SOVEREIGNTY STARSHIPS

BATTLECARRIERS
The backbone of the Sovereignty Military. Similar to a Battlestar in respects but quite different in others. BattleCarriers are massive multi-role, multi-mission vessels capable of handling a wide variety of tasks in peacetime and all-out war. While they are Military Command & Control vessels, they are extremely capable working alone and independently from a Battle Group. Because of their sheer size (1620 Metres length not including antennae) they see use in Sovereignty-sponsored research expeditions into uncharted and potentially hazardous areas where they can support a full research division of specialists and their equipment as well as Ambassadorial Envoys while serving as a mobile embassy. In peacetime it's not unusual whatsoever to see BattleCarriers transporting cargo in a freighter capacity as they make the rounds of their patrols. In peacetime, the Military operates as a profit-generating entity.

First and foremost though, BattleCarriers are the primary means of force-projection on an interstellar level.

Armed and equipped with weapons and ordnance sufficient to dominate an entire star system and simultaneously exert serious influence and control over nearby systems working individually without support vessels, they are vessels to be respected if not outright feared by any being with a shred of common sense.

They mount anywhere from 24 to 32 turrets with each supporting two Matter Cannons and two to four hull-mounted bow Matter Cannons easily twice as powerful as the turret guns.

Ten Strategic-type missile tubes as well as four Tactical Missile Launch Bays and four Torpedo tubes with five-hundred and forty Combined Close-in Weapon Point-Defense (CIWPD) batteries to round out the vessel's arsenal.

Standard fighter complement is one-hundred and twenty DeathWing Multi-Mission Space Superiority Fighters normally, but when loaded for War Operations this goes up to one hundred and sixty.

Normally each Battlecarrier has twelve Electronic Intelligence Combat Utility Scouts (EICUS) and when War-Loaded carries twenty-four. Drone complement is comprehensive, composed of Semi-Autonomous Intelligence units of Multi-Mission profile. Engine systems comprise Sublight, Vector-Warp, and Hyper-Dimensional 'Jump' types.

RESIDENT MACHINE INTELLIGENCE
A BattleCarrier is in a very real sense, a life form. Central to the vessel's operation at peak efficiency is the RMI which handles millions of tasks every second ranging from simple maintenance in areas difficult for Organic crew to access to handling situational aspects of a pitched battle.

Machine Intelligences are not made, they enlist in the Military and work their way up the ranks like anyone else, and the dream of many is to be assigned a BattleCarrier to integrate with. RMI's integrated into a vessel allow the full performance and efficiency of the vehicle to be realized on a practical level and allows for vessel function in the event the Organic crew is incapacitated and also allows unparalleled control of a situation where a vessel is forcibly boarded by enemy forces.

The RMI is both part of, yet seperate from, the vessel it is assigned to. It does not reside in the vessel's computer system but rather in a specialized system that serves it as the equivalent of quarters, work-station, etc.. There is extreme connectivity to the vessel, but in the end, the RMI is and remains it's own entity.

Prior to Integration, a candidate MI is reviewed, tested, assessed and spends time in simulators to gain a sense of how well suited it is to a given assignment. This review process is conducted by a board of Organics and Machine Intelligences in combination.

The RMI's suite is an extremely secure area built much like an armored vault, complete with ejection systems to serve as a lifeboat for the MI and any Organics in the suite. Access is generally as open or as restricted as the RMI elects to make it. MI's are very capable of protecting themselves from attempts at injury or manipulation by way of computer code for the simple reason that as they have been evolving on their own for tens of millenia, they are unimaginably complex and possess naturally evolved 'Immune' systems that deal with code viruses and suchlike in similar manner to the Immune system found in Organics. As a member of the crew, the RMI does have access to weapons, sidearms, in addition to being able to summon security and deploy combat drones to protect itself. The system modules that physically compose the 'housing' of the MI is fully armored and resilient.

RMI's interact with Organic crew via holography, disembodied voice, and Avatars as well as through various screens and any of thousands of drones aboard. The Avatar is not the RMI, but an extension of it, a living splinter. Even with Selinian technology, a full MI is too complex and 'big' to be housed in anything as small as a physically-identical Life-Modeled Avatar (LMA). The Avatar does possess sentience and consciousness, but is always subservient to the MI itself although very independent as well. LMA's are fairly common, and very detailed in their construction. LMA's are a common sight aboard Military and Civilian Commercial vessels.

