>>6131914“That’s… morbid.”
“You’re telling me. At least I knew what happened next. Poor girl was so out of it…” Raleigh trails off mid-sentence. “Where were we?”
“Manifestation,” you say. “Can it be predicted?”
“Not really, but mostly it happens in the rottenest weather around. We’re not sure if they bring the storms or the storms bring them, but the two come hand in hand.”
“Watch the weather, got it. Um, okay, I’m going to need to focus on flight ops in a few minutes here. I need hard numbers. I’ve seen their air-to-air weapons, and I know they have interceptors for fleet defence, but what kinds of detection and threat ranges are we talking? What are their EW capabilities? How do I deal with their magic countermeasures? Actually, is it possible for anyone to patch us back into the master threat library? That would be the fastest way.”
“We’re working on it ma’am,” one young tech says, a thin pasty boy with a great length of neck, “but you’re all going to need security updates, and we’re still chasing down the records on what hardware you’re running, so it may be a few hours. We can find an AG to keep you posted on weather from here in the meantime.”
“Okay, I can work with that,” you say. Then, more quietly to Raleigh, “‘ma’am?’”
“The Navy typically treats new returnees as brevet 1st LTs until we sign on proper,” she explains. “Sometimes they’ll bump us up to 0-3. Though, some of us are with the Coasties, some are enlisted, and some are even Army or Marine Corps, and they all do it case by case.”
“Good to know. Anyhow, could you give me some quick numbers?”
“From the few encounters we’ve had against the more modern Abyssals, we can say: sensor performance is hard to analyse, but overall, generally good enough for hunting merchies but not fighting a proper modern navy. Radar is mostly poor, but their sonar is decent. Their night vision on the other hand is excellent - darkness doesn’t hinder them much on the surface or in the air. That’s true of the older types, too.
“Air-to-air weapons: both active and semi-active guidance, physically large and heavy and with greater than 40 mile ranges, poor performance against manoeuvring targets, high susceptibility to countermeasures, and no home-on-jam capability.
“Surface to air missiles: ranges in excess of 60 miles, decent performance against slow targets such as aircraft, but poor against supersonic weapons. Air defences both magical and mundane have shown a high degree of vulnerability to saturation.
