Sa'arm Ships
(Copied straight from .XML 'backup' file, needs formatting and corrections. ZM User (talk) 20:15, 22 April 2024 (PDT))
Sa'arm Vessels
This is not a definitive list but a representation of what has been encountered so far.
In many cases there does not appear to be a common design philosophy as you would find within a human constructed fleet. Often the vessels are modified copies of the ships of another race, including those used by the [[Confederacy.
In the same way that NATO gave a designation to the craft used by the Soviets the Confederacy has employed a similar system.
Vessels believed to be hyper capable begin with a 'V' whilst vessels designed for in system use begin with 'L'.
Care had to be taken to ensure that the names used -mostly of Roman deities- were not used as vessel names within the Confederacy
Hyper Capable Ships
| Reporting Name | Class | Comments |
| (Unnamed Courier) | Courier | The smallest starships used by the Sa'arm, these ships generally only carry 10-12 crew, apparently serving as communications relay ships. |
| Vacuna | Scout | A small vessel, often used in threes which appears to be scouting out systems far in advance of the Sa'arm advance. |
| Vagitanus | Corvette | Appears to be a close copy of the Castle class corvette |
| Venti | Destroyer | One of the fastest vessels in the Sa'arm inventory but that is it's only attribute of note. See also CSS Stone |
| Vervactor | Cruiser | Slow and sluggish, like the battleship, it has quite a bit of firepower. |
| Volturnus | Freighter | A Sa'arm vessel somewhere between the Aurora and Kilo class ships in size. The major difference is that it carries its cargo internally. |
| Vesta | Battleship | |
| Volumna | Hive Recon Sphere | 500 troops. 12 attached light ships. May land and lift off again after refueling |
| Virtus | Hive Colonizer Sphere | 10,000 troops and another 100,000 in hibernation/stasis. 27 attached light ships. Lands and stays. |
| Voluptas | Hive Conquest Sphere | 25,000 troops, and another 1,000,000 in hibernation/stasis. 30 attached light ships. Lands and stays. |
Available names:- Vediovus Veritas Verminus Viduus Virbius
Intra-System Ships
| Reporting Name | Class | Comments |
| Lactanus | Corvette | Appears to be a close copy of the Castle class corvette without the hyper capability |
| Lares | Carrier | Described by one Navy Admiral as a barge the Lares is the home base for the Liber and Lima vessels. It has a minimal maneuvering capability and appears more like a space station than a vessel of war. |
| Liber | Fighter | A small vessel, about the size of a Backfire bomber but used as a fighter. Its primary armament is two lasers of moderate power. Relies more on quantity than firepower. |
| Lima | Bomber | Larger than the Liber it carries two plasma torpedoes as its main strike weapon |
| Lupercus | Shuttle | "Rescue Mission" says the Lupercus can carry 300 Sa'arm internally and is used by the Voluptus and Volturnas. It appears to have external hard points although they have never been seen in use. No weapons have been noted. |
Available names:- Larentina Laverna Levana Libertas Libitina Lucina
Atmospheric Craft
(The below is not yet canon. It was pointed out in Ending This Mess but not described as clearly as here. If this is accepted, this should probably be its own article. -ZM)
The (we need a name. "Libertas?" They certainly do a good job of 'liberating' wherever they go for the Sa'arm. -ZM) 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. Each one has a Sa'arm capital ship's hull as its underside, and it has a Medium Particle Beam turret sticking through it.
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 Confenderacy ships gathered to eliminate the Russian Voluptas before it could land, all of the gunboats 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. 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.
Since these gunboats use a starship's hull as their lower hull, they are effectively immune to ground fire. Only damage from above seems to do anything. 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 made these attacks very expensive.
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. 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.
Sa'arm Ship Manning Estimates
The Sa'arm seem to do everything in threes, or in powers of threes. The following is a conversion table from powers of three to decimal system numbers:
- 3^2 = 9 - Assumed crew of a Lima bomber or (unnamed) courier ship
- 3^3 = 27
- 3^4 = 81 - Assumed crew of one Vacuna scout/patrol ship
- 3^5 = 243 - Size of a colony ship 'freezer' compartment
- 3^6 = 729
- 3^8 = 6561
- 3^9 = 19,683
- 3^10 = 59,049
- 3^11 = 177,147
- 3^12 = 531,441
(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))
