Eclipse, Independent Starship

The CarpWheel class light frigate with the registration “ISS 4040-1 Eclipse” (meaning it's the four-thousand-and-fortieth independent ship to bear that name since we started keeping these records a thousand years ago, though it's the only one in its mass and armament class) masses just north of 30,000 metric tons. The ship has been heavily customized, including the introduction of a number of heavy-weapons platforms and custom built, highly innovative individual weapons, and with those additions it technically classes as a dreadnought, despite being unreasonably small. This power in such a small spaceframe is enabled by a very energy-dense power source hooked to a highly efficient control system, and the most compact and versatile interstellar drive in history.

The weapons platforms fixed to the rear engine box-frame were developed by Meiago-Teclast using technology licensed from a low-profile brain-trust known only as EDDY in regulatory circles. Each platform consists of an autonomous pod that can either be controlled remotely by an AI or human pilot using a full-immersion control cradle called the FICC (full-immersion control cradle). The pod is fitted with a number of offensive and defensive measures, including close-range plasma beams, category 0.2 XXL caliber kinetic-round cannons, anti-missile counter beams, and high-velocity small caliber rail guns. All ammunition is stored in the pods themselves, but each weapon system is independently operated, and the pods themselves are remarkably resistant to damage, with each individual weapon able to operate even if the control systems or magazines for all of the others have been neutralized. The way the pods are mounted they have nearly a full 360 degrees of coverage, and since there are three suspended around the engine box of the Eclipse, there is almost nowhere, including against the hull of the ship itself, where at least one of these formidable platforms cannot track a target.

The Eclipse is also outfitted with a number of gravitationally managed missile tubes, situated to fire along the forward axis of the ship. As standard she carries a complement of heat-seeking and AI-defeating homing missiles, as well as a variety of high-velocity random-walk missiles, that carry and deploy several hundred smaller explosives along random trajectories, useful against large sophisticated drone-fleets. The Eclipse is outfitted to accept and launch a number of standard and abnormal tactical fusion warheads, but she does not carry them under normal circumstances.

One of the standard grav-launchers has been heavily modified into a custom weapons platform. One of the downsides of missiles in a ship as small as the Eclipse is storage, and only a few dozen of each type of missile can be carried in the launchers at any given time. With that in mind the ship’s engineer designed a weapon that could be fed with nearly any form of scrap. It is a variation on magnetic rail-gun technology, but on a much larger scale. The power requirements would normally restrict a weapon of its kind to a large cruiser or a battlehulk, but the Eclipse actually has power to spare. The gun, as it’s so creatively termed, magnetizes a ball of metal or mineral heated nearly to a plasma, and then launches it forward at significant fractions of the speed of light. The plasma impacts with nearly the same force as a small tactical nuke, but delivers its force and heat to a much more localized point, making it highly effective at punching through even the most hardy of hull platings. A happy side effect of the heating and the magnetic field is that the projectile can function as a last-ditch countermeasure against heat-seeking and AI-defeating homing missiles.

The power system that enables so much armory is in fact a factory standard system. The designers of the CarpWheel light frigates installed military-grade power components and a core fitting compatible with the still unreleased Vac-Tech QVCs, which is what the Eclipse now uses years later. A single QVC produces enough power to supply a mark 6 or 7 battlehulk and all of its major weapon systems, meaning that there really is just plenty to go around on a tiny ship like the Eclipse. Why in the heck the Core Corp engineers thought that would be a worthwhile investment, nobody is quite sure. But the crew of the Eclipse is quite pleased with the end result.

Beyond the simple capacity for an enormous amount of power, the Eclipse is also outfitted with a modular power management system sourced from Chesapeake Corporation. The modular system was originally developed for ground settlements and colonies, and operates based on a series of nodes that can grow to encompass cities. This system has the advantage of being intended to handle enormous amounts of power while also being able to scale down to a small number of nodes as needed on the Eclipse. This also renders the power controls robust, meaning that each individual system can be noded and managed separately from every other system, to the point that individual weapons can be managed as separate nodes. This distributed system means that virtually the only way the Eclipse can suffer a total power failure is if the grid is damaged between the QVC output and the wall of the engine room, a total distance of about a meter.

The primary drain of power in most ships is the interstellar wormhole drive, but that is not the case for the Eclipse. The Eclipse’s primary power use is sustaining the reaction in each of the three J-type fusion engines that provide sub-light thrust. These engines are considered “high output” engines, and a single engine would be more than sufficient for the Eclipse’s needs. Three of them is slightly absurd, and results in such massive acceleration (75,000~ish g's) that the onboard inertial management system will actually limit the engines at about three-quarters output unless overridden by the pilot. Anything above that will overtax the IMS and cause the crew to experience the actual sensation of acceleration. At full output these engines would cause extreme discomfort and possible death. This isn’t advisable (obviously), and again begs the question of just what the heck the Core Corp CarpWheel designers were thinking. High forward velocities achievable with this kind of thrust (upwards of .8 c theoretically) also serve to fuel the fusion reactions amply through the Bussard collectors built in to the engine housings, even in absolutely “empty” space, meaning that almost no on-board fuel storage is required.

Several major structural changes were made when outfitting the Eclipse for interstellar mercenary use. The first was basic reinforcement of the engine box, particularly the corners, to support the Meiago-Teclast weapons platforms. The platforms were mounted to allow as much spherical coverage for each of them as possible, and the frame to which they are affixed creates enormous rotational stress on the engine box itself when all platforms are in operation. The materials are among the strongest alloys and composites known to man, and as such the engine box is more heavily armored than most warship hulls.

The second major structural change was reinforcement to the nose of the ship enabling the Eclipse’s particular method of breach-boarding. As with the engine box, this protective shield uses the most resilient materials available. The nose armor is much beefier than the rest of the armor plating retrofitted onto the hull of the Eclipse, and is tied directly into the reinforced engine box via major lateral supports that run down the side of the ship. All said this gives the Eclipse a subtly different external appearance than the original CarpWheel cargo ships. These changes were sketched up and commissioned by the first Boss of the Eclipse’s crew, and cost an exorbitant amount of money. Whether the final profile of the ship was completely intentional or perhaps the result of some kind of darker psychology is a question regularly debated by the Eclipse’s crew when she’s planetside. Unfortunately an actual answer won’t be readily forthcoming, since that dude has been dead for over 15 years.

Of course, the pride and joy of any interstellar craft is right there in the “interstellar” moniker. The Eclipse employs what is widely termed an outmoded form of faster-than-light travel, basically what amounts to instantaneous inter-dimensional position-hopping helmed by a member of the race of Benders. The power requirements are very low, and aside from the cost of employing a Bender (who, in the case of the Eclipse, is a valuable member of the crew in many other ways) is more cost effective than any version of the intergalactic wormhole drive used by everyone else. Benders can fold themselves and anything they can form a conductive path to or carry (along with whatever is inside of that thing) through space to any point within a specific range determined by their own stamina. There is an upper limit to the amount of mass they can carry with them, though this seems to be less stamina related as just raw talent. Benders are bred and sold as property, and their reproduction is carefully controlled on a galactic scale. The bender on the Eclipse is a paid and contracted member of the crew, since even the degenerates that bought the ship originally were uncomfortable with slavery.