You are the USS Enterprise, CVN-65, the First, the Finest, the world’s first nuclear supercarrier, and you are stuck in the middle of a hostile sea.

When last we left off, you, Long Beach, Bainbridge, and Nagato were steaming for Hawaii out of Bikini Atoll, Prinz Eugen was effecting emergency repairs after taking a glancing torpedo hit that put her down a screw, and your ASW squadrons hunted the Abyssal sea monster/sub. Though your VFA squadrons annihilated one Abyssal fleet and fended off an attack from the second, that second fleet managed to escape.

In Pearl Harbour, Raleigh has been giving you the rundown on the broader war. Energy and goods are flowing along the main trade routes, but Abyssal attacks are still common on the high seas, and in recent months they have made the leap to sophisticated guided weapons and in increasing numbers. A steady trickle of shipgirls flowing in over the past eighteen months has helped to turn back the tide, but until now, all of them were launched before mid-1945.

From here remain nearly 2200 nautical miles to Hawaii, around five days on the mighty Pacific where anything could lurk.

(Note that this world is an alt-history where the Cold War persisted until 1995, and many world events after around 1985 are different or never happened.)

Previous thread (not recommended - the editing on my end was atrocious, including entire story-critical paragraphs missing in places, and half the time I accidentally used the past tense instead of the present): https://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/qstarchive/2024/6100557/

Story-only archive (properly-edited): https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/uss-enterprise-quest-a-kantai-collection-quest-with-shipgirls-both-old-and-modern-archive.1196330/

Current Air Wing:
23 F-14E Tomcats
12 F/A-18E Super Hornets
12 F/A-18F Super Hornets (2-seat var.)
5 E/A-18G Growlers (electronic warfare)
8 S-3B Vikings (long-range patrol, ASW, light attack) (2 away in Hawaii)
4 E2-C Hawkeye (airborne early warning and control - AWACS)
8 MH-60S Sierras (general purpose, SAR, light attack)
12 MH-60R Romeos (ASW, light attack)

Fixed-wing flight ops are normally flown in pulses or 'events' of 12-20 sorties, spaced 60-90 minutes apart, with around 10 events per day. Each event's planes are staged while the previous one's are in the air and the deck has more room for reconfiguring. Launching at will can result in long delays for the cats or lost airframes and pilots if the wires aren't cleared in time. Helicopters must work around the launching and landing schedule for safety reasons but can operate at all hours of the day or night. A typical carrier BARCAP, Barrier Combat Air Patrol, consists of roughly 12 fighters flying in pairs, orbiting arbitrary positions 200-odd miles from the fleet.

Long Beach and Bainbridge each carry a pair of MH-60R Romeos, while Prinz Eugen and Nagato both carry floatplanes for scouting.

>>6253377 (OP)

>(2) Keep your Hawkeyes running - their radar detections might be the only warning of a manifestation right on your heels.

>(A) Run below cavitation speed (~16kts) - the quiet is your best friend.


“The Hawkeyes stay hot,” you decide. “The early warning is too valuable. But we will slow it down, 16 knots.” Though it galls you to say so - were it only you and Long Beach and Bainbridge you would have no trouble sustaining 30-plus knots all the way home, but that’s not an option now, at least not without dividing your already tiny fleet, and seeing as how you’re significantly quieter now than full-sized steel ships as it is, it will likely be safer to give your sonar arrays as much leeway as possible. “Anyhow, how did things go on your end? Were you able to jury-rig together anything for Nagato?”

Long Beach nods. “We gave her a couple chaff tubes and towed decoys, and some proper radios. I also hooked her up with a basic surface search radar to measure muzzle velocity and firing arcs like they did for the Iowas, but I’m not sure how it’ll work with her built-in rangefinder since correction inputs are still manual, and obviously we couldn’t run a proper test under EMCON.”

“Do you two have enough spares between you to outfit Prinz Eugen the same way?”

