Einhauser
26-04-2005, 19:47
Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls. What you are about to read is the end product of over three weeks of planning, writing, and editing. It is the very culmination of my abilities, although it wouldn’t be possible without the following people: Der Angst, Tekania, Xessmithia, my mom, and all the others who helped edit and refine this ship. Thank you. And now, on to the ship!
Introduction: The Firebat Class Battlecruiser is the first ship produced by Einhauser’s Freidark Division. The following chapters of information are designed to help the average layman/ leader understand the might that is the Firebat Class Battlecruiser. I’ve tried my best to cut out all the non-essential fluff that bogs down most new products. After all, who wants to read seven pages of long-winded, unnecessary wordiness?
Chapter one: The hull
--The blade
--The shields
--The cloaking system
Chapter two: The weapons systems
--Lance arrays
--Guns
--Torpedoes
--Point Defense Guns (PDG)
--Boarding capability
--Planetary Assault capability
Chapter three: The interior
--The bridge
--The mess halls
--The grav-deck
--The hangers
--The prison system
--The hangars
Chapter four: The engines
--The FTL engine
--Engineering
Chapter five: Special offers
Chapter six: General statistics
CHAPTER ONE: The hull
The Firebat Battlecruiser is roughly sausage shaped, with the ends gently tapering to about half the diameter of the main body. The prow is tipped with a giant, vertical Durrosteel/ Endosteel blade with its own voidshield, which can be used for ramming opponents. Often, if enough speed is achieved, the Firebat can successfully slice the opposing ship in two. The blade is engineered so that the enemy ship is split and then pushed to the side (kind of like the head on an axe). This keeps the weapons protrusions on the hull from being damaged. The opposite end of the Firebat is adorned with three large engines, although we won’t get into that until Chapter four.
The hull of a Firebat is composed of many different layers of material. They are: Adamantium/ Crystex composites, Durrosteel, Admanite, Endosteel, Ferrosteel, and finally Carbon Dioxenzemes, in that order. The Adamantium/ Crystex composite provides excellent protection from both matter and laser weaponry, with neither being overly emphasized. The Durrosteel acts like a ground wire s well as armor, keeping any energy to hit the layer immediately in front of it from short-circuiting the rest of the ship, while Admanite reinforces the weaker layers below it. Endosteel is usually used for structural framework, but has been put to good use on the Firebat class, stopping projectiles from penetrating farther in 89% of the laboratory tests. The Ferrosteel is similar, although of a lower grade. Finally, the Carbon Dioxenzemes layer keeps the rest of the ship insulated and airtight. In case of a rupture, this layer can heal itself using the nanites woven into its molecular structure in minutes.
All of these layers, when used in conjunction with shields, can keep a ship safe from all but the most powerful anti-capital ship weapons. The shields fitted on this class of Battlecruiser are Type 62P/LS, or, for those who don’t understand Einhauserian scientific jargon (Author’s note: actually, nobody speaks ESJ, because I only made it up for this ship), that means that the ship has two kinds of shields; both energy and void. We shall examine the voidshields first.
A voidshield is what you would find on most ships, albeit under the name particle shields. It runs constantly in one large, all encompassing bubble around the ship, keeping micro meteors and enemy matter-based weaponry, to name a few space-borne hazards, from reaching the hull. The voidshield is usually transparent, although it turns a mottled bluish-green/gray when matter impacts it. The color change only affects the immediate area around the point of impact, and only lasts for a few seconds. The Firebat class is fitted with a device that pulls the voidshield flush against the hull, for use in the TDM (see chapter four). Alas, as magnificent as this technology is, it can still be overcome. Particularly large or particularly fast objects can pierce the shield with relative impunity.
The energy shields are almost totally different. Instead of blocking matter, they absorb energy from enemy laser weaponry. The energy absorbed is transmitted to the shield generator, which then in turn stores it until a certain amount has built up, at which point the energy is either directed back into space, or into the engines. This later action results in a massive boost in speed for a few seconds, but also degrades the engine integrity rapidly. If the generator waits too long to empty the energy it stored, it will shut itself down or explode, depending on how well it is maintained. A different way they can be knocked out is by absorbing too much energy too quickly. This will result in similar actions as if it waited too long to send out the stored energy.
Another difference is that the energy shield does not come in one bubble. Instead, it consists of ten different shield generators, each projecting a separate, overlapping field. The generator positions (and the area they cover) are as follows: fore, fore-port, fore-starboard, port, starboard, aft-port, aft-starboard, aft, up, and down. Each shield is independent of the others in the sense that if one fails, all the others will remain working.
In addition to all the things listed above, there is one other interesting item included with the Firebat’s hull, and that is the cloaking system. The outer layer of the hull is not only made of Adamantium/ Crystex composites, but also fiber-optic cables. These cables all run directly into the main computer, and said computer can cloak the ship by projecting the image of what is on the other side of the hull. This means that cameras on the port side of the hull can survey the stars in their field of vision and then transmit that video feed to the computer, which will transmit it to the fiber-optic cables on the starboard side. Although this system is highly advanced, it is not foolproof. If a ship looks too hard at a cloaked Firebat, it can usually detect it, and if the cables are damaged, they cease to function. The system can also display images of ships of either the same or smaller shape and mass, to throw off enemy vessels.
