions, but did not recognise them for what they were and so did not realise the danger.

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>>6110881

Were it raining or had the sea state been any higher, that could easily have confused the missiles’ seekers, optimised as they were for chasing fast-moving aerial targets against the backdrop of the open sky; but the weather over the Marshalls today is as fair and clear as any sailor could ask for.

Had the enemy been manoeuvring quickly or even just spaced closer together that could have spoiled the tenuous firing solution the Tomcats had acquired; instead the enemy is spread out and holding courses.

Everything had lined up to give the Phoenixes their best chance.

T - 3 minutes 22 seconds to impact.

While your first salvo screamed high into the atmosphere your ordnancemen worked furiously to prepare a much larger put-them-under-now strike package. Your first readied mission had been just eight F-18s armed with a pair of Harpoons and four laser-guided Paveways, as an emergency measure against either land or sea targets, whichever should present themselves. Now you know your foe better. 16 Super Hornets will be committed, each carrying four SLAM-ER anti-ship missiles. They will ingress at 90° angles to one another in two flights of eight. Each salvo will be supported by an E/A-18G Growler’s sophisticated electronic misdirection, blinding and confusing those radar arrays as survived the Phoenix barrage. With the F-18s weighed down and flying to the very edge of their combat radii, refuelling will be needed both on launch and recovery; this will be provided by four more F-18s carrying five buddy tanks apiece.

With your own strike group, an injured cruiser, an ASW task force, and a critically valuable AWACS aircraft to protect, all sixteen Tomcats on deck, the last four uncommitted Super Hornets, and another two Growlers will need to take to the sky to fly CAP against the enemy CV’s inevitable retaliation. Even if you do manage to take out their carrier with your main thrust it won’t be until long after their retaliatory mission is in the air. Two more E-2s would be launched as backups for Searchlight. You will have just eight Tomcats, four Super Hornets, a Growler, and four Vikings left in reserve, and would likely have little time to carefully consider their armaments.

T - minus 10 seconds. 9. 8. 7. 6…

Searchlight picks up an eruption of radiation to the southeast, many faint but powerful sources.

4. 3. 2. 1… 0.

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>>6110882

The emissions are abruptly cut down to a fraction of what they were.

When a distant steel-on-glass screech of pain reaches your E-2 you breathe a deep sigh of relief. It had worked. It had *worked!* The missiles had done their job. In just a few short minutes you’d have sixty-four SLAM-ERs headed their way, and they’re going to be hard-pressed to stop them with a crippled AD network.

The big question now was how quickly the Enemy CV could sortie its fighters. Assuming that you hadn’t just put their carrier out of action, they would be throwing every available airframe off the deck at this very moment. This presented two dangers. One was that their own CAP would arrive on station in time to intercept your strike mission and prevent them from launching their cruise missiles or take the missiles out partway. The F-18s would not be defenceless with two AIM-9Xes and two AIM-120Cs each, and the cruise missiles’ impressive range and numbers would help a lot in preventing this outcome, but the problem was not insignificant. The other danger was that they would throw everything against Prinz Eugen and Searchlight, as those were their only available targets. If they did, the chances that you could stop a full alpha strike was low, even with twenty fighters dedicated to defence.

The answer comes around the time you’re finishing up launching event 3. They have nearly matched you, it seems. Searchlight picks up a large blob of aerial contacts bearing down on Prinz Eugen, dozens, at least, which look like they’ll arrive just minutes after your CAP is on station… but they’re not coming from the fleet you just attacked. No, Searchlight is close enough to see that fleet clearly now, and the only aerial contacts there number perhaps six, just as Gamma Flight detected originally. This group is coming up from further south, from the direction of Majuro. Almost at the same moment you detect them they begin radiating freely in search of victims.

You kicked the hornet’s nest. You had thought to simply soften their fleet up for an attack, and had succeeded. But either the fleet you attacked had not contained their carrier, or you had managed to put one out of action, but not the other.

Looking at the distances and timing involved, though, you begin to get a better picture of the scene. That second carrier couldn’t be far from where its planes had been picked up. It was close enough that one of the two strike missions against Fleet 1 could be retasked to attack Fleet 2 without any real change in overall mission profile. That would represent a significant reduction in massed force against either fleet. On the other hand, the first fleet was already weakened, and this second fleet lacked AWACS cover, or if they did it was still fully passive. Even a mere 32 sea-skimming cruise missiles could be devastating without adequate advance warning.

>>6110884


>[1] Split your forces. You could end this battle in a single blow if it works.
>[2] Preserve mass. You can deal with the fleets consecutively.

Incidentally, I thought after I flipped that coin that this strike really would be a hell of a longshot, and decided to roll the dice to see how many missiles would hit. So I got my favourite d20 and rolled against a DC of 10, and I shit you not, rolled: 20, 18, 12, 13, 20, 11, 20, 14.

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>>6110898
Sweet rolls, not a single 1 digit.

One thing I would really recommend is that if rolls are required in game, do them in game. Reduces the chance of something that should work not working, just being blamed on the QM not wanting it to or stuff like that. And players love rolling dice, it helps with us feeling engaged. Like you could asked for 4 players to roll 2d20 to see how well the strike worked.

Or don't, I am running my first thing and must constantly fight the urge to turn it into a lewder thing than it should be.

Run the thing 100% narratively and people will still like it.

>>6110932
That roll was very much a one-off I did for fun. I may ask for rolling later on occasion, but this time I only decided to give it a shot after I'd already started writing and decided that the attack would have at least some decent effect.

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>>6110937
Got you. Plenty of very good quests have been run on 100% narrative systems or had the QM just flip a coin behind the scenes.

Dealing with making a balanced dice system can be annoying and un-needed plenty of times.

Also not a criticism, just FYI

I am going to wait a bit for other anons to chime in on what our course of action should be, though I do have a leaning towards a pick, possible ideas.

Are write-ins usually allowed unless they are just retarded?

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>>6110943
I'll say write-in suggestions are welcome, especially for those more familiar with the weapons and sensor systems involved than I am. Meta-questions about the alternate timeline post-1989-ish are welcome too - you're all playing as Enterprise and know the things she does, including about recent history up to around 2012.

As for full-on writeups/omakes, I'll say those will be welcome as a bit of non-canon fun once we've gotten in contact with Hawaii and had a chance to meet more characters and do a bit more proper roleplaying.

(Getting to Hawaii is taking a bit longer than I expected, partly because I need better post discipline; it's not sustainable for every update to run to >1,500 words. I'll see what I can do to expedite the dry technical stuff so we can enjoy shipgirl bullshit in full.)

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>>6110952
>Getting to Hawaii is taking a bit longer than I expected

Hofstadter's law does say it will always take longer to complete an expected task, even accounting for Hofstadter's law as it is as expected, recursive. I have been stuck because I keep wanting character interactions, for example.

I might see if something ever comes to me regarding some lewd/alt fic for your shit if I can ever get a good pace for my shit, don't get distracted by more shit for my oshi quest, like your characters, ect. Something involving the smaller ships would kind of be up my alley and give me a reason to go autistic regarding some of their IRL characteristics once I refresh my memory of them.

Going to shut up now, wait to see if good plans emerge.

You are doing a very good job so far Nuke. Happy I found this.

>>6110884
>[2] Preserve mass. You can deal with the fleets consecutively.

It's only out of the fight, after we kill it. Until we assert how well their terminal defenses work we can't be certain of anything really.

>>6110952
>Meta-questions about the alternate timeline post-1989-ish are welcome too

So how far did the development of the AGM-137 / -154 / -158 / -184 progression diverge, It seems slightly weird to be going after carriers with a mix of RGM-109B & AGM-84K with F/A-18s.

Even if they're only recently getting around to actually mounting them.
https://www.twz.com/air/marine-legacy-f-a-18-hornets-getting-major-firepower-boost-with-jassm-cruise-missiles

>>6110884
>[2] Preserve mass. You can deal with the fleets consecutive
Defeat in detail and shit, mang

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>>6110978
I've tried to use the real timeline as far as possible, as I will for most weapon systems that actually exist rather than having been cancelled after the Cold War, but honestly trying to follow the development of US cruise missiles has given me a headache. As in, I've literally gone crawling through congressional budgetary reports to make sure I'm understanding the timelines right to figure out which services got which variants when and on what platforms, and I'm still not sure I have it all straight.

As far as I can reliably answer, the AGM-84H/K SLAM-ER would be the and most advanced longest-ranged anti-ship cruise missile available to Enterprise ca. her final deployment in 2012. The AGM-158A JASSM was Air Force-only until later. The anti-ship RGM-109B TASM was withdrawn from service in 1994, as its utility was rather limited and not really huge improvement over existing AShMs, as the primary limitations of any anti-ship weapon are the sensory capabilities of the launch platform and not the weapon itself.

That's part of why Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles aren't quite as bad a threat as they're made out to be, just as Soviet supersonic anti-ship missiles were during the Cold War. Certainly they're dangerous, but you still have to localise and target the enemy fleet first, which against the vastness of the sea is not as easy as it sounds. The PLA's ISR satellite capabilities are what actually make them dangerous, as they have frequent-enough and high-enough-quality satellite coverage for tactical use, which the USSR never did.

