Born the son of a ship captain and owner of the freighter Arch of Horizons and he also owned the space station Hagar III a repair and salvage station complete with a field of wrecked starships dating back to the first century of humanities travel to the stars. My father was the owner of the transport and salvage company known as Frontier Repairs that is until the fateful day when they came, pirates equipped with proper ftl ships a rarity in the earth system as the technology had only recently hit the market they came in hard and fast my father took command of his freighter a armed Ion class built by Makar Corp on earth originally designed for heavy transport in the current era it was little more than a intersystem freighter but my father had modified it extensively he added 4 auto cannon turrets with quad 20mm auto cannons and installed 4 scattershot type rail guns none of his weapons were designed to penetrate armor.
Energy weapons are considered the most effective weapon system second only to missiles but my father preferred the old solid shot weapons they certainly did well against the first ship he lined it up perfectly and covered them with a number of hits at extreme range but they were coming in too fast for his railguns to recharge meanwhile I was stuck on the station and told to suit up and get aboard one of the older ships we had in the salvage yard a Hiemdel Heavy Metal industries frigate designed in an era where armor was the only thing keeping your ship in a fight it had 10 centimeters of a unique composition that had been lost with the original company in a terrorist attack the armor technology has all of the best qualities you'd want in armor but one glaring weakness it's heavy so much so that no one had bothered to reverse engineer it though for its weight it offered about 145% the protection to mass ratio of other systems of armor but between mass and the unique composite structure both contributed to the fact no one bothered to reverse engineer it but it was the advent of energy shields that put the nail in its coffin.
I locked myself in the most heavily armored ship at my father's orders I was pretty upset but couldn't do anything but listen to him though it put me in a disabled ship that was and had been in a state of repair for years. The old frigate was disabled I had 3 people with me and no power for any of the systems and what systems were intact were not useful in a fight but I could probably get the railgun working but with no power but I might have a solution for that but first I'd need to get power working. As I worked on getting power I kept an eye on the battle raging outside my father was getting in some solid hits but he was out numbered and it was clearly a last stand meanwhile the station was hitting the pirates any time it had a shot unfortunately it wasn't built for combat and its few retrofitted lasers were mostly annoying the pirates though they seemed to want the station intact.
As the inevitable finally happened I got a front row seat to my father's end as his ship finally took critical damage and came apart under concentrated fire from the pirates. My father's ship exploded in a ball of plasma taking one of the pirate craft in the process luckily I managed to get a backup generator running off of the left over fuel in the drive coils it would only last a few hours but that should be enough to charge the railgun for a single shot with a bit left over for maneuvering. As the railgun charged the single remaining pirate vessel dispatched the stations turrets with impunity and were preparing to board but as luck would have it the railgun charged first and I made my shot count.
My shot had to count so I aimed carefully I targeted the pirates in the mid section where I could take out the atmospherics on their ship and take out their shuttle bay as well. The impulse from the railgun shook the deck and launched a hail of sparks as the slug of metal flung away from the ship and darted across the intervening distance a microsecond later impacting dead on the other ship. The shot blasted a hole into the pirate ship meters deep crippling the ship and obliterating the shuttles full of pirates however it was a pyric victory as all but my crew of three had perished.
After the battle I ordered my skeleton crew to comb the debris for survivors and salvage sadly there were precious few survivors from any of the ships or station my mother had run the stations defenses and been killed by shrapnel when one of the turrets detonated. The survivors I'd found consisted of a pirate crew man and a survivor from my father's ship though he was in critical condition and the two crewmembers left alive on the station after the battle. With a grand total of four crewmembers I could trust and functional one out of commission and likely going to die considering the state of medical on this ship and one that up until a few hours ago had tried to kill us and take everything, honestly I thought about taking his suit and dumping him out the lock but I couldn't bring myself to do it even though it would reduce my problems it would be immoral.
After deciding what to do I put actions to plan and got to work getting my ship into working order first thing on the list was fuel we would run out of fuel in a little over an hour so I started salvaging what I could from the intact fuel cells aboard the pirate ship. I quickly realized that the fuel situation was more complex than I'd like I had more work to do to get the fuel transferred to my ship I'd first have to cut the fuel cells out of the pirates ship then physically transfer it to mine. My crew and I worked for hours to get the old frigate into some semblance of working order half the lights didn't work the water had a funky smell and the air smelled of stale onions and sweat but it was livable if not pleasant.
While the crew worked I had a little chat with our pirate guest who ended up just being a young kid just turned 18 on his first run as a pirate who I had to convince that the life of a pirate wasn't for him and that it wouldn't be reported that he had been serving as crew on a pirate ship if he could prove that he wanted to change his ways and I'd give him a chance at a much better life that included dental he loved that idea so much he signed the paperwork on the spot and I put him to work. Once the ex pirate was squared away things proceeded smoothly the new guy proved his skills fixing the numerous minor issues with the ship and even worked with the only crewman that had engineering experience outside of minor repairs to increase the number of shots we could get out of the main battery getting two fully charged shots and a single half charged shot was a massive improvement over the single shot previously we even salvaged some power cells out of the disabled ships in the salvage yard and increased our maximum charge by 71% meaning we could squeeze an extra fully charged shot from our main gun and it increased our main guns maximum velocity by 4% it might not sound like much but when you are slinging rounds at half the speed of light extra velocity just makes bigger holes in the target.
We spent a solid month rebuilding that old frigate replacing the drives refitting weapons into its hull and rebuilding ammunition feeding systems it was challenging but rewarding work and the end result was pretty impressive if I do say so myself. My newly rebuilt ship sported a single hyper velocity railgun four quad 20mm auto cannons six point defense laser turrets 4 aft and one on each side of the bow and a pair of dual 100mm auto cannons amidships while not the most heavily armed ship in its weight class it was more armed than the majority of anything else out there granted the ships weight class was cruiser territory.
For my ships defenses the laser turrets pull double duty as both point defense and light attack while the incredibly durable armor provided a solid bit of protection on its own and then the engineering duo came up with something that knocked me off my feet they had managed to rig up a shield system on this old frigate granted running the shields would mean that the recharge on the main gun would take four times as long while they were active but they had even come up with an ingenious system that would allow the shields to be charged before battle meaning that I could have shields for 4 minutes or less depending on the battle conditions with no imput from main power granted they were the shields out of the pirate corvette and so were probably stolen from some freighter but they would mitigate energy weapons fire at least.
After getting the physical installations done we started loading ammunition which was the first point I realized we had an issue as all total we had another 3 rounds for the railgun and mabe 58 rounds for each of the 100mm guns and about 309 rounds per barrel of the 20mm guns which is exactly 3/4 of a second of ammunition for them give or take. If you're thinking about a half a second of shooting isn't much it isn't but as a method of keeping your behind alive every single bullet can be the difference between life and death.
Armed and as well equipped as we could manage we managed to rig up a second gun a hodgepodge of lasers cobbled into a cannon with a bore of 12cm what would be considered a hellbore so called because back ine the days where the term originated this type of large cannon was said to have hell itself loaded into the bore capable of massive destruction in a relatively short range my hellbore is similar in that respect however my hellbore has significantly better range but it doesn't have the best effective range only about 3 to 4 light seconds for optimal performance a railgun might have longer dangerus range but missiles are the most effective in ship to ship combat.