CHAPTER TWO: The weapons systems
In addition to having one of the best hulls ever to be seen by man, the Firebat Battlecruiser is equipped with enough weaponry to strike fear into even the most experienced star captains.
The main weaponry of the Firebat is the Naval Railgun. Each of these guns can hurl a mini-van sized shell to extraordinary distances, and the Firebat packs 80 of them! The railguns are mounted in a giant, vertical metal ring, which hangs from the ceiling of the three-story room in which they are kept. The ring can be moved to almost any part of the room, enabling the rail gun to depress almost flush against the hull. The barrel of the railgun is always jutting out the side of the ship, which leaves them pretty vulnerable to enemy fighters and bombers. To counteract this weakness, point defense guns (PDGs) are always in a position to cover them.
The railguns are mounted in banks of 40, with each side of the hull receiving one bank running horizontally down the sides of the ship. Complimenting the Railguns are 12 batteries of Lance Cannons (known as laser guns to the layman), or Lance Arrays to use the plural term. Each Lance Array consists of three Lance Cannons, which resemble extraordinarily large gun barrels. Each Lance Cannon packs a gigantic anti-capitol ship laser, which can melt through most known substances. The Lance Cannons are mounted in large turrets, which allow them to swing in any direction. These are the fastest weapons on the ship, for although they may be large, the turrets movement can be described as anything but slow.
The final weapon that the Firebat is equipped with is torpedo tubes. These tubes are modular, so they can fire most any torpedoes available on the FT market with only limited modifications. The tubes are separated into banks of three, and situated in between all the Lance Arrays. There are also six tubes facing backwards, nestled among the engines, and six tubes embedded in the prow/blade that have special shutters on them to prevent debris from damaging the tubes.
All of these weapons would be useless against fighters or bombers, so Point Defense Guns (PDG) have to be installed to protect the ship. There are 1,200 PDGs covering the hull of the Firebat, with extra dense clusters of them around the engines and weapons. Each PDG consists of three miniature Lance Cannons, with a sophisticated Targeting, Tracking, and Termination (T3) computer to back them up.
Now, all of those big guns are fine and dandy for beating the snot out of enemy ships, but what if you want to capture them? What then? Well, the Firebat is equipped with 400 Boarding Torpedoes, which are pretty much hollowed out Naval Railgun rounds with gravity couches and a drill-bit on the end. They are fired out of the railguns in the direction of the desired target, and the maneuvering thrusters in the rear of the pod guide the ship the rest of the way. Although the Boarding Torpedoes are fired from the railguns, they travel slower than the standard ammunition of said gun. Because of this, they tend to bounce off shields; it is always best to eliminate the enemy ship’s shield generators before launching the Marine-filled shells. When a Boarding Torpedo impacts an enemy’s hull, it usually has enough momentum to smash through the hull and into the deck directly behind it. At this point, the Marines activate the drill in the front of the torpedo, and it will grind its way towards the center of the ship. When the boarding party is satisfied with how far they’ve gone, they blow the tiny explosive charges in the drill bit and rush into the belly of the enemy ship. A modular weapons mount just inside the torpedo allows for a support weapon of some sort to be carried and fired. Each Boarding Torpedo can carry 20 Marines, and are reusable (if you can drag them out of the target ship).
Because the Firebat lacks Orbital Bombardment weaponry and can’t pass through atmospheres, most people would assume that it is useless in planetary actions. However, this is not the case. In addition to being able to fire Boarding Torpedoes, the railguns can also fire Orbital Drop Pods. These six-person capsules can deliver a fire-team to the surface of a planet in mere seconds. The armored hull of the pods can also punch through fortified bases, allowing troops to be deployed into the heart of Hive Cities or fortresses.
CHAPTER THREE: The interior
After examining the hull and weapons systems, let us head into the interior of the ship-- into the very guts of the beast, if you will. The Firebat is almost like a maze, with narrow corridors barely big enough for just two people to walk side-by-side (there is only room for one if the person is wearing armor), and very few large rooms scattered over the 56 floors (otherwise known as decks). This arrangement allows Einhauserian engineers to cram as many decks as possible into the hull. A latticework of service ducts and crawlspaces honeycomb most of the area that isn’t taken up by walkways.
The largest room onboard is, of course, engineering, but we won’t get into that until later. Instead, let us examine the bridge. The bridge on a Firebat is, unlike most ships, buried deep in the fore-center of the ship. This almost completely cuts off any possibility of the deck being destroyed in battle, which would leave the rest of the ship confused and more than likely useless.
When one walks through the heavy blast doors to the bridge, one is immediately welcomed by the abundance of real oak. It adorns everything, from the helm to the armrests of the captain’s chair. Studies have shown that when a large number of people are asked what material they prefer, 62.75% of those polled would choose oak. It is for that reason that the oak is in place. (Author’s Note: I actually did this study, and got those exact results).
Once you get past the oak, you notice the two levels of the bridge. The top level, where the doors are found, is reserved for the helmsman and the sensor consoles, while the floor below is where the Captain sits with the rest of the bridge crew. The forward wall is dominated by a massive screen, which displays the outside to the crew. Smaller monitors surround the main screen; each displays different shots of the outside. If, for some reason, the power supply to the bridge was cut, backup generators have been installed under the deck of the lower bridge.
