BuWeaps' and BuShips' response had been the Shrike-B, which exchanged the original Shrike's internal hangar for its own small cutter/lifeboat for four more countermissile launchers, a half dozen fire control links, and six more laser clusters designed to cover its stern. In addition, total countermissile magazine space had risen from fifty-two to one hundred, evenly divided fore and aft. Unlike larger, hyper-capable ships, the Shrike-Bs lacked transfer tubes, so each point defense battery had its own magazine, and the forward launchers could not use the after-launchers' birds or vice versa. That was a fairly minor concern, however, and all of the sims (whose parameters had been heavily updated on the basis of actual combat experience at Hancock) indicated that the new LACs would be considerably more survivable than the original Shrike.
In addition, however, Vice Admiral Adcock's BuWeaps was finally getting the entire Ghost Rider missile and drone family into full production. Because Ghost Rider's components had initially been conceived of as something to be carried only by hyper-capable combatants, BuWeaps had faced a severe challenge in engineering the same capabilities into something a LAC could carry, but they'd met it. The LAC-sized specialist missiles and drones were less capable than the full-sized versions, but the LACs were also far harder for enemy fire control to lock up in the first place, so the trade-off in effectiveness was virtually a dead heat. Where the LACs came up shortest was that they didn't have much internal capacity for any missiles, and each electronic warfare bird they carried was one less shipkiller they could have fitted in.
BuShips' solution, designed in close cooperation with BuWeaps, was the Ferret —class LAC. The Ferrets dropped all offensive energy armament to provide the maximum hull volume for missile magazines and an even more powerful electronic warfare suite. The enormous squeeze the Shrikes' massive graser put on their internal volume was obvious when the missile numbers on the Shrike-B— twenty shipkillers and a hundred countermissiles — were compared to the same numbers for the Ferret: fifty-six shipkillers and no less than one hundred and fifty countermissiles. That was particularly impressive given that EW volume requirements had grown by over twelve percent at the same time.
Doctrine called for the Ferrets to operate in a support role for the Shrike-Bs in alpha strikes on heavy warships. Against light combatants or merchantmen, the Ferret would be lethal from well outside the Shrike-B's energy-attack range, but LAC-sized missiles would be much less effective against anything bigger than a heavy cruiser. Against heavy units, the Ferret's job was to accompany the Shrike-B to provide EW support and as an antimissile escort, relying on its heavy countermissile load for active intercepts, and with its main magazines stuffed with electronic warfare birds rather than with shipkillers. Each LAC wing was assigned two squadrons of the missile boats, and despite a certain initial skepticism, the "Bird Boats" of the missile squadrons had quickly earned the respect of anyone who exercised with them. Or against them.
But the Ferrets also had one more innovation which the Shrike-Bs lacked. Because they had no offensive energy armament, it would have been foolish for them to accompany the graser-armed LACs all the way in on an alpha strike, so doctrine called for them to break off before the strike entered the enemy's point-blank energy range. That protected them from the fury of heavy shipboard lasers and grasers to which they could not reply, but it also meant enemy missiles were far more likely to get a clean shot at their after-aspects as they broke off and away. Accordingly, BuShips had used the last scraps of the internal volume freed by removing the graser to shoehorn in an additional sidewall generator. Just as powerful as the new "bow-wall" that closed off and protected the front of a Shrike' s wedge as it bored into energy range, the Ferret's "sternwall" closed off the rear of the wedge. Power requirements and the physics of the wedge meant only one aspect, bow or stern, could be closed at any given moment, but it gave a Ferret's skipper a much more flexible choice of breakaway vectors.
What Roden and Bolgeo wanted to do was build the same capability into a Shrike-B. BuShips had already considered the possibility and pronounced against it because the designers had no more internal volume to work with. They couldn't put the additional generator in without taking something else out, and they were disinclined to start pulling the additional systems BuWeaps had just bullied them into putting in in the first place.
They were no doubt correct about that, but Roden and Bolgeo had a notion of their own. They were both natives of Liberty Crossing on Gryphon, and until Bolgeo went into the Navy, ten years before Roden headed for Saganami Island, he and Roden's older brother had spent most of their free time in the machine shop of Bolgeo's engineer father. They'd done a lot of tinkering with spacegoing hardware, and Bolgeo had come up with an interesting solution to BuShips' objections. If the generator wouldn't fit inside the hull, why not mount it out side?
Personally, Tremaine was a bit surprised Roden and his crew had been able to find time to even consider such an original approach. The new LAC wings had already demonstrated a propensity for attracting the oddballs and the colorful (himself excluded, of course), but Cutthroat's crew was more offbeat than many. Bolgeo, Cutthroat's engineer, for example, had a record almost as distinguished as Horace Harkness' had been in his more adventuresome days. Then there was PO 2/c Mark Paulk, Cutthroat's helmsman. Paulk had a well-deserved reputation as a hot pilot... and he'd once been a chief petty officer before a certain incident involving an admiral's pinnace, a pair of young ladies of negotiable virtue, and a case of really good Hadrian's World scotch. Cutthroat's astrogator, Lieutenant (jg) Kerry Gilley, was younger than the others, but old in sin, with eyes which tried (generally unsuccessfully) to look innocent as the newborn day... as they had the day after he and CPO Paulk had taken the admiral's pinnace for its unauthorized spin. There were PO Sam Smith and his buddy PO Gary Shelton, Cutthroat's electronics warfare specialist and com officer respectively. Both of them were lifers — Smith had over thirty-six T-years in, and Shelton wasn't far behind — and there were persistent rumors that before the war, they had made themselves very helpful to Logistics Command in the disposal of redundant electronics. Of course, LogCom hadn't known the parts were redundant, but that was only because Smith and Shelton hadn't wanted to bother the Navy by cluttering up the proper channels with the paperwork on them. Or the profit from their disposal.
The rest of Cutthroat's crew were almost mundane in comparison. Lieutenant (jg) Olivia Cukor, the LAC's sensor officer, and Lieutenant Kirios Steinbach, the executive officer, actually didn't have a single blemish on their records. How long that would remain true, given the company they were now keeping, remained anyone's guess, of course. PO 3/c Luke Thiele, the assistant engineer, was too brand, squeaky new to have earned the same reputation as his older crewmates, but the way he followed Bolgeo around with puppylike devotion boded ill for his future record. As for the final member of the crew, Lieutenant Joe Buckley, the tac officer, the jury was still out. He was very good at his job, and had demonstrated a positive genius for tweaking and modifying his weapon systems' software, but the consensus in the squadron was that he could not possibly be as innocent as his earnest expression and manner seemed to indicate. He was, after all, assigned to Cutthroat, and everyone knew what that meant.