Wisp: Overview

Wisp drones are the primary scouts of GDS, capable of global recon, intelligence gathering, advanced targeting calculations, counterintelligence, electronic warfare, depth field detection and more. As the core of the ARS Swarm system, Wisps are the main driving force behind the GDS integrated arms doctrine. When deployed, Wisps act as data processing relays to allow numerous weapon systems, drones, vehicles, aircraft, and static defenses to share real time information.

Besides logistics, intel and recon are the most valuable resources any military force can have. Marching a force into battle and winging it against whatever comes up is the greatest way to end up with your head stuck on a pike. This is one of the reasons Gathia lost the war; we had the equipment and the weapons to outclass everyone else, but none of the intel to use them properly.
In a head on battle, just a straight up slug fest, we’d win.
Literally any deviation from that, and we’d get our asses beat.
_{I’ll redact this in the next version, don’t out yourself so casually Acris. – Hansuke}

That’s a summary of the speech I had prepared to give Iza in the event we needed to justify the budget for the Wisps, and Christ above was I going to need it.

To start with the Wisp development, we settled on concentrating as much recon capability as possible into a singular unit. There’s a flaw there of course; putting too many eggs in one basket as it were. If our recon system relied upon a singular drone, all it’d take is one good missile hit to send us back to having no intel whatsoever.
However, spreading the capabilities out evenly by sending and coordinating eighteen different drone systems just gave more targets. There was redundancy, yes, but the complexity and integration of those systems would cause far more issues and problems than it’d solve.

Eventually we settled on giving each Wisp unit the following:

· Data redundancy between units, meaning all information is replicated across the swarm.

· Absurdly high-resolution visual systems that cover all spectrums, including true night vision, that can relay video feeds back in real time with sub 5ms latency.

· Omni directional electronic intel gathering systems, covering all possible data types.

· Omni directional depth field detection systems.

· Extensive countermeasures for all possible threats.

· Extreme durability and environmental resistance.

· High degree of evasive capabilities such as pinpoint maneuverability, stealth, and hypersonic speed.

· Operational ceiling above 26km.

· Intercontinental operational range.

· Armor that’s on par with a Hard Iron tank.

· Synergistic connectivity with every last legionnaire, vehicle, drone, aircraft, GDS network and static defense emplacement within our arsenal.

· More systems than I can succinctly describe, some of which are classified info beyond the scope of this induction manual.
_{Oh thank Christ Acris, I’m so glad you finally care about OPSEC for once in the entire writing process of this goddamn brick. – Ye-Jun}

Stop and consider those features for a second. Then, realize how some of those features are contradictory with one another without requiring numerous breakthroughs in our understanding of aerospace physics and engineering. Even the network and data transfer aspects of it would require entirely new standards and technological advancements for nearly everything we already had. Ponder on how it would require the entire Science Legion working together on this singular project without interruption, for an extensive amount of time.
Now take that into account, think on the material costs of the systems above, produced on a mass scale, and put it into a cost projection report.

Take that report, put it in a nice little envelope, walk it into Iza’s office, get on a ladder, climb up, and then slide it across her desk.

Iza opened it up, read the numbers, and then placed it back down. Just as I was ready to launch into justifications, she grabbed her overcoat, threw on a hat, and walked out of her office without a single word.
And that was the last we all saw of Iza for about two weeks.

Eventually I got a message from her containing a signed approval form and the single word “ Jesus ”.
_{You nearly started another world war with how much I had to jack up all our contract prices to cover your legion’s costs. – Iza
Arbiter, your legionnaires don’t need to know that, please message Acris directly with any comments. – Hansuke}

Funding had been secured, and we could finally get to work.
As this was one of our earlier drone designs, work was split off into numerous fronts across every single department in the Science Legion. For this project, Cormorant Works had overall authority in engineering while I and the Baleful Sovereigns checked over work and verified data. My entire life became checking reports, assisting with research, reviewing engineering plans, verifying data, and sending so many bills at Finance that it’d likely count as a form of battery. It wasn’t enough that we had to design the Wisp, but that we also had to retroactively make all of our other systems work in tandem with it. The amount of coding and compatibility patches this required was beyond astronomical, not to mention the hardware retrofits and upgrades across every last base and fortress we had.
Iza was on the verge of crushing my head due to the cost, and Sonny was on the verge of shooting me due to the workload we’d dropped onto his legion.

After six months of work and having to explain to Johann why my legion had become frequent visitors of the Medical Legion due to failing livers and kidney stones, we had our first prototype.

It couldn’t fucking fly.
Claire came by and suggested we add traditional wings and launch it from a slingshot to act as a glider. I appreciated the thought, but I had to excuse myself to shoot my desk a few times after hearing that.

After shoving all the required systems into it, getting the armor to an acceptable level, and engineering it all to meet the standards of an Env-4 rating, the thing was about as flightworthy as a cement mixer. The engines required to get it airborne would annihilate the generator’s output capabilities and overheat everything onboard the drone due to the strain.
Being what I’d call a “Significant goddamn problem”, we threw it into a wind tunnel, ran hundreds of tests and verified the most obviously problematic area. That being the armor.