After examining the bridge, let us take a look at the mess halls. There are two mess halls onboard the Firebat; one for officers and one for enlisted men. The officer’s mess is roughly an acre is size, with a small galley to provide food. The enlisted man’s mess is much larger, at 3 acres. It has two kitchens that pump out food 24 hours a day, to keep up with the hefty appetites.
Another area of interest onboard is the training room. Since there are usually around 3,700 Marines stationed on a Firebat at any one time, and boarding actions could happen unexpectedly, keeping them in fighting form is essential. To keep the soldier’s muscles from atrophying in the null-gravity, a special workout deck has been installed. It is basically a large ring that rotates vertically around a central core deep inside the ship, called the Grav-deck. The ring spins just under the surface, so the hull armor protects it’s delicate machinery. The Grav-deck is the only place on the ship with any form of gravity.
On this deck there is a large, 12,200 square foot gym complete with every kind of bodybuilding machine imaginable. In the very center, there is a sunken circle of sand, with low risers around it. It is in the center of this ring that Marines and crew can settle their differences in single-combat. It also allows Marines to keep up on their hand-to-hand combat classes. If one were to examine the Grav-deck long enough, they would notice that only a small portion of the deck is taken up by the gym. Of course, this sets one to wondering what the rest of the deck is for.
If you go through another blast door in the side of the gym, you would come across the Boarding Action Training (BAT) room. It is extremely large compared to the gym. The ceiling is six stories above the floor, and the horizon curves into the distance. This room is all about boarding actions. Modular wall and floor sections can be set up to simulate boarding an enemy ship, and strobe lights and fog machines add to the chaos. There is also a second room that is very similar to this onboard. In fact, it is exactly the same, excepting that it is on a part of this ship that does not rotate, giving the room null-gravity.
Now, all of that training materiel is fine for Marines, but what about the pilots that are stationed on the Firebat? To help them train, three 3D training rooms have been added. Each is one square acre in size. The walls are lined with panels of non-reflective materials, and fiber-optic cables are embedded in them. Using the cables, images of space can be imprinted on the walls, giving the sense that you are piloting a ship. Each trainee is given a “flight suit,” which is basically a restricting jumpsuit. Special light-sensitive diodes are laced in the fabric, that when concentrated light is centered on one for a few seconds, the fabric constricts and keeps the targeted person from moving the area that’s lit up. This constriction continues until the supervisor of the match “thaws” the suits with a special device known as a “wand”. Each trainee is also issued a “laser gun”, which fires beams of tightly-focused light, to disable the enemy trainees. (If you have ever read the book Ender’s Game, think of the battleschool’s game and you wont be far off.)
Just below the training rooms for the pilots are the three hangars that service the Firebat class. The two main hangars are located on decks 1-7 on either side of the ship, although only about 1/4th of the total area of the stated decks is used by the hangars. They allow for the docking of up to 100 medium fighters. Just to the fore of the fighter hangars is the misc hangar. It holds up to 40 bombers or 40 shuttlecraft.
Our last stop on the tour of the interior is the prison sector. It is located in the very bottom of the ship, and has enough containment cells to hold 300 prisoners at a time without any overcrowding. Just down the hall from the prison is the death row. It has room for up to 100 crewmen, and is built around an Incinerator in the center. The death row is totally soundproof. Here is a description of an Incinerator from another document:
Judging from the name, the average person would say that the Incinerator is just a large oven. However, it is so much more. The Incinerator is a pentagonal room made of white tile. A steel grate forms the floor, and beneath the grate is a ten-foot pit. Lining the walls of the room are various nozzles of dubious looks, for indeed their purpose is most grim. You see, when the sprinkler system in the roof of the incinerator turns on, a special mixture of flammable materials (we will call it napalm for this tour, although it is much more of a liquid than real napalm) spray down onto the victims in the room. After a quick shower, the nozzles on the walls gush out jets of flame, so that the entire room catches fire. Do not fear, however, as the only flammable thing in the room will be the condemned people. After they burn up, a second liquid is pumped through the sprinkler system, this time a powerful acid that only affects organic matter. It will turn the deceased’s body (or bodies, as the case may be) into a soupy sludge, which will pour down through the grate and into the pit below. This pit can be emptied into space, so cleanup is not an issue. The screams of the condemned are recorded by the speaker-system in the ceiling, and broadcast into the death row, to demoralize and break the inmates held there. Up to 15 people can fit into the Incinerator at a time
Interrogation rooms are located in the prison sector, so captives can be examined.
CHAPTER FOUR: The engines
The three engines on a Firebat are truly a site to behold. They are plasma driven monsters that generate enough thrust to move a ship 30 times larger than the Firebat, which gives it immense maneuverability. The engines are located in a rather strange room called Engineering. Unlike conventional Engineering rooms, this one is vented to the void. This helps keep the engine’s massive heat output from decaying the ship, and allows them to run longer and faster. Maintenance is performed either by tiny maintenance drones or space-suited engineers. The room itself is some ten stories high, and double as long, taking up nearly the entire rear section of the Firebat.
Of course, the engines would be meaningless without an FTL engine. The Firebat's FTL engine is a new and improved version of the Time Manipulation Drive (TMD), an original drive system developed by Einhauserian engineers several years ago, and only now put into use. To explain the complicated mechanics of this system, I will quote a document of the time:
My idea for an engine is called the Time Manipulation Drive. Let me explain how it works. When a ship begins to use its sub-light engines, it slowly begins to pick up speed. It can take quite a while to get going very fast, and even at full speed it is only going a fraction of the speed it could be going with it’s Faster Than Light (FTL) engines. That’s what the Time Manipulation Drive (TMD) changes.
