Phlegethon-class Carrier/Destroyer
Name/Type: Phlegethon-class Carrier/Destroyer
Designer/Manufacturer: Inferno Fleet
Designation: Medium Cruiser
Crew: 330 + 76 Gunners
Length: 600 meters
Speed: 17 MGLT, 850 Kph
Hyperdrive: x1
Shield Rating: 2270 SBD + 2270 SBD Back-up
Hull Rating: 2546 RU
Weapons: 10 Quad Turbolaser Cannons, 20 Light Quad Plasma Mass-Driver Cannons, 50 General Purpose Warhead Launchers, 4 Tractor Beam Projectors.
Fighter Complement: 60 Medium Starfighters or other equivalent.
Troops: 20 Heavy Vehicles, 60 Speeder Bikes, and 3000 Infantry or other equivalent.
Support Craft: 8 Medium Transports or other equivalent.
Description: Since multiple Dawn Star-class Bulk freighters were readily available from the Ventil Yards, and the shipyards were already tooled to make such craft, Inferno Fleet commissioned Donahue, the designer of the Dawn Star, to convert the vessels into warships; thus adding another freighter-to-warship design to the Fleet. Deciding to capitalize on the freighter’s large internal volume, Donahue came up with a hybrid destroyer-carrier design based on the Providence-class used by the CIS during the Clone Wars. Like that class, most of the Phlegeton’s weaponry is in the form of warhead launchers, which provide a powerful, if somewhat ammunition-limited, punch. The rest of the ship’s weaponry is designed to primarily thwart enemy starfighter attacks, although the quad turbolaser cannons are quite capable of dealing with small-medium sized capital ships. As importantly, the Phlegethon serves as a mobile base for five squadrons of medium starfighters and a small army; allowing Inferno Fleet the previously unheard ability to land large amounts of troops and vehicles (in previous classes, nearly all Inferno vessels only had troops for boarding defence and limited scale ground actions). Overall, the Phlegethon is an average warship in performance, with above average armor and slightly slower speed for a ship its size. Because the holds of the Phlegethon can easily be adapted, some of them serve as simple, armed supply transports, ammunition carriers, or fully adapted to become pure starfighter or army transports rather than the hybrid starfighter-army mix portrayed within the statistics, and so forth.
Technical Descriptions:
Relative Cost: Below Average
Cost: The ship has a below average price tag for its size, mostly because it is a converted freighter. This is because the nature of the design(since much of the ship is actually empty space to carry starships, troops,etc and troops) and the yards with their volunteer and droid workers; Phlegethons are rather cheap vessels to build and man. The ship’s simplistic lines and uncomplicated, civilian equipment also further this, as well as expedite the building and repair times. This would make the vessel dirt cheap to build and operate, except that the starship requires warheads, some of which can be costly since Inferno Fleet does not have facilities to manufacture them; and the frequency in which they need to be replaced.
Speed: Slightly Below Average
Speed: The Phlegethon uses relatively simple and reliable civilian engines. While this does not severely handicap the ship’s speed, it does make it slower to some modern warships of its size who often use high-end military-grade hardware.
Shield Rating: Average
Shields: The Phlegethon sports roughly average shielding for its size, albeit not as heavy as a Rendili Dreadnaught or a Strike Cruiser, but then again, the Phlegethon is faster than both of those ships. Donahue has also incorporated back-up shields within the Carrier/Destroyer based on his experience with Mon Calamari vessels when he served within the New Republic.
Armor: Above Average
Armor: The only area where the Phlegethon has an advantage of most similiarly sized warships; this is not due to the quality of the ship’s armor, but rather that the simply flat sides of the vessel allowed Donahue to fuse extra armor plating to the vessel without interfering with any of the intricacies which would have been a problem in more intricate designs such as Mon Calamari cruisers or tech-packed BDE vessels. This is just as well, as armor is probably more important in its role of carrying and protecting units while they are being transported.
Weapons: Average
Weapons: The overall power of the Phlegethon’s armament is roughly average. Its design layout is not. Rather than concentrating on guns for its main armament, the Carrier-Destroyer uses General purpose Launchers. This lends flexibility to the cruiser at the cost of limited ammunition. Typically, the Phlegethon does not run out of ammo unless it is near the end of a very long engagement. But frequently after battles, the starship must meet up with a tender or return to base to reload before charging back into battle (if it hopes to have more warheads). Its main secondary weapons are quad turbolaser cannons; medium weapons capable of dealing with small to medium sized starships, and perhaps best suited for laying up flak walls and barrages given its multiple barrels and fast firing rate. Lastly, the Phlegethon carries Light Quad Plasma Mass Drivers, which are easily mistaken for quad laser cannons in form and size. While the LQPMD does fulfill the same role of that weapon, it does in a very different fashion. Each barrel is actually a basic magnetic accelerator which accelerates a partially gas-filled slug into action. When the normally inert gas passes through the accelerator, it becomes ionized and is turned into plasma. Upon turning into plasma, it breaks through the rear of the bullet to form a rudimentary plasma drive; thus accelerating the slug faster. Thus, the slug actually becomes faster the longer its flight is, and thus if it encounters a distant starfighter, will likely punch completely through its shields and hull. Conversely, if the shell hits a target right upon leaving the barrel, it still has a lot of plasma within it, which will create explosive splash damage to the target. Thus more simply put, as range increases, penetration increases; as range decreases, explosive damage increases. Thus the LQPMD is effective at all ranges, but like missile launchers, also suffer from relying on relying on physical ammunition. The rounds themselves are fairly small, and all emplacements on the Phlegethon have enough ammunition for up to several consecutive engagements.
Complements: Average (For a hybrid carrier)
Complement: Roughly half of the ship is dedicated to its role as a transport, and the vast bulk of those cargo areas are on the lower half of the vessel to better facilitate offloading onto planets and large docking facilities. Phlegethons have large, multiple ramps on these lower decks to quickly convey cvehicles, passengers, and cargo to the ground. Starfighters and other carried starships are released from a pair of heavily armored and massive blast doors at Phlegethon’s blunt bow. Given the varied nature of their work, some Phlegethons have added or removed some of these offloading and receiving areas. As an example, Phlegethons which will be operating as troop ships for an extended amount of time often weld and or plate over the hangar blastdoors, as the ship will not be carrying any starships. Starfighter carriers often weld and plate over the landing ramps or change them into hangar blast-doors.
Thread: Torches of Freedom
(OOC Note: The stats of the ship are basically directly scaled-down from the CIS Providence-class Carrier/Destroyer, except for the ground complement, which has already been slashed down considerably because having 90 MTTs, 150 tanks, and 827,000 battle droids seemed a bit much...)