The Death Star is a space station 160km in diameter, with a superlaser capable of destroying planets in a single shot--not really the level of a dread, which really is just a big ship with a big gun.
The Death Star is a space station 160km in diameter, with a superlaser capable of destroying planets in a single shot--not really the level of a dread, which really is just a big ship with a big gun.
The stopping power of the main gun (due to the way railguns and coilguns work) is directly correlated to the length of the barrel; therefore, the longer a ship is, the bigger the punch it can deliver. the stopping power of the main gun (due to the way railguns and coilguns work) is directly correlated to the length of the barrel; therefore, the longer a ship is, the bigger the punch it can deliver. If a gun runs the length of a ship, it can hit hard.
Impeirsky Lieb-Gvardya (Imperial Lifeguard, or ILGV)
The smallest branch of the Dominion Armed Forces, the Lifeguard is an elite cadre of men and women hired from every corner of the empire with one express purpose: protect the Tsar, his family, and the seat of the Dominion's government, Svoboda Prime. Originally formed by Vladimir Windsor as his personal guard, the Streltsy, the Guard would morph into its modern incarnation by the coronation of Tsarina Anastasia I, the first to officially take up the mantle of a monarch. Since then, the Guard evolved into a separate branch of the military in its own right; equipped with the most modern weapons, vehicles, tanks, and aircraft the Dominion can supply, they are indisputably one of the most formidable units in the galaxy.
Like IMIs, Lifeguards are heavily augmented depending on their role (a tank commander will not receive the same level of augs as an infantryman/woman will, for example). LGVs are only accepted into their advanced combat training after they have served at least a decade in one of the military's land-based branches—the Imperial Army, the IMIs, or the Home Guard. Exceptional service is a must; recruits are picked from the most decorated soldiers, and further thinned by a rigorous mental/psychological requirement—deep devotion to the Dominion is necessary, as is high intelligence and a penchant for tactical thinking. Of the hundreds of millions of candidates considered throughout the Armed Forces, less than ten percent are selected for training.
The first stage of training, pre-aug conditioning, is very similar to the pre-aug courses given to IMI recruits—if orders of magnitude tougher. Recruits are physically conditioned, mentally stimulated, and simply challenged in any possible way to push themselves to their limits. This is the final "test" before they are officially Lifeguards, and it is a test that seventy percent fail—but the remaining thirty percent are now sworn in as Lifeguards.
Then comes the augmentations; depending on the branch of service, some will receive more, others less, but when the process is complete, the Guards-in-training will be placed into advanced training, where they learn the tools of their trade, again depending on their service branch. Finally, after about two years of training and augmentation, the recruits are now full-fledged Lifeguards.
Lieutenant Mikhail Antonov Dostoyevsky, denoted as a member of LGV-A (Armored) by his burgundy wrist stripes and epaulette trim.
Author's Note: Last bit of fluff before I return to history!
Confederation of Perseus: First Perseus War, Part 1 637 BFD—635 BFD
There are many in the galaxy who blame the Sagittarian Republic for setting off the chain of events that would lead to the Perseus Confederaton, and in some ways, they're correct. The catalyst that set off the necessary chain of events was the First Perseus War, a war that is, for all intents and purposes, the fault of the Republic—no matter what the current government will say.
—Dr. Nikolai Whitaker
In the late 600s BFD, the Sagittarian Republic was beginning to hunger for resources. They were far from desperate; their vast territory could provide everything they needed, but considerable amounts of rare resources had been shut off from them by the slew of sanctions placed on them by the rest of the galaxy. Their income of supplies of processed hadrium ore had decreased by 40 percent since the end of the Caedhewe War, and their total supplies of refined antimite [1] were halved by that point. In addition, the civilian sector was suffering; the entire trade industry had been an emaciated shell of its former self for literally centuries, and tourism was effectively gone.
All the while, the leadership of the Republic tightened their control. The members of the First Troika had long been dead, with Nu Kyin being the last survivor and essentially assuming control as a shadow dictator for several years. When she died in 757 BFD, the mantle of leadership stayed up in the air for some time. The incumbent Chief Secretary, Anton Nkobwe, was just as much a weak toady as his predecessors, his position only given to him as a powerless ASCOM puppet. Now, the military felt that, in order to give their regime more legitimacy, they would have to assume direct control over the civilian government. In the next elections, their chosen candidate, former admiral Annapurna Mishra, "won" an overwhelming majority of the vote, becoming the Chief Secretary. He came to power at the head of the military-sponsored "Alliance for Sagittarian Dignity" Party,
With their internal hegemony uncontested, the military began to look outwards for targets to channel the restless energies of their enormous population. They found their target—and a suitable casus belli—to the galactic south, in the Perseus Arm. Just over a century prior, the Treaty of Charleston had been signed by many systems in the Arm, primarily to facilitate trade, but there was a less-publicized secondary reason for the agreement—mutual disgust at the actions of ASCOM and the Sagittarians had led to a mass embargo of the new nation, and the Treaty helped the nations of the Perseus Arm pick up the new slack with each other. Needless to say, the Sagittarians did not take kindly to this.
