Amazon-class Patrol Corvette
Overview
The smallest class of military vessel in the Systems Alliance to be considered a proper warship, The Amazon-class Patrol Corvette was a light escort and patrol vessel commissioned in 2154 and was primarily designed for interplanetary security.
Typically found along established trade routes and shipping lanes or in the orbit of settled worlds, the duties of an Amazon-class Corvette consisted of anti-smuggling and anti-piracy operations. Escorting merchant vessels along their patrol routes and boarding and inspecting civilian ships suspected of smuggling, operating illegally, not complying with regulations or not cooperating with the corvette's instructions. As such, an Amazon-class has a contingent of two marines permanently assigned to it to carry out these inspections.
If a ship refused to allow Alliance marines to board or attempted to flea, Amazon-class Corvettes were equipped with military-grade GARDIAN lasers to disable the ship as well as grapples to catch and stabilise it's motion. The crew also possessed cutting tools to cut through the hull of a ship denying entry. If the corvette determined that a ship posed a threat to it or other ships, it was equipped with two M-65 Sabre torpedo tubes powerful enough to destroy lightly armoured or shielded targets.
In 2161, the post-war Systems Alliance commissioned a new Victoria-class Corvette as a successor to the Amazon-class and over the next 25 years, the Amazon-class would be gradually phased out, making up less than 20% of all Alliance Corvettes by 2186. They were all destroyed in combat during the Reaper war.
Hull and Superstructure
From stem to stern the Amazon-class has a length of 77.9 meters, a wingspan of 31.8 meters and a height of 17.2 meters. With a mass of 4,200 metric tonnes.
The main hull has a length of 58.3 meters, a width of 8.2 meters and a height of 11.4 meters.
The hull is protected by up to 90 millimeters of layered ablative ceramic composite armour plating. This armour serves as the inner layer of ship defenses. The armour is primarily designed to defend against directed energy weapons like lasers by boiling away when heated. The vaporised armour material scatters the DEW beam, rendering it ineffective.
A scaffold was built around the interior pressure hull, with sheets of ablative armor hung from the structure. Ships typically have multiple layers of armor separated by empty baffles, spaces often used for cargo storage.
The exterior hull is also lined with strips of ceramic as part of it's Defused Radiator Array, used to radiate the ship's passive heat build-up from everyday functions such as running thrusters, drives and other internal systems. Under thermographic imaging, this makes the ship appear striped, leading to the nickname "tiger stripes" or "war paint". Though, they are not as efficient as regular radiator panels, they are more durable. If damaged by enemy fire, the ship only loses a small portion of it's radiation capacity. In most cases, a vessels DRA alone allows it to cruise with no difficulty. Operations inside solar systems can cause problems.
During combat, the ship utilizes droplet heat sinks built into the hull itself. Filled with lithium, these sinks capture the titanic amounts of heat generated by weapons and thrusters during combat. Once filled to capacity, the lithium is sprayed out of nossels at the bow in the form of droplets, where they are cooled in the cold vacuum of space before being sucked back in at the stern. Droplet sinks can manage 10 to 100 times more heat than a DRA, but every time they are cycled through, a portion of the lithium coolent is lost to space. Limiting their use to only when necessary.
Shields
The Ships also feature a Corvette-grade anti-bombardment kinetic barrier array linked to a Model 3 kinetic barrier shield generator based on the Berlin-class Cruiser design. This would later be upgraded to a Model 5 generator in 2161.
Kinetic barriers consist of hundreds of tiny emitters spaced evenly across the outer hull. An object with mass traveling above a certain velocity will trigger the barrier's reflex system, generating a localised repulsive mass effect field around the point of impact, deflecting it.
