Jane's Fighting Ships 2183 Edition

by ThatRabidPotato

A companion work to my greater trilogy. Purely worldbuilding. Will eventually contain the technical specifications for every single class of warship operated by every organic navy in Citadel space, as well as a brief history of the design of that class and its current usage, as well as some other tidbits.

Systems Alliance

Dreadnoughts

Humanity and the Systems Alliance have an interesting relationship with dreadnoughts. On the one hand, no species was as quick to design and produce their first as humanity. The turians, who today muster by far the largest complement of dreadnoughts among the known sapient species of the galaxy, took two hundred years from their discovery of mass effect technology to the production of their first. It took humanity six years.

On the other hand, the Treaty of Farixen's limits on dreadnought production and maintenance, while a fact of life to the other associate races on the Citadel, are absolutely intolerable to humanity, which seeks to maintain a relevant and dangerous military in a galaxy where it is heavily outnumbered in terms of active warships, individuals under arms, and in total industrial capacity. Consequently, no government has expended more resources than the Systems Alliance to find a way to dethrone the dreadnought as the ultimate arbiter of space warfare. Humanity maintains the maximum allowance of dreadnoughts allotted to it under Farixen, but alone among the sapient races of the galaxy that field them, the great beasts do not form the cornerstone of its naval tactics and strategy.

Everest-class: Everest (2154), McKinley (2157), Elbrus (2160)

Specifications:

Length: 1005 m

Height: 240.1 m

Beam: 300.5 m

Weight: 207, 310 tons

Armament: 1x 18" super heavy spinally-mounted mass accelerator cannon, 20x 6" medium mass accelerator cannon (pair mounted in turrets, five turrets each on port and starboard undersides), 260x GARDIAN infrared laser emitters, 8x missile clusters (each containing up to 10 ship-to-ship missiles).

Armor: 24.2" (614mm) over aft third of vessel, 360 degree coverage with exception of missile cluster hatch doors, laser emitters, and turret mountings. 17.3" (439 mm) over fore two thirds, with aforementioned exceptions. Turrets- 11.6" (295mm) front and rear, 7.25" (184mm) sides and roof. All armor plating composed of outer third ablative ceramic polycarbonate, inner two thirds steel-nickel-titanium alloy.

Power Plant: Primary- 1x Westinghouse K6R nuclear fusion reactor. Secondary- 1x Westinghouse C4W nuclear fusion reactor.

Propulsion: 4x General Electric ARX fusion torch drives, 120x hydrogen monoxide reaction control thrusters. Refitted in 2165 with 6x Nashan Stellar Dynamics hydrogen antiproton combat maneuvering thrusters.

Crew Complement: 2200 enlisted, 115 officers. Additional 60 attached to space wing.

Spacecraft Complement: 24x Lockheed-Martin/Kawasaki X-25 Raiders, 34x H2E unmanned reconnaissance probes.

The Everest-class were humanity's first dreadnoughts. The lead ship of the class, SSV Everest, was produced an astounding six years after the human discovery of the Prothean ruins on Mars and the attendant discovery of mass effect technology. The second ship, SSV McKinley, followed three years later, following the Everest's sterling performance in trials and war games. Despite said sterling performance, the massive cost of construction and operation for even one dreadnought, combined with the perceived lack of need for vessels of such limited utility in a galaxy with (at the time) no other known sapient species, combined with the Systems Alliance's lack of political clout and consequent inability to extract funding from the various nations of Earth and humanity's fledgling colonies pre-First Contact, meant that the Ways and Means Committee of the Systems Alliance Parliament was very much not inclined to pay for a second dreadnought. The Everest-class might have consisted of one ship, had it not been for the efforts of then-Rear Admiral Kastanie Drescher, who mounted a furious and ultimately successful campaign in Parliament for the necessary funding.

The McKinley was completed in 2157, the same year as the attack on Shanxi by the Far Watching Fleet of the Turian Hierarchy. She served as Drescher's flagship in the relief of the colony, and remains to this day the only human dreadnought to have ever fired her guns in anger. The third and final ship of the class, SSV Elbrus, was ordered immediately after the liberation of Shanxi, and was completed in 2160.

By the time of Elbrus's completion, however, the Everest-class was already approaching obsolescence. Humanity's appearance in the galaxy, successful destruction of a modern turian dreadnought over Shanxi, and stubborn insistence on maintaining a powerful navy of its own instead of relying upon the Council races for protection sparked a naval arms race not seen in the galaxy since the period of the Krogan Rebellions. Today, although not complete relics like the asari Deliclarme, the Everest-class dreadnoughts are already relegated to the status of "emergency ships": units only to be committed to the fight in desperate need.

Kilimanjaro-class: Kilimanjaro (2168), Tai Shan (2171), Aconcagua (2178), Orizaba (under construction, scheduled for 2183)

Specifications:

Length: 1220 m

Height: 240.1 m

Beam: 300.5 m

Weight: 227, 545 tons

Armament: 1x 22" super heavy spinally mounted mass accelerator cannon, 32x 8" medium mass accelerator cannon (pair mounted in turrets, eight turrets each on port and starboard undersides), 310x GARDIAN infrared laser emitters, 12x missile clusters (each containing up to 12 ship-to-ship missiles).

Armor: 24.2" (614mm) over aft third of vessel, 360 degree coverage with exception of missile cluster hatch doors, laser emitters, and turret mountings. 17.3" (439 mm) over fore two thirds, with aforementioned exceptions. Turrets- 11.6" (295mm) front and rear, 7.25" (184mm) sides and roof. All armor plating composed of outer third ablative ceramic polycarbonate, inner two thirds steel-nickel-titanium alloy.

Power Plant: 2x Westinghouse K6U nuclear fusion reactors.

Propulsion: 4x General Electric FUZ fusion torch drives, 8x Nashan Stellar Dynamics hydrogen antiproton combat maneuvering thrusters, 150x hydrogen monoxide reaction control thrusters.

Crew Complement: 2420 enlisted, 120 officers. Additional 60 attached to space wing.

Spacecraft Complement: 24x Lockheed-Martin/Kawasaki X-25 Raiders, OR 12x Sukhoi X-30 Vandals, OR 12x Saab B-9 Dragoons, 50x H3C unmanned reconnaissance probes.

Within a year of the commissioning of the SSV Elbrus, it became obvious to Alliance naval architects that recent developments by the turians and salarians in dreadnought design, incorporating lessons from Shanxi, were already threatening to render the Everest-class obsolete. The Alliance had already become signatory to the Citadel Conventions, and thus the Treaty of Farixen, at that point, and could not hope to match the Council races in sheer number of battleships. While its strategists frantically attempted to figure out a way to make up the deficit in the strength of the battle line in other ways, the Alliance still desired to at least attempt to maintain a qualitative edge over its potential rivals.

The Kilimanjaro-class was the result. After two years on the drawing boards, work on the lead ship commenced in 2163, and she was launched five years later. SSV Kilimanjaro, in addition to being the first ship of her class, was also the first dreadnought constructed at Arcturus Station. This led to her construction being plagued with various hiccups and setbacks as Alliance builders adjusted to constructing a massive warship at a deep space station located in a system without any habitable planets. Nevertheless, upon her commissioning in 2168, SSV Kilimanjaro was immediately hailed as the wave of the future in dreadnought design by military minds both foreign and domestic, with such luminaries as asari First Hunt Mistress Kirae calling her "a revolution in dreadnought speed and firepower." The next ship of the class, SSV Tai Shan, was completed in a more normal three year span, while SSV Aconcagua, the newest dreadnought currently in service in the Alliance fleet, had a rough period of development reminiscent of the "Big K"'s, due to being built in Stonewall Shipyards above Luna like the Everest-class had been, rather than at Arcturus like her sisters. The SSV Orizaba, fourth and final ship of the class and the Alliance's seventh and last dreadnought, is currently under construction at Arcturus and is slated for completion and commissioning at the end of this year.