On February 9, 637 BFD, the drive core of the SCV Mogadishu, a Sagittarian light cruiser refueling in the border system of Willow's Den, exploded due to unexplained circumstances, killing everyone on board the ship, the station, and any other vessels nearby. Debris from the detonation rained down on the nearby planet, causing billions of Sagittarian credits worth of destruction. The Sagittarian government of Chief Secretary Ibni immediately launched an investigation into the accident, due to an anonymous "tip" from local Sagittarian security forces of unusual goings-on at the station.
This being the pre-Fujiwara era, there was plenty of wreckage to sift through, and despite cries of foul by several independent searches, the ASCOM commission declared that they had found evidence of sabotage—sabotage that was quickly blamed on a Charlestonian conglomerate, MagnaCo. MagnaCo had been one of the few Perseus-based corporations still operating in Sagittarian space, and yet it still received subsidies from its government, making it the perfect scapegoat. "Credible sources" within MagnaCo's board of directors "admitted" that the Charlestonian government had contracted it to sabotage the sublight antiproton drive of the Mogadishu. Despite denials from Charleston and MagnaCo, the ASCOM's Public Communications Division had already worked their magic—it was too late to back down now, sending the militarized Sagittarian population into a frothing rage. On January 7, 635 BFD, the Sagittarian Republic launched the first of several invasions of the Perseus Arm…
[1]: A mineral essential for the production of a practical superconductor (antimium), antimite is one of the rarest substances in the galaxy. Entire industries have formed around its procurement or synthesization.
Author's Note: A small update today, been on vacation for a while.
Excerpt from Avraham Siegel's Modern War: Space Combat Published 22 Av 10316 [1], University of New Haifa JDFS Yamato with a Simbirsky-class for reference
Chapter Six: The Dreadnought
The dreadnought needs little introduction other than her name—that alone conjures up the common, glamorous image of the great "war cities" that have dominated space combat ever since the exodus from our homeworld. Multiple kilometers long and bristling with weaponry, the dreadnought is possibly the most powerful class of ship ever constructed and launched by sapient hands. They are also hideously expensive to operate and require enormous amounts of resources to operate and maintain, making them the rarest ships in the galaxy.
While there are a great range of dreadnought types, with wildly varied specs, weapons, and crew complements, the general configuration and role of the class remains the same the galaxy over: the dreadnought is the center of a fleet, with her long-range guns and colossal main cannon dealing colossal damage from afar. She is the primary vessel in a dreadnought battle fleet, usually supplemented by many battleships and hundreds of cruisers and destroyer screens.
There are many classes of dreadnought the world over, but the most iconic—and arguably the most powerful—is the Japanese-built, Svoboda Prime Pact-used Yamato-class. Currently the largest dreadnought in operation by any nation (the colossal Sagittarian Monetine-class is "only" 5.77 km long to the Yamato's 6.13), this behemoth has been built under license by the Dominion, as they are noticeably superior to their own home-grown Tsar-class. For this chapter, we shall use Yamato herself as an example; while she has spawned many children and has four sisters in the JASDF [2] (Tenryū, Nagato, Kongō, and Atago), she is unique in her design.
…Yamato, unlike the vast majority of starships, was built with a certain sense for aesthetics in mind—this can be seen on her gracefully curved "kuchibashi" [3] bow and sleek, rounded design. With most ships, especially tremendously expensive dreadnoughts, aesthetics are low on the list; there's little point to making a ship appear intimidating if, in most cases, the enemy will never get within visual range of the vessel. However, for Japan, Yamato is unique; she and her sisters represent the pride of the Japanese fleet, and as a result she was designed to look as good as possible on pictures and holovids.
