Earhart's Officers' Club
You decide to stay at the table of the young officer, who is regaling his comrades with the latest news from EarthForce. They are all asking about the next generation of the Starfury fighter, which is supposed to be coming into service soon.
Okay, okay guys! I'll tell you what I know - and you'd better tell your friends that you heard it first from Flight Lieutenant Warren Keffer! There's a new EarthForce fighter coming, called the Thunderbolt. It's being delivered to all Omega Class Destroyers. The Thunderbolt's a dual-role aerospace craft. In space it works exactly like a Starfury, with multi-vector engine pods; but it's also designed to enter a planetary atmosphere. It's a two-seater, armed with missiles and plasma cannon.
Mitchell-Hyundyne SA-26 Thunderbolt
The new SA-26 Thunderbolt is a twin-seater aerospace fighter, developed from the SA-23E Starfury space superiority variant. They finally cracked the problem of how to trade off the atmospheric and deep space handling capabilities.
First, you can see that it has a new 15 meter streamlined fuselage, with a twin cockpit on top. But see also the similarity with the Starfury in the four wing-mounted engine pods. They're microfusion powered multivector thrusters, just like on the standard 'Fury, except that you don't see nearly as many projecting thruster nozzles. They've tried to fit those flush with the pod hulls, for obvious reasons.
Now get this - first, the wing pylons are proper aerofoils, which means that you get some lift in a planetary atmosphere; second, they've tucked a pair of scramjets under the upper wing so that you can increase your loitering time over the surface. It's a genuine dual-mode machine, versatile enough for standard space escort or ground attack. The scramjets will fly you up to the stratosphere, after which you can cut in with the particle thrust drive to make orbit.
In the Cockpit
Unlike on the conventional Starfury, the pilot sits forwards, strapped into his seat in a five-point harness. It's more comfortable that way if you're going to be flying in normal gravity conditions. The backseater has the job of managing sensors, ECM and ground attack weapons. The pilot has control over flight and the nose guns.
In this profile, you can see that the silhouette is much smaller and the wings are thinner and more aerodynamic than on the SA-23E. I guess you would say that the fuselage is kind of wedge-shaped. That's an armoured heat-shield, made of ceramic tiles, to protect the pilot and crewman. If you look closely, you can see the hard-points under the lower wing, where missiles are mounted. Under the upper wing surface, you can see the scramjet intake on the leading craft.
Perhaps the most unusual features are the roll-out aerofoils, which are extended in this picture, but stowed in the last picture I showed you. These give extra lift and manoeuverability to the craft when you're flying in an atmosphere, but they're just extra mass to shift when you're in deep space. So, the solution they came up with was to have them mounted on rotating collars on each engine pod. They roll out of the way when you're in space; then, the wingspan is reduced to something like 13.5 meters, so the ship has less angular momentum and still spins on a credit like the standard 'Fury.
Thunderbolt Attack
What's it like to lead a ground attack? Well, you start out in orbit, maybe launched as a wing from an Omega Class Destroyer. Then, you warm up the particle thrust drives and hit reverse, dipping into the thin layers of the upper atmosphere. As you dig deeper, the ship starts to heat up and you get a corona of ionisation flowing round the hull; but the ceramic tiles are really good insulators. You and your backseater feel like you're hanging from the straps as you go from orbital velocity down to about mach 2 in a matter of minutes.
Once you've lost the hull ionisation, you roll out the stabilisers and find that she begins to respond to the stick like a normal aircraft. The scramjets come on-line when the computer thinks there's enough gas to put through the compressors. It works best on oxygen and methane-based atmospheres and helps save on helium fuel.
The Thunderbolt's main theatre is planetside, bringing firepower to bear on the ground from space. For that, she carries a variety of payloads. On the pictures I've got here, you can see high explosive missiles mounted on four hardpoints under the lower aerofoil. You could mount another couple of missiles outside these, without interfering with the outrigger gear stored in the lower wing farings. Providing you clear the scramjet nacelles, you could mount two missiles each side under the upper wing. That makes ten hard-points in all, which is a lot of ordnance. Fire control is with the backseater, who uses the target designator situated under the nose gun to select targets.
Thunderbolt Firepower
Apart from the missiles, the main armament of the Thunderbolt is the helium quad-pulse cannon. That PPG is one big mother of a weapon. It's really four interlinked phase plasma guns - just look at the size of the bulge under the nose, that's two prefire chambers on each side. They found a way of feeding the plasma from behind, and then economised on weight by having a single 40mm muzzle at the front. The recycle time is really short, since the chambers fire in sequence; you should see how this baby spits fire, it's something else!
For defense, you have the armoured cockpit module, which can be ejected if you're splashed in space; or else the pilot and crew can bail out in the old fashioned way, if you're flying below the planetary troposphere. The upper aerofoil farings are ECM pods for jamming enemy tracking systems; but the lower farings stow outriggers. The main landing gear is under the belly, with a nose wheel to the front. The projecting faring at the rear of the upper fuselage houses a braking chute for short runway landings.
Oh yeah, there's one other thing - they've brought back the old tradition of painting animal heads on the noses of the ships. This one here's an eagle. The first one I showed you was a shark. You can get some really good snarls onto these - plenty of teeth to go with the bite!