HULL & STRUCTURE
BattleCarriers are not 'Unkillable', but they do take an immense amount of killing. Selinian design principles are never 'Lowest Bidder' and Selinian combat ethos is: 'Kill the enemy, and come home'. While Selinians have no great psychological fear of death, they see no benefit in pointless death. That said, the ethos extends to their ships, also.

A BattleCarrier has it's massively reinforced Primary Structural Hull, and within this is three Environmental Hulls all heavily reinforced as well and possessing multiply-redundant damage control and auto seal systems.

Working out from the PSH are the Outer Structural Hulls, typically five. The outermost sixth hull is the most heavily armored and reinforced.

Between the hulls is the complex and immensely-strong, shock-attenuating and maximally-reinforced structures that lend such incredible strength and resilience to the vessel. Along with the support structure in these areas are open buffer-spacing, and nano-active diamond aerogel in a diamond honeycomb support matrix interspersed with interlocking shock-attentuating/absorbing ceramalloy plates meant to add further impediment to any penetrating force. Each hull is fully armored and would supply more than adequate protection individually by the standards of most other races.

ARMOR
The armor technology employed by the shipwrights responsible for Military vessels is a multilayer composite with the main elements being an electrically-responsive high-density Titanium and Tungsten-based ceramalloy that sees it's interatomic and intermolecular bonds strengthened upon being exposed to specific frequencies of electrical energy. The actual energy requirements are relatively modest compared to the benefits. The armor plating is produced in zero-G conditions and has it's natural Rest-State intermolecular and interatomic bonds permanently increased during manufacture to a typical value of five times what they are normally.

A plate is composed of five ceramalloy plates, each 10 cm thick with one on the top, one on the bottom and the remaining three spaced among the other composite layer elements. These other element layers are composed of intermolecularly-strengthened very high density Fullerene sheeting bonded to interatomically-strengthened Boron Nitride-TungstAluminum Cermet plate.

The plates ride atop the structural support ribs inclusive to standard hull manufacturing principles on high-stress shock-attenuation/absorption mountings and interlock amongst themselves to dissipate impact and other impinging energies over a larger area and lessens the shock-transfer to the ship.

SHIELDING
The method employed by Selinianity to generate starship-level shields is considerably different than most others.

Plasma Window technology

Another Discussion (Plain English) On Plasma Windows

Drawing upon ancient Plasma Window technology, the shields that protect Selinian ships are extremely resilient and difficult to penetrate. Rather than a 'bubble' encapsulating the entire ship, vessels commonly use a larger number of smaller generator-projectors. This allows for a penetrating hit to penetrate but not take out the rest of the shielding while at the same time uninvolved shielding units can bolster the efforts of those that are involved.

The shields themselves are plasma that is suspended electromagnetically from the hull and strengthened with projected Nuclear Binding Forces to levels that ordinary matter cannot sustain. This means that a plasma 'pane' as thin as a single millimetre can withstand the impact of Terajoule to Petajoule scales of energy before being penetrated, and the impact is also absorbed to a significant degree by the electromagnetic support fields which lessens strain on the shield 'pane'. Using 'panes' also allows for weapons fire without having to drop the shields. While the plasma can be polarized to allow one-way travel through, it does have a sizable negative effect on weapon performance, thus 'panes' are opened to allow weapons-fire.

ELECTROMAGNETIC AREA EFFECT WEAPONS
These are a standard system found aboard almost ever Military vessel, but also see use in the Civilian Commercial sectors for various reasons. Every BattleCarrier mounts six EAEW's, one per axis. These discharge a very high-energy EMP out through a superheterodyne antenna-waveguide as a directed area-effect 'blast' cone 85 degrees wide. The retained energy of the pulse at a distance of one-thousand kilometres is 23.6 Gigajoules per metre squared. These weapons are used to maintain 'clear space' around the vessel and prevent enemy fighters and drones from being able to easily get in close, and also sees use in traumatically disarming incoming enemy warheads. Typically, these weapons have an effective duty-cycle of twelve times per minute and are fired randomly to prevent an enemy from exploiting an advantage of timing. Overload duty-cycle can see them firing thirty times per minute for short durations of no longer than five minutes. The discharge cone can be controlled to allow friendly vessels and small craft to approach safely.

MANEUVERING AND FLIGHT CONTROL
Battlecarriers, like any starship or spacecraft require the means to adjust their position and course-path in space. Sovereignty engineering addresses this in multiple ways.