The TMD uses a burst of energy from a Warp Coil (a big spiral of specially treated metal composites that conducts and stores massive amounts of energy) to force the ship’s shield generator to create multiple force fields. The two fields, one inside the other, trap layers of time. The first shield encompasses the ship and contours to it, trapping a layer of standard time, and the second, rounder shield surrounds the first field, which contains a second layer of time.
Special spikes are planted at strategic positions along the hull of the ship that protrude through the first shield and into the second. The tips of these spikes are filled with nanobots that can build new nanobots out of the bodies of the old. These bots will keep the tips of the spikes from being destroyed as time goes by. Now, beyond the second field is normal time, just like what’s inside the first shield.
After the two fields are in place, the TMD sends a second, higher pulse of energy through the tips of the spikes and into the second layer of time. This speeds it up vastly. For example, is you were going 100 MPH and you engaged the TMD for 300 years, the ship would essentially travel at 100 MPH for three hundred years. When you drop out of accelerated time, you would find out that you had been traveling at 30,000 mph.
What’s that you say? Wouldn’t the ship get deteriorated and the crew die over all that time? No! Remember the first layer of time? It doesn’t speed up. Life goes on as normal inside the first shield, even as millennia are streaking past in the second. The thrust from the engines is the only part of the ship to reach into the second layer.
When the destination is reached, the inner field expands (with the help of the rest of the Warp Coil’s energy) and cancels out the second field. The result is that you can move millions of light years in only a few seconds. The faster the ship’s sublight engines, the more fuel for said engines the ship carries, the number of warp coils the ship carries, how many planets are in between you and the target, and what kind of shield generator the ship has all effect the range and speed the ship is capable of.
Recharging the Warp Coil is problematic. It stores so much energy that it can take days to fully recharge using only the power from the main engines. This process can be speeded up considerably with the installation and use of solar sails. These giant, circular sails are 50 miles in diameter, and composed of a mesh of fabrics only 1/40th of an inch in thickness. The main drawback to these sails is the steep cost (the material is roughly $1,089 a square foot) and the lack of space to put them on board a ship. Their other main problem is that the fabric is pure white, and is very visible from quite a ways away. While using the sails, the ship cannot move for fear of wrecking the sails.
Here are some Pros and Cons to the TMD:
Pros: Nearly instantaneous travel to anywhere; can’t be damaged while using TMD; can’t be tracked with sensors.
Cons: Massive energy requirements; long recharge time; possibility of ending up in the apocalypse; cant be tracked with sensors while using TMD; cant fire weapons while using TMD; cant steer while using TMD; cant view the outside while using TMD; cant stop until destination is reached.
The process of using the TMD is as follows:
The captain inputs the coordinates of the desired target into the TMD’s navigation computer. The computer finds the fastest path there while still avoiding planets and other such obstacles. When that is done, the captain sets the ship on the course laid out by the computer, then engages the sub-light engines, and then drops the ships shields. After this is done, he engages the TMD, and then waits for the computer to bring the ship out of accelerated time.
The Spikes that are necessary for the TMD have been mounted on retractable levers along the hull, so they only need to stick out when the ship is about to make a jump. That way they are shielded against enemy attacks for as long as possible.
CHAPTER FIVE: Special offers
The Firebat Battlecruiser was designed with heavy Warhammer 40,000 influence. To get a feel for the different systems, I read several WH40K novels, and I spent a good deal of time on WH40K websites. As much of an influence Warhammer was, the Firebat is not totally exclusive to that universe. Therefore I am releasing a WH40K variant of the Firebat, called the Firebat-U. It is a refined version of the Firebat, with extensive use of gothic architecture, systems, and various other things. The interrogation rooms are coated with special paint and surrounded by modified energy shields, to keep any psyker energies at bay. Because the ship does not use the Warp to travel, the shielding that would normally protect the hull from daemon attack has been turned inward; to protect the crew when the ship is used in the vicinity of Chaos infested planets and such. Of course, the ship can also be easily turned Chaos, if the captain shuts down the guard systems…
CHAPTER SIX: General statistics
Ship Class: Firebat
Role: Battlecruiser
Maximum Crew: 18,520
Minimum Crew: 14,300
Length: 960 meters
Diameter: 224m
Mass: 8.63 million tons.
Decks: 56
Offensive Weapons: 36 Lance Arrays, 80 Naval Railguns, 36 Torpedo Tubes
Defensive Weapons: 1,200 Point Defense Guns
Hull: 6 layers
Shield System: Void, ten-point energy
Maximum Sublight Acceleration: 50m/s^2
Maximum FTL Speed: 246 YPS (Years Per Second)
Maximum Jump Range: 100,000 years
FTL Recharge Rate: Fully charged in 4 hours
Sublight Engines: Three HK-070 Pihc plasma engines
FTL Engine: Time Manipulation Drive
Power Generation: Three plasma driven reactors (one for each engine with the surplus going to other systems.)
Fighter Compliment: 100
Miscellaneous Compliment: 40 bombers or 40 various shuttles or a mix of the two
Maximum Deployment Time: 6 months without resuply
Cost: $183,456,609,672
WH40K Cost: FREE (if you have a coupon. If not, its $183,462,843,484)
Please note that the coupon is worth only as much as the upgrades to the Firebat. You still have to pay the base price, just not the WH40K price. Please DO NOT post the code, TG it to me.
