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  Obsolete Ship / Weapon Classes  
 
Class   Description   Comments
Warstar Battlestation   A vast mobile fortress the size of a small moon, with unimaginable power and weaponry   Unimaginably expensive to build and maintain, and of only limited use. Regarded as much too vulnerable and not at all cost-effective.
         
Orbital Fort   A heavily armed orbital station   Not as much use as the equivalent cost in IP battleships.
         
Long Range Pacifier   A pacifier stripped down to carry its own hyperspace drive.   An expensive and rather pointless toy.
         
Missile Heavy Cruiser   A heavy cruiser with weapon replacements to increase missile delivery systems.   Very limited use. Only of value as a support ship to a fleet action. Vulnerable to direct attack.
         
Missile Battleship   A battleship with weapon replacements to increase missile delivery systems.   Very limited use. Only of value as a support ship to a fleet action. Vulnerable to direct attack.
         
Semi-Automatic Battleship   A very high-G battleship, using a high degree of automation   Very high overheads in terms of LSSI support to keep it running.
         
Ram Ship   Small and highly maneuverable armoured ship designed to ram and board enemy ships and deliver marines.   Of limited use in most contexts.
         
Strategic torpedo   Robot controlled ship/missile containing large nuclear warhead, designed to make a very long range approach (5 or 6l AU) at up to 2g   Very easily tracked and shot down with modern weapons or intercepted by pacifiers.
         
Interplanetary Strategic Missile   A very long range missile capable of being launched from the surface on a planet and delivering a nuclear warhead to a target on another planet in the same system. Range about 4 AU.   Rather slow and easy to intercept if the enemy have ships in-system. originally developed int he early years of interplanetary travel, when old Earth was have some trouble with Old Mars. Never used.
         
Automatic Battleship   Bright-Slave controlled robot battleship.   Very high overheads in terms of LSSI support to keep it running. General suspicion from Naval personnel.
         
Mass Driver Ship   A ship designed to attach itself to a rock, then push the rock towards the target, detaching during the final approach.   No use for them once mass driving was made illegal.
         
Advanced Automatic Battleship   A moriarti-class robot battleship   Illegal.
         
C-Cannon Ship   Super high velocity linear accelerator gun mounted on a specialised ship.   Rather antique. Easily countered by modern weapons, and regarded as much too specialised. Also the cannon itself was about 1km long, so only IP.
         
Stealth Destroyer   Designed to maximise silent running features - very unreflective to radar etc.   Expensive and the advantage is only marginal at best. Silent running is hard enough to spot anyway.
         
Spy Ship   A ship optimised for detection and designed to sit for long periods hidden on the M25 observing a system.   Fell in to disuse as there are easier and cheaper ways of finding out what is going on.
         
Startrooper Dropship   A ship designed to deliver 'startroopers' - a sort of space paratrooper into low orbit.   Startroopers went out of fashion pretty quickly as shuttles became a more reliable and accurate way of delivering troops planetside.
         
Plasmatic Sentinel   A ship with a single huge super-PAD-class weapon   The prototype blew up, and whilst working versions did exist they were very unstable and very highly specialised.
         
Colony Ship   Specialised transport ship designed to carry everything that is needed for a self sustaining colony in one lift, and was converted into a small orbital at the end of the trip.   It didn't work. The resulting colonies were too small to have a good chance of viability - more than 60% failed. Also Class 5000 merchants became more numerous and cheaper, they rendered these unnecessary.
         
Interstellar Sleeper   Long range personnel transporter equipped with large numbers of deep sleep hibernation capsules. Intended for long distance carriage of personnel.  

Used more when HS speeds were low and trips to quadrants might take years. Deep sleep technology contains a small but significant risk of terminal failure - so is little used these days.
         
Generation Ship   A very large ship designed for STL interstellar transport. A self-contained ecosystem and thousands of inhabitants and their descendants who expect to spend up to a century or even longer getting to their destination.   Rendered unnecessary by the invention of HS Drive. It is believed that some of these might have been built some time before the Technological Dark Age on Earth (2831-2856) - but records were destroyed and confirmation is difficult.
         
Heavy Pacifier   2-crew pacifier with more weapon load, but much less maneuverable.   Regarded as not cost-effective.
         
LeTappier Missile   A heavy missile with an HS field generator as a warhead. Designed for use within the M25, the HS generator is activated when he missile gets near the target - thus causing the HS generator and the ship to disappear.   Unbelievably expensive weapon. Nobody would waste a fantastically costly HS field generator, when it could be used in a ship to greater effect. Especially if it were likely shot down or destroyed before it could be activated (which it would be).
         
