Widow Maker Class Starship

The Widow Maker Class is the latest design in Solas Tempus technologies. It fuses together concepts from common elements from Federation, Romulan, and Klingon designs with those of Imperial and Rebel Alliance designs brought in by Splicers who were brought to this universe unintentionally by a Splice. The new design elements feature the shape and general design trajectory and philosophy of the vessel away from the standard hull designs prevalent in Federation / Solas Tempus vessels. The wedge shape and the feature of extremely powerful engines as well as a throw-back to terrestrial Earth ship designs from Frigates and Battle Ships where mounted cannons were extensively used, as they are in Imperial vessels which have spliced in.

Length

234 meters

Crew

225 Standard
30 Minimum
500 Evacuation Capacity

Power Source

Matter/Antimatter Reactors (3)
Deuterium Fusion Reactors (18)

Propulsion

Dimensional Fold Drive
Jump Point Generator
Impulse Drive

Cruising Speed

Warp 7.67

Maximum Speed

Fold 12.975

Emergency Speed

Fold 14 for 30 Minutes

Offensive Systems

• Dual-Cannon Pulse Phaser Turrets (12)

4 Dorsal, 8 Ventral

180 Degree Lateral Arc / 90 Degree Vertical Arc

• Heavy Anti-Proton Cannons (2)

Forward / Ventral

90 Degree Lateral Arc (Moves as a Pair)

• Torpedo Launchers (4)

2 Forward, 2 Aft

Standard Load-Out of Transphasic Torpedoes

Accepts Standard Torpedo Design

• Magnified Heavy Ion Cannon

Mounted Forward

Magnified Heavy Ion Cannon

Using a design of Imperial and Alliance forces from their native universe, the ship has a massive forward mounted ion cannon. The cannon collects ion particle energy in a spheroid stasis containment field during a charge phase, when the energy reaches peek, the field drops in the direction of fire and the collected ion particle energy discharges in a massive 5-10 meter wide beam. This ion beam is designed for a singular purpose, the disable shields and vessels.

The ion cannon overloads power and shield systems by exposing those systems to an intense discharge of particle energy, the energy is relatively low-impact on physical matter but instead produces and intensely polarized charge within whatever it hits. This causes an immediate and intense electromagnetic disruption in the area of impact, the charge displacement is so large that once it comes into contact with a conductive surface / signal or power conduit the disruptive charge continues along that path disrupting power and connected systems in its wake.

This cannon requires at least 3 minutes to charge, but can be fed directly from the interior matter/antimatter reactor. The cannon has a maximum charge point of 5 minutes and 15 seconds before it must discharge or risk the energy backfiring and disabling the ships own power systems.

Defensive Systems

• Deflector Shields
• Phasing Cloak
• Ablative Hull Armor
• ESMS

Deflector Shields

While Imperial vessels tend to have a centralized shield generator the makes for an excellent target, this vessel uses the Federation style shield grid which allows for the shields to be segmented but is more difficult to target.

Teufel Sensor Probes

Cruising Speed

300 kph

Maximum Speed

1000 kph

Nominal Range

1 Meter - 1 AU from Vessel

Maximum Range

25 AU Control
2.5 ly Relay

The newly developed Teufel Sensor Probe is an entirely new design in remote sensing and threat assessment. The vessel is equipped with 150 of these small 1.7 meter diameter truncated-sphere probes that are launched from various specialized launchers along the lateral surface of the ship. The probes are small and constructed of energy absorbent materials making them extremely difficult to detect, they operate on a micro-gravity displacement generated within the core by a Spacial Variance Reactor. The probes have a simple AI system that allows them to be given simple commands from their operator on what they are to do. The primary purpose is to fly near to the ship and relay sensor information back to the ships main computer and command center. They carry a full sensor suite of short-range and long-range sensors. They can operate independently or in groups, when in groups they can magnify their sensor strength by arranging themselves into array patterns for higher sensitivity.

Since they are unmanned they may turn in any direction in three-dimensional space within microseconds, which they routinely do along their programmed flight path to form an exceptionally erratic and difficult to track path of movement. The onboard AI is capable of being directly told to fly in a direction in a straight line, however under normal operations they are given a pattern to follow that includes how far off the directed course they are permitted to go at any given time. The AI will then plot random course changes (or at times not-so-random to give a more varied sensor reading) in order to avoid detection.

The ship is capable of handling 20 Teufel Probes in operation at the same time.

Communications

The probes are capable of communicating not only with the vessel which launched them but with each other. They normally employ precisely timed direct point to point subspace enhanced direct beam communications (similar to laser pulse communications but operating faster than light) to communicate with each other. To communicate with their vessel they use subspace high frequency burst communications, or will use this to communicate with each other if required.