>>6110885
>[2] Preserve mass. You can deal with the fleets consecutively.
Commit to defeat in detail

>>6110932
Can't say I mind hidden rolls going on behind the scenes, especially if a quest is narrative focused where asking for rolls could break the atmosphere. Not sure what QM is ultimately going for here but I follow a few quests where this has been the case where we've had the discussion and decided to keep them hidden.

>>6110885
>>[2] Preserve mass. You can deal with the fleets consecutively.

>>6110885
>[1] Split your forces. You could end this battle in a single blow if it works.
Can Bainbridge and Long Beach shoot their ASMs?

>>6110885
>[1] Split your forces. You could end this battle in a single blow if it works.

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>>6111135
>>6109746

Long Beach and Bainbridge are armed with 16x AGM-84D anti-ship missiles (8 in VLS tubes, 8 in boxes), with a range of ~120nmi. The distance between fleets at present is over 450-500 miles. There is a good reason a modern fleet's offensive firepower tends to be so overwhelmingly concentrated in the air wing. Long Beach and Bainbridge like most guided missile ships are designed air defence platforms, especially against enemy cruise missiles. They will come into play if or when enemies are able to localise and target your strike group - which, I should add, your choices as players have so far successfully prevented.

>>6111107
Enterprise Quest is meant to a wholly narrative quest, but it doesn't have to be, at least not all the time. As it is a collaborative story I am open to suggestions and requests.

>>6111372
I don't mind the odd bit of dice behind the scenes, especially if it means that there's not always a "right" and "wrong" choice to make, just some that are more likely to go right or avoid deciding complex situations like this wholly by fiat.

>>6111372
>Long Beach and Bainbridge are armed with 16x AGM-84D anti-ship missiles (8 in VLS tubes, 8 in boxes)
Do we know what their VLS module count or approximate missile inventory looks like?

Would the VLS cells have been dropped in to replace both the fore RUR-5 (ASROC) and Terrier / Standard Missile Rail launcher station(s), since the RUM-139 (VL-ASROC) / VLS Standard Missile variants effectively made them redundant?

>>6111377
Fair enough. I think that if I roll behind the screen, I'll be transparent about it, and I can label the higher-risk higher-reward leave-it-to-the-dice option as such.

I should say as well, dice or no I do not offer wholly right or wrong answers. That's not fair to you as players. This is a quest, not a test; every choice you make is valid, and every tactical decision has its consequences both good and ill.

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>>6111442
I'm not sure, honestly. It depends a bit internal space vs deck space - nuclear reactors are big and bulky on small surface combatants, and it's hard to say how much volume for VLS cells they would have available. I have so far been using a Ticonderoga-class cruiser's armaments as a model for a remodelled Long Beach and a Flight I Burke for the smaller Bainbridge to make things easier, so that would work out to 128 and 96 cells each. That's a little questionable with Long Beach given her proportionally narrower hull, and apparently she was already rather cramped to begin with (such as only having enough dining space for 1/3rd of the crew at a time), but it's a decent working model since I'm not a naval architect and don't want to get that far into the weeds.

A Ticonderoga-class cruiser's typical VLS loadout circa 2000 would be something like 82x SM-2MR, 32x TLAM, 8x VL-ASROC, and 8x Harpoons. In the real timeline the VLA wasn't procured in large numbers because the USSR went and died and took most of both its submarine fleet and the USN's budget with it. We can imagine there might have been more of them made in this timeline.

As to what loadouts Long Beach and Bainbridge came back to life with, I suppose that depends a lot on what mission they were expecting to perform. Did they come back as carrier escorts, or as lone wolves? Would they be more focused on anti-ship, anti-air, or land attack? I think the average numbers quoted above are fairly reasonable to use since they cover all the different missions of a modern US surface combatant reasonably well.

>>6110885
>[2] Preserve mass. You can deal with the fleets consecutively.

Had a funny thought: meeting a Chinese boat, and it is a Frankenstein's monster abomination that can barely speak and is retarded. It's like that one cousin who had to wear a helmet and a walking boot b/c one leg was too short, the one you lit to play with everyone else out of pity. Hahaha.

I don't like very much, you might be able to deduce.

>>6111522
*Like the Chinese

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>>6110885

Though a moment of serious temptation passes by you to attack both fleets at once, it is a brief moment. So long as you can defeat their air wings, you’ll be able to attack at leisure, and you’re a goddamn supercarrier with more than enough depth of magazine to consume however many interceptors their escorts carried, even if it took days to wear them down. That is what you were *made to do.* But defeating those air wings had to come first, and Step One to that end was putting one of those carriers under with prejudice before it can get its planes in the air in the first place. So long as they had two flight decks operational it would hinder your own ability to concentrate force adequately against either fleet. And the longer the air battle continued, the more danger there was to Prinz Eugen and your air wing - and the more there was of being located and attacked yourself.

You glance at the time again as the last birds of event 3 marshall and fly away. 12:56. First contact with the Enemy should occur in less than 15 minutes, while on your end the aircraft of event 2 would be landing.

In the fleeting calm before the battle, you check in with the other members of your little fleet. You’ve taken their lives into your hands; it’s only right to reach out.

‘Long Beach, Bainbridge, Enterprise - it was an honour serving with you for all those years, and it is an honour to serve with you again,’ you say.

‘Likewise, E.’

‘Light ‘em up and send ‘em under. We got ya covered here.’

You smile to yourself. They were children of the Cold War just as you, fledged beneath the shadow of the Backfire and Badger and Bear, pursued ever by the quiet menace of submarines below. They knew this business well.

The same could not be said of your other companions. Nagato had been laid down before the first true aircraft carrier was ever launched and when powered flight itself was not even a generation old. Radar had been little more than a laboratory footnote. Prinz Eugen was younger by nearly twenty years but even she had sunk years before the invention of the integrated circuit. For Prinz Eugen especially, now would be the only moment to warn her of what is to come.

‘Prinz Eugen, Enterprise - come in.’

‘I’m here!’

‘What’s the status on your turbines? Will they hold?’

‘They’re… hot. But they’re holding. I think I might be able to get number 3 back online soon. It was only shaken a bit - no serious damage.’

>>6112299

‘That’s good news,’ you say. She would still be down a screw, but that would take a lot of the pressure off her other turbines. ‘Listen…’ you begin tentatively, ‘I don’t know what those enemy fighters are capable of. In the years since the war the world’s great powers have developed rockets that can chase a ship down from tens or hundreds of miles away. If they have anti-ship missiles, I don’t know that I’ll have enough weapons to deal with both these fighters and all the missiles they launch, so I’m trying to prevent them getting into position. I will cue you on bearings if I see any that do get through when my own fighters are otherwise engaged. Watch your surface search radar carefully. Sea-skimming cruise missiles will come in low and fast, literally a metre or two over the wavetops.’

She had little hope of shooting down something like a Harpoon or Exocet with flak guns. But giving her even a slim hope was infinitely better than asking her to sit around with nothing to do but wait to live or die. If the enemy had supersonic high-arcing missiles, well, you need not mention that those existed. At the very least your E-2s’ radars were much less likely to miss high-flying contacts than something hard on the deck.

Prinz Eugen doesn’t respond immediately. No doubt she heard the concern in your words and had a good impression of how bad things might get. ‘Understood,’ she says simply.

You glance at Nagato. She’s clearly not happy with being left out of the fight, but there’s not much you can do about that at the moment.

The minutes tick down. Twelve F-14s rush to meet the enemy in between Prinz Eugen and the incoming fighters at an initial distance of 50 miles, while the enemy is 150 miles out from them. Ideally they should be intercepted further out still, but they had your ‘Cats outnumbered 2-to-1 that you could detect, and the further you were away the easier it would be for them to get past you and make their attack run, and the harder it would be for your fighters to shoot down their cruise missiles if they did. The two Growlers dedicated to that portion of the battlefield stay back well behind the main line.

As to what the Enemy might carry for weapons, well. The only real clue you have to their level of technology is their radar emissions. Passively-scanned arrays, according to your E-2, nothing to sneeze at but not particularly impressive either, perhaps 1970s or ‘80s vintage. The same was generally true of their ship radars. The scout Gamma Flight faced hadn’t carried high-off-boresight fox 2s, or had chosen to attempt a gun kill despite having every opportunity to use one for reasons known only to it.

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>>6112302

120 miles from your BARCAP. No missile launches yet. They were advancing in 4-ship formations, six of them total. All units were scanning the sea and sky with abandon. If they had anything like the AIM-54D, they’ll launch them in the next couple of minutes. You feel yourself chewing a hole in your lip as the seconds pass. But they don’t, as the minutes pass without a launch.

100 miles. The first Phoenix shots come off the rails and ignite. Cued by Beacon, the Hawkeye on scene, they will give no indication to the enemy of having locked on to them until the missiles’ own second-stage guidance kicks in, by which point the target will be inside the Phoenix’s kinetic no-escape zone. Whether the monsters’ magic screams or spotlights could defeat an advanced radar-homing missile, you would learn in about two minutes.