LeTappier Smart Mine   A small directable device with an HS field generator as a warhead. With a short-burn hi-g thruster and some detection equipment, this propells itself towards any ship that passes with a few hundred kilometres of it then. It then sets off the HS field causing the target to disappear.  

Fantasically expensive weapons.

Can only be used within M25, and only effective close to 'fixed' orbitals where approach routes are predictable. Hence a very serious navigation hazard.
         
Solar Windjammer   Light craft propelled by solar wind in gigantic foil sails.  

Very slow and only useful near a star (say within 10 au). Low payload. Quite hard to maintain. No interstellar capability. Highly visible.
         
Sprint Missile   High acceleration missile. Range about 100km, very high G missile (about 10g sustained for a few minutes). High velocity vector means that at ranges over about 30km it is hard to guide and therefore easy to counter.  

Is large and needs very large launch system. Usually only of any use from orbitals or surface based.

Too expensive for the minor advantages gained.
         
Deception Craft  

A specialised ship capable of mimicking the energy signature of another class, both by the size and spectrum of the main thruster burn, and other emissions etc.

This highly specialised technology means that there is little or no room for offensive weaponry of any sort.

   In colonial struggles it was found to be of limited value for considerable expense, especially since its combat value is negligible.. Navies prefer to spend the resources on actual fighting ships.
         
Monitor   Heavily armoured warship with exceptionally thick hull. Because of the mass it had very low accelerations (around 0.2g) and limited weaponry.   These proved unsuccessful in battle because the armour did not prevent the hull mounted weapons from be knocked out - rendering it a sitting target. The lack of manoeverability also allowed its opponenents to determine the conditions of any engagament.
         
X-Ship   A class 5000 merchant modified to carry concealed ship to ship weaponry (including missiles and HELL) and one-shot pacifiers, giving it the firepower approaching that of a light cruiser.   The basic power planet of the class 5000 meant that there was heavy reliance on batteries to power all the bolted on systems. Only a few were ever built, due to the expense.
         
Super Carrier  

A design (never built) for a huge modular ship, comprising 4 large IS-capable modules, which on leaving hyperspace attached to each other forming a giant carrier. Modules were:

  1. Power and Command
  2. Flight Operations A
  3. Flight Operations B
  4. Maintenance and supply.

The super carrier would have been capable of accelerations of about 0.8g and would carry up to 50 Pacifiers.

   The idea was regarded as too radical and was never built. Main opposition was from professional naval officers who thought the whole thing would be too complex and unwieldy and vulnerable to conventional and/or nuclear weapons.
         
Mobile SpaceDock   A class 5000 interstellar flying workshop. Capable of basic repairs and the like, but nowhere near as capable as a normal orbital repair yard.   Became unnecessary with the growth of the colonies and the increased prevalence and efficiency of orbital repair yards.
         
Salvage Ship   A class 5000 ship designed to dismantle an abandoned ship or installation and carry of the salvaged components.  

Some of these still exist in corporate fleets, but increased relaibility and repair capabilities meant that crippled ships could almost always be recovered without dismantling.
         
Seed Ship   A very old design for a ship that would land on a planet and act as an atmosphere processing plant. Many of these would land on theplanet to be terraformed and left running for many decades.   Became obsolete when it was realised just how many already suitable worlds there were.
         
Expatriation Ship   In some polities, early colonies were formed of social outcasts and criminals. This is a liner designed to keep unwilling colonists secure until they arrive at their, often quite inhospitable, destination.   These are more enlightened times, and this sort of thing doesn't happen nowadays, so these ships are obsolete.
         
Deep Space Missile   A combination of nuclear warhead and remote-controlled HSD. Intended for use in battles outside the M25, the MSD would deliver the warhead right next to the target instantly and detonate it.   Very wasteful of an expensive HSD, these were regarded unnecessary since practically no battles ever occur outside the M25, and those that do, never require nuclear weapons.
         
'Swarm' Multiple Pacifier Ship   A highly specialised vessel that mounted up to 72 pacifiers in 'one-shot' single launch containers.   The high logistics support requirement, cost and vulnerability to countermeansures such as missiles made this an unpopular oddity in some fleets during the 3050s.
         
Replicant Warship   An automated computer controlled warship that converts itself into a shipbuilding facility to build more warships like itself.   The build process was too long, and general distrust of automatic warships mean that this design has never been built, so far as anyone knows. Technical details here.
       
...more to come      

 

 

  
 
 
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The Universe(of Starship Marine, Cruel Void and Hellfire) is © Jim Wallman 1996-2005. You may freely use this material in other games, works, websites etc for your personal entertainment - with appropriate credits as to authorship and copyright. It may not be resold or distributed with any publication for sale without the express permission of the copyright holder.