“Plenty. Decoys and chaff come cheap.”

“Good,” you say. Ideally you could do something about her lack of point-defence, maybe a battery or two of Rolling Airframe Missiles, but hooking those up underway doesn’t sound like a good idea. “Anything helps. Keep it up. Everyone, return to stations; I’m going back to get more information. I’ll brief you all in depth once Prinz joins us.” You give your companions a salute, and they return it before turning and vanishing into the starry Pacific night.

As you take a last look at your tac view, it occurs to you that the ASW squadrons hunting near Kwajalein are already over 200 miles away and counting. They’ve already served their core mission there, pinning the Abyssal sub down while Prinz Eugen builds some distance between her and it; whether they ought to stay on station any further is an open question, as you’ll certainly need those assets to safeguard your own fleet.

>(1) Keep them hunting as long as you can. You don’t want to leave that Abyssal sub out there if at all possible.
>(2) Recall and retask them to patrol the path ahead.

AYO?
>>6253378
>Recall and retask them to patrol the path ahead.
PE should have given the sub the slip by now. I don't know how fast the thing is, but it should struggle to catch up in a stern chase even if it still has a location on her, at least until she can RV with us properly.

-----

At this rate, it's going to take us five days to reach Hawaii. I Spy might get boring.

Is our old decommissioned self still sitting at Newport News? Might be kinda weird seeing our own corpse if we're out that way. Our old crew are also going to be really happy to see us up and about, no doubt.

>>6253378
>(2) Recall and retask them to patrol the path ahead.

>>6253378
>>(2) Recall and retask them to patrol the path ahead.

>>6253378
>(2) Recall and retask them to patrol the path ahead.

Cool to have you back OP, I really enjoyed your last thread

>>6253378
>(2) Recall and retask them to patrol the path ahead.

Err... any maps here? How far away are we from Eugen right now? Either way it's better to keep abyssal subs away from our strike group than to keep our planes on a snipe hunt while some other sub puts six torps into our keel.

... and how many Romeos/Vikings are currently guarding Eugen right now?

>>6253378
>>6253715

4-6 Romeos and 2 Vikings are hunting the Abyssal sub at any given moment, and the Romeos are at a fairly extended range for helicopters.

For a sense of scale on the map, one will cross a nautical mile at 500 knots in about 10 seconds.

>>6253785
Based Google Earth client holdout.

>>6253808
Maps can go fuck itself. (Although I'll admit the Street View interface is a little better than Google Earth's.)

>>6253813
I meant Google pushing the online version over the program client. It'll be a cold day in hell before I use that.

>>6253836
Well, I use Google Earth Pro to make my maps, whatever the case, and I would certainly never use the browser client

>>6253378
>(1) Keep them hunting as long as you can. You don’t want to leave that Abyssal sub out there if at all possible.
>Stick some extra Romeos on patrol behind the fleet, just in case.

Given how we've got some alt-hist Cold War stuff going on, I just wanna ask about what we're working with here. Are the Tomcat-Es based off the ST-21s or are they just Tomcat-Ds with AMRAAMs and LGBs? Does Long Beach have her Strike Cruiser style AEGIS refit? And does Bainbridge have anything different to her IRL fit?

>>6253785
Should we be turning toward 1-8-2 for an hour or two? Eugen had been keeping a heading of 3-6-0 for a few hours and we're now 50nm to her north-east while keeping a heading of 0-8-0 (assuming we had been sailing relatively straight between 1238 and 2000 hours), so I'm pretty sure she'll miss her rendezvous by about 40 nm; plus, I'm not exactly comfortable with leaving a damaged ship out of our protection range for too long.
(Yes, I know, protection range is really relative for a carrier given Eugen's solidly inside of both our BARCAP range and Watchtower's radar horizon, it's Eugen being out of our CGNs' missile defense / ASW range that I'm worried about. Abyssals may not have the ability to straight-up teleport, but them being easily mistakeable for marine life both before and after their attacks meant we still can't afford to take any chances.)

