Vacuna
Vacuna Class Sa'arm Scout Corvette
A Vacuna is a small single-weapon corvette-type vessel which the Sa'arm use for scouting/exploring, patrolling, and capital ship screening. It is most often used in threes.
The Vacuna appears to be the smallest starship design used by the Sa'arm for combat. While they were occasionally seen in isolation at first, after the first few contacts it became far more common to see them grouped. Three together, a "Triad", is common. If one or two are seen, it is assumed that the rest of the triad was lost sometime earlier in their mission. If four are seen together, it is assumed that there were two triads but two ships were lost.
Once we developed our theory of their 'hive mind' this was explained by saying that the Vacuna was large enough to permit sufficient crew for surveying or exploring, but it was too small to hold sufficient crew for the rapid decisions required by combat. Apparently three together held the minimum number of units necessary to conduct thoughtful combat maneuvers. Once the Sa'arm became aware that some starships were capable of hostile behavior, staying grouped for thoughtful response would become more important than surveying efficiency.
In published stories the Confederacy never captured a complete, undamaged, crewed Vacuna. However, we were able to take our time looking at several disabled ones after the Marines had cleaned out the crews. If you analyze everything you find in a Vacuna with a smashed stern and then everything you find in another Vacuna with a smashed bow, you can probably learn everything there is to learn about the class.
Weapons
- 1 Sa'arm Medium Particle Beam turret
Crew
- Between 30 and 35 Sa'arm.
Capabilities
Some have written that a single Castle will destroy a single Vacuna, but it will get beaten up. Since the Vacuna only has one beam weapon turret while the Castle has two of them as well as a devastating close-range weapon, ZM took that to mean that the Vacuna's Particle Accelerator Beam was somewhat more powerful than the Castle's.
Further, the Sa'arm responded to this inequality by grouping the Vacunas in triads. This gives the Sa'arm three times the weapons, but far more importantly three times the units for the local gestalt, making it far more intelligent. What's worse, the three separate ships can use their separation as a phased-array lidar to get even better targeting than our own AI-driven targeting. A single Castle has no chance against a Vacuna Triad unless it has surprise. It either runs or dies. The best result we know of was DE-032 Maiden Castle, which got a clean sweep of the field (itself and all three opponents) by crippling two and then ramming the third. The only survivors were Maiden crew who bailed out before impact.
It is 'canon' that the Sa'arm didn't have the Confederacy's Nav Shield until they captured a couple of Confed envoy ships which had it; after that all Sa'arm ships had the Confed Nav Shield. In The First Command ZM said that the original Castles didn't have it either -they were too old- but it was installed during the initial overhaul when we first got them. When both ships have equivalent shields, a single Vacuna dies quickly. It will need several hits to take the Castle's shield down, while the Castle's two separate weaker beams can either fire together for more damage or alternate to prevent the Vacuna's shield from recovering. Either way, once the range closes to 200KM the Castle will fire its plasma torpedo and, if the Vacuna's shield is already stressed, the fight is over. The Sa'arm scouts only started surviving encounters with our Castles when they started grouping into triads.
The Confederacy's other early scout, the Patrician, carries four missile launchers and a pair of light railguns. It also carries, as all of our ships do, a much better sensor suite than a Vacuna. Unfortunately, all Patrician weapon systems are fixed mounts firing forward. The missiles will home until their engines fail, but they are boosting _forward_ when they launch and will lose much of their limited Delta-V if they must turn very far. The railgun slugs are simple ballistic slugs with no homing capability. Thus, a Patrician must be pointed directly at a target to fire on it.
A single hit from a Pat missile will break a Vacuna. If it's a 'near miss', though, the missile will take out the Vacuna's shield but miss the ship. Once the Sa'arm are aware of an enemy in the area, they will avoid the incoming missiles. A Vacuna is nimble enough for that. Thus, a Patrician can only beat a Vacuna from surprise, and from near enough that the missile is still boosting and homing. It's theoretically possible to take out four different Vacunas if all tubes are fired for time-on-target hits on all four.
If no one is surprised, the Patrician again needs to run, even from a single Vacuna. A Pat can close on a Vacuna, but by the time it is close enough to be sure of repeated hits with a rail gun, it has already been chewed up by the Vacuna's Particle Beam -which can ONLY damage the bow and its weapon systems, if the Patrician is closing on it- so the Pat probably has already lost most or all of its weapon systems by the time it is close enough to get a hit.
If a Patrician runs into a large group of Sa'arm ships, it is possible to get boxed in such that no path to escape is possible. We don't know if that ever actually happened, but we know we lost some Patricians even when they were only supposed to be surveying systems from a safe distance.
See Also
Story Usage
A textual analysis of the story repository, current as of 9/2019 and performed on 2019-09-21 and using SS Lib ver 1.15.07 (9/21/2019) identified the following top ten usage counts for Vacuna:
- Independent Command by Zen Master 59 instances.
- The Enemy Within by Frostfyre 12 instances.
- Living a CAP Based Present by Allan Joyal 9 instances.
- Ending This Mess by Zen Master 6 instances.
- Victoria Per Scientiam by SGTStoner 6 instances.
- Guerilla by Zipper D Dude 5 instances.
- We Few, We Happy Few, We Band of Brothers by LughIldanach 5 instances.
- The First Command by Zen Master 4 instances.
- Going Fishing by lordshipmayhem 3 instances.
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern by lordshipmayhem 3 instances.
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