The Kilimanjaro-class, although vastly larger and more powerful, are the direct spiritual descendants of the old United States Navy's Iowa-class battleships of the mid-twentieth century. The Iowa-class were designed specifically to operate alongside carriers in "fast task groups", defending the carriers from surface attack while the carriers defended them from the air as well as spotted for the battleships' guns. Similarly, the great reliance of the Systems Alliance Navy upon carriers dictates that every one of the fleet's modern dreadnoughts must be designed to work in tandem with them. The Kilimanjaro-class is fully twenty percent longer than the Everests, but the exact same in height and beam. Into that frame has been packed improved armament of all kinds across the board, as well as antiproton combat thrusters for drastically improved speed under combat conditions. The demands of this equipment are met by two primary reactors as opposed to the one main, one backup of the older ships. The end result is a much faster, much better armed ship capable of exceeding every demand the Alliance makes of it.

Carriers

Even before First Contact, Systems Alliance naval doctrine envisaged a major role for the carrier as one of the centerpieces of the fleet alongside the dreadnought. Although the space-borne dreadnought retains relevance much more than its seaborne counterpart did due to no effective limiters on the range of its main guns, human naval doctrine still was heavily influenced by nearly two centuries of total supremacy of the carrier. Swarms of unmanned or single-pilot craft, capable of overwhelming enemy ships and providing close support to deployed ground troops, had an influence in the development of human space naval strategy that simply was not present for the turians, asari, or salarians.

First Contact only intensified the human love of the carrier. Although the SSV McKinley served as the Second Fleet's flagship during the liberation of Shanxi, and although the McKinley was the ship that officially would be credited with the kill of the turian dreadnought Tyreaus, it was obvious to any observer of the battle that the turian ship had been beaten by the swarms of fighters and bombers deployed by Alliance light carriers. Deployment of massed single-pilot craft in such a manner was completely foreign to the Citadel species, and alone of all the various aspects of space warfare, humanity found something in which it truly, genuinely outclassed everyone else. Naturally, Systems Alliance policy in the intervening quarter century has been to maintain that edge at all costs, despite the increasing efforts of the asari, and to a lesser extent, the salarians, to catch up.

Einstein-class: Einstein (2154), Newton (2154), Galileo (2156), Copernicus (2158), Von Braun (2160), Kepler (2163), Heisenberg (2166), Curie (2169), Fleming (2173), Edison (2177), Franklin (2181), Archimedes (under construction, scheduled for 2184), Bohr (scheduled 2185), Fermi (scheduled 2187)

Specifications:

Length: 895 m

Height: 190.6 m

Beam: 412 m

Weight: 208, 755 tons

Armament: 290x GARDIAN infrared laser emitters, 5x missile clusters (each containing up to 7 ship-to-ship missiles).

Armor: 5 in (128mm) over vital spaces. Solid titanium-nickel alloy.

Power Plant:

Pre-refits: primary- 1x Westinghouse K6R nuclear fusion reactor, secondary- 1x Westinghouse C4W nuclear fusion reactor.

Post-refits: primary- 1x Westinghouse K6U nuclear fusion reactor, secondary- 1x Westinghouse C7T nuclear fusion reactor.

Propulsion:

Pre-refits: 3x General Electric ARX fusion torch drives, 140x hydrogen monoxide reaction control thrusters.

Post-refits: 3x General Electric FUZ fusion torch drives, 6x Nashan Stellar Dynamics hydrogen antiproton combat maneuvering thrusters, 170x hydrogen monoxide reaction control thrusters.

Crew Complement: 2000 enlisted, 150 officers. Additional 1250 attached to space wing.

Spacecraft Complement: 240x Lockheed-Martin/Kawasaki X-25 Raiders (half operated through internal hangars, half through external ports), OR 120x Sukhoi X-30 Vandals, OR 120x Saab B-9 Dragoons, 500x H3C unmanned reconnaissance probes.

The Einstein-class is the sole class of large carrier operated by the Systems Alliance, dating back to before first contact. While the newer Everest-class dreadnoughts rapidly fell into obsolescence in the galactic arms race resulting from First Contact, a series of refits in 2168-2171 were enough to keep the Einsteins sufficiently up to date to serve with humanity's fleets in the modern battlespace. The reason is simple—humanity's edge in the field of carriers was so great at First Contact that the other races had to essentially invent the entire concept from the ground up, instead of merely updating their existing designs as they could do with their other ship classes. The Einstein's frame was more than adaptable enough to allow for changes to keep abreast with the evolving nature of space warfare.

The refits updated the power plant and thrusters, to better allow the Einstein-class to keep pace with the new fast Kilimanjaro-class dreadnoughts that had begun to be built at the time. The armor and weapons needed no updates, as human carriers have always been meant to stay safe and secure behind a battle line of other ships. Nor did the spacecraft complement—human spacefighters and bombers, like the ships that launch them, have always been top of the line. The X-25 Raider is still the premier space superiority fighter in the galaxy, just as it was at Shanxi, and the X-30 Vandal and B-9 Dragoon fill well the roles of close atmospheric support and strikes against enemy warships.

Hudson Bay-class: Hudson Bay (2150), Tokyo Bay (2150), Chesapeake Bay (2150), Severnaya Bay (2153), James Bay (2153), Kitkun Bay (2153), Fanshaw Bay (2156), Liscome Bay (2156), Anzio Bay (2156), San Sebastian Bay (2159), Nagasaki Bay (2159), Ommaney Bay (2159), Manila Bay (2162), Natoma Bay (2162), Takanis Bay (2162)

Specifications:

Length: 344.26 m

Height: 73.31 m

Beam: 114.4 m

Weight: 74, 555.36 tons

Armament: 112x GARDIAN infrared laser emitters.

Armor: 3 inches (76.2 mm) over vital spaces. Solid titanium-nickel alloy.

Power Plant: 1x Westinghouse C4W nuclear fusion reactor.

Propulsion: 2x General Electric ARX-2C fusion torch drives, 50x hydrogen monoxide reaction control thrusters.

Crew Complement: 775 enlisted personnel, 52 officers. Additional 220 attached to space wing.

Spacecraft Complement: 80x Lockheed-Martin/Kawasaki X-25 Raiders (half operated through internal hangars, half through external ports), OR 40x Sukhoi X-30 Vandals, OR 40x Saab B-9 Dragoons, 192x H3C unmanned reconnaissance probes.

The Einstein-class fleet carriers, in spite of their centrality to Systems Alliance naval doctrine (or more accurately, because of it), have very few actual instances of combat on their record. To humanity, the big carriers are as valuable as dreadnoughts, and so like dreadnoughts, they are carefully husbanded for usage only in truly vital strategic operations against enemy fleets or major planets. Since humanity joined the galactic community, there have been only two incidents that meet that description: the Liberation of Shanxi itself in 2157, and the Assault on Torfan in 2178. Only in the latter case did any Einsteins (SSV Curie and SSV Kepler) take part. At the time of Shanxi, humanity's three fleet carriers were all assigned to fleets other than the Second.

The Second Fleet's strike craft capability was instead provided by five light carriers of the Hudson Bay-class. These ships, and the San Francisco Bay-class that is in the process of replacing them, are the true workhorses of the Systems Alliance Navy, even more than the cruisers or frigates. The Hudson Bay-class light carrier was one of the first ships designed and built after the discovery of the Prothean ruins on Mars, and unlike the heavier ships, there was no trouble getting funding for them from the Systems Alliance Parliament; for there was plenty of use for small, cheap ships such as these pre-First Contact. Humanity's space, even as comparatively small as it was in those days, had a pirate problem. Light carriers, produced in sufficient number and grouped with a couple of cruisers and a wolfpack of frigates, were deemed the most efficient way to sweep the spacelanes clean. They were also capable of providing air support on the ground against insurrectionists and rioters such as on Mars in 2154.

