Chapter 562: First Deal
The pirate ship that had been in pirate hands, the Cobra-class destroyer, had been brutally refitted over and over!
Huge numbers of its internal compartments and decks had been torn out, rebuilt from sheet metal, torn out again, and rebuilt again.
By now, the inside of the destroyer was nothing but jerry-built sheet-metal shacks. That was where the pirates had lived.
And when Kian looked closer, he found that most of the pirate ship's lances and macro-cannons didn't work anymore. They'd been destroyed centuries ago, and the pirates had only kept the bare minimum of armament working.
The ship's void shield and plasma reactors were also hopelessly worn out. All you could say was that the thing still flew. It definitely couldn't handle any heavy combat.
The tech-priests told Kian that if he wanted to restore the destroyer to factory-new fighting condition, it would have to be hauled to an industrial world for a twenty-year super-overhaul.
Kian didn't have twenty years, and he didn't have the money for that kind of overhaul either. He couldn't afford all that expensive equipment.
So he figured he might as well convert the destroyer into a mobile raw-materials plant.
Kian's idea was that from now on, the Golden Road would handle fine manufacturing, actually building lasrifles, artillery, and so on.
The pirate ship would handle rough processing: smelting ore into iron, turning certain substances into chemicals, and so on.
There were plenty of rare minerals out in the void, and Kian's Scavenge-Strike-Extract System recognized them too.
Because a warship was so huge and held so many goods, the system had simply sorted the materials Kian could acquire into three tiers.
Tier 1: Common Materials. Used to make lasrifles, carapace armour, and other ordinary products. Ordinary steel, ordinary chemical products, plastics, and similar all count as Common Materials.
Kian checked. One unit of Common Materials in the system worked out to roughly ten tonnes in reality.
Ten tonnes of Common Materials could produce about twenty thousand lasrifles.
Tier 2: Intermediate Materials. Alloy steel, specialty chemicals, and other refined inputs.
Walkers were built from materials of this grade. Roughly one unit of Intermediate Materials plus two units of Common Materials made two walkers.
Tier 3: Advanced Materials. Adamantium, extremely rare chemical materials, extremely rare specialty materials, extremely rare medical materials, and so on.
Right now, the Golden Road's holds contained 2,000 units of Common Materials, 500 units of Intermediate Materials, and 1 unit of Advanced Materials.
That one unit of Advanced Materials was the adamantium drill head he'd pulled out of the ground on Agri-World 496b last time. It happened to weigh a little over ten tonnes, so it counted as one unit of Advanced Materials.
Ever since Kian bound the Golden Road as his flagship, the ship had become partly data, and in some ways the line between it and reality had gotten blurry.
For example, building a lasrifle obviously took more than steel. It needed synthetic plastics, laser crystals, and other materials.
But as long as the system showed enough low-tier materials, it didn't matter if those materials were all steel or all chemicals. The ship's mobile manufactorum would still produce lasrifles. It was that absurd!
That was exactly what drove Kian to convert the pirate ship into a raw-materials plant!
The pirate ship was already a wreck. If he sent it into battle and it sank, then what?
Better to hollow it out and put in a steel mill, a chemical plant, and other raw-materials processing.
Then, when they passed asteroid fields with useful minerals, he could park it there to mine and smelt.
The steel and chemicals it produced would be sent over to the Golden Road, where they'd be converted into all-purpose low-tier materials.
Those low-tier materials could be used to make guns, cannons, and armour, or even synthetic starch, so the people aboard could keep running indefinitely.
Kian's order to the Planetary Governor was one mining production line, one chemical production line, and twenty-four multi-purpose void-mining shuttles.
The Governor read the requirements, closed his eyes, and did some calculating.
The mining line and the chemical line weren't expensive, but 5,500 slaves clearly wasn't enough to pay for it all.
He'd have to send people to move all of it onto the pirate ship, heavily refit the pirate ship, and calibrate the equipment.
If all he got was 5,500 slaves, he'd clearly be losing out.
So the tall fat Governor and Kian negotiated for a long time, going back and forth, until they finally reached a new deal.
The Crossroads' Governor would repair the Golden Road, patching up the big holes punched in it during the boarding fight.
He'd also refit the pirate ship and turn it into a mobile production plant.
On Kian's side, he'd pay 5,500 slaves, 20% of the canned guana-beast meat aboard his ship, and 120,000 specially modified lasrifles.
When the fat Governor learned that Kian's ship had a lasrifle production line and could make custom lasrifles, he was overjoyed. He immediately rattled off a list of specs and asked Kian to produce 120,000 custom lasrifles for him.
Gravity on their asteroid was very low, so people two to two and a half metres tall were everywhere.
They looked tall and intimidating, but every one of them had brittle bones. Give one a kick, and he'd be lying on the ground for half a day.
Lasrifles had recoil too. When the laser flashed at the muzzle, it pushed back on the gun, and these brittle-boned void-dwellers couldn't take even that much push. Sustained fire caused bad shoulder pain or even fractures.
Most of the lasrifles sold on the void market were standard models, made for ordinary people. Even the Governor's guard used these groundside lasrifles, which caused all kinds of problems and never really suited them.
So when Kian showed up with a lasrifle factory, the Governor was over the moon.
He asked Kian to make three hundred thousand guns with extremely low recoil but firepower as close as possible to an ordinary lasrifle.
Kian modded the gun to his specs.
First he gave the lasrifle a floating barrel, so with each shot the barrel slid back a little, soaking up some of the recoil.
Then he put an angled muzzle brake on the front of the barrel, like the slanted muzzle brake on an AK.
That way, when the laser flashed at the muzzle, the rearward push would be redirected downward.
Then he swapped in a buffer-spring stock, like the one on an AR rifle, so the spring in the stock would eat a big chunk of the recoil.
Finally he added a rubber butt pad: two points less recoil, a little better ergonomics.
With that, the lasrifle was done: recoil control maxed out, at three times the price of an ordinary gun.
The tall fat Governor tested the gun himself and was full of praise. The recoil was so low it wouldn't hurt his brittle-boned void-dwellers, and it kept nearly the same firepower as an ordinary lasrifle. It was the perfect weapon for them!
If installing the mobile factory on the pirate ship hadn't only taken a month, and if the Golden Road's lasrifle factory could produce more than 120,000 a month, he'd have wanted to buy even more.
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