This is not without risk, however. The emitters themselves can only repel objects up to a limit. Sufficiently massive objects traveling at a high enough velocity can pass through the barriers unimpeded. Additionally, the kinetic barrier generator takes power from the ship's mass effect drive. Even if the projectiles do not penetrate, consistent impacts can put strain on the generator, this strain in turn is carried back to the drive. To prevent potential drive failure, the drive is designed to temporarily shutdown power to the shields until the field stabilises once again. The sudden, abrupt shutdown of the generator causes all emitters to discharge residual energy build-up into the vacuum of space. Triggering the characteristics "shattering" effect.
This allows the ship to withstand impacts from ship-based weapons, but doesn't do anything against Directed Energy Weapons such as lasers.
The strength of the kinetic barrier depends on the size of the mass effect drive, the amount of element zero used and overall design of the drive and generator. The more powerful the mass effect fields the ship generates, the more powerful the shields can be. An Amazon-class Corvettes's shields are rated for about 40 terajoules of kinetic energy per square centimeter. This makes them practically immune to ship-mouted auto-cannons, projectile-based point defense cannons or any other turreted mass accelerator-based weapons that could be used on civilian ships. However, these shields would be completely useless if struck by any spinal-mounted or fixed mass accelerators.
Power and Propulsion
The ship's drive core is a Mk III Orion Mass Effect Drive Core. This large drive is scaled down from the Orion Drive of the Berlin-class and spans across both decks. The drive is powered by the ship's on board helium-3 nuclear fusion power plant, which delivers a powerful electrical current to a core of element zero, causing it to radiate large amounts of dark energy, which are captured by the mass effect field generators.
The Orion Drive is used to increase the power of on board weapons, generate kinetic barriers, reduce the mass of the ship, generate gravity, power inertial dampeners and more, but the most significant advantage the drive gives is the ability for faster than light space travel. The mass effect field generator generates a mass reducing field around the ship, lowering it's mass, while simultaneously raising the speed of light around it. Allowing for faster than light travel through conventional thrust without any negative effects. Ships accelerate for half the journey, befor flipping around and decelerating for the other half. This means that there is no consistent speed. A ship's FTL travel time is largely determined by the distance they travel. Longer distances allow for higher average velocities than shorter distances.
Following the 2161 retrofit, these ship's were equipped with the Mk IV Orion Drives, which massively increased mass effect field generation. It also allows for a substantial 300% increase in FTL acceleration and deceleration. From a rate of approximately 23,100 km/s to approximately 69,200 km/s. Allowing for the ship to travel roughly 13.7 lightyears within a 24 hour period. However, due to static build-up of the drive core, the ship can not maintain FTL flight for longer than around 50 hours at a time. Limiting it's maximum FTL speed to around 59 lightyears every 2 days.
One downside however is that as the ship accelerates, the difference in light speed between the interior and exterior of the field causes a doppler shift. Objects outside the ship redshift, eventually only becoming visible to the ship's radio telescope antenna. As the ship goes faster, high-energy electromagnetic source such as x-rays, gamma rays, and eventually cosmic ray sources become visible, replacing stars with pulsars, the accretion disks of black holes, quasars and gamma ray bursts.
To an outside observer, the ship appears to be surrounded in a blue or purple aura as the light within the mass effect field is blueshifted into higher frequencies, making the field itself visible to the naked eye. The ship's radiation emissions are also compressed as a consequence. If within a field that allows light to move twice as fast, the ship produceed twice the emissions. If in a field that allowed for 200 times faster light speed, it's visible light is emitted as x-rays and gamma rays and the infrared heat of the hull is blueshifted up into the visible spectrum or higher.
As a result ship is almost completely blind during FTL flight, requiring a specially trained navigator to plot each FTL jump and instuct the helmsman on course corrections based on calculations provided by the ship's FTL plotter. If an object of significant enough mass is in the path of a planned FTL jump, a safety lock built into the drive core prevents the ship from accelerating above safe speeds. The safety lock was intentionally designed to be integral to the FTL warm-up process. Meaning that removing or tampering with the mechanism could cause critical damage to the drive core.