Her keel was laid down just over a century ago ago in 10209 [4], originally planned to measure 5.33 kilometers but extended to her current length midway through construction. She took fifteen years to complete (five years faster than expected, as it happens), and was launched in 10234. [5] She and her sisters have undergone multiple modernizations, improving weapons, tactical systems [6], and engine power. Her armament is extremely impressive; fifty turreted mass driver cannons cover her expansive surface, and she is also armed with dozens of smaller secondary railgun batteries. A new development is the "laser strip," replacing the more common, tried-and-tested point-defense rings (PDRs) of other vessels. The laser strip is a point defense system that has a larger area of effect than a conventional PDR, but uses far more energy. She is also armed with sixteen antimatter torpedo tubes and her coup de gráce weapon, the colossal plasma lance (known affectionately as the "wave motion gun" by her crew for the unusual recoil of the weapon when fired). Another feature was added as well: the ability for the crew section to separate from the rest of the ship and maneuver away from a hypothetical power collapse [7] at FTL thanks to a Chomsky drive installed in the crew section.
However, the near-reverence she has garnered has had a different effect than intended—one that SPP Joint Command is rather annoyed by. Japanese military command has relegated Yamato to the Home Fleet; de jure one of the most prestigious positions a warship in the JASDF can receive, but de facto a sentence to endlessly patrol the Osaka system until decommissioning. This, combined with her luxurious interior (she is said to have the best cooks in the Japanese navy aboard her, and the officer's mess is infamously bedecked with fancy wooden paneling and even a chandelier) has given her the nickname "Hotel Yamato—" especially since the Japanese Emperor has used her as a personal transport on several state visits before.
However, the few times Yamato DID enter combat, the power of her fifty colossal mass divers (each a larger caliber than the spinal cannon on the average cruiser), her massive antimatter torpedoes, and her spinal plasma lance became very apparent. In the Battle of Gamma Thoridor V, in a near-disastrous joint SPP intervention, she and two Japanese battleships—Shōkaku and Unryū—along with a small screening force of cruisers, missile boats, and destroyers, utterly wiped out a numerically superior force of rebel vessels before overwhelming Dominion reinforcements even arrived.
Yamato and her sisters inspired the creation of a massive fleet of new license-built dreadnoughts for the Dominion and the Dutch, one of which is the DSS Tsar Nikolai III—current flagship of the Dominion navy.
[1]: August 27, 2370 AFD in the Hebrew calendar
[2]: Japanese Aerospace Defense Force, the Japanese combined air/space fleet
[3]: "Beak"
[4]: Again just under a century in the galactic standard calendar, in 2273 AFD
[5]: 2291 AFD
[6]: A wide umbrella of terms that covers shielding, point defenses, and EW systems.
[7]: A power collapse is essentially the loss of the singularity containment in the reactor of a starship, invariably the death of any vessel. Once containment has been lost, the singularity inside will invariably devour the vessel and everything else within a 20km radius. Failsafes and backups will try to delay the collapse if one is in danger, hopefully giving enough time for the "abandon ship" order to be given and for the crew to launch escape shuttles. Unfortunately, this is not always effective, especially in combat.
Overview:
Length: 6,174m
Beam: 1,320m
Powerplant and Propulsion:
24x Sobytiy Horizon singularity reactors
1x Fujiwara Mitsubishi singularity FTL drive
1x Mitsubishi Chomsky-type FTL drive
77x antiproton propulsion clusters
Artificial Gravity: 0.98g
Complement:
21,600 enlisted
3000 commissioned officers
3000 marines (optional)
Equipment:
Armament:
1x "Kamikaze" spinal plasma lance
50x "Kaminari" dual mass driver batteries in 25 heavy turrets
108x "Katana" dual railgun batteries
16x torpedo tubes
~8,000 "Ransu" Type 80 torpedoes
15x point-defense laser strips
Armor:
12.1m main armor
16m engine housing armor
13.9m turret armor
15.6m torpedo arm casing
Shield Systems:
Outer Shield: Nakajima Type 70 magnetic energy shield
Inner Shield: Mitsubishi Type 67 particle shield
Spacecraft Carried:
50x "Amia"-class shuttles
1x captain's yacht
10x marine Type 77 dropships
Used By:
Svoboda Prime Pact (particularly Greater Anglyskiyan Dominion)
AN: I apologize for the long time between the last update and this one, school just restarted and I needed to sort my stuff out for the last week at home and the first week at school.
The invasion began in such a way that made the Sagittarian Republic's huge preparations obvious. Charleston's outer colonies came under attack quickly, folding under overwhelming numbers impeccably organized by High Admiral Gopal Iyer. Iyer's force, the Perseus Theater, consisted of three fleet groups at the start, each one made up of a multitude of smaller fleets tasked with seizing Charleston's border systems.