TL;DR: (write-in) can we move closer to Eugen and keep her inside of our own ASW screen?

>>6254255
Eugen is moving ~5kt faster than we are, so she can shift her course to be mostly parallel with ours and slowly converge and close the distance to be with us within the day.

>>6254248
>Are the Tomcat-Es based off the ST-21s?

More or less. After the political failure of the A-12 program but in a time of high tensions and expanding Soviet naval capabilities, the Navy was able to put through a full replacement program for the F-14 through Congress (which by design has 0% parts compatibility with the A through D models just to make sure the Iranians couldn't get their hands on any spares). It comes with integral FLIR, airframe-integrated Sniper Pods for laser designating, greatly improved engines permitting supercruise, substantial weight reductions allowing for greater internal fuel capacity, the Joint Helmet-Mounted Cueing System, a large-aperature AN/APG-64 AESA radar, and improved datalinking - essentially a new fighter built with technologies that were mature by the mid-1990s, much as would be the later Super Hornet, and Enterprise's would be roughly up-to-date with other 4th-gen fighters ca. 2012. The AIM-54D Delta Phoenix is likewise a wholly new missile sharing only a name and rough outer dimensions with the old, a two-stage design made to hit manoeuvring targets at ranges of well over 100 nautical miles, with both a robust home-on-jam capability and a data-linked semi-active guidance mode so it can be cued by Aegis or AWACS aircraft. The two together were built serve the same mission as always - kill airborne threats from as far away from the CSG as possible.

>Does Long Beach have her Strike Cruiser style AEGIS refit? And does Bainbridge have anything different to her IRL fit?

All nine of the US' nuclear cruisers were rebuilt nearly from the waterline up in the mid-90s with the full VLS Aegis suite and both towed and bow sonar arrays, along with some other changes like reactor overhauls for greater power output. However, they completed their overhauls just as the USSR ash-heap-of-history'd itself, and Long Beach and Bainbridge were retired in 2001 and 2003 respectively, and hence missed out on ballistic missile defence with the SM-3 and -6, and the various cumulative effects of the last twenty-odd years of Moore's Law on sensors, processors, and EW. They currently carry the SM-2-III, TLAM, and VLASROC, along with eight Harpoons apiece.

>>6253378
>(1) Keep them hunting as long as you can. You don’t want to leave that Abyssal sub out there if at all possible.
This quest looks really interesting
I'm gonna follow it

>>6253378
>(2) Recall and retask them to patrol the path ahead.

you a'ight there QM

>>6256238
I'm alright. This update is longer than I wanted and I've had to revise it like twice, but I think I'm pretty close, maybe done by late tonight or tomorrow morning

>>6253378

>(2) Recall and retask.

Conventional subs are ambush predators, not made for pursuit on the open seas. That sea monster is almost certainly hunkered down not far from where it first dived, waiting for you to leave. Unfortunately, however, you must - submarines have more patience than helicopters, and the hunt is tying down too many assets. After a terse message to Prinz to inform her of the change in plan and provide an updated heading, you call them off, and the Romeos begin their slow progress back. She’s a hair under 50 miles from you now; within Long Beach and Bainbridge’s Aegis umbrella, but not comfortably so, not yet, and far enough that sonar coverage is still spotty and limited to dropped buoys rather than the two cruisers’ deep-reaching towed arrays.

Local matters all seen to, you focus once more on Ruby Flight far away, and the unfamiliar stars fade to black, swiftly replaced by the harsh fluorescents of the Hickam hangar, momentarily blinding.

“Hickam, Enterprise, reporting in.”

The moment you speak aloud, Raleigh’s head pops up from among the folding tables, peeking out like a blonde meerkat, and she hastens back to her previous position.

“So, we’ve been going over that data you sent us, and we have some questions,” she says, and continues without waiting for a reply. “First of all, is what we’re seeing here right? That you detected Abyssal voice interference thirty miles from their aircraft?”