The probes operate on a multi-dimensional fractal encryption algorithm, the communications protocol changes the timing and frequency range of all subspace communications routinely so that only the vessel which launched the probes will know what channel, duration, and timing they are going to communicate on next. The encryption keys are also rotated frequently with a similar shared-key style that is synced at launch time.

When communicating with each other the probes use their own communications protocol which developed independently along a neural net algorithm and essentially learns and changes to suit each situation, this means that their inter-probe communication is unique to the ship they are launched from as well so that no two sets of probes can communicate with each other directly, the probes can only talk to the ship they were launched from or the other probes from that ship. All other communications will be ignored unless authenticated properly as coming from one of those two sources. To the probes, a set of probes from another vessel would essentially be speaking a different language and another vessel would be unable to guess the next communications channel, frequency, timing, or encryption key the probes intended to use.

As an additional security measure the signals can also be authenticated to a key tied to the ships transponder code from which they were launched. The key and transponder code go together, while one cannot guess the key from the transponder code it becomes blatantly obvious if a signal is being fraudulently sent trying to mimic their mother-ship even if the ships transponder codes match, their keys would not.

Power Distribution

The vessel takes on Klingon philosophies of system redundancy, especially following Borg encounters the Klingon vessel design is to keep going as long as possible with decentralized power distribution systems and redundancy. The Widow Maker Class power systems use this same philosophy. The 18 deuterium fusion reactors are placed throughout the vessel. Reactors are placed at each gun turret, at the main bridge, in each shuttle bay, and at the central rear impulse engine. Each reactor is linked into the primary, secondary, and tertiary power grids and can be isolated from sections of the grid. When the grid is fully isolated the ship can maintain power independently throughout vessel. The vessel is capable of withstanding significant hits with ion cannons before becoming inoperative so long as the power distribution system can be put into a lock-down state. Different segments of the ship are even designed to be able to use different power grids independently.

Rather than having a single Matter/Antimatter reactor powering the ship, there are three reactors. Each reactor is independently fed fuel using the same distributed deuterium storage as the fusion reactors, with the addition of antimatter storage pods at each of the three locations. The reactors are placed one in each of the two primary engines as well as a centralized reactor which is directly tied into the main super-heavy Ion cannon located on the ventral forward section of the hull. Each reactor can be further died into any of the three power grids from the section of the ship it resides in. In addition, the three reactors have dedicated emergency power conduits which are laid out to connect each reactor to each other in the event one or more reactors is inoperative, those systems can be fed power from one of the other reactors.

The vessel is designed so that is can maintain operational power for shields, weapons, navigation, communications, and FTL capability even if two out of the three reactors are inoperative.

Engineering / Control

The distributed nature of the ships systems means that while the ship has a main engineering section toward the rear-central area of the ships interior, there are two other secondary engineering compartments each located at one of the ships main warp nacelles. Each one can cross-connect to control the vessels power systems, but are normally used to manage and monitor their own systems and coordinated from main engineering.

At main engineering there is also the primary fuel storage for the vessel, while each reactor has a reserve in place at that location which can be run independently, they are all fed from the main fuel storage located at main engineering.

Propulsion Redundancy

The Widow Maker Class is designed for maximum operational capacity.

Sub-Light / Impulse

The vessel is equipped with three primary sub-light impulse drive cores. The central impulse drive is the primary drive and is directly fed from a series of fusion reactors at that location in the central aft section of the ship. In addition to this each of the warp nacelles at the rear of the ship have their own smaller impulse drive system fed by independent fusion reactors at each location. These impulse drives are normally kept in a stand-by ready but ultimately inactive status.

FTL / Warp

The ships primary FTL system is a Dimensional Fold Drive coupled with a standard Warp Drive system. Each warp nacelle is fed by its own Matter/Antimatter reactor in the nacelle itself and have their own smaller reserve fuel storage there as well. However, the bulk of the fuel for these reactors comes from the ships main body, the primary fuel storage located near main engineering. If the DFD / Warp Drive system is rendered inoperative for some reason the ship is equipped with a Jump Point Generator which will allow it to enter Hyperspace. The system will not engage, however, unless all warp plasma has been purged from the drive system, otherwise upon entering Hyperspace the ship would suffer severe damage.

OOC

This class design I found out is actually the Antarian Class Cruiser from Star Wars Exodus, for the purposes of the Blazing Umbra Setting, the design is a new design and is not a refit of an existing class, that is to say for Star Wars characters in Blazing Umbra, the Antarian Class Cruiser does not look or function like this. However, there are parallels to the design, which were come up with by discussion on Discord after posting the image from Pinterest. Discussion took place in the #web-feeds channel on September 3rd, 2018 at 5:04pm U.S. Eastern Time.

As an additional note, there is a distinction between Hyperspace in this context (as used in most of Blazing Umbra) and that of Hyperspace in a Star Wars context, this uses the Blazing Umbra / Babylon 5 version of Hyperrspace, not that of Star Wars.