![]() These included various designs referred to as fighters, patrol ships, area control vessels, and gunships. Instead of the large fragile expensive behemoths of the interplanetary period, the Federation used small, fast, short-range highly manoeuvrable vessels that were based in trouble spots and constantly on call. While the Federation did not have any enemies comparable to the Interplanetary Age superpowers, the continued existence of stubborn, survivalist, and hostile haloists, backgrounders, shadow federationists, and exdependents, all of whom were resentful of Federation incursions and mining operations on their territories, and any of which would launch sudden guerrilla attacks on megacorporate and government outposts, required a defensive force of some sort. And once detected, both types of vessel were large, unarmoured, fat easy targets that could be taken out with a single kinetic or beam hit.įederation Era Spaceforce The next five hundred years were a period of isolation of human habitation, with occasional forays by raiders and pirates in crude and often jerry-rigged nanobuilt ships, until the rise of the Federation of Sophonts ushered in a new era of peace of prosperity. If it passed over a starfield being observed by defenders' telescopes it was visible. Again, if it used its active sensors it was visible. However, once the ship's drive units (usually nuclear fusion, in some cases ionic) were engaged the vessel was immediately visible. Tactics often involved a game of hide and seek, not unlike the submarines of industrial and information age Earth. The so-called "stealth" materials, which absorbed all types of electromagnetic radiation, were invaluable here. A great deal of expense and research was invested in making these vessels invisible to passive scanning, and to give them the tiniest possible signature for active scanning. Their task was to seek out and destroy Attack Ships. Hunter-Killers were equipped with rockets and heavy beam weapons. Attack ships were often essentially modified SIOS or heavy shuttles equipped with advanced sensors, and using smart rockets and drones (with either a conventional or a nuclear, much more rarely an amat, warhead) to bombard a target, and had beam, kinetic, and defensive missile weapons for point-defence. Interplanetary age warships fell into two broad categories, Attack ships and Hunter-Killers. Nevertheless, human nature is such that, even as early as Interplanetary period, vessels were being adapted for combat in a vacuum. Interplanetary Age Warfare The first spaceships were slow, clumsy, inefficient, and incredibly frail, and remained so well into the Federation period.
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