Alpha Crash

Alpha Crash

On the shore of the Styx Sea, Dante, 82 Eridani:

The tech teams are still on their way down, but I’ll give you what I have. The Alpha came down intact. Despite plowing into the shallows at Mach 2, there’s not a scratch on it. The crew didn’t fair so well. All I can say for sure is that we’re definitely fighting aliens. There are two bodies in the cockpit. Six limbs, head on top, green fur on the outside, a skeleton on the inside. That’s all we can give you for now. Those two are totally pulped from the impact.

We did a quick survey of the ship as the tide was coming in. It’s hard to say whether it’s more advanced than ours. The six pseudo grav pods are smaller than anything we can build, and based on the ten to twelve sustained gees the Alphas showed us in the battle, they’re pretty impressive. But their power looks to come from a half dozen small CNO-spike reactors – we haven’t used them in decades, but these must be pretty efficient, given the energy output. Everything is interconnected for massive redundancy.

The strange thing is that there are no reaction drives at all. It’s just the grav pods and some big gyros. No thrusters, no reaction mass. The wings look impressive, but I think they’re more for heat radiation than lift.

And I know you’re interested in armaments. I’m fairly sure the main weapon is the twenty meter long small bore mag gun that runs through the ship’s spine. Probably kicks a few dozen micrograms up to relativistic speeds. The two wing mount lasers are fixed, which makes me think they’re more for targeting than combat, and there’s a whole series of short forward and back mag guns set at various angles on the hull. Point defense, maybe?

All the weapons are fixed. Nothing rotates. I see no signs of hardpoints for drones or external weapons, but those barbs around the cockpit section may be more than decorative.

I’ll put together a full report within a couple of days. Please consider my request to lift this sucker out of here, back to Earth, for a thorough dissection. We’ll want that for the crew, too.

Lt. Commander Jose Balandin, Intelligence Branch, Terran Space Force. March 22, 2254