Nar Shaddaa

Nar Shaddaa, the smugglers moon. You look out at the expansive ecumenopolis from the safety of the Eos’ cockpit. Like Coruscant, Nar Shaddaa was a planet wide city. Unlike Coruscant, which was covered in an endless city comprised of thousands of well organised smaller cities, the Smuggler’s Moon was a single gigantic sprawling mess. Gigantic towers covered in neon advertisements spread across the surface of the planet, criss-crossed haphazardly by platforms and pathways that were narrowly avoided by air vehicles. Rolling banks of smog coloured the entire city a brownish red, while spotlights attempted to make their varied skyscrapers stand out amongst the millions of their kind. If you hadn’t known the size of Coruscant, you would have been forgiven for mistaking Nar Shaddaa as the more populous of the two. Freighters the size of aircraft carriers and speeders as small as buggies clogged the airways between buildings, traveling as fast as they pleased. Even as you watch, a speeder slammed into another one and detonated mid air. It was a monumental, three-dimensional traffic disaster, from the stars all the way to the inky depths of the abyss many hundreds of meters below you. You are amazed you made it to your landing pad at all.

“Whoa” Tanna said as she watched the streams of flying vehicles float past the landing pad you had been assigned.

“Makes me wonder how Coruscant managed it’s traffic” you say, observing the unholy abomination of traffic.

“It’s going to be a nightmare to get anywhere here” Tanna commented before sighing and getting up, stretching herself out with a pleased sigh.

“I think it’s finally time for us to get an insignia for our motley little crew” you say as you get up and follow the Twi’lek out, eyeing her arse as you did.

“Anything in particular?” Tanna asked. You hold out a datapad with the symbol you wanted. An angel winged woman, her wings curving down slightly and holding a pair of cutlasses below her wings. “Ooooh, is that the depiction of Eos?” Tanna asked, taking the pad from you to inspect it.

“She is depicted as a winged woman, yes but the swords part is my own is something I came up with.” you tell the woman.

“Offloaded the cargo” Sata told you as you meet her on the crew deck.

“That was fast, we only landed a few minutes ago” you reply with a frown. Sata merely shrugged.

“It’s extraordinarily easy to sell stuff here, especially things like cash rocks” she explained.

“Cash rocks?” Tanna asked. For once there was a concept that someone other than you didn’t know.

“Yup, every world tends to have their own version of currency” she explained “lots of them use some kind of mineral as their currency, thereby getting the term ‘cash rock’ because it’s a rock that’s used for money” she finished.

“That reminds me, what are the chances for us bolting a turret to the top of the Eos?” You ask.

“We could easily do that, just have to cut a hole in somewhere for the gunner to get into it” Sata replied, frowning. “The only issue is that we already burn through a lot of Tibana just to power our lasers, never mind the turbolasers. Adding another turret to the mix, and it’d have to be blasters, would just increase costs far too much” she explained. You, however, merely grinned.

“Who said anything about blaster tech?” you ask, a massive shit eating grin stretching across your face. Both Tanna and Sata frowned at you as if you had gone mad. “Come, I show you” you say as you power stride towards the CIC.

Somehow you had picked up Tyttania along the way, you now had all three of your girls crowding around your holotable as you punched in commands.

“On my world, we had multiple forms of point defence” you begin “It’s actually a thing for us” you say this while bringing up an image of a german flak cannon “The first versions of point defence would just fill the sky with shrapnel using chemical propellants, but we’ve since developed better ways to spit metal at high velocity” with that, you change the image over to a pair of lines coiling. “Magnetic coil guns” you say simply as the gun formed around your image “The coils provide spin which provides stability, and with modern magnetic technology we can be spitting metal at high speed and in quantity.” You grin as you look at the faces of the girls “Of course, it doesn’t end there, we can easily add proximity explosives to our shells for added effect” you finish and notice the reactions of the girls. Tanna is intrigued, Sata has pulled out a pad and is working on something, while Tyttania was practically salivating over the hologram.

“The rate of fire would indeed be much better than blasters” Sata said, probably having done some calculations on her datapad. “And with the shells not actually touching the guns, heat would be better than using blasters” she added “This tech is so simple, why isn’t this used so much more often? It’s scalable, so we could just bolt on massive cannons and . . .” Sata trailed off as she worked on her datapad. “It would be easy and so inexpensive it’s ridiculous” Sata finally told you, nodding in confirmation of her own words.

“Excellent, I’ll leave you to it” you tell the Pantoran. “Tyttania, make sure the ship doesn’t get pirated, don’t care how” you tell the Mandalorian, “Me and Tanna are going to head off and find a cantina, maybe even find paying work” you say with a sigh. “Try not to break the poor droid while I’m gone” you add over your shoulder. You swear you could have heard a ‘don’t leave me’ come from Wub Wub who had just entered the CIC.