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Battletech - Dauntless class Destroyer Escort.

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Description

Note this is a non-canon ship

Length - 537 meters
Displacement - 400,000 tons

Designed to be a close escort for capital ships and to engage hostile fighters and dropships using the latest small craft targeting systems to engage fighters and dropships at long range before they became a threat.  Most SLDF vessels lacked any appreciative anti-fighter and anti-missile defences, instead relying on numbers and raw firepower to overwhelm a foe in conjunction with their technological and training advantage they had over the House Fleets.  But the weak anti-fighter and missile defences were seen as a flaw that could be exploited by a canny opponent as had happened time and again in the Reunification War.

To cover this gap a new escort ship was ordered to act as a close escort.  Whilst based originally on the Vincent class corvette the new design was stretched out by another hundred and thirty five meters.  Despite this the weight went down to 400,000 tons.  The ship whilst longer, is lighter and its engines are based on those on the Lyran Mako class corvette to provide a ferocious amount of thrust, pushing the design to a maximum of 4g of thrust.  This allowed it to move round a convoy or fleet to meet a threat coming in. 

Unlike the Vincent the new design's cargo was limited to over 17,000 tons of cargo giving the vessel a somewhat limited endurance in terms of supplies and spare parts.  A lithium fusion battery was also not installed due to a lack of space.  Instead everything went into weapons, batteries of NL-35's in quad mounts and batteries of Barracuda missiles provide the main anti-fighter punch.  The heavy anti-shipping punch comes in the form of a pair of light gauss rifles and a quartet of White Shark missiles all mounted in the bow.  A layer of AMS are also installed to shield the ship and let her protect her larger charges from hostile missile strikes.  This comes at a cost as the heat system is over stressed and can barely control half the weapons load.  The ships were also very uncomfortable to serve on, a tiny grav deck, cramped crew quarters and limited space made them unsuitable for patrols or long duration missions and they were to be tied to escorting the battlewagon's of the fleet.

The Dauntless class as it was known was just entering service at the outbreak of the Amaris Civil War and of the 20 in service were destroyed in combat on the march towards Terra.


Art by the amazing mattplog.deviantart.com/
Image size
2150x1650px 1.14 MB
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Comments2
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MwOwJ's avatar
The design of the ship is awesome!