Voluptas

Voluptas Class Sa'arm "Conquest Sphere"

   A Voluptas is the largest Sa'arm colony ship that we have met.  It apparently carries ~25,000 troops ready for use, another million in hibernation or stasis, and literally hundreds of armed landing craft.  They are built in orbit, but when reaching their target they land.  They are designed for rapid disassembly and are not capable of taking off again.
   These ships represent an immense investment in time, labor, and materials, and in Confederacy experience they are only used to deal with particularly troublesome food sources.  One Voluptas with its integral group of armed and armored gunboats and its fleet of escorting smaller warships should be enough to resolve the Sa'arm's difficulty reducing any planet.  It should be a source of pride to the Humans that at the Fourth Battle of Earthat the Sa'arm brought four of them as well as two smaller colony ships.
   It has been wondered how the Sa'arm came up with the design with heavy armor on the hull that comes apart and becomes gunboats, as they learn quickly but not particularly good at research or invention.  The Confederacy has not met any other Sa'arm ships with such removable outer hull.  One possibility is that they captured an example of a ship with rough-duty landers as its outer layer, and converted the idea to gunboats to provide extra protection for their largest colony ship before landing as well as providing armored airborne artillery to support ground operations after landing.

Performance During Fourth Battle of Earthat

   During the Fourth Battle of Earthat, once the defending fleet had been swept away, two Voluptas were able to launch their gunboats, clear their selected landing sites, and land undamaged in India and Brazil.  A third damaged Voluptas may have intended to land in Europe but crashed in Antarctica instead after launching its gunboats.  It was destroyed in place as quickly as possible, before any survivors recovered from the crash.
   The fourth Voluptas, hovering over Russia, was unable to land as quickly due to the effective defense put up by thousands of missile- and chaingun-armed combat aircraft and laser-armed main battle tanks.  By the time its intended landing site had been cleared, Earth's surviving defending fleet had regrouped and were able to destroy this last Voluptas before it could land.

Combat Results

   It has not yet been resolved if the inner hull of the Voluptas, what is uncovered when the gunboats have been released, is also armored or not.  If it is armored, the new colony has that much more processed steel to build with, but it will be harder to take the ship apart.  It has been verified, however, that with the gunboats gone the core Voluptas has little to no anti-ship weapons available to defend itself with.  Apparently, the invading fleet is supposed to completely eliminate all defending warships before releasing the gunboats.
   As of this writing Confederacy forces have destroyed several Voluptas-class ships.  In every case this was done using weapons which would have penetrated the ship's hull either way.  In the first case, Shipkiller Missiles launched from long range for maximum closing speed destroyed the ship while still under construction, and no sensors were close enough to get detailed imagery.
   In the second case, a Castle, acting as a slower but far more massive missile, rammed it.  Again, no Confederacy sensors survived to record details of the target's construction.
   In the last four known cases where Confederacy forces have destroyed a Voluptas, the weapons used were nukes and Hero-class railguns or coilguns.  In the Fourth Battle of Earthat, it was an actual pair of hastily-recommissioned Hero battlecruisers which stood off and pounded apart the one over Russia while what survived of the Earth Defense Fleet took care of its remaining escorts.  The one which crashed in Antarctica was destroyed by a nuclear weapon placed beside its hull.  The other two cases involved warships the same size as a Hero or larger mounting Hero-class coilguns with the same effect as the original Hero railguns.
   In every case where Confederacy forces have destroyed a Voluptas, the weapons used would have been equally effective regardless of interior hull armor.  Unfortunately, none of these battles ended with enough of the Voluptas left for Confederacy forces to examine.

Details Known

• Mounts an immense number, probably 243 (3^5), of Medium Particle Beam turrets.
• Before landing, the outer shell comes apart to be used as gunboats or landing craft.  Since each gunboat has a "lower" hull made of a warships' outer hull and has a Medium Particle Beam turret sticking through it, it can be assumed that each Voluptas 'carries' 243 of these.
• Carries 9 light starships internally, usually Vacuna scout/patrol ships
• Carries 21 (plus, probably 27) smaller ships internally, usually Lima or Lactanus local-space craft
• All wrecked Sa'arm colony ships we have inspected had 243 (3^5) units in each "freezer" room but we have never inspected a Voluptas.
• Live crew may be exactly 19,683 (3^9) units
• "Frozen" troop count may be exactly 531,441 (3^12) full-grown or immature units with another 531,441 stored eggs ready to be hatched.

Story Usage

   A textual analysis of the story repository, current as of 2018 and performed on 2019-09-06 identified the following usage counts for Voluptas:

• Chosen Frozen II by lordshipmayhem 7 instances.
• Guerilla by Zipper D Dude 3 instances.

See Also

• Sa'arm Ships
• Libertas Attached Gunboats

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