The Emperor’s Angel of Death

#1792 - Battlefield Recycling

After Roghris took care of the Dreadnought, Solzhenitsyn returned to his heavy workload. He knew very well that the end of the Angstrom naval battle did not mean that the war would end soon. The main force of the Red Corsair fleet was not severely damaged, and they still had the strength to fight the Imperial Expeditionary Force. Moreover, Chaos forces were best at tricks and conspiracies, and the other party might have even more vicious tricks that had not been used yet. Therefore, the slight advantage on the front battlefield could be completely ignored.

In other words, until now, the Expeditionary Force and the Red Corsairs were still in a stalemate, and this stage might have to last for a considerable period of time until the accumulated troops and weapons and equipment reached the scale originally envisioned by Solzhenitsyn.

Therefore, Solzhenitsyn did not rush back to the Sagan Star System, but lingered in Angstrom for some time. On the one hand, it was to allow the warships damaged in the battle to be repaired in the Angstrom shipyards, and on the other hand, it was to continue to arrange post-war processing.

Although the Red Corsairs were defeated, they also left some troubles, such as the derelict ship.

The derelict ship itself was troublesome because of its huge size. In addition, demonic summoning rituals had been performed inside it before, and the corruption was extremely serious. Moreover, its complex internal structure also created great difficulties for post-war cleanup. Even several days after the end of the battle, reports of some Red Corsair stragglers were still received. However, if such a huge piece of space junk was left unattended, it would be difficult to guarantee that it would not cause any disasters. Even accidentally colliding with Angstrom's orbital station would cause a disaster.

After comprehensively considering various opinions, Solzhenitsyn decided to directly dismantle it in space.

The specific process was to first use the main ship's lance to shoot it into several pieces, then use the tugboat's gravity traction device to separate the large pieces, then the Adeptus Mechanicus's engineering ship used high-power cutting lasers to divide the large pieces into smaller parts, and finally the fragments were brought to the vicinity of the star and directly propelled into the star with booster rockets.

Originally, the Adeptus Mechanicus also considered whether to recycle some of it, but after the Inquisitors arrived at the battlefield, this plan was immediately rejected. The only solution for such a heavily polluted derelict ship was destruction, and the most thorough destruction.

In this process, more than twenty Red Corsair stragglers were actually found. Some of them resisted to the end and were eventually eliminated, while others were captured and handed over to the Inquisitors - unless there were special circumstances, only endless torture awaited them, until all the secrets in their heads were extracted. Even for powerful Space Marines, the Inquisition had thousands of ways to pry open their mouths.

In addition, some Red Corsair warships were damaged for various reasons and could not move, and were eventually abandoned on the battlefield. In the current situation where every warship is very important, Solzhenitsyn naturally could not let go of these valuable war materials.

The most special and largest of these was an Executioner-class Grand Cruiser.

The Executioner-class is a lance ship, equipped with a full 6 sets of lances on the left and right sides, which makes its production volume relatively small, but it has a very strong long-range output capability.

However, this model was discontinued after several batches were produced in M35. The remaining Executioner-class ships were constantly subjected to battle damage, and their number gradually decreased. By the end of M37, only the last squadron led by the Royal Honor remained. They were also part of the large fleet stationed at the Cadian Gate.

In a fleet operation against Chaos ships from the Eye of Terror, the Royal Honor and her sister ships formed part of the pursuit force. After holding the line and forcing the raiders to retreat, she and some ships launched a pursuit. However, all the ships involved in the pursuit disappeared. Their fate became a mystery. Most people believed that they were lured into a trap and destroyed. However, five centuries later, three missing ships - including the Royal Honor - were identified as part of the rebel fleet.

Later, the Royal Honor went through many twists and turns, and came into the hands of the Red Corsairs thousands of years after the rebellion, and was renamed the Bloodied Honor.

In this Battle of Angstrom, the Bloodied Honor was besieged by fighters. Because the Executioner-class was not designed to consider the possibility of large-scale air strikes, its point defense firepower was relatively weak. Therefore, it appeared very vulnerable when facing a massive number of fighters. Its powerful lance array was even more useless. It was eventually destroyed on the upper deck and engines, lost its combat effectiveness, and withdrew from the battlefield. Afterwards, the Red Corsairs, eager to escape, did not have time to destroy it, and allowed it to float on the edge of the battlefield, where it was captured by the Empire.

However, although it was captured, the condition of this ship was really bad. The entire upper deck was almost destroyed. Fortunately, the keel was not damaged, but the engine was almost scrapped. This meant that repairing it was equivalent to rebuilding one-third of it, and thousands of years of warp corruption had made its machine spirit unsalvageable and could only be completely erased and replaced. Not to mention the parts inside the hull, if the Executioner-class was not really rare, and its side lance array originating from ancient technology was relatively well preserved, Solzhenitsyn would have been too lazy to repair it, because this was basically equivalent to rebuilding a ship - to put it bluntly, repairing it all depended on the face of those guns.

However, the Inquisitors did not agree with this. Most of their opinions were still that the ship was severely corrupted and had no salvage value. Some people also believed that the cost of repairing it was not proportional to the return, and it would take a long time. It was possible that the expedition would be over after it was repaired, which would be a pure waste of resources.

Solzhenitsyn was too lazy to talk nonsense to these Inquisitors who had no experience in the military field. He would listen to what was valuable, and ignore what was not. After all, repairing this ship was not just for the subsequent battles - this was battlefield loot, belonging to the Chapter, the kind that could be taken back after the expedition.

So this ship was towed to Angstrom and underwent a long repair - according to the statements given by all parties, it would take at least 3 years to completely repair and purify this warship.

In fact, this time was already faster than Solzhenitsyn had expected. After all, it took almost ten years to repair the Eternal Crusader. After careful inquiry, he learned that the most complex part of the Executioner-class was its lance array and energy transmission system. Fortunately, these things were not on the upper deck, so they did not suffer much damage. And this ship had no other main weapons except the lance, so the structure was relatively simple, and it was easier to repair than other Grand Cruisers.

As for other light cruisers and small warships, those that could be quickly repaired were recycled, and those that did not have much recycling value were dismantled. Of course, Solzhenitsyn did not swallow all the captured warships. The participating Chapters received a certain amount of warship replenishment, although most of them were small warships or even armed transport ships transformed, but for most Chapters with tight ships, they were already very precious spoils of war.

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In addition, the weapons and equipment in Angstrom's inventory will be given priority to replenish the participating Chapters, and then transported to various war zones through transport ships. As the leading forge world in the Maelstrom, Angstrom can produce most of the Space Marine's equipment, from bolters to jump packs to power armor, and some light vehicles. There were even some brand-new equipment in the warehouse that was prepared to be transferred to the Star Talons Chapter before the Badab War. These were directly requisitioned by Solzhenitsyn free of charge and distributed to the various Chapters.