“Voice inter- oh, yes. The screams were causing problems from that far, and I detected them from over fifty. I take it that’s unusual?”

“This morning the *detection* range record was five miles from their planes, maybe twenty from surface units. And certainly not strong enough to make something the size of a Tomcat nearly lose control.”

“That’s what I faced, though. And I’m pretty sure my E-2 detected their ships from over two-hundred and fifty miles.”

Raleigh’s expression falls further, but before she can respond a middle-aged man in Air Force camo calls out from behind her. “Ma’am, what time was that?”

“Zero-zero-four-one hours and about forty-five seconds UTC,” you reply. “When my Phoenix salvo hit them.” It’s not hard to guess the reason for his interest - 250 nautical miles reaches well into low orbit, and any satellites in the area at the time might have picked it up.

Raleigh’s hand goes to her forehead as she looks at something on her tablet. “Well, that really throws a spanner in the works… and it looks like their anti-missile defences are better than we’ve encountered before, too. The good news there is that both problems can be mitigated pretty well by software changes, but those will have to wait until you’re on land, but…”

“But the Abyssals just demonstrated a generational leap in the course of a day, and in magical capabilities at that.”

>>6257358

“More or less.” She glances at her watch, then back at the collected analysts, then to her papers. “I suppose we ought to get this show on the road. The moment your datalinks go live the Admiral wants your full attention on mission coordination. I don’t usually give the introduction-to-being-alive briefing to girls already in the thick of it, so I’ll try to focus on what you’ll need to know in the next few hours. First things first, how long have you been flying?”

“Since about oh-eight-hundred.”

“Twelve hours. How are you feeling?”

“I’m- okay? Uh…” Having only felt things at all for less than a day, you don’t have much context to say, but the more you think about it the less completely okay you feel. Twelve hours of flight ops is already a full day, and you also just fought the largest carrier duel since the Philippine Sea. For all your crew’s exceptional performance, most of your aircrews have now flown at least once, many twice, and your deck crew hasn’t had more than a few minutes off since the day began. You’re far from spent, but you can see plainly what Raleigh’s getting at. This can’t go on indefinitely, and the sooner you can rest, the better.

The realisation hits as suddenly as an airstrike. Stupid. Stupid! How could you not have seen this coming? Had you planned on flying 24/7 all the way to Hawaii? No, it was worse than that: the possibility of needing to sleep had just never occurred to you. Your fleet looks to you for leadership! You never asked, never expected it of them, but they trust you as a flagship. To be so careless is simply unforgivable, no matter what distractions the day has held.

“I’m, uh, not maybe so good,” you begin, feeling deeply ashamed. “What happens now?”

“We plan around your non-flying hours. That’s just how it is.”

“But- I mean- if I have to sleep, what’ll happen? Will I have to be towed, or-”

“Towed!?” Raleigh actually bursts out laughing. “No no, you can navigate fine on night watch. We don’t sleep, not the way humans do, at least on the water.”

“But, I can’t provide air cover.”

“No. Past experience with carrier girls tells us that you can get sixteen to maybe eighteen hours of flying a day if you push it, but you can’t sustain more than that. We can’t maintain full twenty-four-hour combat ops even as long as normal ships.”

Sixteen hours of flight ops. Which gives you until around midnight, or 0200 in an emergency… and it's a 2,000-mile 4-hour flight to or from Hawaii, much too far for tactical aircraft. The simple fact is you'll be sailing for significant periods without an active CAP. And that that fact could have blindsided you so is beyond the pale.

>>6257359
On the other hand, 6 hours of rest- that's a bit under the endurance of an E-2. If you sent one out as your very last sortie and had it fly a max-endurance profile, it could provide early warning throughout the night.

“… What can I do, then?”

“You can keep a helo or two up, so long they're not doing anything complicated, and put a few fighters on Ready 15, the same as you normally would in a war zone,” Raleigh says. “And remember you’re not alone out there.”