Ships also can not perform an FTL jump while under fire. Accelerating to FTL necessitates that a ship reduce it's mass to levels unsafe for combat. During large-scale combat, it's common practice for a losing fleet to sacrifice a portion of their forces to draw enemy fire while the rest of the fleet escapes. These ships would then attempt to escape combat at sublight speed, where they would jump to FTL as soon as they were out of range and rendezvous with the rest of the fleet.
Conventional thrust was provided by 4 aft and 2 fore antiproton drives witch inject antiprotons into a reaction chamber filled with hydrogen. The resulting matter-antimatter annihilation provides unmatched motive power. The drawback is fuel production. Antiprotons are produced one at a time in massive solar arrays orbiting energetic stars. Making them both expensive to produce and easy targets during wartime. The exhaust of an antiproton drive is measured in millions of degrees Celsius. Any ship caught behind it would melt like wax in a blowtorch.
Maneuvering is performed by an array of liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen reaction control thrusters.
The ship features backup hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells to meet the minimum power requirements for the ship to function for a few hours, even after the fusion plant is taken offline.
Crew and Compliment
The standard crew size for the Amazon-class Corvette was 8. A commanding officer, Executive Officer, helmsman, navigator, weapons officer, comms officer, engineer and medical officer with an additional 2 marines for security, who also served as the boarding party during inspections.
Emergency escape vehicles consist of 3 M-78 Hammer emergency evacuation pods, each equiped with their own emergency beacon, thruster module, heat shields, inertial dampeners and at least a week's rations for a crew of 10.
Sensors and Communications
An Amazon-class features a variety of active and passive sensors that give it a detailed visual of it's surroundings.
Passive sensors are used for long-range detection and include visual, thermographic and radio detectors that monitor the ship's surroundings at all times.
Active sensors are shorter range, but more accurate. They include ladar and radar that emit a "ping" of energy and "listen" for a return signal. Radar has a wider field of view than ladar, but ladar's higher resolution allows images of detected objects to be assembled.
Due to light-lag, passive sensor accuracy is reduced and active sensors don't work while the ship is traveling at FTL speeds.
Communication is achieved through tight-beam communication, which fires a communications laser at the nearest FTL comm bouy. Acting as mini, primative mass relays, these bouys use mass effect FTL corridors to transmit the data at superluminal speed along the comm bouy network. Depending on the distance between the sender and their nearest comm bouy, this method of communication is almost instantaneous, especially since military communications take high priority when it comes to communication bandwidth.
Armament
The primary armament of the Amazon class is two M-65 Sabre torpedo tubes. Armed with conventional high-explosive warheads, designed to target and disable thrusters to prevent escape. In large enough numbers, they can also destroy civilian craft if necessary.
The ship's General ARea Defense Integration Anti-Spacecraft Network (GARDIAN) is used for close-in defense against enemy missiles and fighters as well as the primary anti-ship weapon for short-range engagements. consisting of 5 anti-missile and anti-fighter laser turrets on the exterior hull. Since lasers move at the speed of light, they can not be dodged by anything traveling at superluminal speeds. At the start of combat, GARDIAN is 100% accurate. It's not necessarily 100% lethal, but it doesn't have to be. Damaged fighters have to break off attack for repairs. Defraction restricts GARDIAN's effective range to only a few kilometers. Fighters attack in swarms in an attempt to overwhelm the ship's GARDIAN defenses, the first few will be shot down, but as a battle progresses, overheating deteriorates both the accuracy and strength of the laser turrets.
Layout
An Amazon-class has 2 decks.
Deck 1 is the main deck and includes primarily the bridge and comm room as well as main engineering.
Deck 2 housed the cargo hold, armoury, four sleeper pods, medical bay and mess hall.
Ships of the Line
- SSV Amazon PC-54: Active 2154 - 2168
- SSV Yangtze PC-69: Active 2156 - 2181
- SSV Mississippi PC-61: Active 2156 - 2169