Libertas Attached Gunboats

(This article is not yet canon.  It was pointed out in Ending This Mess but not described as clearly as here. -ZM)

Libertas-Class Attached Gunboats

   The gunboats/landing craft carried by the Voluptas Conquest Sphere have proven especially difficult for ground-based defenders to deal with.  They are not carried ON or IN the hull, they are carried AS the outer hull on the Voluptas, which is the largest class of Sa'arm ship we have met.  Each gunboat is armored on the bottom by the simple expedient of using the sort of armor one would expect to find on a major capital warship's hull as its underside, and then using a large number of these gunboats as a Sa'arm capital ship's outer hull.  Not only are the gunboats themselves almost impossible for ground-based defenders to destroy, using a layer of them as a warship's outer hull makes that warship just as difficult for armed starships to destroy as well.
   The Libertas appears to have only one integral weapon system, a Medium Particle Beam turret mounted underneath it and protruding through through that hull.  When the gunboat is attached to its mother ship, this weapon serves as the ship's main armament.  When the gunboat is released for independent flight, this weapon becomes portable mobile artillery.  Since this weapon is normally used as a major warship's primary battery, it is far stronger than needed to reduce any possible planet-based fortification.  The gunboat's only known major combat weakness is the gun's inability to fire upward.
   As these gunboats are released while their mother ship is still in orbit, they must be space-rated.  However, there are no records of a gunboat going into orbit.  Certainly, at the end of the 4th Battle of Earthat, when the surviving defending Confederacy ships gathered to eliminate the Russian Voluptas before it could land, all of the gunboats which that Voluptas had released would have been helpful in protecting their mothership if they were capable.  This did not happen.  We conclude that these gunboats are primarily atmospheric craft with the ability to enter the atmosphere from space and survive re-entry, and may not have many support systems typical of spaceships like antigravity and atmosphere scrubbing.  It may help that they are not at 'orbital speed'; they are released from their mothership while it is at orbital altitude but hovering over its selected landing site.
   Given the immense energy requirements to fire this weapon on demand, we assume that a large part of the gunboat's internal volume and mass is used to hold the power plant needed to drive it.  Such a power plant should have no trouble lifting the mass of the vessel into space using several technologies known to the Confederacy.  Either the Sa'arm are not aware of these technologies, or are aware of them but have not yet converted them to use on these gunboats, or, possibly, they have done so and these gunboats are actually capable of lifting from a planetary surface into space but do not do so for unknown reasons.

Performance in the Fourth Battle of Earthat

   Since these gunboats use a starship's hull as their lower hull, they are effectively immune to infantry ground fire.  Artillery and laser weapons will do some minor damage to the hull and may disable the Particle Beam, either the mounting turret or the weapon itself.  Only damage from above seems to have any meaningful effect on the vessel itself.  During the "Fourth Battle of Earthat", Earth's combat aircraft were able to easily down these gunboats from above, but the casualties taken to get a missile or a chaingun in position to fire from above made these attacks very expensive.
   Many of Earth's aircraft had been reworked with Confederacy technology, and in many cases that included a fixed-target escape portal.  When an attacking aircraft was damaged beyond its ability to continue the mission, the pilot could eject via the installed portal.  When he or she did so, the pilot could simply man an identical aircraft, waiting at the airbase the destroyed one had come from.  However, if the portal or pilot himself (or herself) was part of the damage, the portal wouldn't get used.  And, like most closing engagements, the front of the aircraft with the pilot was the most likely part to get damaged.
   It wasn't the orbiting Sa'arm warships or the hordes of Swarmtroopers that made Earth's defenses fall so quickly, it was these gunboats.  The Confederacy has not yet found anything short of a warship's combat shield which can withstand even a single shot from a Medium Particle Beam turret.  Without control of Earth's orbitals by warships armed with anti-ship weapons, Earth's defenses had no effective counter for them.  No passive defense has been found against these things.  Only an active defense where the defenders go out and destroy these gunboats before they can fire on their target can work.
   These gunboats are comparatively fragile from above, since -aside from the lower hull- they are only built strong enough to do their jobs.  There appears to be no upper armor.  Certainly, one shot from any starship-mounted weapon can down a gunboat since it strikes from above.  Once the 7th Military District's relief fleet arrived in Earthat, there were literally hundreds of armed starships orbiting Earth, and they made elimination of all Sa'arm gunboats an early priority.
   Perhaps an artillery or mortar shell with an air-burst charge and a proximity fuse would have helped the defending forces, but no such shells that were smart enough to wait until they were _above_ the gunboat were available.  Once that idea was put forward such shells were rapidly produced but by the time they made it to the front all of the gunboats had been destroyed by (starship) naval gunfire from orbit.

Details Known

• About 30 meters long, calculated mass ~1400 tonnes
• Wrecked gunboats have been found with between 10 (possibly base crew?) and 100 (base crew plus ~90 troops?) Sa'arm onboard.
• Each Voluptas apparently carries 243 gunboats as the outer layer of its hull.
• The mother ship releases all its (outer hull) gunboats and all internally carried small craft before entering the atmosphere.
• Each gunboat has, as its lower hull, a section of the armor from the outer hull of their largest and most expensive warship.
• Each gunboat has a Medium Particle Beam turret sticking out the bottom.  It has 360 degree radial coverage from 90 degrees 'down' to ~10 degrees 'up', allowing a gunboat to engage airborne targets at a distance but not nearby and above.
• They are able to "float" in atmosphere, probably using a gravity nullifier, but move at a ponderous pace. They cannot be described as nimble or quick.
• They are space-worthy and can land on a planet, but have never been seen to climb back up out of the gravity well.  This begs the question: "If they cannot launch from the planet and go to the assigned ship, how do the Sa'arm get them to the ship?" Are the gunboats all built out in space?

(Someday this will be a navigation template.  It will provide a bar across the bottom of each article with useful navigation links.  Until then, this is just a placeholder to get rid of all the red "broken link" indicators. -ZM User (talk) 10:00, 3 May 2024 (PDT))

Canon