Introduction: The Firebat Class Battlecruiser is the first ship produced by Einhauser’s Freidark Division. The following chapters of information are designed to help the average layman/ leader understand the might that is the Firebat Class Battlecruiser. I’ve tried my best to cut out all the non-essential fluff that bogs down most new products. After all, who wants to read seven pages of long-winded, unnecessary wordiness?
Chapter one: The hull
--The blade
--The shields
--The cloaking system
Chapter two: The weapons systems
--Lance arrays
--Guns
--Torpedoes
--Point Defense Guns (PDG)
--Boarding capability
--Planetary Assault capability
Chapter three: The interior
--The bridge
--The mess halls
--The grav-deck
--The hangers
--The prison system
--The hangars
Chapter four: The engines
--The FTL engine
--Engineering
Chapter five: Special offers
Chapter six: General statistics
CHAPTER ONE: The hull
The Firebat Battlecruiser is roughly sausage shaped, with the ends gently tapering to about half the diameter of the main body. The prow is tipped with a giant, vertical Durrosteel/ Endosteel blade with its own voidshield, which can be used for ramming opponents. Often, if enough speed is achieved, the Firebat can successfully slice the opposing ship in two. The blade is engineered so that the enemy ship is split and then pushed to the side (kind of like the head on an axe). This keeps the weapons protrusions on the hull from being damaged. The opposite end of the Firebat is adorned with three large engines, although we won’t get into that until Chapter four.
The hull of a Firebat is composed of many different layers of material. They are: Adamantium/ Crystex composites, Durrosteel, Admanite, Endosteel, Ferrosteel, and finally Carbon Dioxenzemes, in that order. The Adamantium/ Crystex composite provides excellent protection from both matter and laser weaponry, with neither being overly emphasized. The Durrosteel acts like a ground wire s well as armor, keeping any energy to hit the layer immediately in front of it from short-circuiting the rest of the ship, while Admanite reinforces the weaker layers below it. Endosteel is usually used for structural framework, but has been put to good use on the Firebat class, stopping projectiles from penetrating farther in 89% of the laboratory tests. The Ferrosteel is similar, although of a lower grade. Finally, the Carbon Dioxenzemes layer keeps the rest of the ship insulated and airtight. In case of a rupture, this layer can heal itself using the nanites woven into its molecular structure in minutes.
All of these layers, when used in conjunction with shields, can keep a ship safe from all but the most powerful anti-capital ship weapons. The shields fitted on this class of Battlecruiser are Type 62P/LS, or, for those who don’t understand Einhauserian scientific jargon (Author’s note: actually, nobody speaks ESJ, because I only made it up for this ship), that means that the ship has two kinds of shields; both energy and void. We shall examine the voidshields first.
A voidshield is what you would find on most ships, albeit under the name particle shields. It runs constantly in one large, all encompassing bubble around the ship, keeping micro meteors and enemy matter-based weaponry, to name a few space-borne hazards, from reaching the hull. The voidshield is usually transparent, although it turns a mottled bluish-green/gray when matter impacts it. The color change only affects the immediate area around the point of impact, and only lasts for a few seconds. The Firebat class is fitted with a device that pulls the voidshield flush against the hull, for use in the TDM (see chapter four). Alas, as magnificent as this technology is, it can still be overcome. Particularly large or particularly fast objects can pierce the shield with relative impunity.
The energy shields are almost totally different. Instead of blocking matter, they absorb energy from enemy laser weaponry. The energy absorbed is transmitted to the shield generator, which then in turn stores it until a certain amount has built up, at which point the energy is either directed back into space, or into the engines. This later action results in a massive boost in speed for a few seconds, but also degrades the engine integrity rapidly. If the generator waits too long to empty the energy it stored, it will shut itself down or explode, depending on how well it is maintained. A different way they can be knocked out is by absorbing too much energy too quickly. This will result in similar actions as if it waited too long to send out the stored energy.
Another difference is that the energy shield does not come in one bubble. Instead, it consists of ten different shield generators, each projecting a separate, overlapping field. The generator positions (and the area they cover) are as follows: fore, fore-port, fore-starboard, port, starboard, aft-port, aft-starboard, aft, up, and down. Each shield is independent of the others in the sense that if one fails, all the others will remain working.
In addition to all the things listed above, there is one other interesting item included with the Firebat’s hull, and that is the cloaking system. The outer layer of the hull is not only made of Adamantium/ Crystex composites, but also fiber-optic cables. These cables all run directly into the main computer, and said computer can cloak the ship by projecting the image of what is on the other side of the hull. This means that cameras on the port side of the hull can survey the stars in their field of vision and then transmit that video feed to the computer, which will transmit it to the fiber-optic cables on the starboard side. Although this system is highly advanced, it is not foolproof. If a ship looks too hard at a cloaked Firebat, it can usually detect it, and if the cables are damaged, they cease to function. The system can also display images of ships of either the same or smaller shape and mass, to throw off enemy vessels.
CHAPTER TWO: The weapons systems
In addition to having one of the best hulls ever to be seen by man, the Firebat Battlecruiser is equipped with enough weaponry to strike fear into even the most experienced star captains.
