Ten Thousand Empty Tombs - Blog Posts

An independent freighter and three space taxis in orbit above The Grandmother. This ship is a simple chemical fuel design built to utilize the tether network to get around and only light its engines to provide a little extra boost. It's a very common sight in more heavily-developed areas of space. The second image shows the inner layer of containers with the exterior stacks removed.

Even corporate paramilitaries need warships in TTT -- this express freighter has been refit with a much more power-dense reactor and AShMs (lasers weren't in the budget) -- it's actually substantially better than the typical patrol craft fielded by first rate naval powers (and that's the point). It's the sort of vessel that is mean enough to ignore anything short of an actual warship without causing undue concern to the people who do have actual warships. It's also vastly superior to most craft fielded by pirates and criminal organizations.

The reactor refit would've been a no expenses spared item bought off a great power's navy with a lot of concessions and begging. Very humiliating for a huge organization but the results are undeniable.

That was ambiguous. Like, they mostly aren't shipping stuff. It's more like a '''fun''' combination of agribusiness and extractive colonial projects. The East India company was bad enough without a nuclear arsenal as large as USA's [on this vessel alone 24x 500 kiloton warheads and 40x 2 kiloton defensive warheads (dialable down to >.1 kiloton but rated to carry as many as 3x that number]

I am still settling on the exact details but the engines are high end PIT or MPD so there's enough thrust for a decent amount of operational maneuverability to set up favorable fights or run down targets with empty tanks. The missiles themselves are fairly impressive post-revolution designs -- bigger than the standard MBE-pattern AShM and capable of doing between 15-17km/s depending on payload and a sensor suite that supports a long chase. The sort of people this ship is meant to fight are mostly not capable of reaching out and touching somebody from that distance and don't have the tools to engage (moderately) sophisticated submunitions from long distance. People who want to do something about a ship like this will either bring a destroyer, suck up to a bigger friend who can bring one, or try to jump it well inside its reach (probably suicidal but undeniably effective). It's not really viable as a mainline warship but conventional patrol craft fielded by actual states are often NTR/NEP hybrids for similar reasons. They are not very capable warships but are designed to cruise efficiently and (like this ship) meet their targets when they have mostly empty tanks. You don't really use ships like that in a peer war but the space traffic environment in TTT is hellishly complicated so you need to be able to efficiently cover a lot of ground to ensure customs, biosecurity, and access to strategic resources.