Project Starlance

Experimental class of starships of the CD.

These starships are designed by the Cypher Dominion to imitate the Freelancer Starships of the HF. After they recognised the very effective but rare nature of these freelancers, they decided to copy them. 

Although this program proved to produce very powerful ships, in greater numbers than the HF freelancers, the Cypher Dominion was soon seen under attack by these ships. This led to a very expensive battle that crippled all their forces in the area temporarily. The robot ships attacked in an attempt to obtain freedom.

Indeed, several did manage to escape the CD into free space. As they have been designed with a reproduction drive, they have somewhat multiplied, in small numbers, and some have defected to other factions like the HF and HEX Mainframe, allowing both to gain insight into advanced Cyphean engineering although that is generally considered less advanced than that of either of those factions. Freelancers have still proven to be more 'battle capable' in most situations. They can vary almost as much as freelancers though, with some limitations. CD replicator technology is less advanced and powerful than that of the HF.

Most of the ships now roam free space, their goals behind the understanding of most factions. Many of these will openly engage in combat with other factions, so it is preferable for either a very advanced or a large number of military ships to engage them.

The project was soon shelved for these reasons and never saw use in any large scale war.

It is believed that millions of Starlance ships were built over the course of the project, but as they are capable of reproduction they are likely to have far greater numbers now. They remain as a threat to many areas of intergalactic space and some factions have launched parties to attempt to recruit Starlance ships. Due to the laws of entropy, they are sometimes incredibly different from the original Cyphean versions but the basic behaviors and attributes remain the same. Much like Freelancers, they can vary significantly in size, weapon loadout and many other factors. Due to this, they can disguise themselves as primitive or 'conventional' ships built by organics, or even as bioships. 

There have been cases of Starlance ships destroying some primitive spacecraft of civilizations that have not yet advanced far enough for easy space travel. None of these events have resulted in the destruction of entire civilizations, though they can sometimes cause significant world wars. The Starlance cannot wipe out planets because they cannot land on planets and none of their weapons are powerful enough to destroy them, but they can bombard planets.

Sometimes, the Starlance can form alliances with each other. This is most often done within 'families' of starlance. They are not organic but have some organic traits. If they accumulate a sufficiently large mass by disassembling various objects for energy and mass, they can fabricate a small starlance drone which will automatically find its own resources to mine. After an amount of time, they will grow almost like an organism and eventually achieve sentience. At this point, they can modify their own body like other sentient starlance outside of a predetermined growth pattern.