Libertas Attached Gunboats
This is a "Stub", or a short article with little useful information. Any editor with more information about this subject is invited to help improve it.
(This article is not yet canon. It was pointed out in Ending This Mess but not described as clearly as here. -ZM)
Voluptas Class Attached Gunboats
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, which is the largest class of Sa'arm ship we have met. Each gunboat 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 Confederacy 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, 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.
Since these gunboats use a starship's hull as their lower hull, they are effectively immune to infantry ground fire, although artillery and laser weapons will do some damage to the hull. Only damage from above seems to have any effect. 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.
Many of the aircraft had been reworked with Confederacy technology, and that included a fixed-target escape portal. In many cases there were more aircraft waiting where those had come from, but first-rate combat pilots don't grow on trees. When an attacking the aircraft was hit, the pilot could eject via the installed portal and could often be flying a new plane in hours. If the portal or pilot himself (or herself) was part of the damage, though, 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.
Perhaps an artillery or mortar shell with an air-burst charge and a proximity fuse would have helped, 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.
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.
Details Known
- 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.
- 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))
