As soon as the drops ships settled at their respective landing sites, large cargo doors retracted up and into the top hull sections. A ramp moving out from the lower hull and slowly lowered to the ground. After these preliminary actions a large hover sled slowly moved from out of the drop ship. On the sled was a covered projector dish, which was followed by another right after it.
These projector dishes would later be fitted to a base control and shield generator station. Before this installation would be assembled there would have to be an underground room constructed to help keep the shield projectors and power generators protected. To assist in these actions four massive contructions droids emerged from the cargo holds and went right to work.
Engineers were also onboard the drop ship and would be the ones instructing all the building and assembly to make sure it all went smoothly. They set up a makeshift camp and started to put together prefabricated housing after meeting with the Kashan ground troops and thanking them for their security assistance.
As the ground teams unloaded the drop ships Rob Stellar was still in the lounge discussing the nature of the contract. He took a drink of his water and started accessing files on the data pad before him. Soon, above the table an image of a hexagonal stucture appeared. As it rotated one could see it had a flattened top and buttom, but sloping sides joing to a straight section. It all appeared to look like a hexagonal box with all eight sides sloping towards the edge.
Above and below this center hexagonal central box structures extended a square platform. It rotated slowly to reveal itself fully to the Commodore and anyone else in the room. At the top of the projection words appeared, "Gladiator Modular Defense Station" they stated. This was Stellar Enterprises first attempt at a fully modular station that could serve a variaty of different purposes for different missions. Instead of a fixed design, most system within the station could be swaped out for different ones. All weapons and sensors could be replaced with modules contained other systems or other weapons types.
These modular sections were fully prepared containers. Each one contained the necessary systems and operating stations for quick installation or removal. Once moved into the hull, the sections are connected to the stations computers and power relay stations making them quickly operational. They were designed to be primerally plug-n-play type units.
If a customer ordered a fighter defense platform, the heavy weapons modules could be removed and more antifighter modules could be put in their place. The same was true for the stations fighter compliments. With some weapons modules removed, the station would be host to eighteen fighter/bomber squadrons.
The one floating over the table, however, was an example of a well balanced defense station. It had weapons for every sort of engagement. As it rotated slowly, small boxed popped out and listed system descriptions while small projections pointed them out. This station before them had a massive single hypervelocity slug cannon installed into the top square platform. This gun was covered with massive armor clamshell blast doors. These would retract in battle and allow the cannon to emerge from the hull to engaged targets further than any turbolaser or missile system.
The magnetically accelerated rounds were only limited by accuracy at longer ranges as well as the power it consumed. Its power demands were massive on any scale. While the gun fired, other weapons systems could not. It was a fair trade off, however, since the cannon could quickly destroy or disable larger ships from great distances and if ones made it closer, the cannon could be powered down and the power tranferred to the other weapons systems.
As more boxes appeared, they revealed that besides the hypervelocity cannon the station contrained 85 Heavy Turbolaser Batteries, 80 Dual turreted Turbolaser Cannons, 16 Heavy Ion Cannon Batteries and 50 Ion Cannon Batteries. For antifighter and missile defense duties the Gladiator was armed with 90 Heavy Repeater Laser Cannons. These new weapons systems could lay down massive volumes of laser fire yet required somewhat longer cool down times. Because of these the onboard computers usually fired only half the lasers at one time, while the other half fired when the others were in cool down.
45 Rotating Warhead Launchers and 20 Turreted Tractor Beam Projectors were also added to the stations arsenal. These specially designed launchers could quickly send out a wave of torpedoes and fire almost every 2 seconds. As one warhead was fired, another one was autoloaded into another tube. Once fired the expanded tube would rotate out of the way and the just loaded one would take its place. While the other fired, the just expended one would be reloaded, and so on. Each tube was launched using magnetic accelerators and pushed out the warheads as high speeds without the need for them to use their own propulsion. This increased their ranged and also desguised their launching, giving no clues except visual and when the warhead actually ignited its own engines and seeker head.
Rob smiled as he looked at the Commodore. "What do you think Commodore Lucerne? Is this defense station suitable to your needs?"