80 miles. Your Growlers light up their EW suites, bombarding the enemy with noise just seconds before the first Phoenix goes active, timed to maximise confusion. The first missile dives. The enemy detects it and the whole formation jinks left and right as one and lets loose their countermeasures, but for many it is too late. One drops off the radar track as a Phoenix impacts. Then another, and another. Yet most survive the first wave; chaff and magic bullshit evidently carry them through. The second wave is already on its way, though, the thin the herd further. It was the last of your Phoenix shots, though - the AIM-54 was a large and heavy missile, nearly three times the mass of the AIM-120, and in this fight depth of magazine and endurance is going to matter a great deal; each Tomcat was allotted just two. The AMRAAM and Sidewinder would carry the rest of the fight.

60 miles. Several more vanish as the second wave of AIM-54s descend. It’s 12 to 13 now. But the enemy is not deterred, and onward they come.

>[1] Maintain defensive posture. What you’re doing is working; the enemy’s countermeasures are evidently not good enough to keep them alive for much longer.
>[2] Have your Tomcats advance on them. This will become much harder once your own fighters are in range of enemy’s A2A missiles, and if they have anti-ship missiles, every mile they draw nearer puts them closer to firing, after which you have no second line of defence.

>>6112305
>[2] Have your Tomcats advance on them. This will become much harder once your own fighters are in range of enemy’s A2A missiles, and if they have anti-ship missiles, every mile they draw nearer puts them closer to firing, after which you have no second line of defence.

>>6112305
>[2] Have your Tomcats advance on them. This will become much harder once your own fighters are in range of enemy’s A2A missiles, and if they have anti-ship missiles, every mile they draw nearer puts them closer to firing, after which you have no second line of defence.

>>6112305
>[2] Have your Tomcats advance on them. This will become much harder once your own fighters are in range of enemy’s A2A missiles, and if they have anti-ship missiles, every mile they draw nearer puts them closer to firing, after which you have no second line of defence.

We need to push though this, the other Threat Task force And subsurface contact(s) is still out there and we'll likely need to refresh our defenders at some point.

>>6112305
>[2] Have your Tomcats advance on them. This will become much harder once your own fighters are in range of enemy’s A2A missiles, and if they have anti-ship missiles, every mile they draw nearer puts them closer to firing, after which you have no second line of defence.

>>6112305
>>[2] Have your Tomcats advance on them. This will become much harder once your own fighters are in range of enemy’s A2A missiles, and if they have anti-ship missiles, every mile they draw nearer puts them closer to firing, after which you have no second line of defence.

>>6112305
>[2] Have your Tomcats advance on them. This will become much harder once your own fighters are in range of enemy’s A2A missiles, and if they have anti-ship missiles, every mile they draw nearer puts them closer to firing, after which you have no second line of defence.

So what is the era-range we are expected to see when it comes to these ship-Girls? Like could we expect to see the Monitor and Marramack? Or to see like a ton of civilian-craft girls? Or is this strictly warships of the 20th-21st century?

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>>6112652

This is a Kantai Collection story, and Kancolle focuses on warships from the Dreadnought age, so ~1905-1945. I've extended that through the end of the Cold War, which in this timeline lasts until 1995 to let me not get too involved with current events. As to types, we will meet mostly military ships, but that does include repair and logistics ships, not just combatants. But there will be exceptions to both those rules on occasion.

>>6112705
Nice.

Guessing no tank girls or plane girls?

I also have queries about ourselves. Are we just a girl with bits tacked on and do our stuff entirely by Magic(tm)-don't-question-it-okay, or do we have a physical presence as a big fuckoff supercarrier to go with it? Descriptions seem ambiguous thus far and, if the former, where are we even launching aircraft from?
Also, what of our crew? Are they individuals in the background, or are they more like extensions of us and not actual people per se?

>>6112717

Probably not, no. But we will get the vehicles themselves - amphibious assault shipgirls are very much going to appear and they carry tanks and hovercraft and so on, and as aircraft carrier shipgirls are naturally going to be a central focus of the story, seeing as our POV character is one, basically anything that flew on ships before ~2010 is fair game for a bit of the spotlight.

>>6112782
Would that include stuff like Liberty Ships for resupply- or the ability to loot military bases for resupply/make do with what available. IE swap out one weapon systme for another

It feels like in the long term ammo is going to be very limited, even if we are counting all ammo as somewhat interchangeable for simplicity

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>>6112724

In the not quite 5 hours Enterprise and company have been alive, the answers to a lot of those questions are simply unknown to them. This is all terribly confusing, as much or more to them as to us. They are human sized, and clearly have bodies made of flesh and bones. But it would be clear to you as Enterprise already that you are much more than a human superhero with some neat gadgets and instead are a full-on ship compressed into a human's appearance, as you have a heartbeat but also nuclear reactors and steam generators. Whether you have human needs such as to eat or sleep though, that's not yet apparent.

As to what their crewmembers are, well, you haven't actually seen one face-to-face yet, have you? A ship is something of a hive mind - from its perspective its crew are rather like talking cells or organs. It might not occur to them to see crewmen as independent beings without prompting, especially if thrown abruptly into combat and forced to fall back on training and instinct. They seem to function as semi-independent beings in some ways, but more like extensions of their ships' minds and bodies in others, such as how the shipgirls can communicate with and command their aircrews from hundreds of miles away without radio or even words. A few questions about the crew will be answered directly in the wake of the current air battle as Enterprise analyses her pilots' performances.

>>6112832

Regarding Liberty or Victory ships, most were not commissioned Navy vessels, serving instead with the Merchant Marine. I don't know whether any will show up just as yet.

As to ammo supplies, that's not so much of a concern. You are five days from Hawaii, and a supercarrier like Enterprise has around 375,000ft^3 (~10,600m^3) of magazine capacity, designed to permit 160+ strike sorties every single day for two full weeks. That's one of the principle reasons why Uncle Sam builds them on such a colossal scale. Even if you have to fight multiple battles every day all the way back to Hawaii, you have the ammo needed to do that. Long Beach and Bainbridge have 224 VLS tubes between them, plus the various CIWS emplacements all three of you possess, on top of which are radar decoys and other EW countermeasures to defeat threats non-kinetically. Even Prinz Eugen and Nagato came back fully-stocked, for what it's worth. Longer-term, well, somehow I doubt the Navy will be all that stingy during an active shooting war against literal monsters of the deep.

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>>6113044
>Longer-term, well, somehow I doubt the Navy will be all that stingy during an active shooting war against literal monsters of the deep.

Never doubt the incompetence of the elected officials and bureaucrats behind the scenes, Nuke. Never doubt their ability to seize defeat from the jaws of victory.

>>6113044
Ok that’s a relief- So there are normal people to draw resources from? I was thinking under the prospects of what ‘’normal’’ infrastructure being damaged or outright eliminated. As so far we had seen zero indications of civilian activities.

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>>6112305

This is the moment of truth - the moment to push. You can feel it in your bones. Tactical-aircraft-launched AShMs generally have ranges of shorter than a hundred miles, especially the older sort, but rarely much shorter, and each bandit might have as many as four. You have to disrupt their charge before they get a firing solution.

All twelve of your fighters turn into the enemy, and all go noses-hot, adding the voices of their powerful AESA radars to the chorus of electronic noise the Growlers are putting out.

The Enemies’ first proper move comes shortly after. At 50 miles out the screaming reaches you, not yet potent enough to cause damage but no doubt that was soon to change, followed by missile shots a few seconds later. Seven shots, aimed at Red 1, Green 2, 3, and 4, and Blue 1, 2, and 4. The targeted ‘Cats pulled hard left and right, forcing the incoming missiles to burn off their short supplies of propellant early. None of the missiles track or are able to maintain their pursuit and all seven flew past harmlessly overhead.

Twelve AMRAAMs leapt forward in response as one. Then a dozen more, and a dozen more still. Kinematically there is little chance of escape - running from any missile must mean running into another. The screaming is getting louder by the moment, and now you can see magic spotlights flashing in the distance, beams which defeat many of the AMRAAMs, along with more conventional countermeasures. But many still get through, and one bandit after another falls out of the sky, wails of the damned falling silent as they die. Nine remain.

30 miles out, and the screaming is starting to mess with your planes’ avionics. Lights blink, screens flicker, flaps and rudders twitch. Red 3’s engine starts overheating briefly. Red and Green Flights form up and slew away from the now-outnumbered enemy to target their flanks while Blue drives ahead, intent on charging through them.

Still the enemy comes on, undeterred though their wingmen have fallen, unafraid of death. All nine fire their second salvo. Nine AMRAAMs answer as the targeted ‘Cats slew away, flares and chaff blazing in their wakes, Growlers roaring their silent songs. One by one the incoming weapons sailed past. The AMRAAMs find their targets, slender contrails marking their paths as they descend. 10 miles. Green and Red Flights turn to come on the enemy from behind and below, while Blue charges in dead ahead. In the last moments before the four formations collide, all three of your flights unleash their Sidewinders, two or three to a bandit. Splash three more.