By 2157, there were nine Hudson Bay-class light carriers in the Systems Alliance Navy; First Fleet's Tokyo Bay, Kitkun Bay, and Fanshaw Bay were temporarily assigned to the Second Fleet for its liberation of Shanxi, giving it a total of five light carriers including its own Liscome Bay and Chesapeake Bay. The fighters and bombers launched from these carriers were almost entirely responsible for stripping the shields of the turian dreadnought Tyreaus, allowing it to be destroyed by the SSV McKinley and securing human dominance of Shanxi's orbit.

In the years following, the Hudson Bay-class continued their prewar work of anti-piracy and ground support for Marine expeditionary forces, now with the additions of anti-slavery patrols. The Hudson Bay-class formed the backbone of human task forces engaging in the slowly intensifying frontier war against the Batarian Hegemony that marked the 2160s and early 2170s and would eventually culminate in the Skyllian Blitz.

Unfortunately, the demands of their new role proved too much for these ships, products of humanity's very first attempts to adapt mass effect technology for usage in spacefaring warships. The few years separating the design of the Hudson Bay-class light carriers from the Einstein-class fleet carriers proved the difference in the latter being deemed worth the effort of refits and upgrades to keep them worthy of the front line of service, and the former not. As the replacement San Francisco Bay-class began to come out of human shipyards in the late 2160s, the Hudson Bay-class have begun to be decommissioned and scrapped. Currently, only those ships produced in 2159 and later remain in service, with the last of the class scheduled for decommissioning in 2188.

San Francisco Bay-class: San Francisco Bay (2168), Botany Bay (2168), Salerno Bay (2168), Gambier Bay (2168), Commencement Bay (2170), Anguilla Bay (2170), Massacre Bay (2170), Resurrection Bay (2170), Mobile Bay (2172), Delaware Bay (2172), Biscayne Bay (2172), Guanabara Bay (2172), Cam Ranh Bay (2174), Kasaan Bay (2174), Saginaw Bay (2174), Chaleur Bay (2174), Morecambe Bay (2176), Bothnian Bay (2176), Galveston Bay (2176), Guantanamo Bay (2176), Kalinin Bay (2178), Shark Bay (2178), Bonavista Bay (2178), Kadashan Bay (2178), Petrof Bay (2180), Nehenta Bay (2180), Conception Bay (2180), Ungava Bay (2180), Saldanha Bay (2182), Hoggatt Bay (2182), Sitkoh Bay (2182), Table Bay (2182), Moreton Bay (scheduled for 2184), Poverty Bay (scheduled for 2184), Shipley Bay (scheduled for 2184), Steamer Bay (scheduled for 2184), Rudyerd Bay (scheduled for 2186), Maputo Bay (scheduled for 2186), Milne Bay (scheduled for 2186), Shamrock Bay (scheduled for 2186), Bulls Bay (scheduled for 2188), Puerto Galera Bay

Specifications:

Length: 400 m

Height: 80 m

Beam: 130 m

Weight: 82, 345 tons.

Armament: 125x GARDIAN infrared laser emitters.

Armor: 3 in (76mm) over vital spaces. Solid Titanium-nickel-molybdenum alloy.

Power Plant: 1x Westinghouse C7T nuclear fusion reactor.

Propulsion: 2x General Electric FUZ-1G fusion torch drives, 4x Nashan Stellar Dynamics hydrogen antiproton combat maneuvering thrusters, 65x hydrogen monoxide reaction control thrusters.

Crew Complement: 810 enlisted personnel, 65 officers. Additional 250 in space wing.

Spacecraft Complement: 100x Lockheed-Martin/Kawasaki X-25 Raiders (half operated through internal hangars, half through external ports), OR 50x Sukhoi X-30 Vandals, OR 50x Saab B-9 Dragoons, 213x H3C unmanned reconnaissance probes.

Of all the various warship types on the Systems Alliance Navy roster, the San Francisco Bay-class light carrier is the most familiar to all other species in Council Space. Designed and built as direct replacements to the obsolete Hudson Bay-class, the "Friscos" fill not only their predecessors' roles on anti-pirate and anti-batarian patrols in Alliance space, but are also frequently seconded to turian, asari, and salarian fleets engaging in patrols in their own space as well as expeditions into the Terminus Systems. In particular, their second-to-none (except Einstein-class fleet carriers) space/air traffic control systems and hefty spacecraft complements for their size make them highly sought after by the turians, who have no light carriers of their own.

The SAN currently fields thirty two ships of the class, with eight more currently scheduled for construction and completion within the next four years, with the possibility remaining for more should tensions with the batarians escalate even further, or some similar threat demand a massive escalation of the Navy.

Battlecruisers

The carrier may be the linchpin of human naval strategy and the most famous symbol of humanity's determination to rewrite the rules of space warfare, but it is the battlecruiser that truly is the most purely human ship to sail the void. Human carriers and the squadrons of fighters and bombers they carry may be recognized as the most advanced and numerous in the galaxy, but the Systems Alliance is not the only interstellar nation to field them; the salarians, asari, and even the elcor all have at least a few of their own, and the asari have already nearly closed the gap both in quality and quantity. Even the turians have begun to commission fleet carriers, though the Hierarchy still strictly views them as an auxiliary to the dreadnought.

The same is not true of the battlecruiser, which is fundamentally a human attempt to solve a uniquely human problem: how to maintain a naval force worthy of respect by the Council races while not being a Council race. Every other species in Council Space either does not need them, being able to simply build dreadnoughts (turians, asari, salarians), or does not have the desire to invest in large naval forces (volus, hanar, elcor). But humanity, limited by the Treaty of Farixen to a mere seven dreadnoughts, has managed to design a class of ships that barely squeezes below the minimum tonnage limit defining a dreadnought in Farixen's official classification system, yet hits very nearly as hard (if not nearly as well protected, the ships squeaking in under the limit primarily by shaving off a significant amount of armor plating). For this reason, human battlecruisers are commonly referred to in other navies as "pocket dreadnoughts", in a strange mixture of derision and respect.

Nile-class: Nile (2170), Amazon (2173), Mississippi (2174), Amur (2176), Yenisei (2176), Danube (2179), Ganges (2179), Niger (2180), Rhine (2180), St. Lawrence (2180), Euphrates (2181), Seine (scheduled for 2183), Savannah (scheduled for 2183), Yangtze (scheduled for 2186)

Specifications:

Length: 890 m

Height: 170 m

Beam: 200 m

Weight: 170, 755 tons

Armament: 1x 20" super heavy spinally-mounted mass accelerator cannon, 24x 8" medium mass accelerator cannon (pair mounted in turrets, six turrets each on port and starboard undersides), 200x GARDIAN infrared laser emitters, 6x missile clusters (each containing up to 10 ship-to-ship missiles).

Armor: 11" (279.4mm) over aft third of vessel, 360 degree coverage with exception of missile cluster hatch doors, laser emitters, and turret mountings. 9" (228.6 mm) over fore two thirds, with aforementioned exceptions. Turrets- 7.5" (190.5mm) front and rear, 5.25" (133.35mm) sides and roof. All armor plating composed of outer third ablative ceramic polycarbonate, inner two thirds steel-nickel-titanium alloy.

Power Plant: Primary- 1x Westinghouse K6U nuclear fusion reactor. Secondary- 1x Westinghouse C7T nuclear fusion reactor.

Propulsion: 3x General Electric FUZ-1C fusion torch drives, 6x Nashan Stellar Dynamics hydrogen antiproton combat maneuvering thrusters, 115x hydrogen monoxide reaction control thrusters.

Crew Complement: 1300 enlisted personnel, 120 officers. Additional 50 in space wing.

Spacecraft Complement: 24x Lockheed-Martin/Kawasaki X-25 Raiders, OR 12x Sukhoi X-30 Vandals, OR 12x Saab B-9 Dragoons, 35x H3C unmanned reconnaissance probes.

