Tereshkova-class Fleet Carrier
The Tereshkova-class Fleet Carrier was commissioned in 2161. They were were a direct improvement on the design of the legendary Einstein-class. Like their predecessor, they were designed as mobile Dreadnought-sized staging base for support craft and ground forces during large-scale fleet engagements and ground operations. Able to deploy hundreds of troops and support craft simultaneously at the cost of firepower and lacking any offensive firepower beyond their support craft. They also featured many improvements that are present in other 3rd generation Alliance warships, including improvements to the drive core, shielding armour, defenses as well as additional space to support even more ground forces and support craft.
As a rule of thumb, the Alliance allocated one Carrier for every 100 ships. By 2186, the Alliance had 43 Carriers, with 28 being Tereshkova-class. They were all destroyed during the Reaper War.
Hull and Superstructure
From stem to stern, the Tereshkova-class Carrier has a length of 1134 meters, a beam of 319.7 meters and a height of 174.4 meters. With a mass of 4.11 million metric tonnes.
The main hull has a length of 950.3 meters, a width of 45.4 meters and a height of 104.6 meters.
The hull is protected by up to 2.1 meters 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 Dreadnoughts-grade anti-bombardment kinetic barrier array linked to a Model 5 kinetic barrier generator, scaled up from the York-class Cruiser.
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. Tereshkova-class kinetic barriers are rated for the equivalent of 6 kt of kinetic energy per square centimeter.
Power and Propulsion
The ship's drive core is a Mk IV Orion Mass Effect Drive Core. This massive drive spanned across multiple decks. It's a modification of the older Mk III that incorporates turian design principles. 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.
The Mk IV Orion Drive allows for a rate of approximately 57,900 km/s of acceleration and deceleration. Allowing for the ship to travel roughly 11.5 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 50 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 of an Einstein-class was 1,500 with facilities to accommodate a brigade of upto 3,100 marines.
Emergency escape vehicles consist of 1,150 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 8.
Tereshkova-cla Carriers have 7 hanger decks carrying a total of 39 Attack squadrons and 39 Interceptor squadrons of 18-20 A-61 Trident Fighter Interceptors, 12 Air Assault squadrons of 8-10 A-61 Mantis Gunships and a Landing fleet of 100 UT-47 Kodiak Drop Shuttles and 60 HT-50 Goliath Heavy Transports.
In addition, the Tereshkova-class carries 540 Ground Combat Vehicles. Including the M29 Grizzly, M-35 Mako, M-44 Hammerhead and M-080 Megalodon.
Sensors and Communications
A Tereshkova-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
Due to the amount of space allocated to aircraft storage, maintenance and deployment, the Tereshkova-class doesn't feature any offensive weapons. The ship's primary armament is it's Space Wing.
As of 2182, Tereshkova-class Carriers included 20 M-83 Javelin torpedo tubes as short-range weapon to compliment their point-defence network and give them the ability to fend off smaller warships like Frigates more effectively. Javelin torpedo are scaled up variants of the Fighter-launched disruptor torpedo. Like Disruptor torpedos, Javelins are equipped with element zero warheads that create random, unstable mass effect fields that warp space-time around them. In flight, they use mass increasing fields making them too massive to be blocked by kinetic barriers, but also making them sluggish and easy prey for point-defence systems. Javelins are fired in large numbers and in pairs, on converging trajectories, programmed to collide, just before impact, allowing the dark energy field emitted by the impact to resonate, magnifying the resulting warp effect.
Close-in defense against enemy missiles and fighters is the primary mission of the ship's General ARea Defense Integration Anti-Spacecraft Network (GARDIAN). By necessity, Carrier GARDIAN networks are more extensive than regular warships. Consisting 179 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
A Tereshkova-class Carrier has 22 decks.
The Combat Deck was on Deck 2 and included a completely sealable Bridge, CIC and War Room. As well as the Captain's Cabin.
Deck 4, 6, 8 and 9 were reserved almost exclusively for crew accommodations. Personnel facilities, R and R facilities, mess halls, barracks, training areas, medical bays, locker rooms, gyms.
Decks 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17 were the Hanger Decks. Twice the height of a regular deck and each housing upto 260 auxiliary craft per deck, consisting of Fighters, Gunships and Shuttles. These decks connected to each other and the flight decks through vehicle elevators.
Deck 18 and 19 were the flight decks with 13 mass accelerator deployment tubes in each wing per deck that use mass accelerator technology to accelerate and decelerate auxiliary craft with redundant overhead accelerator claws that use an electromagnetic catapult system to "throw" and "catch" auxiliary craft if necessary. The flight decks are where the auxiliary are prepared for deployment. Containing facilities to arm, fuel and repair space craft. These decks were also used to load up landing craft for surface deployment. The deployment tubes are sealed by heavy duty blast doors as well as environmental fields made up of gas membranes held in place by mass effect fields that can be activated when the doors are open to prevent the atmosphere from escaping, while still allowing vehicles to pass through unimpeded. During combat, these two decks become the busiest decks on the ship.
Deck 20 and 21 were the Vehicles decks, each containing over 270 vehicle bays as well as the facilities to maintain, repair and refuel them.
Deck 22 contained the cargo hold. connected to a cargo docking port on both the port and starboard side for loading freight.
The aft section of the ship plays hosts to the power plant and mass effect drive. All all available and serviceable by qualified engineers and technicians via the engineering section of deck 22
Ships of the Line
- SSV Valentina Tereshkova CV-20: Active 2161 - 2186
- SSV Jon Grissom CV-21: Active 2163 - 2186
- SSV Buzz Aldrin CV-22: Active 2166 - 2186