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>>6113131

Finally, the four remaining of the enemy blaze past Blue Flight at a combined 900 knots. Into the Merge they all go. It is a damned fool thing - an F-14E not weighed down with ordnance is among the most nimble of all 4th-generation aircraft, second only to the F-16, and one still armed with high-off-boresight Sidewinders makes even passing close enough to merge suicide for almost anything that flies. But it is nothing good for your own, either: once merged and facing an aircraft of the same generation, a pilot’s fate came down to their ability as a pilot. Even the smallest mistake would be punished with death. So dangerous was the dance of equals that every advancement in tactical aviation since the invention of the guided missile had been made to prevent the merge from ever taking place - and to rousing success, as not once had an American pilot merged with a bandit since Vietnam.

Dangerous it is, and dangerous it proves. The sky became a tangled mess of missiles and planes scattering in every direction, turning into and around each other. Even from 250 miles away, you can feel the g-forces pressing your pilots hard into their seats as the wails of the damned pressed into their skulls. Blue 3 is almost immediately drawn into a brutal and terrifyingly close back-and-forth one-circle with one of the monsters, fighting their own plane’s flight controls as much as their bandit as they tumble downward towards the open Pacific. Blue Leader ends their fight quickly with a wild spray of white tracers that saw the foe in half in the first pass, insanely risky but deftly done. Blue 2 extends out and gets off their final Sidewinder at their bandit, just close enough that the magic spotlight could not do its work, and the enemy’s shadowy form erupts in black smoke and orange flame.

Blue 3 is struggling more than most with the hellish voices, barely in control, and no, no, no, eyes on your bandit! But it’s no use. When the green traces slash across the cockpit, you feel a sharp stab of pain in your gut, and then nothing, your telepathic link to Blue 3 suddenly severed, pilot and RIO both.

Distantly, you notice that Green 2 makes the final kill, silencing the monsters’ shrieks, but all your attention is on the slowly descending form of Blue 3, spinning and tumbling like a leaf. The monsters had gotten to them. A pilot and RIO were dead… and a bit of you had died with them; that much was plain enough, as the cold of empty racks not be filled tonight gnaws at you already when you look within.

Who… who were those brave aviators? The fact that you didn’t know their names or calsigns or faces hits you like an uncharted sandbar. Did they even *have* any? 5,800 officers and ratings make up your complement. Every one you had tasked today had carried out their duty with aplomb and without question, even when you sent them into battle outnumbered two to one, and you couldn’t do them the decency to know them first?

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>>6113132

With the enemy fighters gone and every one among them exhausted and spent, Red, Blue, and Green Flights turn and begin their return journey, while you return your focus to your immediate surroundings. And to the little world inside you.

And it is indeed a world. Miles of corridors, machinery spaces, mess halls and kitchens, cabins and wardrooms, a CIC, a bridge, a machine shop, convenience stores, gedunk bars, coffee stands, endless stowages, an armoury the size of some lesser ships, a hangar large enough you could have fit a attack submarine inside with room to spare. And everywhere is bustling with activity. With… little people.

Your first impression is that they look like dolls. Their heads are oversized, bodies strangely round, eyes big and dark and beady. Sort of mouse-like, actually. Perhaps the right word might be sprite. Or fairy.

A ship needs a crew, and here is yours.

>[1] Time to get some goddamn answers. You still have a battle to win, but everything about this whole situation and your very existence gets weirder every time you look at it, and you really need to have a handle on what the fuck you are and what the hell these crew pixies are before your strike mission reaches the enemy fleet.
>[2] Your crew sprites aren’t going anywhere, and you have a battle to win - ask a few questions now, but keep your focus. The last thing you want to do is let another pilot come to harm on account of your inattention.
>[3] Write in. (You have about 12-15 minutes before your main strike reaches their launch point against Fleet 1.)

>>6113133
>[2] Your crew sprites aren’t going anywhere, and you have a battle to win - ask a few questions now, but keep your focus. The last thing you want to do is let another pilot come to harm on account of your inattention.

We're in a dangerous line of work and losses aren't something we can always avoid, the best we can do is learn what we can to avoid it happening again and ensure we take full advantage of any we sustain. Do we have "Special" Weapons / Alternate Warheads in inventory?

We should start building a threat library and cataloging metrics of the various types of enemy we have encountered, if we should prefer to use massed waves of Air to Air missiles to safely engage them, so be it. It just means we need to shift towards tactics that support retaining standoff range if we can, and reserve closing the distance for when we absolutely need it. The only issue will be airframe fatigue since we can only sustain so many in the air at once.

>>6113133
>[2] Your crew sprites aren’t going anywhere, and you have a battle to win - ask a few questions now, but keep your focus. The last thing you want to do is let another pilot come to harm on account of your inattention.

>>6113133
>>[2] Your crew sprites aren’t going anywhere, and you have a battle to win - ask a few questions now, but keep your focus. The last thing you want to do is let another pilot come to harm on account of your inattention.

>>6113133
>[2] Your crew sprites aren’t going anywhere, and you have a battle to win - ask a few questions now, but keep your focus. The last thing you want to do is let another pilot come to harm on account of your inattention.

Are we loaded with any NBC weapons?

>>6113133
>[2] Your crew sprites aren’t going anywhere, and you have a battle to win - ask a few questions now, but keep your focus. The last thing you want to do is let another pilot come to harm on account of your inattention.

Out of curiosity- dose any ships in our fleet have means to detect radioactive particles in the air?

If so can they use them real quick to see if there’s indications of significant nuclear exchanges- we don’t know if these monsters have MAD capabilities or if anyone tried to use nukes on them.

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>>6113222
If we have that capability, it would be smart.

>>6113222
>means to detect radioactive particles
The MH-60 the MH-60 or S-3's support / intel shops may be able to;
as sampling water is a method of detecting transits of nuclear reactors (or tests / release treaty compliance) since they leave slight but still detectable increases in the level of radiological isotopes behind due to the use of Seawater as the feedstock of the "Cold Side" of the heat exchanger.

see the "Activation Radionucleotides" section on PDF page #76 & 77

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0005512850.pdf#page=76

>>6113258
We should also do that if we get close to any major naval ports on the regular- I can imagine someone like that cna let us know if nuclear powered vessels were sunk in port strikes/battles near ports. Or near any costal areas with nuclear reactors.

Lacking more information; I am assuming these monsters had been attacking humanity and have land-warfare capabilities if not simple abilities to fire into interior cities. If a naval-port is saturated in particles we should send recon into the area first.

Now that I think about it before we approach any landmass we need to preform significant recon to ensure we are not stumbling on infrastructure captured/modified

>>6113222
You've got three nuclear-powered warships at play. And all have dosimeters as a matter of course, both for safety and warfare reasons, as I have to assume would most or all of your aircraft. If there had a been a significant increase in short-lived radionuclides over background levels in the air they would have set off alarms the moment you woke up. That the world's satellite infrastructure is still evidently intact is also suggestive of a non-strategic conflict.

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>>6113133

You reach your mind inward, calling for whoever is in charge. A wordless voice answers.

‘This is the Captain speaking.’

You find the self-titled captain in the CIC, among a crowd of other fairies busily monitoring the vast battlespace and coordinating the pending skirmish, while others analyse the results of the one which had just ended. For all the activity the room is still quiet.

The captain looks basically like all the other fairies, and has blue hair the same shade as yours tied in a knot behind its head. (Her head, you decide. It’s not human, so it’s hard to say for sure what its gender is or if it even has one, but it gives you that impression.) The fairy is dressed plainly in standard blue coveralls, as are the rest that you can see.

‘My captain? How does that work?’

‘I am in charge of the ship’s company.’

‘But, I’m making my own decisions. How can you be in charge too?’

‘You are the ship.’

‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

‘You are the *ship.* I am only the skipper.’

You sigh. You would have to unpack the philosophical questions about your existence later. ‘Do you have a name?’

The Captain cocks her head, giving you a puzzled expression. ‘I am the Captain.’

‘That’s it?’

‘What else would I be called?’

‘Whatever you want. Do none of you have names?’

‘No. Why would we?’

They don’t really seem to talk with words in the first place, so maybe they just had no need for names with each other. ‘How should I address you all, then?’

‘Ask for us, and we will answer.’

‘Just like that?’

‘The ship speaks, the crew listens.’

You’re beginning to get the impression that this being doesn’t actually know as much as you imagined it would. ‘Right… um, can you, er, come outside?’

‘On deck?’

‘Yes, please.’

For a moment you’re not sure how that’s going to be possible, but then, suddenly, you know. You lift the flight deck / tower shield you use to catch incoming fighters before they disappear back into the higher-dimensional hull-space inside you and set it on its side, then let it down as if resting it on a shelf just below shoulder height on your left, bow end aimed into the wind. The Captain fairy exits the CIC while you get the deck situated and makes her way up through the steel hallways, and passes through a doorway…

And there she is. Perhaps five inches tall, the little fairy really does look like a doll in person. The Captain snaps a sharp salute. Twenty knots of wind whip around her, but the little fairy is unmoved.

“At ease,” you tell her. She relaxes slightly, and looks at you straight ahead from her perch imploringly, ready for whatever her ship demands. You try to think of what to say, but no matter how many questions you may have, there’s only one that matters. “Report. What comes next?” you ask.