The Nile-class battlecruisers are the only class humanity fields. In armament, they are roughly equivalent to the Glory-class turian dreadnought, the most modern turian battleship type at the time of Shanxi and still the class that makes up the bulk of the turian fleet's numbers in dreadnoughts. In armor, speed, and to a lesser degree shielding, however, they are closer to cruisers. Therefore, human doctrine does not envisage a battlecruiser winning a one on one fight against an enemy dreadnought. Rather, battlecruisers are meant to lead a squadron of heavy cruisers, similar to how a light cruiser might lead a wolfpack of frigates, and overwhelm a dreadnought using the cruisers as both meat shields and extra fire support.

Humanity has yet to engage an enemy dreadnought since the Nile and her sisters were first launched, however, so the battlecruisers have been turned to other tasks. Their role as flagships of cruiser squadrons meant that they have seen much more action than the Alliance's dreadnoughts in the constant, low intensity frontier conflict that dominates relations between the Systems Alliance and Batarian Hegemony, as well as against pirates from the Terminus. One of the most notable actions in which they took part was the Theshaca Raids of March through September 2178. The so-called Theshaca Raids were a follow-up to the Siege of Torfan in January of 2178, itself a direct retaliation for the Skyllian Blitz of 2176, which had devastated the peaceful human colony of Elysium. Torfan was designed to kill or capture the pirate leaders (mostly batarian) who had planned the Blitz, and was largely successful; the Theshaca Raids were meant to destroy the remnants of their armada before it could regroup and pose a threat once again. Over the course of six months, Alliance listening posts on the moons of Theshaca (hence the name Theshaca Raids) deduced the location of no less than eight major pirate bases via FTL vectors. Alliance task forces led by the battlecruisers Yenisei, Mississippi, and Amazon were sent to wipe them out.

In the fighting that resulted, the battlecruisers proved nearly perfect for the task of pirate extermination. Their reduced weight combined with their massive power plants and engines allowed them to easily run down much smaller pirate frigates and light cruisers, while their dreadnought-level armament vastly overpowered the strongest shields available to the Terminus clans. SSV Yenisei alone registered more than twenty ship kills of various types during the raids. In addition, their large Marine detachments were extremely useful in clearing pirate ground installations at certain of the anchorages.

The Alliance's success in producing a ship able to both stand and fight in a dreadnought battleline, yet have utility in the more "day-to-day" realm of naval operations such as anti-piracy operations and frontier patrols, has put the rest of the galaxy on notice. Although there remain no equivalents to the Nile-class in service with any other Council military, turian and salarian observers of the Theshaca Raids and larger Torfan campaign were extremely impressed with the performance of the battlecruisers, and rumors are already beginning to surface of turian designers working on their own version. Whether there is any truth to them remains to be seen.

Cruisers

In their carriers and battlecruisers, and even to some extent in their dreadnoughts, humanity is acknowledged as one of the most innovative species in the galaxy in the innovativeness of ship design and tactical employment. Not so with their cruisers. Humanity's cruisers are almost completely unremarkable in comparison to those of other organic navies—and here, as opposed to the heavier classes of ships, the comparison takes in the navy of almost every organic species in the galaxy. The cruiser is the fundamental cornerstone of every navy, the regular foot soldier of space. Even the elcor field cruisers, and theirs are no more or less remarkable than humanity's.

This is not to say that human cruisers are of poor quality; far from it. The York-class of heavy cruisers, the current generation under production and replacing the older Berlin-class, are fine ships; well-armed, reasonably well-armored for their tonnage, and appreciably fast. But in none of these categories do they outpace all of the equivalent ships in the Council fleets—they are under-gunned compared to salarian and asari cruisers, under-armored compared to asari and turian ones, and slower than the most modern turian and salarian designs. For that matter, they are also slower than their batarian equivalents, a fact that has cost human ships time and again in their efforts to hunt down batarian slavers in the Attican Traverse and Skyllian Verge.

Brussels-class: Brussels (2149), New York (2149), Ottawa (2149), Bogota (2149), Port Moresby (2149), Tel Aviv (2150), Luanda (2150), San Diego (2150), Tripoli (2150), Torino (2150), Hangzhou (2150), Santiago (2151), Singapore (2151), Mogadishu (2151), Mumbai (2151), Melbourne (2151), Portland (2151), Cheyenne (2151), St. Louis (2152), Roanoke (2152), London (2152), Geneva (2152), Budapest (2152), Odessa (2152), Novorossiysk (2152), Baku (2152), Kabul (2152), Delhi (2153), Bangkok (2153), Ho Chi Minh City (2153), Manila (2153), Honolulu (2153), Sacramento (2153), Oklahoma City (2153), Atlanta (2153), Port-au-Prince (2153), Freetown (2153), Kigali (2154), Medina (2154), Tehran (2154), Islamabad (2154), Colombo (2154), Auckland (2154), Lima (2154), Rio de Janeiro (2154), Tangier (2154), Ragusa (2154), Krakow (2154), Aleppo (2155), Tashkent (2155), Shenyang (2155), Nagoya (2155), Anchorage (2155), Bismarck (2155), Quincy (2155), Rochester (2155), Kingston (2155), Falmouth (2155), Stavanger (2155), Riga (2155), Addis Ababa (2155), Zanzibar (2156), Antananarivo (2156), Tokyo (2156), Quito (2156), Bordeaux (2156), Emden (2156), Samara* (2157), Townsville (2157), Portland (2157), Toronto (2157).

Specifications:

Length: 510 m

Height: 100.5 m

Beam: 120 m

Weight:

Pre-refits: 82, 450 tons

Post-refits: 90, 650 tons

Armament:

Pre-refits: 1x 6" medium spinally mounted mass accelerator cannon, 4x 4" light mass accelerator cannon (singly mounted in turrets, two turrets each on port and starboard undersides), 50x GARDIAN infrared laser emitters, 4x missile clusters (each containing up to 10 ship-to-ship missiles)

Post-refits: 1x 6" medium spinally mounted mass accelerator cannon, 12x 4" light mass accelerator cannon (pair mounted in turrets, three turrets each on port and starboard undersides), 85x GARDIAN infrared laser emitters, 4x missile clusters (each containing up to 10 ship-to-ship missiles)

Armor: 8" (203.2 mm) over aft third of vessel, 360 degree coverage with exception of missile cluster hatch doors, laser emitters, and turret mountings. 5" (127 mm) over fore two thirds, with aforementioned exceptions. Turrets- 5.25" universal coverage. Solid steel-nickel-titanium alloy

Power Plant:

Pre-refits: 1x Westinghouse P2L nuclear fusion reactor

Post-refits: 1x Westinghouse P4 nuclear fusion reactor

Propulsion:

Pre-refits: 2x General Electric ARX-L fusion torch drives, 90x hydrogen monoxide reaction control thrusters

Post-refits: 2x General Electric FUZ-1N fusion torch drives, 4x Nashan Stellar Dynamics hydrogen antiproton combat maneuvering thrusters, 110x hydrogen monoxide reaction control thrusters.

Crew Complement: 625 enlisted, 55 officers

The story of the Brussels-class of cruisers is the story of the Systems Alliance Navy.

Immediately following the discovery of the Prothean archives on Mars in March 2148, the plans were hastily laid for what would become the Brussels-class, and the first five ships of the class were launched an astounding 14 months after the discovery of the technology that had made them possible: giving the class the distinction of being humanity's very first spacefaring warships with mass effect drive as well as humanity's first cruisers, beating out both the Hudson Bay-class of light carriers and the Kadesh-class of frigates.

The class was designed as the mainstay of the SAN's fleet, capable of meeting any task that might conceivably confront the Navy before First Contact: anti-piracy work, insurrection suppression on colony worlds, disaster relief, etc. In the nine years spanning the commissioning of the lead ships of the class and First Contact, sixty five ships were constructed, consuming approximately fifty percent of the naval budget allotment for new construction at the height of the program (2154-2157). When the turians attacked Shanxi, the Brussels-class remained the only class of cruiser in service in the SAN, and the human relief attempt very nearly foundered on this fact.