The initial invasion was reasonably successful due to pure weight of numbers. Much of the territory that now makes up the Orion DMZ fell to Iyer's forces in a matter of months, as the Charlestonian armed forces under Grand Admiral Nicholas Bishop fell back to secondary defense line after defense line. Charlestonian ships were resilient and well-armed, but to quote an ancient Terran statesman, "Quantity has a quality all of its own." The entirety of the Charlestonian armed forces just about reached parity with Iyer's vast force that was bearing down on it, and more and more ASCOM-Navy vessels were joining the fray as time went on.
It became clear that Charleston could not win the war on its own, not with significant portions of its industry gone and its military forces decimated. With little else to do, President Nathan Gears turned to the diplomatic table. Before the invasion, Charleston had primarily been an economic power. A resource-rich system fed a healthy heavy industry sector, which in turn gave the nation considerable buying power in the local galactic market.
The start of the war left many smaller nations, as well as those in close proximity, devoid of certain material goods. The Limans in particular were hit hard by the wartime collapse of the Charlestonian economy, due to heavy investment in Charlestonian businesses thought to be relatively safe. When the sources of raw materials for these companies fell behind Sagittarian lines, the Liman stock market plummeted. Other nations lost their supplies of hadrium ore almost overnight as any surplus was sucked up for the Charlestonian war effort, and galactic finance in the Perseus arm fell to pieces as well.
On January 9th, 633 BFD, President Gears met with fellow Charleston Treaty leaders in the Savannah system, a small, out-of-the-way star with a sleepy colony and a single large space station that had once housed Charleston's stock exchange. There, he and twenty other men and women haggled for six days over the possibility of a regional coalition against the invading Sagittarians. The Republic, argued Gears, would not stop at conquering Charleston's border colonies; its brutality and hunger for territory would push it outwards, eventually bringing it into conflict with the rest of the Perseus Arm.
Many nations, especially those who had lost merchant vessels to Sagittarian commerce raiders, readily agreed. Others, like the Europan Union or the New Aztec Republic, were not convinced; the Charlestonian war effort was a fool's errand, they said. It was undeniable that the Sagittarian forces outnumbered the Charlestonian military by 633 BFD, and it would not be in the Arm's best interests to support what was essentially a doomed cause.
Supporters replied that it was the Sagittarians themselves who had proved the value of cooperation during the Scutum War, and had defeated an enemy numerically superior to themselves. But the detractors argued correctly that, even united, the human population of the Perseus Arm would still not be enough to fully defeat their adversaries.
In the end, twelve of the twenty signatories of the treaty joined Charleston in the Savannah Pact, a military alliance in opposition to the Sagittarian invasion. Some, like the Republic of Georgia, would provide ships to the large "SavPac" fleet, while others like the Limans would support the war effort economically.
The first significant payoff for the SavPac alliance would come in July of 631, when Fleet Admiral Hector Cardenás led an allied flotilla to a desperate victory against Star Admiral Kistna Bachachan at the Battle of Obregon. Obregon, an important industrial system under a Charlestonian benefactor, would eventually fall in the 620s, but the victory provided a much-needed boost for League morale.
It also had another, more far-reaching effect. Other nations began to take notice, including the rising great power of the Anglyskiyan Federation…
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So after a long hiatus, I return to this story. My quest will still take priority, but I'll try to keep pumping out updates to this when I can.
I find it interesting the Xacree dreadnought is like the smallest dreadnought among the Great Powers. Makes me wonder if it could take on a Yamato dreadnought.
I find it interesting the Xacree dreadnought is like the smallest dreadnought among the Great Powers. Makes me wonder if it could take on a Yamato dreadnought.
Differing naval philosophies. Xacree ships are also notably more advanced technologically, which generally applies across most fields. They've been around longer than the humans.
How long have the Xacree been known about at this time? During the era where the Confederation of Perseus is created I mean.
Also, any transhumanist philosophies, like uplifting of animals or mind uploading, being found in any of the Great Powers? Or really extensive genetic engineering like making a person's body to be able to photosynthesize?
Well I know humans here are generally hardly "baseline" so perhaps "transhumanist" isn't quite the right word since aspects of it appear widespread.
Hm are most systems heavily colonized on both planets and in space?
Finally, are there space fighters of some sort in this verse? Well maybe more like Honorverse LACs than single man super small fighters like in most science fiction?
So I'm gonna be restarting this in the near future (new thread and everything), and I'm working on revamping the map and several of the nations. In the meantime, have a WIP: Lost Cradle Mk II: WIP
There will be a number of differences. The nature of a few nations has changed, and I've retconned a few things. I'm starting it again because I feel that the differences are enough to warrant it.