The main weaponry of the Firebat is the Naval Railgun. Each of these guns can hurl a mini-van sized shell to extraordinary distances, and the Firebat packs 80 of them! The railguns are mounted in a giant, vertical metal ring, which hangs from the ceiling of the three-story room in which they are kept. The ring can be moved to almost any part of the room, enabling the rail gun to depress almost flush against the hull. The barrel of the railgun is always jutting out the side of the ship, which leaves them pretty vulnerable to enemy fighters and bombers. To counteract this weakness, point defense guns (PDGs) are always in a position to cover them.
The railguns are mounted in banks of 40, with each side of the hull receiving one bank running horizontally down the sides of the ship. Complimenting the Railguns are 12 batteries of Lance Cannons (known as laser guns to the layman), or Lance Arrays to use the plural term. Each Lance Array consists of three Lance Cannons, which resemble extraordinarily large gun barrels. Each Lance Cannon packs a gigantic anti-capitol ship laser, which can melt through most known substances. The Lance Cannons are mounted in large turrets, which allow them to swing in any direction. These are the fastest weapons on the ship, for although they may be large, the turrets movement can be described as anything but slow.
The final weapon that the Firebat is equipped with is torpedo tubes. These tubes are modular, so they can fire most any torpedoes available on the FT market with only limited modifications. The tubes are separated into banks of three, and situated in between all the Lance Arrays. There are also six tubes facing backwards, nestled among the engines, and six tubes embedded in the prow/blade that have special shutters on them to prevent debris from damaging the tubes.
All of these weapons would be useless against fighters or bombers, so Point Defense Guns (PDG) have to be installed to protect the ship. There are 1,200 PDGs covering the hull of the Firebat, with extra dense clusters of them around the engines and weapons. Each PDG consists of three miniature Lance Cannons, with a sophisticated Targeting, Tracking, and Termination (T3) computer to back them up.
Now, all of those big guns are fine and dandy for beating the snot out of enemy ships, but what if you want to capture them? What then? Well, the Firebat is equipped with 400 Boarding Torpedoes, which are pretty much hollowed out Naval Railgun rounds with gravity couches and a drill-bit on the end. They are fired out of the railguns in the direction of the desired target, and the maneuvering thrusters in the rear of the pod guide the ship the rest of the way. Although the Boarding Torpedoes are fired from the railguns, they travel slower than the standard ammunition of said gun. Because of this, they tend to bounce off shields; it is always best to eliminate the enemy ship’s shield generators before launching the Marine-filled shells. When a Boarding Torpedo impacts an enemy’s hull, it usually has enough momentum to smash through the hull and into the deck directly behind it. At this point, the Marines activate the drill in the front of the torpedo, and it will grind its way towards the center of the ship. When the boarding party is satisfied with how far they’ve gone, they blow the tiny explosive charges in the drill bit and rush into the belly of the enemy ship. A modular weapons mount just inside the torpedo allows for a support weapon of some sort to be carried and fired. Each Boarding Torpedo can carry 20 Marines, and are reusable (if you can drag them out of the target ship).
Because the Firebat lacks Orbital Bombardment weaponry and can’t pass through atmospheres, most people would assume that it is useless in planetary actions. However, this is not the case. In addition to being able to fire Boarding Torpedoes, the railguns can also fire Orbital Drop Pods. These six-person capsules can deliver a fire-team to the surface of a planet in mere seconds. The armored hull of the pods can also punch through fortified bases, allowing troops to be deployed into the heart of Hive Cities or fortresses.
CHAPTER THREE: The interior
After examining the hull and weapons systems, let us head into the interior of the ship-- into the very guts of the beast, if you will. The Firebat is almost like a maze, with narrow corridors barely big enough for just two people to walk side-by-side (there is only room for one if the person is wearing armor), and very few large rooms scattered over the 56 floors (otherwise known as decks). This arrangement allows Einhauserian engineers to cram as many decks as possible into the hull. A latticework of service ducts and crawlspaces honeycomb most of the area that isn’t taken up by walkways.
The largest room onboard is, of course, engineering, but we won’t get into that until later. Instead, let us examine the bridge. The bridge on a Firebat is, unlike most ships, buried deep in the fore-center of the ship. This almost completely cuts off any possibility of the deck being destroyed in battle, which would leave the rest of the ship confused and more than likely useless.
When one walks through the heavy blast doors to the bridge, one is immediately welcomed by the abundance of real oak. It adorns everything, from the helm to the armrests of the captain’s chair. Studies have shown that when a large number of people are asked what material they prefer, 62.75% of those polled would choose oak. It is for that reason that the oak is in place. (Author’s Note: I actually did this study, and got those exact results).
Once you get past the oak, you notice the two levels of the bridge. The top level, where the doors are found, is reserved for the helmsman and the sensor consoles, while the floor below is where the Captain sits with the rest of the bridge crew. The forward wall is dominated by a massive screen, which displays the outside to the crew. Smaller monitors surround the main screen; each displays different shots of the outside. If, for some reason, the power supply to the bridge was cut, backup generators have been installed under the deck of the lower bridge.
After examining the bridge, let us take a look at the mess halls. There are two mess halls onboard the Firebat; one for officers and one for enlisted men. The officer’s mess is roughly an acre is size, with a small galley to provide food. The enlisted man’s mess is much larger, at 3 acres. It has two kitchens that pump out food 24 hours a day, to keep up with the hefty appetites.