The underpowered main gun of the class (in both bore diameter and projectile velocity) and scanty secondary armament had been sufficient to deal with human pirates in converted merchantmen; when placed in opposition to the turian Savagery-class, the Brussels' proved almost comically undergunned. Each turian cruiser was easily able to handle two or even three of their human equivalents at once. Thankfully, the turian Far Watching Fleet, discounting the possibility of human reinforcements, had detached almost half its numerical strength prior to the Second Fleet's arrival at Shanxi; this, in combination with superior human tactics and light carriers, was enough to compensate for the firepower deficiency of the human battle line.

After the ceasefire imposed by the Citadel Council, SAN Fleet Command was forced to confront the nightmarish reality that every cruiser in the fleet was immediately obsolete by virtue of its laughable armament. They could not simply scrap the class, and even phasing it out would take more than a decade. Some use had to be found for them in the short term.

The solution was twofold: in the short term, the Brussels-class were designated as light cruisers, serving as the flagships of frigate wolfpacks and dedicated frigate/corvette killers, with refits beginning in late 2158 to upgrade the secondary armament, fire control systems, comm systems, and power plant to better fill this role. A second series of refits in 2168-2171, concurrent with those to the Einstein-class of fleet carriers, updated their engines. Their role in the battle line was given over to the new Berlin-class of heavy cruisers, the first of which were commissioned in 2161, and their efficiency in their new role made the need for their replacement less urgent in a time when the SAN was confronted with more demands than its yearly budget could hope to meet.

In the long term, the Brussels-class were scheduled to be replaced by the new Yokohama-class of purpose-built light cruisers, the first of which entered the fleet in 2178. However, due to the escalation of tensions with the batarians culminating in the Skyllian Blitz two years prior, the phasing out and scrapping of the class was put on hold, and only resumed in 2181. Consequently, of the original sixty five ships making up humanity's first cruisers, forty remain in service today.

Berlin-class: Berlin (2161), Cairo (2161), Tbilisi (2161), Abu Dhabi (2161), Beijing (2162), Makassar (2162), Cuzco (2162), Nashville (2162), Hartford (2162), Reykjavik (2163), Dublin (2163), Cape Town (2163), Athens (2163), Baghdad (2163), Mysore (2164), Jakarta (2164), Sydney (2164), Seattle (2164), Houston (2164), Tallahassee (2165), Nassau (2165), Fez (2165), Amman (2165), Djibouti (2165), Isfahan (2166), Lahore (2166), Luoyang (2166), Taipei (2166), Juneau (2166), Boise (2167), Calgary (2167), Caracas (2167), Sao Paulo (2167), Lagos (2168), Benghazi (2168), Chisinau (2168), Yerevan (2168), Samarkand (2168), Nagpur (2168), Hanoi (2168), Changsha (2168), Hefei (2168), Osaka (2169), Hilo (2169), Reno (2169), Ciudad Juarez (2169), New Orleans (2169), Mobile (2169), San Juan (2169), Rennais (2169), Den Haag (2169), Venezia (2170), Sofia (2170), Astrakhan (2170), Bombay (2170), Dhaka (2170), Kaohsiung (2170), Hakodate (2170), Oakland (2170), Salt Lake City (2170), Tegucigalpa (2170), Paramaribo (2171), Conakry (2171), Sfax (2171), Munich (2171), Prague (2171), Orel (2171), Riyadh (2171), Dushanbe (2171), Chennai (2171), Vientiane (2171), Guangzhou (2172), Pusan (2172), Fresno (2172), Monterrey (2172), Havana (2172), Hartford (2172), Cardiff (2172), Marseille (2172), Gdansk (2172), Beirut (2172), Tabriz (2173), Bangalore (2173), Nanjing (2173), Brisbane (2173)

Specifications

Length: 610 m

Height: 120 m

Beam: 140 m

Weight: 110, 110 tons

Armament: 1x 10" medium spinally mounted mass accelerator cannon, 8x 4" light mass accelerator cannon (pair mounted in turrets, two turrets each on port and starboard undersides), 65x GARDIAN laser emitters, 5x missile clusters (each containing up to 10 ship-to-ship missiles)

Armor: 9" universal coverage, with exception of missile cluster hatch doors, laser emitters, and turret mountings. Turrets- 7.5" (190.5mm) front and rear, 5.25" (133.35mm) sides and roof. Armor over hull composed of solid steel-nickel-titanium alloy; turret plating composed of outer third ablative ceramic polycarbonate, inner two thirds steel-nickel-titanium alloy

Power Plant: 1x Westinghouse P4 nuclear fusion reactor

Propulsion: 2x General Electric FUZ-1N fusion torch drives, 4x Nashan Stellar Dynamics hydrogen antiproton combat maneuvering thrusters, 150x hydrogen monoxide reaction control thrusters

Crew Complement: 700 enlisted, 60 officers

The Berlin-class of heavy cruisers was designed to take over the role of the Brussels-class as the mainstay of the Alliance fleet. Conceived in the immediate aftermath of Shanxi, where the Brussels-class had only managed to do its part in beating the turians through sheer weight of numbers and clever tactics, the Berlin-class sought to remedy the flaws that had most directly harmed human cruisers in the battle.

Chief among these flaws was a woefully underpowered main gun. After frantic work, human engineers managed to produce a weapon that not only fired a significantly larger projectile than the gun fitted onto the Brussels-class due to its larger bore diameter, but also achieved a much higher projectile velocity. This gave the Berlin-class firepower outstripping not only the Brussels, but the turian Savagery-class that had been their bane at Shanxi.

The main armament was not the only upgrade. Improved communications infrastructure, thicker armor plating, a new system of hull compartmentalization and damage control response that would henceforth be standard on all new Alliance construction, and a variety of other tweaks were centered around improving the ability of the class to stand and fight in a battle line.

Today, with eighty-five ships produced, the Berlin-class of cruisers stands as the most numerous of the Alliance's cruisers, and the second most numerous amongst all human warships, after the Talavera-class of frigates. Though humanity is now producing its successors, the York-class, the Berlin-class is not being phased out of service, and there are no plans to do so in the immediate future, with the two classes of heavy cruisers serving concurrently. As a result, of the eighty-five ships of the class that have been commissioned, seventy-nine are still in service today.

Of the six that have been lost, four were destroyed in actions against pirates or during the Skyllian Blitz/Torfan Campaign. The SSV Astrakhan suffered a catastrophic explosion while loading ordnance in 2178 that gutted half the ship sufficient that it was deemed only worthy of scrapping. The fate of the SSV Fez will never be completely confirmed, but it is believed that in 2175, a slight error in the navigational systems, compounded by a failure on the part of its helmsman, led to the ship plotting and executing an FTL jump that took it directly through a black hole.

Yokohama-class: Yokohama (2178), Denver (2178), Veracruz (2178), Groton (2180), Edinburgh (2180), Stockholm (2180), Khartoum (2180), Damascus (2180), Karachi (2180), Hong Kong (2180), Canberra (2181), Phoenix (2181), Mexico City (2181), New Cleveland (2181), Monrovia (2181), Madrid (2182), Bucharest (2182), Mosul (2182), Madras (2182), Phnom Penh (2182), Taipei (scheduled for 2183), Fukuoka (scheduled for 2183), Christchurch (scheduled for 2183), Las Vegas (scheduled for 2183), Winnipeg (scheduled for 2183), Jacksonville (scheduled for 2184), La Coruna (scheduled for 2184), Rouen (scheduled for 2184), Jerusalem (scheduled for 2184), Nizhny Novgorod (scheduled for 2184)

Specifications

Length: 450 m

Height: 95 m

Beam: 100 m

Weight: 70, 800 tons

Armament: 1x 5" light spinally mounted mass accelerator cannon, 8x 4" light mass accelerator cannon (pair mounted in turrets, two turrets each on port and starboard undersides), 110x GARDIAN laser emitters, 4x 20mm rotary autocannons (two each on port and starboard undersides, placed immediately forward of fore MAC turrets and immediately aft of aft turrets)

Armor: 5" (127 mm) over entirety of vessel. Turrets- 5.25" (133.35 mm) universal coverage. Solid steel-nickel-titanium alloy

Power Plant: primary- 1x Westinghouse P4 nuclear fusion reactor, secondary- 1x Westinghouse C7L nuclear fusion reactor

Propulsion: 3x General Electric FUZ-4L fusion torch drives, 9x Nashan Stellar Dynamics hydrogen antiproton combat maneuvering thrusters, 200x hydrogen monoxide reaction control thrusters

Crew Complement: 350 enlisted, 30 officers

Bigger is not always better.