You take a deep breath. “Okay, sleep. What’s next?”

“This one isn’t bad, per se: you don’t need to eat, not yet, so don’t worry about it until you’re at least aboard the Mustin or Higgins.”

You recall your captain-fairy’s words from earlier. “Do we resupply by eating?”

“Very slowly. Some higher-up or other decided it would be amusing to call it organic replenishment, or ORGANREP. We’ll talk more about it once you’re off the water. Though that does bring me to the next point, resupply. Given how much a supercarrier like you holds I doubt you’ll need it, but I’m afraid our options for resupply are pretty limited; anything that isn’t aboard one of the destroyer girls we’re sending your way will have to come by air.”

“That’s more or less what I anticipated,” you say. But you aren’t concerned. It’s not for nothing supercarriers like you routinely out-displace your strike groups by a factor of two - you’re built to produce 160 strike sorties a day for two full weeks and have all the depth of magazine and fuel reserves to prove it. And now you know that your weapons are more than adequate to render a direct confrontation with these Abyssals a one-sided slaughter, even when outnumbered… when you’re able to get your planes into the fight in time, that is. “What’s next?”

Raleigh consults her papers again. “Your crew. You may have noticed you have one by now?”

“I, uh, have, yes,” you say, thinking about the thousands of little creatures within. “What… are they?”

“Fairies,” Raleigh says. “That’s what everyone calls them, and honestly that’s the best I can give you. If you find the real answer, publish it, you’ll probably win a Nobel Prize or something. As to how they work, trust that they know their shit, but not to be independent - particularly very clever ant drones is how they’re usually described.

>>6257361

“You’ve likely also noticed that they cannot speak, which is a serious problem, especially for carrier girls like you, but a general weakness of all shipgirls. However, know that we can split our attention a few many ways with a bit of practice, and the more we displace, the more we can pay attention to. Little destroyers can’t do much more than maybe three or four conversations at the same time, but carriers can do about one per airframe, assuming they’re all strictly business. You’d do well to try it out pretty much now, though it usually takes us a while to get the hang.

“Also, your connection to your fairies does fade over time once they’re more than about a thousand miles away. Right now the crews of Ruby One and Two are merged with their airframes - I’m talking to empty cockpits here - but in another couple hours they’ll pop out, and you won’t be able to see through their eyes anymore.”

“Shit. I hadn’t considered that,” you admit. “Um… do Abyssals have fairies?”

Raleigh gives you an unpleasant look. “I hope not. I don’t want to imagine what awful little imps they’d be. But their carriers can communicate with their aircraft telepathically, we know that for certain.”

“I expected they would.” Unjammable and un-interceptible communications are going to be a serious problem, but both are still limited by the quality of the information their sensors can gather. “Juuust great. Next?”

“There’s still a lot, but most of this is about adjusting to life on land, so we’ll skip it for now. Let me see… Ooh, right. This last one isn’t part of the standard briefing, since most of the girls who’ve turned up here were sunk or scrapped before the space race ever began.” She then brings up another picture on the oversized flatscreen. A satellite view of Hawaii, it looks like, inverted across the x-axis. “This was taken by NOAA-20 yesterday. What you’re seeing is Hawaii, except exactly as it would be if it were flipped across the equator.” The image changes then, becoming a false-colour elevation map. “ISAR images of the islands produce the same results - Hawaii, as it is, down to about a kilometre-to-pixel resolution. It’s been there all week, obscuring some of the Cook Islands. This is typical of high-atmospheric illusions.