Another area of interest onboard is the training room. Since there are usually around 3,700 Marines stationed on a Firebat at any one time, and boarding actions could happen unexpectedly, keeping them in fighting form is essential. To keep the soldier’s muscles from atrophying in the null-gravity, a special workout deck has been installed. It is basically a large ring that rotates vertically around a central core deep inside the ship, called the Grav-deck. The ring spins just under the surface, so the hull armor protects it’s delicate machinery. The Grav-deck is the only place on the ship with any form of gravity.
On this deck there is a large, 12,200 square foot gym complete with every kind of bodybuilding machine imaginable. In the very center, there is a sunken circle of sand, with low risers around it. It is in the center of this ring that Marines and crew can settle their differences in single-combat. It also allows Marines to keep up on their hand-to-hand combat classes. If one were to examine the Grav-deck long enough, they would notice that only a small portion of the deck is taken up by the gym. Of course, this sets one to wondering what the rest of the deck is for.
If you go through another blast door in the side of the gym, you would come across the Boarding Action Training (BAT) room. It is extremely large compared to the gym. The ceiling is six stories above the floor, and the horizon curves into the distance. This room is all about boarding actions. Modular wall and floor sections can be set up to simulate boarding an enemy ship, and strobe lights and fog machines add to the chaos. There is also a second room that is very similar to this onboard. In fact, it is exactly the same, excepting that it is on a part of this ship that does not rotate, giving the room null-gravity.
Now, all of that training materiel is fine for Marines, but what about the pilots that are stationed on the Firebat? To help them train, three 3D training rooms have been added. Each is one square acre in size. The walls are lined with panels of non-reflective materials, and fiber-optic cables are embedded in them. Using the cables, images of space can be imprinted on the walls, giving the sense that you are piloting a ship. Each trainee is given a “flight suit,” which is basically a restricting jumpsuit. Special light-sensitive diodes are laced in the fabric, that when concentrated light is centered on one for a few seconds, the fabric constricts and keeps the targeted person from moving the area that’s lit up. This constriction continues until the supervisor of the match “thaws” the suits with a special device known as a “wand”. Each trainee is also issued a “laser gun”, which fires beams of tightly-focused light, to disable the enemy trainees. (If you have ever read the book Ender’s Game, think of the battleschool’s game and you wont be far off.)
Just below the training rooms for the pilots are the three hangars that service the Firebat class. The two main hangars are located on decks 1-7 on either side of the ship, although only about 1/4th of the total area of the stated decks is used by the hangars. They allow for the docking of up to 100 medium fighters. Just to the fore of the fighter hangars is the misc hangar. It holds up to 40 bombers or 40 shuttlecraft.
Our last stop on the tour of the interior is the prison sector. It is located in the very bottom of the ship, and has enough containment cells to hold 300 prisoners at a time without any overcrowding. Just down the hall from the prison is the death row. It has room for up to 100 crewmen, and is built around an Incinerator in the center. The death row is totally soundproof. Here is a description of an Incinerator from another document:
Judging from the name, the average person would say that the Incinerator is just a large oven. However, it is so much more. The Incinerator is a pentagonal room made of white tile. A steel grate forms the floor, and beneath the grate is a ten-foot pit. Lining the walls of the room are various nozzles of dubious looks, for indeed their purpose is most grim. You see, when the sprinkler system in the roof of the incinerator turns on, a special mixture of flammable materials (we will call it napalm for this tour, although it is much more of a liquid than real napalm) spray down onto the victims in the room. After a quick shower, the nozzles on the walls gush out jets of flame, so that the entire room catches fire. Do not fear, however, as the only flammable thing in the room will be the condemned people. After they burn up, a second liquid is pumped through the sprinkler system, this time a powerful acid that only affects organic matter. It will turn the deceased’s body (or bodies, as the case may be) into a soupy sludge, which will pour down through the grate and into the pit below. This pit can be emptied into space, so cleanup is not an issue. The screams of the condemned are recorded by the speaker-system in the ceiling, and broadcast into the death row, to demoralize and break the inmates held there. Up to 15 people can fit into the Incinerator at a time
Interrogation rooms are located in the prison sector, so captives can be examined.
CHAPTER FOUR: The engines
The three engines on a Firebat are truly a site to behold. They are plasma driven monsters that generate enough thrust to move a ship 30 times larger than the Firebat, which gives it immense maneuverability. The engines are located in a rather strange room called Engineering. Unlike conventional Engineering rooms, this one is vented to the void. This helps keep the engine’s massive heat output from decaying the ship, and allows them to run longer and faster. Maintenance is performed either by tiny maintenance drones or space-suited engineers. The room itself is some ten stories high, and double as long, taking up nearly the entire rear section of the Firebat.
Of course, the engines would be meaningless without an FTL engine. The Firebat's FTL engine is a new and improved version of the Time Manipulation Drive (TMD), an original drive system developed by Einhauserian engineers several years ago, and only now put into use. To explain the complicated mechanics of this system, I will quote a document of the time:
My idea for an engine is called the Time Manipulation Drive. Let me explain how it works. When a ship begins to use its sub-light engines, it slowly begins to pick up speed. It can take quite a while to get going very fast, and even at full speed it is only going a fraction of the speed it could be going with it’s Faster Than Light (FTL) engines. That’s what the Time Manipulation Drive (TMD) changes.