That was the guiding principle behind the design of the Yokohama-class of light cruisers; until the commissioning of the SSV Normandy SR1 stealth frigate this year, the most technologically advanced and innovative warships in the fleet of the human Systems Alliance.

Incorporating lessons learned both from the conversion of the Brussels-class to the role of the light cruiser and from asari and salarian ships, the Yokohama-class was designed from the keel up to fill the twin roles of a light cruiser—flak defense of capital ships and leading frigate wolfpacks—and nothing else.

To that end, the armament of the class was geared towards the killing of frigates, unrated craft such as gunboats, fighters, and bombers exclusively, with the potential to damage anything larger reduced from the mediocrity of the Brussels-class to completely nonexistent. The main gun was downsized in bore diameter, but given overcharged rails allowing it to achieve incredibly high projectile velocity. Four of the secondary MAC turrets present on refitted Brussels-class cruisers were removed and replaced with extremely rapid fire, short range rotary autocannons, a feature borrowed from the asari designed specifically for point blank "knife fights" against enemy frigates. The antiship missile batteries, one of a cruiser's primary weapons against large opponents, were removed entirely and replaced with more GARDIAN lasers to defend against fighter/bomber attacks.

Yet the changes in armament only scratch the surface. The armor and shielding were both reduced from the already thin protection of the Brussels-class, making the Yokohamas highly vulnerable to a direct hit from any large weapon. Instead, the class's primary defense against enemies comes in the form of a bleeding edge ECM jamming/spoofing system designed both to throw off missile locks and to actively interfere with gunnery targeting systems; a feature borrowed from the salarians.

This system, as well as the turbocharged accelerator rails for the main gun, as well as the extra engines and thrusters that allow the Yokohama-class to achieve speeds unheard of for a human cruiser, all come at a tremendous cost in energy. These demands are met by another feature unheard of in human cruisers: multiple reactors, which provide levels of power normally reserved for capital ships, packed into a light cruiser.

The final innovation comes in how all of these things are operated. Although Yokohama-class cruisers are 88% of the length of their predecessors, 95% of the height, and 83% of the width, they carry only 56% of the crew, a much smaller complement in proportion. As a result, space that would otherwise have been given over to crew quarters, sustenance, and life support can instead be used for power relays and computer systems. The duties of the missing crew members are assigned to a complex network of VIs; Yokohama-class cruisers are heavily automated.

The class has yet to see serious combat; their introduction into the fleet just barely missed the Skyllian Blitz and Torfan Campaign, and unlike other ships of their tonnage, they are both too few and too expensive to risk on standard anti-piracy and anti-smuggling patrols, being instead kept in the main anchorages at Arcturus and Earth with the capital ships they protect. They have performed exceedingly well in war games and simulations, however, and if tensions with the batarians continue to rise, it may unfortunately be only a matter of time before they fire their weapons in anger.

York-class: York (2176), Amsterdam (2176), Milan (2176), Aden (2176), Lhasa (2176), Seoul (2176), Adelaide (2177), Panama (2177), Tampa (2177), Philadelphia (2177), Belfast (2177), Dijonnais (2177), Rome (2178), Thessaloniki (2178), St. Petersburg (2178), Bishkek (2178), Kathmandu (2178), Guangxi (2178), Sapporo (2179), Fak-Fak (2179), Albuquerque (2179), Little Rock (2179), Tuscaloosa (2179), Montreal (2179), Boston (2180), Casablanca (2180), Hamburg (2180), Warszawa (2180), Moskva (2180), Dubai (2180), Brunei (2181), Dalian (2181), Kagoshima (2181), Vladivostok (2181), Vancouver (2181), Chihuahua (2181), Des Moines (2182), Columbia (2182), Santo Domingo (2182), Salamanca (2182), Tunis (2182), Kosovo (2182), Constantinople (scheduled for 2183), Basra (scheduled for 2183), Musqat (scheduled for 2183), Calcutta (scheduled for 2183), Kuala Lumpur (scheduled for 2183), Ambon (scheduled for 2183), Durango (scheduled for 2183), Kansas City (scheduled for 2183), Belmopan (scheduled for 2183), Detroit (scheduled for 2183), Charlotte (scheduled for 2184), Liverpool (scheduled for 2184), Yamoussoukro (scheduled for 2184), Napoli (scheduled for 2184), Rostock (scheduled for 2184), Nairobi (scheduled for 2184), Astana (scheduled for 2184), Novosibirsk (scheduled for 2184), Chengdu (scheduled for 2184), Wuhan (scheduled for 2184), Qingdao (scheduled for 2184), Saitama (scheduled for 2185), Niigata (scheduled for 2185), San Jose (scheduled for 2185), Tucson (scheduled for 2185), Austin (scheduled for 2185), Baton Rouge (scheduled for 2185), Cincinnati (scheduled for 2185), Raleigh (scheduled for 2185), Valencia (scheduled for 2185), Ghent (scheduled for 2185)

Specifications

Length: 630 m

Height: 120 m

Beam: 160 m

Weight: 125, 500 tons

Armament: 1x 10" spinally mounted medium mass accelerator cannon, 12x 6" medium mass accelerator cannon (pair mounted in turrets, three turrets each on port and starboard undersides), 20x GARDIAN laser emitters, 7x missile clusters (each containing up to 15 ship-to-ship missiles)

Armor: 11" (279.4mm) over entirety of vessel, 360 degree coverage with exception of missile cluster hatch doors, laser emitters, and turret mountings. Turrets- 12" (304.8mm). All armor plating composed of outer third ablative ceramic polycarbonate, inner two thirds steel-nickel-titanium alloy.

Power Plant: 1x Westinghouse P6 nuclear fusion reactor

Propulsion: 4x General Electric FUZ-1N fusion torch drives, 6x Nashan Stellar Dynamics hydrogen antiproton combat maneuvering thrusters, 175x hydrogen monoxide reaction control thrusters

Crew Complement: 600 enlisted, 65 officers

As the SAN has expanded in the decades since first contact, the trend in ship design has been to specialize ship classes solely for certain roles. Whereas in the first few years after the discovery of mass effect technology, the limited numbers of the Navy's roster required that every hull be capable of filling multiple and widely varied purposes, now increased numbers have granted the luxury of diversity.

The York-class heavy cruiser was designed alongside the Yokohama-class light cruiser, yet despite the latter being intended to entirely replace ships that were much older and more out of date where the former was intended to merely work alongside its predecessors, the York-class entered service first, the lead ships of the class in time to see action during the Skyllian Blitz and Torfan Campaign.

For the most part, this was due to the level of innovation and radical design changes being much less in the York-class than the Yokohama-class. In order to specialize the ships for the role of anti-cruiser and anti-capital ship warfare, relatively few and straightforward changes were made. Armor was increased, magnetic rails on the main gun were increased, secondary armament was increased, anti-strike craft GARDIAN lasers were removed in favor of increased ship-to-ship missile clusters.

Yet it also reflected the political realities of the situation for the Alliance. Despite the constant, low level conflict with Terminus pirates and unofficially state sanctioned batarian slavers, the eyes of Alliance High Command remained fixed on the possibility of all out war with the turian and above all batarian governments: neither of whom fielded large amounts of strike craft, but both of whom fielded large amounts of cruisers. To that end, priority was deemed necessary to be given to enlarging the Alliance's complement of heavy cruisers above all else.

Frigates

Human frigates, like human cruisers, generally are not considered to be of exceptional quality by standard metrics.