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>>6113642

‘Victory!’ the tiny Captain squeaks at once. The actual sounds that come out of her mouth are something more like “desu desu desu!” but you have no trouble understanding it.

“That’s your analysis?”

‘Yes! The enemy fleet’s current aircraft are stationed too close to their ships, and have not been replaced or refuelled in the last forty minutes. The strike will be delivered from standoff distance and with safe egress.’

“Are you certain of that?”

‘All analysts are confident of success.’

It wasn’t easy to share their confidence, but having a second opinion did help a little. “Can you elaborate?”

‘Enemy air-to-air weapon performance is judged to be poor. Analysis of hostile radar emissions indicate low-power mechanically-steered arrays of only moderate sophistication, highly susceptible to electronic attack. The Enemy has demonstrated no electronic warfare capabilities beyond crude jamming and unclassified short-range interference techniques.’

“As in, ‘prevent detection entirely’ susceptibility?”

‘Of our strike aircraft, yes. Their aircraft will likely alert them to the incoming cruise missiles.’

“Will they be able to shoot them down?”

‘Some, but not all. Though no clear assessment can be made of the performance of their interceptors, based on the type and performance of enemy countermeasures in the last battle, our analysts believe at least one hit per ship can be considered likely.’

That’s really all it would take. The impact of an AShM is a devastating thing. And you have sixty-four of them on the way to absolutely fuck the enemies’ shit the hell up, ten or eleven per ship. It would be the first true cruise missile saturation attack ever attempted against an enemy fleet.

And despite your still-fresh nerves from the outcome of the last battle, you can see clearly that this would not be a repeat. You had no one but your own aircraft to defend, no priorities split between the hostile cruise missile threat and the air battle, and you would be firing from great distance against an enemy that apparently could not put up the kind of aerial defence you just had.

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>>6113643

The greatest complication is going to be those few patrol aircraft still in the air. If they carry air-to-air missiles they would be able to substantially reduce the missile attack’s numbers and hence chance of success, on top of possibly providing targeting data to their fleet just as your own aircraft could. Unless, of course, they were coaxed away and taken out. That would require at least some of your fighters to follow their SLAMs into harm’s way to distract the foe, but you had the overwhelming advantage in numbers both of airframes and of missiles, and with just four patrol aircraft in position to do anything about your attack and no conflicting priorities for weapons employment this time, you almost certainly be able to overwhelm them from a distance, even if it meant defending from a shot or two in turn.

>[1] Continue the mission as planned; there’s been enough risk today. You’ll almost certainly do some serious damage if not put all those ships under outright, and in the worst case, you have more missiles, and can mount a larger and more sophisticated attack the second time.
>[2] Take the risk. If the attack fails you’ll be facing a longer battle, possibly against two carrier air wings (even if one has just been largely declawed), and so forced to defend again.

>[3] Write-in. (e.g. questions for the Captain fairy, telling me to GET ON WITH IT, etc.)

>>6113644
>[1] Continue the mission as planned; there’s been enough risk today. You’ll almost certainly do some serious damage if not put all those ships under outright, and in the worst case, you have more missiles, and can mount a larger and more sophisticated attack the second time.

Write in; ask the captain how are we to get replacement personnel (even if we can ‘’pick up’’ or just a ‘normal’ jet to replace lost ones like it’s Minecraft, replacement pilots can become a issue)


Side note; Annons, what is our plan if/when we encounter the US Navy command? Or normal humans in general

>>6113644
>[2] Take the risk. If the attack fails you’ll be facing a longer battle, possibly against two carrier air wings (even if one has just been largely declawed), and so forced to defend again.

>>6113644
>[1] Continue the mission as planned; there’s been enough risk today. You’ll almost certainly do some serious damage if not put all those ships under outright, and in the worst case, you have more missiles, and can mount a larger and more sophisticated attack the second time.

PS -- From the last battle it seems better to standoff rather than close-in with this foe.

And now that the Captain of the Enterprise is mentioned, I cannot help but think of Owen Honors. Gotta see their fo'c'sle follies videos once we safely in port.

>>6113644
>>[1] Continue the mission as planned; there’s been enough risk today. You’ll almost certainly do some serious damage if not put all those ships under outright, and in the worst case, you have more missiles, and can mount a larger and more sophisticated attack the second time.

>>6113644
>Continue the mission as planned; there’s been enough risk today. You’ll almost certainly do some serious damage if not put all those ships under outright, and in the worst case, you have more missiles, and can mount a larger and more sophisticated attack the second time.
We have enough of an advantage that we don't have to be taking risks like this

egads all our crew have been maximum weebified and are now cute chibi girls in whatever maybe-physical hammerspace they exist in. There is the remote possibility that this setting might have been written by the Japanese!

>>6113644
>[1] Continue the mission as planned; there’s been enough risk today. You’ll almost certainly do some serious damage if not put all those ships under outright, and in the worst case, you have more missiles, and can mount a larger and more sophisticated attack the second time.

>>6113644
>[1] Continue the mission as planned; there’s been enough risk today. You’ll almost certainly do some serious damage if not put all those ships under outright, and in the worst case, you have more missiles, and can mount a larger and more sophisticated attack the second time.

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>>6113644

You look down at the fairy as another question burns its way to the fore. “Where do you come from?”

‘I come from the ship. I am the Captain.’

“You were born aboard me?”

‘Yes. I awoke at time 0735.’

“Today? All fully-developed?”

‘Yes.’

You bite your lip. “If a member of the crew dies, what happens? Is it possible to recruit new sailors?”

‘A new sailor will be recruited and trained.’

“From where, though?”

The Captain once again looks baffled. ‘From the Ship.’

“So, when you die you just respawn? Like some kind of video game?”

‘No. New crew must be recruited and trained.’

“How long does that take?” Depending on their position and level of expertise, training a new human crewman could easily be a task of months to years.

‘Unknown.’ She pauses, and you can actually feel her reaching out to some other fairies somewhere deep in your hull. ‘Protocols dictate milestones, not timelines.’

“You could start right away, then? With recruitment?”

‘Negative. Vital resources are required.’

“That’s still not very helpful, you know. What kind of resources?”

‘Material resources.’

You grit your teeth and try not to get short with the tiny creature. “Such as?”

The fairy pauses again, this time querying your logistics corpsmen. ‘Autogenous replenishment will principally require proteins, oils, and complex carbohydrates.’

“… Food? You’re saying I need to eat food to repair and resupply and even train new crew?”

‘Affirmative.’

That was probably the first straight answer about anything you’ve received all day. “What else do I need to do, then? Do I need any special facilities to do maintenance?”

‘Certain repairs that cannot be performed underway may necessitate port calls and time in drydock.’ The Captain purses her lips. ‘Exact requirements unknown.’ Naturally. Then, ‘recruitment may also require time in port.’

You check the time as you chew on her words. Six minutes to launch.

You can’t help but think about the Enemy. Twenty-four monsters, lost to a one, for a single dead foe and no anti-ship missiles launched. They had not simply charged into battle with courage and lost, they had been… expended, not as assets but as munitions. Assuming the Enemy’s carrier isn’t suicidally stupid or hopelessly insane they had sent a huge portion of their air wing to die on the off-chance that one or two might get a missile in edgewise. If the lives of their aircrews really are just that cheap, and the monsters you now faced could replenish their losses by eating and resting like living organisms healing from injuries, it made a certain cruel sense. Perhaps there was some other reason, but that had all the cold logic a monster could hope for.

>>6114339

This Captain fairy has a look of single-minded determination no human could match. She is a part of you. She is of you. From you she was born, and with you she shall perish. So too are all the thousands of other fairies that make up your complement and air wing. When you seek out the commander of Blue 3’s squadron - VFA-1, you suppose they would be called - and find her in a meeting room, pointing at a whiteboard with a drawing of the enemy aircraft and dissecting the enemy’s observed capabilities with a group of other pilot fairies. You don’t pay much attention to what she’s saying but her attitude is plainly disparaging. Every one among them carries an air of iron resolve. You know already that they are ready and willing to carry out whatever mission their Ship calls them to perform, no matter the danger.

But that’s not your way. There’s no reason to take risks you don’t absolutely have to. Your fairies deserve better regardless of how ready and willing they may be. You decide against retasking your strike aircraft; the mission will go ahead as planned. You dismiss the Captain, and she disappears back into your hull with another sharp salute.

After a minute, you radio over to the rest of your strike group. ‘Everyone, Enterprise - are you all… full of, um, potato-faced elves too, by any chance?’

For a long moment, there is silence. Then you hear a sharp snort. ‘Potato-faced-!’ Bainbridge spits. ‘Yeah, they really are, aren’t they?’

‘Wow, look at them all. So cute,’ Long Beach says.

When you look over, Nagato has one sitting in her palm and is staring at it in rapt fascination.

It was a relief to know you weren’t the only one who had taken having a crew for granted.

