Prototype Sovereign Light - Class Advanced Cruiser

The Sovereign Light - Class Advanced Cruisers are the most advanced ships in service with the Hyperion Federation other than the highly unstable Singularity - Class Experimental Prototype Super Battleship, which is notorious for suddenly and spontaneously combusting into a supernova. 

The Sovereign Light is widely known to make use of barely understood precursor archaeotech in its construction - typically of Xadian origin. The true potential of archaeotech is far greater than the HF can understand currently, but obtaining archaeotech of this caliber is an extremely rare and difficult feat. As such, the prototypes of the original Sovereign Light class Advanced Cruisers were exceptionally expensive. They often ran into many problems such as archaeotech overloading HF systems and behaving in unpredictable ways. It took many iterations to get the designs for the modern Sovereign Light reliable. The sheer cost of archaeotech for this program would simply be unsustainable, so each ship was scrapped and constructed in a way that its archaeotech would be recoverable should the antimatter annihilation core explode. This is perhaps one of the most costly areas of this project, but saved significantly in powerful archaeotech. Rather than testing with crew, they instead used virtual universe machines to allow the crew to pilot robotic bodies remotely which would be sent to crew the prototypes instead. 

The first several prototypes almost immediately exploded upon boot up for various reasons. The first 4 versions were failed attempts to figure out why it was exploding, the HSA figuring out several problems that could lead to that on the 5th prototype ship built, by monitoring the archaeotech very closely. The next several models were very unoptimized in several ways (consuming huge amounts of antimatter just to remain stable, very poor main thruster output, no self repair ability). The HSA understanding of archaeotech improved though, so it could be argued that these prototypes performed their roles very well and later models were much more efficient. They were still unreliable for several reasons and some even lacked heavy armament, the latter would be fixed well before the final production version was built and re-named into T.S. Sovereign Light for service.

Information obtained here also allowed S.R.I.A to incorporate archaeotech into its body.