Cruisers

Overview

Cruisers are the middle-of-the-road class of vessel, incredibly versatile and often modular in design. They usually form the backbone of large fleets, creating large fields of overlapping fire in all directions. Their weapons are often moderately sized, with enough firepower to one-on-one another vessel of similar size. Some Cruisers have also been known to carry small compliments of strikecraft, though such vessels do suffer in the survivability stakes due to the vulnerability hanger facilities bring.   Cruisers are used in almost every kind of fleet due to their versatile design. Some classes are most often found leading small squadrons of ships, often in anti-piracy roles where larger ships would be deemed unnecessary, such as a Battleship, while others are used as mainline assault ships in large fleets. Their versatile targetting profile allows them to be useful in nearly any situation.   Many classes of Cruiser are often armed with a lot of turretted firepower, allowing them to engage on the move with ease. Though such weapon emplacements are often limited in damage potential due to the necessary reduction in size of the weapons themselves to allow them to be turretted, they are usually numerous enough to allow the Cruiser to destroy most targets in only a few vollies of fire.   Cruisers come in a variety of Sub-classes. Light Cruisers (sacrifice either firepower or armour for increased speed and agility, often on the smaller end of Cruiser sizes), Heavy Cruisers (much like Heavy Battlecruisers, these cruisers sacrifice turret based firepower for less numerous amounts of heavier Spinal Mounted weaponry), Tactical Cruisers (designed for Electronic Warfare and Shield support for large fleets), Missile Cruisers (larger sized cruisers equipped with large amounts of Cruise Missiles and Torpedoes, with very little forms of other weaponry), Interdiction Cruisers (equipped with Graviton generators that prevent nearby ships from entering Superluminal Travel and Recon Cruisers (rare vessels equipped with cloaking devices and other stealth technologies, used strictly for scouting roles or hit and run tactics).  

Human History

The first spacefaring cruisers developed by humanity were developed under the flag of the Emergency Planetary Union in 2047. Two cruiser class vessels were developed before the outbreak of the Interstellar War in 2065, the Bristol-class Cruiser and the Moscow-class Tactical Cruiser. Named after important starship building cities on Earth, the Bristol-class and Moscow-class formed the backbone of the EPU Navy until the mid-point of the Interstellar War in 2074.    The Bristol-class Cruiser was developed by Archer Stellar Industries to answer the EPU's search for a suitable mainline cruiser. It was designed with modularity in mind, with weapon emplacements, electronic warfare suites, and auxillary components easily swapped out when in-station. This would allow it to perform a large variety of tasks within a fleet. However, it proved inadequate for Electronic Warfare due to its hull shape restricting the use of multiple ECM Suites. Its firepower, however, was unmatched for a ship of its size. It's state of the art Hybrid Quantumn-Fusion Reactor allowed it to output an extraordinary amount of power, allowing it to field a massive amount of Railguns, Hybrid Cannons, and other types of powerful weaponry. The powerful reactor also gave it a slight boost to its shield regeneration rate, as well as the rate at which extra shield hexes could be deployed.   The Moscow-class was Yukotan Aerospace Corporation's answer to the shortcomings of the Bristol-class in Electronic Warfare. Its main feature is not its power generation, nor its weaponry. It is instead its Quad YAC-2 Impulse-Plasma Hybrid Thusters. The YAC-2 Thruster is the largest Immediate Impulse class of thruster in the known galaxy. It allows the Moscow-class to create massive amounts of instanteous thrust, offering commanders the ability to intercept incoming missiles, torpedoes and other guided munitions far more effectively. The Moscow-class also features an extensive point-defence grid to make up for it's lack of pure firepower, making it even more effective at protecting itself and its fleet from guided muntions. The training manual for Captains of the Moscow-class repeats the phrase "Impulse, Interdict, Intercept", in reference to how to effectively use the ship's Impulse Drives, ECM Emitters and PD Cannons to protect the fleet from threats.