Tearing your attention away from ship fairies and other inanities, you focus on the missile launch, watching as the planes approach their turnaround. The Enemy makes no move. They could certainly see the existence and heading of the Growlers already flooding the environs with radio noise, but the Growler’s particular paths would not suggest an intercept course, and the F-18s’ relatively small radar profiles would be lost in the electronic fog. The cruise missiles themselves, launched from 135 miles away and queued to their targets by Searchlight, would stay below the radar horizon until 30 or so seconds out, putting immense pressure on the enemy fleet’s relatively primitive and now damaged missile defence suites. Main radar arrays will face coverage gaps, especially old mechanically-steered models; high-resolution fire control radars used to guide interceptors onto incoming threats, already few in number and with some now out of commission, will need to switch from one target to the next with all haste.

>>6114340

When a missile impacts, the blast wave courses through the tight confines of the ship’s compartments, bursting doors like a bottle popping its cork and shaking loose anything not sufficiently nailed down. Shrapnel shreds through the ship’s structure like tissue paper, compromising the integrity of bulkheads and of the hull itself, tearing apart machinery, bursting pipes, cutting wires, killing sailors. But the real danger is fire. While ships are generally built to float, and have a great deal of redundancy in that regard, fire is another matter entirely. Starting with the unspent fuel of the missiles themselves, just about everything that isn’t made of steel is prone to igniting, from plastics and fabrics and fuel and to the rocket propellants and explosives that make a warship what it is.

Even in the best case, the crew faces a desperate rear-guard damcon effort on two fronts against both fire and flood to keep their ship alive. The task would be made orders of magnitude harder by the destruction wrought upon firefighting systems themselves. Ruined plumbing, failing power, equipment lost to the flooding of compartments or separated from the survivors by shattered hallways roaring flame. In the worst, the ship would be torn to pieces in a magazine explosion before efforts at damage control could even be made.

Fire kills. Fire consumes. Fire melts flesh and softens metal, it floods a ship with smoke and poisons the very air. Fire aboard a ship is every sailor’s worst nightmare. You are no stranger to its terrors. The scars of a terrible conflagration on your flight deck decades ago still itch on your lower back, faded now but not gone.

One by one, missiles fall from their pylons and ignite, sinking down close to the waves. The F-18s turn around and make for home. No SAMs rise in retaliation, nor does the enemy CAP give chase.

14 minutes.

Six new Tomcats take point over Prinz Eugen, while tankers top up the fighter escorts surrounding you and your two Hawkeyes. Red, Blue, and Green Flights make it back safely. The slow-moving helicopters of Royal Flight begin to close in on Prinz Eugen, more than an hour after they were launched.

10 minutes. 80 miles. Sure enough, the enemy’s CAP aircraft pick up the cruise missiles, and attempt to chase them down. A few air-to-air missiles go out; a few SLAMs disappear from the track. A few more are lost to guns. Still the noose tightens - there are far too many, approaching the fleet from too many angles.

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>>6114341

The near-infrared imaging seeker on the nose of the SLAM-ER is able to uplink everything it sees to the aircraft that launched it, or in this case Searchlight, as your strikers are long since below the radio horizon. Every uploaded feed starts to record as the missiles make their terminal approaches. Feeds cut out one by one as interceptors home in. Others wink out so close you can tell there was no stopping them before impact. The feeds of a few stragglers give you an impromptu damage assessment, showing pillars of black smoke and raging fires from every hull, including critically a large boxy one in the centre of the formation - their aircraft carrier. Soon enough Searchlight detects that the ships are slowing and meandering off-course. Your attack got through, to savage, ruinous effect.

That fleet, though… what you see sickens you. The ships are all black, part machine, part sea creature, hard straight lines here and smooth organic curves there. Every one is coated with the scales and slime and encrustations of the deep, like the carcasses of dead ships torn from their rest in the cold below and chained to the surface to fight once again. Demons? Zombies? Vengeful ghosts? Whatever they are, they need to die, and go back to the deep to rest or seethe away from the world of the living.

‘Scratch one flattop,’ you announce over the radio. But there’s little triumph in it for you, after seeing your enemy up close, only relief.

Fleet One is no more. Prinz Eugen is defended, both by air and by sea; in a few hours she will be under the umbrella of your cruisers’ Aegis suites. All that remains to be dealt with now is Fleet 2.

And to get in contact with 3rd Fleet command. You might be out of direct radio range, but now that you know your capabilities better and with active combat no longer occupying your full attention, you realise you could take advantage of the radios onboard one of your Vikings telepathically. With bags and tanking they had plenty of range. And maybe, finally, you could get some support. Perhaps even a ride.

>[1] Defensive posture. The enemy could be most of a thousand miles away, and hunting them down would be a serious challenge, especially if they’re stealthier than the other fleet was; trying to attack them from so far away will also be a great deal harder, especially with an intact air defence network.
>[2] Hunt these bastards down even if you have to go to the ends of the earth to find them.

>>6114342
>[2] Hunt these bastards down even if you have to go to the ends of the earth to find them.

>>6114342
>[1] Defensive posture. The enemy could be most of a thousand miles away, and hunting them down would be a serious challenge, especially if they’re stealthier than the other fleet was; trying to attack them from so far away will also be a great deal harder, especially with an intact air defense network.
We only really need to screen for any potential interdiction attempts.


We should share what we saw from the SLAMs, make sure the rest of the "task force" knows the face of the enemy. Also if what damage we have observed on the islands / atolls could correspond to said Threat Fleet based on what we've seen so far.
Determining if their subs travel in wolfpacks or are lone hunters may be an important to figure out.

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>>6114342
>Defensive posture. The enemy could be most of a thousand miles away, and hunting them down would be a serious challenge, especially if they’re stealthier than the other fleet was; trying to attack them from so far away will also be a great deal harder, especially with an intact air defence network.
Mission accomplished for now. Let's wrap up here with the main threat dealt with and continue on with our main objectives instead of running around chasing after enemies, of which there's surely going to be more.

Hopefully Nag doesn't feel too obsolete after that show.

>>6114342
>>[2] Hunt these bastards down even if you have to go to the ends of the earth to find them.

>>6114342
>[1] Defensive posture. The enemy could be most of a thousand miles away, and hunting them down would be a serious challenge, especially if they’re stealthier than the other fleet was; trying to attack them from so far away will also be a great deal harder, especially with an intact air defence network.

We need to get to Hawaii and share the intel gathered, and see if we can refit the older ships with more modern weapons- even if it’s just welding rocket-tubes where the turret use to be and FEMA grade communications equipment set up on the deck-
Not to mention getting updated codes for satellite communications and updated intel on the state of NATO’s navies. I think it’s safe to assumed that Article 5 had been engaged even if only the pasific is ‘’infested’’.

If these monsters are targeting cargo ships- then the clock is ticking before supply chains breakdown cause a global famine, let alone the brake-down of global medical and energy supplies.

>>6114342
>[1] Defensive posture. The enemy could be most of a thousand miles away, and hunting them down would be a serious challenge, especially if they’re stealthier than the other fleet was; trying to attack them from so far away will also be a great deal harder, especially with an intact air defence network.

>>6114342
>[1] Defensive posture. The enemy could be most of a thousand miles away, and hunting them down would be a serious challenge, especially if they’re stealthier than the other fleet was; trying to attack them from so far away will also be a great deal harder, especially with an intact air defence network.

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>>6114342
>>[1] Defensive posture. The enemy could be most of a thousand miles away, and hunting them down would be a serious challenge, especially if they’re stealthier than the other fleet was; trying to attack them from so far away will also be a great deal harder, especially with an intact air defence network.

I want option two, to rip and tear but this is probably better.

Also no offence but that Nagato looks like she has the worst parts of Downs and Fetal alcohol syndrome. Allow me to post a far superior ship.

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>>6114705
Admittedly not a very flattering picture but I didn't have another with a fairy already saved. Here's a better Nagato.

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>>6114705
And some Shimakaze just for you

>>6114718
The most adorable navy in the world.

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>>6114718
Danke you! Kek.

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So. Much. Freedom.

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>>6114735
>reddit

Ewwww.

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>>6114897

I'll cop to reading the news there in the mornings. It's convenient. And when it comes to finding decent fan art, well, sometimes the hardest searches require the strongest wills.

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When OP said Nagato's helmet looked "half samurai and half pagoda mast"....

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>>6114342

We are back! I tried to stuff too many things into this update and it turned into a 4,000-word monstrosity I had to rewrite several times, and I couldn't find a good decision point.

OOOOO

Within three minutes of the possibility of phoning home via Viking occurring to you, four airframes are already off the deck, two to make the journey and two to top them off around 500 miles out so as to give them as much loiter time as possible. Theirs will be a roughly four hour flight over hostile waters, but they’ll make it in silence and keep their eyes and ears wide open. If they lose contact with you then you will have to load up another pair with all the recordings and evidence you can and hope for the best.

In the same event you send up a flight of Tomcats to perform a proper battle damage assessment over Fleet One and a second to go south just in case Fleet Two tries anything, but you don’t expect them to. Those ships could be a thousand miles away already, and with both an operational flight deck and working air defences, they’ll be a pain to try and attack over such a great distance. They’ll have to live to sink another day.