Yes, it was on par with a Hard Iron tank. Yes, it could survive a direct hit from most SAM attacks. Yes, it could survive direct fire for extended periods of time.
Yes, absolutely none of that mattered if the damn thing couldn’t take off in the first place.

I felt that if we leaned into exaggerating the evasion capabilities, ensured it maintained stealth, and operated based on a doctrine of “Don’t get shot at in the first place” then there’d be no issue. Yet the cost of the equipment it carried, and the importance of the Wisp’s role in integrated arms doctrine, meant that it neededto have that armor.
A Wisp needed to survive enemy countermeasures at all costs, and skipping on that would throw an unfixable weakness into the project. Given the cost and strategic value of it all, I was told reducing the armor was unacceptable.
Or as Ye-Jun would incessantly say, “Tactics are great. Plans are good. But I still wear a bulletproof vest.”

All work on the electronics, code, hardware, and systems came to a halt. Instead, all of our engineers, chemists, physicists and mathematicians turned their attention towards the armor. It was Azan who really gave us the direction we needed, pointing out something that we’d all failed to realize.

This came in the form of an incomprehensible drunken message at 02:23, which read as:
“ as you outside stuck world why be stuck when sad curtain thing, try? Abfam far, shit why hav/> ? strang shit gawdam sun”

Reading this gave no miraculous epiphany, but what it did do is annoy the hell out of me because I couldn’t glean a single goddamn word of sense from it. Five days later I finally tracked Azan down and had him explain what the actual fuck any of that garbled trash meant.
What he meant to say, at least the first part, was “Why not check for ideas past the Dread Veil?”. The rest of it was, as I suspected, just brain poison.

We’d only recently sent people in large, armored convoys past the Dread Veil by this point, and the only people who could use Johann’s prototype Nerve Harnesses were Nax and Estra. We’d barely understood Chaff, and plasmatic weaponry was still being improved upon, but there could be something to Azan’s depthless retardation.
So, I took the Baleful Sovereigns, Nax and Estra into the Dread Veil and we set to work. The research and efforts there would fill their own chapters, but I’ll be brief. Three weeks of effort later, and we’d finally classified Allog.

Once we separated Allog from Chaff, we found it could be compressed and processed into a type of durable, lightweight metal. By itself Allog shows no notable benefits outside of being abundant and cheaper to create when compared to tungsten, iron or titanium.
However, when used with another metal to create an alloy, it gave us an entirely new realm of possibilities.
And when combined with tungsten, we got zephatun, the alloy that now makes up nearly all of our force’s heavy armor.

To get back on the development of the Wisps, we attempted to use zephatun plating, but found it was still too heavy. While the protection was there with far less weight than before, it was still a massive burden on the drone’s engines.
Two weeks of drinking and tinkering later, and we’d successfully created maelite, a hybrid material comprised of Allog and ceramics. All the protection, with only 40% of the weight. After numerous tests and experiments to verify it, we had finally found the armor we’d been looking for.
I celebrated by stress puking for over an hour once the tension in my goddamn skeleton had been released.

After making a cement mixer fly, the rest of the Wisp project’s issues felt relatively simplistic.

Months of work later, and our prototype was ready for tests that didn’t involve being ratcheted down in a wind tunnel. First, we ensured it could match the required operational ceiling, required speed, and required stealth. This mostly consisted of having it fly around the Frostfall perimeter and simulating adversarial detection methods to see how well the stealth was working. Once that was all fine-tuned, we moved on.
Second, we ran a war game with one side utilizing the Wisp to gather intel. Within hours, the team using it had enough information to plan out three separate attacks while the other team still hadn’t even located their opponents.
Lastly, the drone needed to coordinate five different weapon systems at the same time. This meant providing firing solutions for artillery and targeting data for Vanguards, aircraft, tanks, and other drone systems. All went off without a hitch.

Out of curiosity, we decided to stress test it by running the same experiment but with five Wisps coordinating their efforts via the ARS Swarm. This meant each one would tackle a main objective, yet also use spare processing power on tasks that were offloaded to it by others in the swarm. Ideally, there would be zero loss of efficiency for each task, unlike if it was all handled by a single unit.
As it turns out, we hadn’ttested this out fully in the design stage.

The network traffic surge demanded by the Wisps wasn’t properly QoS tagged, on top of them sending looping broadcast requests to every single device they could find due to the unified integration setup. Which meant that through a cascade of misconfigurations, subnet escapes and unforeseen failover behaviors, the entire Frostfall network crashed.
With our direct connections to the Wisps still working, we sent an override command for them to land nearby, and promptly boarded a Longboat to head back as we thought of ways to frame this as a good thing. New armor types, new network safety measures to put in place, I felt our potential discoveries were simply boundless at this point.

The integration and fitting of Gray Conduits came later, but overall we had an intercontinental recon platform that could reach hypersonic speeds, handle hundreds of tasks in any situation or setting, and would remain undetected the entire time.

I prepared an envelope, grabbed a ladder, and headed towards Iza’s office with a cost projection report for mass fabrication.

To this day I’ve never seen the light leave someone’s eyes quite like that.

-FrW Dr. Acris Baddarick