>>6257362

“Ever since the Ides ten years ago, the whole world has been suffused with detailed mirages like this one. As have the other planets, in fact. These are not the only kind of illusion - you’ll probably see some before too long, especially if you get into any weather - but they are the largest and most realistic, and greatly complicate satellite ISR. Over land they’re only that, a complication, like weather, and they can be corrected for because mountains don’t usually move overnight. But marine illusions are more powerful, and one bit of ocean looks pretty much like another: anything smaller than about a kilometre tends to get washed out, and whole islands can disappear or move for weeks at a time. Even when we do spot something like a ship, there’s no way to know if it’s real, or even in the same hemisphere as where you’re seeing it, or if what you’re seeing isn’t an echo from some ships thirty years ago.”

The casualness with which Raleigh delivers this news causes you to double-take as you try to follow along. “I’m sorry- am I hearing right? Are you really telling me that satellite ISR is useless at sea?”

“Oh no, if you radiate, you’ll be found just fine. Illusions mostly affect light that passes into the atmosphere before being reflected, not so much what’s produced on the ground.”

“But if I don’t…”

“Then, you’ll have to be spotted from the air.”

You take a long moment to digest the sheer enormity of it all. The thought that Abyssal surface units could sail safely anywhere below a warship or search plane’s radar horizon anywhere in the world is horrifying to contemplate - really, it’s no wonder they’re giving humanity such trouble. At the same time, it’s the greatest gift anyone’s ever given to surface vessels, including the likes of you. Ever since the 1960s dodging Soviet and later Russian and Chinese recon sats to keep task forces hidden whenever possible has been one of the defining challenges of the surface fleet, and suddenly, that challenge is just gone. Now again it seems you’ll be living in the days before, when task forces had to locate each other by scout aircraft alone, and two task forces both running dark could pass within easy striking distance of each other and never know.

As you’re turning over the implications of everything you just learned, the skinny rating you talked to before rises and approaches Raleigh. “Their updates are ready,” he says. “Are we go to upload them?”

Raleigh’s eyebrise rise. “That was quick.”

“Link-16 is made to be pretty backwards-compatible.”

“So it is.” She turns to you. “Well? Up to you.”

>(1) Ask another question before giving the go-ahead. (Write-in)
>(2) Get patched in and talk to the brass now for concrete mission planning.
>(3) Take a minute to try out this attention-splitting thing before you have to do it for real.

>>6257364
>(1) Ask another question before giving the go-ahead. (Write-in)
When we get to Hickam, is it possible for us to get upgraded aircraft? Get our hands on some F-35s to use or even some more....exotic aircraft?

>>6257420
Note when I say exotic, I mean like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Model_147
Also, these aren't exotic, but C-2 Greyhounds or Ospreys for ORGANREP.

>>6257364
>(2) Get patched in and talk to the brass now for concrete mission planning.
I am fine with more questions if others have any, tho

>>6257364
>(3) Take a minute to try out this attention-splitting thing before you have to do it for real.

>>6257364
>(3) Take a minute to try out this attention-splitting thing before you have to do it for real.

>>6257362
>Unjammable and un-interceptible communications are going to be a serious problem
That's a fucking understatement. The Growlers are gonna struggle with passive detection if they aren't talking to eachother.

>>6257364
Supporting >>6257420

Specifically, lets see about getting some upgrades for our existing birds. With how upgraded our Tomcats are, they can probably lug anything in inventory, but the S-3s could use some tanker kits. The fewer hornets we have as flying TEXACOs, the more we can commit to strike missions. And E-2Ds would be a goated upgrade.

>>6259510
As per the QM last thread,
".... the S-3Bs are capable of buddy tanking, and by the end of their service run that was a major portion of their work, as helicopter squadrons took over the role anti-sub and light surface attack.
....
That capability gap is a real problem for the Navy right now, though - sending up superbugs as tankers is an ineffecient use of airframes."

>>6257364
>(3) Take a minute to try out this attention-splitting thing before you have to do it for real.

>>6257364
QM?

>>6263072
I'm alive, but this is literally the first free hour I've had in the last week what with work, road tripping, and summitting a mountain, so I haven't gotten much writing or research done

>>6263882
QM kill?

>>6257364
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