As the minutes tick away and slowly pass to an hour, then two, as you launch and recover and launch again, as your BDA flight finds only debris and burning oil, the calm of the open sea finally starts to work its way into your tense shoulders. You won. Decisively. It was the first real battle you had ever commanded, and though it could have gone far better, you had achieved your goals in every engagement, defending your charge and destroying a major threat to your strike group in the span of not much more than an hour.

Hours later, when the sun is sinking low and your Vikings are still about 500 miles from Hawaii, they finally pick up a whiff of radio noise. L-band microwaves, the source of which appears to be well closer than Hawaii and moving fast. Though the Vikings are well out of range of you or your E-2s and can’t pass the signals along for processing, you have a good idea of what you’re hearing: the call of an E-3 Sentry.

‘Alright everyone, moment of truth,’ you radio to your fleetmates.

The transponders in your planes flick on, squawking out 7700, the code for generic distress.

The distant AWACS is not long in answering. “Ruby 1, this United State military aircraft, state the nature of your emergency,” a voice calls. The man sounds young, and perhaps it’s just your imagination, but rather tense too.

There is a solid 30 seconds of dead silence on the other end. “Enterprise, please confirm: you are CVN-8-0?”

You have a successor already, it seems. Good to see the tradition carried on. “No, this is CVN-6-5.”

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>>6117884

“6-5? Wait- are you a shipgirl?”

That catches you quite off-guard. “… I think so? There are others with me. Long Beach CGN-9er, Bainbridge CGN-2-5, Nagato, and Prinz Eugen. Position is north 0-1-”

“Enterprise, cease transmission immediately. EMCON level Bravo,” the man cuts you off sharply. “Your position is known. Ruby 1 and 2 will be escorted to Hickam. Orders to follow. Over.”

“Roger, emissions Bravo, over and out,” you say.

This war is clearly much larger than what you just experienced, if the man’s brusqueness is anything to judge by.

It’s not a surprise that they know where you are, though. ELINT satellites would have picked you up in the morning pretty much the moment you came to life, and they had no doubt been following your E-2s’ radars with great interest since they first lit up around four hours ago. Complying with the EMCON order doesn’t prove difficult - level Bravo means mission-critical systems only, which is more or less what you’ve been maintaining. You can even do that one better by shutting off your Link-11 and Link-16 connections and listening to your fairies and Hawkeyes directly. Use the Force, Enterprise.

You relay the order to your fleetmates, and tell them to gather in person for a proper meeting.

“Well?” Bainbridge asks. Shouts, really - trying to hold a proper meeting in twenty knots of wind isn’t easy, though being a ship-person apparently comes with pipes like a foghorn, which helps matters.

“That was pretty much it. ‘Stop talking, we know where you are, hurry up and wait,’” you paraphrase. “He did ask if I was a ‘shipgirl,’ though.”

“Shipgirl?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Can’t say I love it. At least we know Hawaii’s still there.”

“That we do. So… monsters,” you say simply. It’s past time to discuss the zombified elephant in the room.

“Yeah, what the fuck?” Bainbridge says. “They looked like shipwrecks!”

“They might be,” you say. “They were black in thermal - cold as ice. Way colder than the water, at any rate, even on a sunny tropical day.”

“Think those are what did for Kwajalein?”

“Not those ones specifically, at least, or not them alone. Whatever it was that hit the Marshalls hit them so hard nobody’s bothered to reoccupy them since. And judging from the footage one of my Vikings got of Wake, it’s the same story there. I can’t imagine a couple of third-rate ‘80s-vintage battle groups doing that and surviving long afterwards.”

“But if those fuckers were just wandering around in broad daylight… God, how many of them *are* there if we don’t have enough bombs to kill them all?”

“It wouldn’t have to be a lot,” Long Beach posits, hand under her chin. She somehow manages to look serious and pensive while sailing backwards on one foot.

“And how do you figure that? I feel like we have plenty of bombs.”

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>>6117885

“Well, we all appeared literally out of thin air, right? Imagine if the monsters can do that too. One moment, nothing, it’s a quiet night, then *poof,* zombie battleship a mile off your port quarter, and you’re in a gun fight like it’s Guadalcanal. Better hope they’re loading AP.”

“… You know what would have been real nice? Waking up back in Bremerton.”

“The monsters can probably manifest in Puget Sound too.”

“It’s still better than monsters in the MIDDLE OF FUCKING NOWHERE! Actually, why *are* we here? Any ideas?”

“I believe the question rather is as to why *you* are here,” Nagato says dryly. “I was already in Bikini Atoll.”

“Well, we’re all dead boats. The three of us are nuke boats, and you’re a nuked boat, and we all showed up in a place where a bunch of boats got nuked dead.”

“And how much wood could a woodchuck chuck?” Bainbridge rolls her eyes. “That doesn’t explain anything.”

“It’s a connection,” you say. “I certainly can’t imagine it’s a coincidence. We’re getting off-track, though. We need to discuss contingencies - in case we can’t be airlifted, for example. There’s a lot of hostile ocean to cross.”

“What’d you have in mind?” Long Beach says.

“We have a pair of heavy gunboats who need an in-depth briefing on modern warfare, as well as whatever equipment we can give them. I don’t think it would be wise to try and jury-rig missile batteries to them underway even if we knew how to refit ourselves in the first place, but countermeasures and comms equipment we can manage.”

You had already gotten a head-start on that last point. Nagato’s attention for the last hour and a half had been completely absorbed by the iPad you’d handed her to give her access to your battle network and the detailed images of the monsters you’d accumulated. Her eyes had gone wide as the Moon as you described even just the tiniest fraction of what the piece of alien technology could do, from giving live-action views of a whole theatre to overlaying all manner of GIS data over high-res satellite imagery. Such a device is rather wondrous even by your standards, granted, but you had experienced the development of the digital age from its earliest days, and the proliferation of cheap personal electronics felt like a natural culmination of all those generations of ingenuity. You can’t wait to tell her about the internet.

“You think we should run gunnery exercises?” Long Beach asks.

“Seeing as you’re volunteering, by all means.”

“Walked right into that one, didn’t I. Well, I suppose I wouldn't mind having something to do. It’s been pretty quiet on our end.”

“Pardon,” Nagato says, “I believe you told me guns are no longer relevant in battles at sea.”

>>6117888

“They aren’t. Jets and missiles do the heavy lifting now, but that’s mostly because of range. If we’re fighting an enemy that can just teleport right up our backsides, a few big guns might come in handy, even if they’re a bit niche otherwise. Me and Bainbridge, we’re mostly anti-air platforms, we only carry a few anti-ship weapons, Harpoons and light anti-sub torpedoes. Although I suppose that close up TLAMs would work fine too, we have more of those, and even Standards’ll do the trick in pinch, though they’re not gonna sink anything…”

“Then, may I trust the two of you to see to training and ad-hoc solutions?” you ask the cruiser girls.

“You got it, E. We’ll give ‘em a crash course and put them through their paces.”

>[1] On with the plot - end the meeting and focus on making contact with the fleet.
>[2] Write-in - questions, suggestions, topics of conversation, tasks to accomplish or missions to launch before you’re occupied talking to brass.)

>>6117889
>[1] On with the plot - end the meeting and focus on making contact with the fleet.

Wonder if that sub is still shadowing us?

The Abyssal Columbia class SSBN, may not exist. and cannot hurt you

>>6117989
Write in; what’s the plan if we encounter hostile Ship Girls who might think that they are still at war with the USA or such?

Assuming we are only worrying about Empire of Japan- and not say- confused Soviets (tho if we see the Pepsi Fleet flying a Pepsi flag- I will LOL hard) or even somehow Iranian ships from Operation Pray Mantis- it’s 100’s of possible ships that would probably not listen. Maybe Nagato can convince them.

Not to mention that if a bunch of WW2 sunk ships of opposing sides poped up within the similar areas, they probably started to shoot at eachother before getting shot at by the monsters.

Nuclearfag- considering that we are all basically ships in our prime plus whatever latest upgrade we had at the time of dying- would that mean that ships that were never built right to begin with are now prime examples of what they should be?

IE; let’s say that in this timeline Amerial Kiriskov sunk in 1995, would that mean that we would see a variant of her that is as she is intended?

>>6117889
>[1] On with the plot - end the meeting and focus on making contact with the fleet.

As much as I love our rag-tag group of ship girls, lets get the show on the road.

Or not, they are fun to together. I also feel like Nagato is going to be useful far sooner that we expect. Modern armor or defensive measures does very little vs 16 inches of solid hate coming your way at knife-fighting distance.

>>6117889
>[1] On with the plot - end the meeting and focus on making contact with the fleet.

>>6118090
Pretty much. Last time I checked Iowas, SoDaks, and North Carolinas were deployed pretty close to the big fleet carriers just in case some Japanese BBs or CAs got any ideas - thankfully they never did.
Hells, IIRC if not for their DD escorts running out of fuel the US carrier fleet at Midway would've sailed right into the Japanese battleship fleet during nighttime and be wiped to the last.

Case in point: if the enemy can teleport always bring some heavy short-range firepower with you.