That blanket stereotype among the layperson fails to account, however, for the wild differences in the three classes of frigates humanity has produced to date. While the Talavera-class, the mainstay of the human fleet for almost the last thirty years, is indeed an unremarkable ship compared to its peers in alien fleets, notable only for its modularity, its predecessors the Kadesh-class were notorious among those who sailed them as the worst ships ever designed by human hands. The new Normandy-class, scheduled to begin arriving this year, is on the opposite end of the spectrum: packed with enough bleeding edge technology and weaponry to make the salarians pale with jealousy, it promises to redefine the wartime and peacetime roles of frigates.

Human frigates are named after noteworthy battles in human history. While the story is most likely apocryphal, it's said among diplomatic circles that when turian Councilor Indro Vorenus received the names of all existing and planned human frigates as part of the human military's integration into the greater Citadel defensive alliance, his response was "If Shanxi had not already taught me of the humans' worth as warriors, this list would."

Kadesh-class: Kadesh (2149), Ilion (2149), Trasimene (2149), Telamon (2149), Raphia (2149), Stalingrad (2149), Crecy (2149), Poitiers (2149), Luetzen (2149), Gaugamela (2149), Poltava (2150), Bannockburn (2150), Salamanca (2150), Fredericksburg (2150), Princeton (2150), Quebec City (2150), First Manassas (2150), Shiloh (2150), Jena (2150), Aschaffenburg (2150), Hemmingstedt (2151), King's Mountain (2151), Guandu (2151), El Alamein (2151), Saipan (2151), Passchendaele (2152), Stirling Bridge (2152), Peleliu (2152), Borodino (2152), Goose Green (2152), Cape St Vincent (2153), Okinawa (2153), Lepanto (2153), Cynocephalae (2153), Adrianople (2153), Santa Cruz (2154), Gergovia (2154), Khalkin Gol (2154), Chosin Reservoir (2154), Gallipoli (2154)

Specifications

Length: 150 m

Height: 30 m

Beam: 30 m

Weight: 5100 tons

Armament: 2x torpedo launchers

Armor: 2" (50.8mm) over entirety of vessel. Solid steel-nickel-titanium alloy

Power Plant: 1x Hua Zhilong Model 2 nuclear fusion reactor

Propulsion: 2x Rolls Royce X29 fusion torch drives, 50x hydrogen monoxide reaction control thrusters

Crew Complement: 60 enlisted, 6 officers

The Systems Alliance Navy would prefer to forget the Kadesh-class of frigates ever existed.

When mass effect technology enabled the construction of true space-going warships for the first time, the fledgling SAN was faced with myriad logistical challenges without precedent to draw on in answering them. Among these challenges was which of the many, many companies from across Earth jockeying for lucrative contracts would be given the responsibility of constructing parts for the new fleet.

The SAN's response to this dilemma was to distribute contracts for various parts of its first three classes of ships—the Hudson Bay-class light carriers, Brussels-class cruisers, and Kadesh-class of frigates—to competitors; one company would build a set of components for one class of ship, while its direct competitor would build the equivalent set for another class. The company whose handiwork proved to be most effective would gain all future SAN contracts for that component. In theory, it would be the quickest and most effective way to find the best supplier, and so it proved to be… but at a heavy price.

The Navy awarded the contract to design the main reactor of the Kadesh-class frigates to the Chinese state company Hua Zhilong; their American competitor, Westinghouse, received the contract for the Brussels-class of cruisers. The design that Hua Zhilong eventually finalized, manufactured, and installed aboard the hulls of the Alliance's first frigates was significantly cheaper and more fuel efficient than the one Westinghouse put aboard the cruisers even in proportion to size.

It also suffered from a fundamental misconception of the way element zero functions when subjected to the nuclear fusion and power derivation processes in a way that the American design did not. Consequently, under even moderate stress, the power plants of Kadesh-class frigates had a tendency to suddenly produce vastly more energy than the fail-safes and circuit breakers were designed to handle, often leading to ship-wide power losses, cascading failures in reaction cooling and containing, and eventually reactor meltdown and explosion.

Nearly every ship of the class suffered at least a minor incident with its reactor at some point within two years of their commissioning. Four ships (SSV Trasimene, SSV Salamanca, SSV Fredericksburg, SSV Aschaffenburg), fully ten percent of the class, were completely obliterated by catastrophic reactor failures, along with all hands aboard. It would have been five, when the SSV Cape St Vincent's reactor suddenly burst a coolant line during its shakedown cruise and began to melt down as well as drenching the engineering compartment in radiation, if not for the prompt action of one Ensign Hannah Shepard. Faced with the sudden incapacitation of her department head (who had been standing directly next to the faulty coolant line) as well as half the other crew in the compartment, Shepard successfully managed to initiate emergency procedures and singlehandedly save the remaining crew in Engineering, as well as the entire ship. For her heroism, she was awarded the Navy Cross, a promotion to Lieutenant, and within two years a transfer to the personal staff of Admiral Kastanie Drescher.

Had the problems with the Kadesh-class been limited to a faulty reactor, the Alliance could simply have replaced it with a better one. Unfortunately, they were not. The class also suffered from consistently buggy fire control and communications gear, inefficient usage of space, and constantly clogged toilets. Naval architects, in the infancy of their field, had been unable to figure out how to miniaturize GARDIAN laser coordination systems enough to fit onto the hull of the Kadesh-class, so one of the most basic weapons, and one of the most essential for a frigate expected to engage enemy strike craft, was left off entirely.

None of the flaws was anywhere near as lethal as the reactor (save perhaps the ammo feed for the torpedo launchers, which had a horrifying tendency to lose its grip on missiles it was trying to load and somehow eject the live ordnance into the hangar area), but together they led to the class's cancellation. Only a third of the ships originally planned were produced, and as soon as production of the successor Talavera-class began, scrapping of the Kadesh-class began as well. None of the class remains in service today.

Talavera-class: Talavera (2157), Saratoga (2157), Samar** (2157), Jutland (2157), Wakefield (2157), Sharpsburg (2157), Lake Champlain (2157), Ascalon (2157), Salamis (2157), Seelow Heights (2157), Arras (2158), Manzikert (2158), Alesia (2158), Dyrrhachium (2158), Elkhorn Tavern (2158), Mechanicsville (2158), Towton (2158), Chibi (2158), Da Nang (2158), Inchon (2158), Malvern Hill (2159), Pharsalus (2159), Guilford Courthouse (2159), Granicus (2159), Surigao Strait (2159), Somme (2159), Civetot (2159), Kharkov (2159), Manila Bay (2159), Isandlwana (2159), Berezina (2160), Pilot Knob (2160), Hue City (2160), Verdun (2160), Coral Sea (2160), San Juan Hill (2160), Prokhorovka (2160), Bosworth Field (2160), Yorktown (2160), Marmiton River (2160), First Isonzo (2161), Second Isonzo (2161), Third Isonzo (2161), Fourth Isonzo (2161), Fifth Isonzo (2161), Sixth Isonzo (2161), Seventh Isonzo (2161), Eighth Isonzo (2161), Ninth Isonzo (2161), Tenth Isonzo (2161), Eleventh Isonzo (2161), Twelfth Isonzo (2161), Thirteenth Isonzo (2161), Fourteenth Isonzo (2161), Caporetto (2161), Adwa (2161), Tobruk (2161), Pantelleria (2161), Sidi Barrani (2161), Gondar (2161)***, Actium (2162), Sedan (2162), Issus (2162), Cape Engano (2162), Sekigahara (2162), Lodi (2162), Masurian Lakes (2162), Gorlice (2162), Carrhae (2162), Tarawa (2162), St. Nazaire (2162), Camden (2162), Leipzig (2162), Santiago de Cuba (2162), Savage's Station (2162), Tsushima (2162), Camperdown (2162), Virginia Capes (2162), Dien Bien Phu (2162), Campion (2162), Plassey (2163), Rivoli (2163), Marathon (2163), Zama (2163), Kawanakajima (2163), Hydaspes (2163), Plataea (2163), Kursk (2163), Dogger Bank (2163), Copenhagen (2163), Little Bighorn (2163), Agincourt (2163), Stamford Bridge (2163), Arnhem (2163), Glendale (2163), Toba-Fushimi (2163), Ulm (2163), Vicksburg (2163), San Jacinto (2163), Gettysburg (2163), Tanga (2164), Suomussalmi (2164), Second Manassas (2164), New Orleans (2164), Anegawa (2164), Cambrai (2164), Thermopylae (2164), Trafalgar (2164), Bastogne (2164), Caen (2164), First Ypres (2164), Raate Road (2164), Nicaea (2164), Arcoli (2164), New Market (2164), Spotsylvania (2164), Koniggratz (2164), Teutoburger Wald (2164), Bladensburg (2164), Wake Island (2164), Brooklyn Heights (2165), Savo Island (2165), Cannae (2165), Tarvis (2165), Guadalcanal (2165), Kasserine Pass (2165), Monte Cassino (2165), Badajoz (2165), River Plate (2165), Metz (2165), The Pyramids (2165), Second Ypres (2165), Dorylaeum (2165), The Alamo (2165), Westport (2165), Tanegashima (2165), Third Ypres (2165), Golden Spurs (2165), Tours (2165), Smolensk (2165), Pearl Harbor (2166), Marengo (2166), Iwo Jima (2166), Varna (2166), Myeongnyang (2166), Mohacs (2166), Catalaunian Fields (2166), Asculum (2166), Wounded Knee (2166), Waterloo (2166)

