Free The Hero's Companion (The Hunter Legacy) by Timothy Ellis

Missiles
    We had an argument over including this
section. Jon thought everyone had heard it too often already. I thought it
needed to be included for reference sake. Annabelle did a face-palm. The twins
laughed at us. BA was too busy in the gun ranges to be bothered commenting.
George said 'Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes'. Personally I can't see
the point of damning torpedoes. Their job is to go boom, and damning them makes
no difference to the outcome.
    Anyway, it's my book, so you get to make
sure you understood all this. Or you can skip it and go direct to the next
reference.
    Missiles were first properly developed for
war in the nineteen forties. Down the centuries, they became more powerful and
smaller. Originally needing a 'hard point' to be mounted on the exterior of an
aircraft or space craft, eventually they became small enough for launchers to
be developed. These come with a magazine of twenty or fifty missiles. The
better launchers could use reload magazines. The best allowed selection of the
type of missile to fire next, allowing different kinds of missiles in the same
magazine. Launchers required more space than hard points, so it is rare for a
ship below the size of a Privateer to carry them.
    Dumb fire are a simple, cheap, fire and
forget missile. It goes where you point it. If you aim it badly, it won't hit.
They are not very powerful, and not widely used anymore.
    Heat seekers are a fire and forget missile,
which as the name suggests, seeks a heat source and targets this only. As there
is no natural heat in space, the only heat is from space ship engines. While
this dissipates quickly, the heat seeker is very sensitive and very accurate.
However, it too is not very powerful.
    FF is the Fire and Forget, a missile that
only targets an enemy generally. Once you fire it, you have no control over it.
It picks its own target. If the target is destroyed or stops being an enemy, it
goes after another one.
    IR, or Image Recognition missile, takes the
data from your target lock, plus any pre-given instructions, and only goes
after that specific target. You fire them at a specific ship, or a specific
place on the ship. The main use of these is to kill the pilot without unduly
damaging the ship itself. While they can target anywhere on the ship, as long
as the pilot is alive, and the power source is active, the ship can still fire
guns and missiles, even if it cannot actually move. If the pilot is dead, so
effectively is the ship.
    The IR is about a third the destructive
power of the FF, but much more accurate. Three IR's can take down the shield of
a standard fighter, and do some damage, while a single FF could do the same.
But it is extremely unlikely two FF's would ever hit in the same place, where
the IR's are programmed to. FF's are useful for distractions, especially at the
beginning of a battle, as they are dangerous to those who ignore them. IR's are
more of a surgical strike weapon, and more use later in a battle when you have
time to think before selecting targets.
    An IR is the only anti-ship missile which
can target and kill another missile.
    Or it was until the Mosquito system was
developed. Designed to be an anti-missile missile, it is guided to its target
by the same sort of guidance system used by the IR, but programmed by an AI. It
can be launched individually, or one hundred at a time. The full firing takes a
top of the line AI a full second to fully target to one hundred incoming
missiles.
     

Holographic systems
    Holographic systems were thought of as far
back as the twentieth century. However, it wasn't until the twenty fifth
century they became a reality. These days, almost anything can be duplicated
holographically. After implanted PC's became popular, the holo tech was added
to them, giving a person the ability to dispense with all forms of solid input
and output mechanisms. The interesting thing is however, the original solid
forms were never fully replaced, as many people still prefer