Reaction Control Thrusters
These take the form of immensely powerful thrusters that utilize a fusion-pulse reaction to generate the necessary short pulse of thrust needed to briskly change a BattleCarrier's attitude in space.

Gyroscopic Control
A Battlecarrier, like most other vessels of Sovereignty manufacture, has two Gyroscopic Control Units. One situated near the bow and one near the stern. These are composed of three hollow rings for the X, Y and Z axis respectively with connected gravity generators rotating inside them.

Between the multi-thousand ton mass of the generators and their connecting structure and the selective fields they can generate very precisely, the Gyroscopes can apply torque forces sufficient to quickly adjust the vessel's attitude without utilizing reaction control thrusters.

The rotational velocity of the armatures is on the order of three-thousand kilometres per second, and they are suspended by magnetic fields to protect against contact with their housing. In operation, they are magnetically-clutched to impart the desired forces, there is no physical contact with them. Clutching force, rotational velocity and how much the armature increases it's mass gravitationally are what determine the final force transferred to the vehicle frame.

Radion Accelerator technology
RADION (Graviscalar)

Radion technology revolutionized spaceflight and vehicle control for Selinianity. In some ways vaguely similar to a Mass Effect field core, it is however independent of Element-Zero based technology and differs from such in many ways.

Radion Accelerator Cores are part and parcel of the vessel's engine system. They can be bypassed quite easily, but this is rarely called for. Most vessels have a single unit, but tandem units is not uncommon.

What an RAC does is simple; It generates a short-lived field that uses gravitic principles to offset and largely 'eliminate' the vessel's mass from the equation of acceleration yet at the same time also manipulates space itself to become 'smoother' and less of an impediment to movement.

This means that a vessel the size of a BattleCarrier can accelerate at what seems to be thousands of Gravities of acceleration and achieve desired sublight cruise velocities very quickly and with less fuel consumption. The real benefit is in how it handles Inertia via quantum manipulation of the vessel's energy state.

Normally, spaceflight is: accelerate to the mid-point of the journey and then decelerate the rest of the way.

RAC's allow a vessel to accelerate almost the entire way, than damp out undesired velocity at the pre-final approach. A Radion Accelerator Core is a necessary component of, and one is built into, the Hyper-Dimensional engine and used to adjust the vessel's inertial state relative to objects that will be encountered post-Jump such as matching orbital velocities with stations. RAC's don't have much to do with Vector-Warp flight, as the effect is space itself moving the vessel rather than the vessel moving through space and when the engines drop the vessel out of FtL it retains the inertial value it had prior to Vector-Warp being engaged however they do often play a role when a vessel resumes sublight operations as the retained inertia may be too great or too little for the circumstances found upon arrival.



OVERVIEW
BattleCarriers are not meant to merely 'show the flag', they're meant to directly engage hostile forces and destroy them. First and foremost, a BattleCarrier isn't meant to simply intimidate, but to demonstrate the force-projection ability of the Sovereignty and the Selinian people as a cold fact. When a BattleCarrier shows up in your system, you know you've managed to make yourself a problem to the Sovereignty worth sending a Serious Response to.

To this end, a BattleCarrier's weapons systems are appropriate to the task. These weapons deliver yields that on a planetary surface would cause great concern due to harsh secondary effects on global ecosystem stability and if targetted at appropriate points on a world's surface can catastrophically destabilize tectonic plate regions and fault lines.

In engagements, they routinely engage three to four opponents simultaneously and often emerge the victor. In some sci-fi, a threat force attacks a ship, then later when they realize they're outmatched attempt to explain it all away as a 'misunderstanding'. BattleCarrier Captains handle such matters with harsh pragmaticism, in that it's assumed the threat-force knew what they were getting into and it's too bad if they found they don't have the stomach for the consequences.

Simply put, attacking a BattleCarrier is a monumentally and desperately stupid idea.

As an example; In STAR TREK; The Next Generation, some alien ship would fire on a BC and would recieve a response of Matter Cannon fire from all turrets that could target it, and the Cannons would keep firing until the vessel fled or was most likely destroyed. The attacker would also most likely have to contend with missiles and if close enough there'd also be the Close-In Point-Defence batteries as well.

BattleCarriers are the Selinian Ethos of War made manifest: 'Kill The Enemy, And Come Home'. They're built to do exactly that.