Specifications

Length: 180 m

Height: 50 m

Beam: 30 m

Weight: 6100 tons

Armament: 3x torpedo launchers, 30x GARDIAN laser emitters

Armor: 5" (127 mm) over entirety of vessel. Solid steel-nickel-titanium alloy

Power Plant: 1x Westinghouse C2L nuclear fusion reactor

Propulsion: 2x Rolls Royce X34 fusion torch drives, 4x Nashan Stellar Dynamics hydrogen antiproton combat maneuvering thrusters, 75x hydrogen monoxide reaction control thrusters

Crew Complement: 80 enlisted men, 10 officers

In stark contrast to their predecessors, the Talavera-class of frigates stands as the longest-serving and most battle-tested class of ships the Systems Alliance Navy has fielded. Representatives of the class have served in every single conflict, great or small, that humanity has faced since its introduction to the galactic community.

The first ten ships of the Talavera-class were commissioned in March of 2157, and hurriedly distributed among the First and Second Fleets (the SAN only fielded three fleets at the time) in an effort to replace the defective Kadesh-class as soon as possible. One of these ten, the SSV Samar, bears the dubious distinction of being the first human warship destroyed by alien forces.

On June 7th, 2157, the turian heavy cruiser Raptor's Fury attacked without warning a group of human civilian vessels attempting to reactivate a dormant relay near the human colony of Shanxi. SSV Samar, which along with the Kadesh-class SSV Lepanto was serving as the escort for the civilian convoy, moved to engage, although completely outclassed. In a brief but fierce battle, the Samar was destroyed and her entire crew killed save for Communications Ensign Clarissa Hobbes, who was captured, forcefully interrogated, and ultimately killed by the turians. SSV Lepanto broke off early in the engagement and arrived at Shanxi in time to warn the garrison.

Despite that inauspicious beginning, the Talavera-class has proved themselves time and time again in the twenty-six years since. The ships are unusually resilient for their size, being able to take severe hull damage that would cripple their salarian or turian equivalents and continue fighting, but what truly makes them stand out is their ease of maintenance and operability. Given what ultimately doomed their predecessors, the first priority during their rushed design process was to create a ship that would be reliable during normal fleet operations, reliable during combat, and easily upgraded to ensure long service with the fleet, so that the annual naval construction budget might be used for bigger ships.

The designers succeeded. Only now, almost thirty years later, are plans even beginning to be discussed to rotate the class out of service, and those plans are still hazy and half-formed enough that the hypothetical succeeding class does not have a name.

Normandy-class: Normandy (scheduled for 2183), Austerlitz (scheduled for 2184), Ain Jalut (scheduled for 2184), Rorke's Drift (scheduled for 2184), Chancellorsville (scheduled for 2186), Midway (scheduled for 2186), Anzio (scheduled for 2186), Cowpens (scheduled for 2188), Friedland (scheduled for 2188), Wagram (scheduled for 2188)

Specifications

Length: 130 m

Height: 30 m

Beam: 30 m

Weight: 6200 tons

Armament: 3x torpedo launchers, 40x GARDIAN laser emitters

Armor: 5" (127 mm) over entirety of vessel. Solid steel-nickel-titanium alloy

Power Plant: Classified

Propulsion: 4x Rolls Royce X40 fusion torch drives, 4x Nashan Stellar Dynamics hydrogen antiproton combat maneuvering thrusters, 75x hydrogen monoxide reaction control thrusters

Crew: 50 enlisted men, 10 officers

The Normandy-class of vessels are called frigates for one reason and one reason only: the term "submarine" is inappropriate for a space going vessel.

Yet that is what their intended usage most closely resembles. The Alliance's Talavera-class, and the frigates of other navies, directly serve as part of a larger fleet. While the fleet seeks the foe, they are on the outskirts of its formation, providing sensor coverage and early warning. In battle, they maneuver in groups called "wolfpacks", seeking disabled or distracted enemy ships to overwhelm.

The ships of the Normandy-class are designed to operate alone. Although it is not listed on the standard table of statistics above, the standout feature of their design is a prototype stealth system known as Internal Emission Sinks, or IES, that effectively makes the ship invisible to sensors in space. The exact mechanics of this system are highly classified, for obvious reasons, but its ramifications are obvious. The Normandy-class has the ability to loiter deep within enemy space and gather vital intelligence, a realm that was previously exclusively that of unmanned spy probes, with the addition of a human crew to make on site determinations about what information might be most valuable. In addition, the stealth system grants the ability to execute sudden, devastating surprise attacks, again similar to the classic modus operandi of a submarine; enemy ships traveling alone, or straggling behind their fleet, are no longer safe.

Unfortunately, the highly experimental, bleeding edge nature of this technology means that as of now it is prohibitively expensive for the Alliance to manufacture. Other than the stealth systems and the equally innovative and classified new reactor system that powers it, the Normandy-class are not that far different from Talavera-class frigates, yet those two things alone are enough to give a single ship of the class a price tag approximately equal to two York-class heavy cruisers. This means that the Alliance only plans for ten of the ships within the foreseeable future.

*: A city in Russia near the Caspian Sea. Not to be confused with the famous asari justicar.

**: The second of the three sea battles constituting the larger Battle of Leyte Gulf in WWII. Not to be confused with the city in Russia or the asari justicar.

***: It was later determined that the official in charge of naming ships had, in late 2160, been dumped by his girlfriend in favor of an Italian man. The Navy was forced to apologize to the Italian government, but did not change the ships' names.

A/N: So this has been a long time coming—I originally thought I could get it out before last Christmas lolololol.

This is the first part of what's intended to be an encyclopedic coverage of the full rosters of every species in the Citadel (so no batarians, and DEFINITELY no Migrant Fleet). I didn't quite realize how much work this would be when I came up with the idea. I'm not one to quit just because something's hard, so you'll see more chapters eventually, but… not for a while. In the meantime, feel free to let me know in the reviews whether you'd like to see the turians or asari next.

And yes, I did name all twenty Talavera-class frigates commissioned in the year 2161 after Italian military disasters. There were fourteen separate battles of the River Isonzo, and the Italians lost all of them, along with Caporetto, where the Italians outnumbered the Austrians three to one and still lost with total casualties of 13k dead and 270k surrendered, and Adwa, where an Italian army with machine guns and artillery got crushed by Ethiopian tribesmen with spears and blowpipes…

If it's any consolation to my Italian readers, at least you only lost to humans. The Australians lost a war to emus. And I may or may not have named a frigate after a "battle" in that "war" too.