Hand-Me-Downs
The Surplus Ships Given to Earth
When we were first recruited by the Confederacy to take on the Sa'arm, they had no idea what it would take to do this 'war' thing and wanted us to deal with it, leaving them out of it after we accepted the task. We were the experts, right?
However, we needed immediate support because bootstrapping ourselves into an interstellar war was going to take some time. If we did it all ourselves, learning from scratch how to use their technology, it would be maybe 20 or 30 years before we were ready to go hunting bad guys.
The Confederacy didn't think we would have that much time to prepare, so they gave us several hundred ships to start with. None were what we actually needed, but neither party _knew_ what we would need. The starter set they gave us was just that, something to get us started.
Without going into detail, they ended up giving us about 200 ships of five different types. These were:
- ~70 Aurora Class Colony Transports were just freighters, but they were pod-transporting freighters and we could use the pods to transport our colonists and other passengers. The ones we used as transports never got armed. The ones we converted to other uses got an assortment of weapons. We saw about 200 total over the first several years, but most were 'contracted' and after several voyages they went back to their own business.
- 60 Castle Class Corvettes ancient pre-Confed, but armed. After environmental conversions for use by Humanity, we used them as-is. As we had time, we modified them further and built more copies, each new one incorporating more newly-developed improvements. Eventually the 'copies' were different enough that they were called Ainsworths or "Improved Castles".
- 12 Mercury Class Light Assault Frigates came to us unarmed, and we added some stuff to give the troops some fire support.
- 20 Patrician Class Corvettes were also prehistoric with four missile tubes that had been converted to non-military use. We converted them back. These ships were just too small to add any other major equipment to, so all they ever had was their missile launchers, 16 reloads, and a pair of light railguns.
- 30 K'treel Class Explorer Ships started with some weapons that allowed them to beat up on unarmed ships, but nothing that could fight back against a real warship.
We built many more of the Auroras, Castles, and Patricians. They were all useful, The copies we built had improvements but were recognizable as copies. The Explorers and Mercuries were too limited; instead of building more of them we designed improved classes.
As we developed point defense tools, they got added to just about everything, so whether a particular ship had one or more Point-Defense Laser (PDL) or Point-Defense Railgun (PDR) mount(s) is more dependent upon when than what.
Note that the original 60 Castles and the 30 Explorers were the only ships that we KNEW had non-Darjee AIs. The Mercuries were built with Darjee AIs. The Patricians had Darjee AIs installed as part of their pre-turnover overhauls so we knew the Pats were built by another race, but not who. The Auroras were a mix. Most were Darjee-built. Occasionally we would realize that a particular Aurora had a non-Darjee AI.
All equipment that we built during the war got AIs built for us by the Darjee, including the 'clones' we built of the Castles while we were designing more effective warships.
Also See
References
- Thinking Horndog's Average Joes
- Zen Master's The First Command
- Zen Master's Patrol Commander (when and if published).
(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))