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>>6118230
>the US carrier fleet at Midway would've sailed right into the Japanese battleship fleet during nighttime and be wiped to the last.

Picrel

>>6117889
>[1] On with the plot - end the meeting and focus on making contact with the fleet.

>>6117889
>>[1] On with the plot - end the meeting and focus on making contact with the fleet.

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>>6117888

“Nagato, I have a task for you as well. A task only you can perform,” you say, turning to the battleship. “For diplomacy, not battle. You survived the war to the end, but most ships of the IJN didn’t: in the event we encounter any, it must fall to you to talk them down.”

Nagato nods gravely. “I shall speak. I cannot say if they will listen.”

“Of course. But we owe it to them to try first.”

With nothing else left on your agenda, you send your escorts. Bainbridge returns to her station while Long Beach takes Nagato aside to give her a crash course in the dangers of the modern age.

“So, the big danger is the anti-ship missile, like I told you earlier,” Long Beach began as they sailed away. “Some like ours are small, since modern ships aren’t armoured, and you can’t armour a radar anyhow. But the Soviets? They built all kinds of nasty massive supersonic overcompensation missiles that could blow up capital ships in one hit, and even designed whole fleets of supersonic heavy bombers just to deliver them. Kind of like the Jeune École of the skies…”

Half an hour later, amidst the golden glow of evening, the thunder of 16’’ gunfire tears through the quiet of the sea. Nagato fires once from each turret, then unleashes a full eight-gun broadside, then another, a tiny steel dragon singing fire back into the world.

Two thousand miles away, a pair of black specks outlined against the setting sun emerge from the patchy clouds to sidle up alongside Ruby Flight. F-16s, you see, laden with anti-air weapons and external tanks, looking like black dragons in their own right. The Vipers stay with your Vikings most of the way to Hawaii as night falls and the ATC at Inouye guides them in, only breaking away as Ruby 1 and 2 descend for their landing approaches.

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>>6120027

Looking down on the lands around Pearl Harbor from altitude, you scan for evidence of destruction through the black and white of FLIR. You spot a few depressions along Iroquois Point west of the bay that might be shell craters, but otherwise little enough. Yet the airport gates are all but empty of passenger liners. The civil airwaves are likewise empty of anything but a couple of local flights. And the military presence is striking. There are at least five CAP flights you can identify from listening to the radio, a second E-3 patrolling in the north, cargo flights bound in and out, a refuelling in process, helicopter patrols, and more. No other traffic at all delays Ruby Flight’s landings a moment.

On touchdown the two planes are directed onwards to Hickam, where they weave their way past a mighty flock of tactical and support aircraft, ultimately to an out-of-the-way hangar on the far side. The inside is brightly lit with all the power of high fluorescent hell lamps, and you find you can see normally, as if from the canopies of your planes, and you find yourself looking down their stubby noses at several rifle-armed Marines standing between you and a gaggle of Navy officers and ratings in the process of setting up folding tables, computers, and various other implements. Several such approach your planes cautiously, and once satisfied that they’re not about to open fire or explode, start to examine them in detail, taking extensive footage from both phones and proper cameras.

Eventually, a door on the other side of the hangar opens, and your planes are approached by a man in khakis and an upper Rear Admiral’s two silver stars. Tall and black and without a hair on his head, he carries himself with an air of due authority. His nameplate reads ‘Wells.’

With him is a small woman with a loose blonde ponytail, dressed rather too informally in baggy jeans and a white undershirt. A contractor, perhaps? But no, the more you look the more certain you are that this woman is a ship - a shipgirl. An old all-gun cruiser, if you had to guess, though what about her suggested that you couldn’t say.

One of the techs holds up a piece of posterboard with a frequency and the words ‘minimum power’ on it. Ah. So that’s how they expect you to talk.

“Testing, testing,” you say. A speaker placed on a chair between the two planes picks you up and you hear your voice ring through the hangar.

The admiral gives a faint, weary smile. “Hello, Enterprise,” he says. “You really have come back, haven’t you? I couldn't believe it when they told me. Oh, pardon me- I am Rear Admiral Thomas Wells, Commander, Carrier Strike Group 16.”

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>>6120028

A group commander strikes you as an unusual choice for a greeting - you had anticipated someone from COMPACFLEET’s office, perhaps, or maybe someone from 3rd Fleet command - but you realise you have no idea what the protocols for this kind of meeting are. Certainly Wells here seems accustomed enough to the notion of talking to an airplane like it’s a person. “Enterprise, CVN-65, the First, the Finest.”

“Welcome back, Enterprise” he says. “I only wish it were under better circumstances.”

>[1] “Speaking of, I’ve got some circumstances I would very much like some assistance getting out of.” (Press for support operations planning.)
>[2] “What *are* those circumstances, anyhow? What the hell happened to the world?” (Ask for a proper lore dump.)

>>6120030
>[1] “Speaking of, I’ve got some circumstances I would very much like some assistance getting out of.” (Press for support operations planning.)
Also give quick AAR of the recent engagement.

>>6120030
>[2] “What *are* those circumstances, anyhow? What the hell happened to the world?” (Ask for a proper lore dump.)

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>>6120030
>>[2] “What *are* those circumstances, anyhow? What the hell happened to the world?” (Ask for a proper lore dump.)

Also, who this bish in the image. Heard something about a Grey Ghost that one time.

>>6120030
>>[2] “What *are* those circumstances, anyhow? What the hell happened to the world?” (Ask for a proper lore dump.)

>>6120030
>[2] “What *are* those circumstances, anyhow? What the hell happened to the world?” (Ask for a proper lore dump.)
... and give a quick AAR.

>[2] “What *are* those circumstances, anyhow? What the hell happened to the world?” (Ask for a proper lore dump.)

‘’Thank god that so far as I can tell this haven’t gotten so bad that there’s a nuclear exchange’’ is probably warranted.

I think the fact that we haven’t detected nuclear detonations or seen apparent evidence of serious civil unrest on Hawaii, than I am predicting that this crisis is still fresh but not as fresh as we are. Maybe a month of being exposed- 1 more for the crisis to spread at most, a few day all together at minimum.

Are we detecting anything on civilian Radio and Television waves? Maybe we can tune into a radio news transmission or even HAM radios to see what they are saying and compare it to the official statement from the Navy. If we can not multitask like that maybe we can record such data for later comparison.

I know we can wirelessly and emissionlessly control our jets and get readings on it- dose that exstend to having them ‘’relay’’ transmissions to our intelligence sweep to have our off-duty sprites go over them for analysis?

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>>6120265
>Are we detecting anything on civilian Radio and Television waves? Maybe we can tune into a radio news transmission or even HAM radios to see what they are saying and compare it to the official statement from the Navy. If we can not multitask like that maybe we can record such data for later comparison.

There's plenty of normal civilian radio going around, music and news and so on, just not a lot of air traffic - I probably should have made that distinction clear. Hawaii apparently isn't a tourist hotspot at the moment.

>I know we can wirelessly and emissionlessly control our jets and get readings on it- dose that extend to having them ‘’relay’’ transmissions to our intelligence sweep to have our off-duty sprites go over them for analysis?

You can see and hear what your planes do from at least 2,000 miles away, but you're limited to the instruments onboard whatever that craft is whenever it's out of radio range of the rest of your aircraft. The S-3s are general-purpose scouting platforms for surface recon, ASW, and SIGINT and so so have some decent signals processing equipment, but to send that to your intel fairies you would have do so directly, which is only modestly better than telling them in words. You could say "I see a ship at position X," but you would need to describe the ship well enough for them to draw a picture rather than transmitting the raw data from the plane's sensors. Additionally, fairies can talk to each other telepathically while within you, but once outside need comms equipment.

>>6120030
>“What *are* those circumstances, anyhow? What the hell happened to the world?” (Ask for a proper lore dump.)
As someone who isn't that familiar with KC, some exposition to get us up to speed would be greatly appreciated.

>>6120265
My guess would be that Hawaii may have been at least partially evacuated and that this has all been going on for some time. With the constant threat of seaborne attack and severed maritime supply lines, a population relocation of the population to keep them safe and free up aviation logistics for the military sounds like the least worst option for the Hawaiians. In the absence of air traffic, it beats me how what they're all eating out here unless they have some kind of convoy escort system going for the merchantmen.

>>6120301
My guess also. Also I wanted to see the radio waves to see how- ‘’apocalyptic’’ the news seems, also if the emergency broadcasting system is playing anything, or if the news now have ‘’Eldwich Horror’s forecasting’’ going on.

To compare what we are going to be told with what the public is being told- if the difference is massive than I would bet then the situation is worse than even what we will be told.

>>6120300
-Write in
Also some questions for what it means for us- like how dose the USA and her Allies regard us Ship-girls? Are we people? Things? Property of the US Navy?
What is the current strategy for the monsters? Are we going to be fighting along side normal navies?
And most importantly: had you guys tried to transport a ship girl via helicopters or planes? Or see if you can pariashoot out of a plane?

The idea of an entire carrier battle group able to be flown coach across the planet in 12 hours- EXPECIAlY if you can cram them full of whatever supplies you need other than normal navial stuff is insane.

QM?