The TMD uses a burst of energy from a Warp Coil (a big spiral of specially treated metal composites that conducts and stores massive amounts of energy) to force the ship’s shield generator to create multiple force fields. The two fields, one inside the other, trap layers of time. The first shield encompasses the ship and contours to it, trapping a layer of standard time, and the second, rounder shield surrounds the first field, which contains a second layer of time.
Special spikes are planted at strategic positions along the hull of the ship that protrude through the first shield and into the second. The tips of these spikes are filled with nanobots that can build new nanobots out of the bodies of the old. These bots will keep the tips of the spikes from being destroyed as time goes by. Now, beyond the second field is normal time, just like what’s inside the first shield.
After the two fields are in place, the TMD sends a second, higher pulse of energy through the tips of the spikes and into the second layer of time. This speeds it up vastly. For example, is you were going 100 MPH and you engaged the TMD for 300 years, the ship would essentially travel at 100 MPH for three hundred years. When you drop out of accelerated time, you would find out that you had been traveling at 30,000 mph.
What’s that you say? Wouldn’t the ship get deteriorated and the crew die over all that time? No! Remember the first layer of time? It doesn’t speed up. Life goes on as normal inside the first shield, even as millennia are streaking past in the second. The thrust from the engines is the only part of the ship to reach into the second layer.
When the destination is reached, the inner field expands (with the help of the rest of the Warp Coil’s energy) and cancels out the second field. The result is that you can move millions of light years in only a few seconds. The faster the ship’s sublight engines, the more fuel for said engines the ship carries, the number of warp coils the ship carries, how many planets are in between you and the target, and what kind of shield generator the ship has all effect the range and speed the ship is capable of.
Recharging the Warp Coil is problematic. It stores so much energy that it can take days to fully recharge using only the power from the main engines. This process can be speeded up considerably with the installation and use of solar sails. These giant, circular sails are 50 miles in diameter, and composed of a mesh of fabrics only 1/40th of an inch in thickness. The main drawback to these sails is the steep cost (the material is roughly $1,089 a square foot) and the lack of space to put them on board a ship. Their other main problem is that the fabric is pure white, and is very visible from quite a ways away. While using the sails, the ship cannot move for fear of wrecking the sails.
Here are some Pros and Cons to the TMD:
Pros: Nearly instantaneous travel to anywhere; can’t be damaged while using TMD; can’t be tracked with sensors.
Cons: Massive energy requirements; long recharge time; possibility of ending up in the apocalypse; cant be tracked with sensors while using TMD; cant fire weapons while using TMD; cant steer while using TMD; cant view the outside while using TMD; cant stop until destination is reached.
The process of using the TMD is as follows:
The captain inputs the coordinates of the desired target into the TMD’s navigation computer. The computer finds the fastest path there while still avoiding planets and other such obstacles. When that is done, the captain sets the ship on the course laid out by the computer, then engages the sub-light engines, and then drops the ships shields. After this is done, he engages the TMD, and then waits for the computer to bring the ship out of accelerated time.
The Spikes that are necessary for the TMD have been mounted on retractable levers along the hull, so they only need to stick out when the ship is about to make a jump. That way they are shielded against enemy attacks for as long as possible.
CHAPTER FIVE: Special offers
The Firebat Battlecruiser was designed with heavy Warhammer 40,000 influence. To get a feel for the different systems, I read several WH40K novels, and I spent a good deal of time on WH40K websites. As much of an influence Warhammer was, the Firebat is not totally exclusive to that universe. Therefore I am releasing a WH40K variant of the Firebat, called the Firebat-U. It is a refined version of the Firebat, with extensive use of gothic architecture, systems, and various other things. The interrogation rooms are coated with special paint and surrounded by modified energy shields, to keep any psyker energies at bay. Because the ship does not use the Warp to travel, the shielding that would normally protect the hull from daemon attack has been turned inward; to protect the crew when the ship is used in the vicinity of Chaos infested planets and such. Of course, the ship can also be easily turned Chaos, if the captain shuts down the guard systems…
CHAPTER SIX: General statistics
Ship Class: Firebat
Role: Battlecruiser
Maximum Crew: 18,520
Minimum Crew: 14,300
Length: 960 meters
Diameter: 224m
Mass: 8.63 million tons.
Decks: 56
Offensive Weapons: 36 Lance Arrays, 80 Naval Railguns, 36 Torpedo Tubes
Defensive Weapons: 1,200 Point Defense Guns
Hull: 6 layers
Shield System: Void, ten-point energy
Maximum Sublight Acceleration: 50m/s^2
Maximum FTL Speed: 246 YPS (Years Per Second)
Maximum Jump Range: 100,000 years
FTL Recharge Rate: Fully charged in 4 hours
Sublight Engines: Three HK-070 Pihc plasma engines
FTL Engine: Time Manipulation Drive
Power Generation: Three plasma driven reactors (one for each engine with the surplus going to other systems.)
Fighter Compliment: 100
Miscellaneous Compliment: 40 bombers or 40 various shuttles or a mix of the two
Maximum Deployment Time: 6 months without resuply
Cost: $183,456,609,672
WH40K Cost: FREE (if you have a coupon. If not, its $183,462,843,484)
Please note that the coupon is worth only as much as the upgrades to the Firebat. You still have to pay the base price, just not the WH40K price. Please DO NOT post the code, TG it to me.