A tale of two scoutstars...
The Earth Union Fleet needed some form of long duration, clandestine scout that could perform everything from signals intelligence to high resolution dradis mapping, and wide area surveillance to remote surveillance, and everything else that could be conceived. Rather than create a custom hull, the base hull of the new gunstar
Electra was chosen; it had plenty of power, performance was as good as anything in the fleet, and it was currently in series production.
The first design used a very ring shaped dradis array that was so powerful that special shielding needed to be installed inside the ship to protect the crew and electronics from the emitters. The design worked, but it was also very limited. The ship, which cost as much as a
Dione class battlestar, carried minimal armament that made it almost too expensive to risk. When the dradis worked, it was amazing, but it required a lot of maintenance, thus the reason for the exceptionally thick rings; crew could access the actual array from inside the ring. Additionally, the ring limited the ability to rapidly maneuver, and even when "the fin" was added, a central pylon used to help support and stabilize the ring, performance, while improved, was still limited.
No one is quite sure where the idea for
Arachne came from; some sources say it came out of a naval design think tank, others say it came from a weekend workship that invited science fiction authors to brainstorm with engineers and line officers, while others say that it was a fall-back plan that had always been in the drawer. However it was developed, the
Arachne Project quickly replaced the
Orithyia class and elements were incorporated into the
Electra class. The concept was to remove the fixed guns from the wings and replace them with two hardpoints each capable of handling a triple ejector rack that carried long duration surveillance drones. Later versions would see the wings upgraded to handle overwing hardpoints and an expanded payload of 24 drones as opposed to the original 12. Arachne was also given an anechoic hull coating to reduce its dradis signature and the same internal electronics and hull mounted dradis as
Orithyia, minus the ring mounted dradis.
The original surveillance drones were designed to perform a variety of tasks while on station, and then when a set of trigger events happened, they would jump back to a predetermined location and rendezvous with
Arachne. Still, the capabilities of the ring dradis was seductive and shortly before
Arachne's trials, a new drone was developed that could operate, with others, as a giant synthetic aperture dradis array, with a diameter of more than 4km. Additional drones could be added to add to the array's resolution and sensitivity, something that prompted the overwing hardpoints. During trials,
Arachne with six drones deployed in a synthetic aperture array was 60% as effective as
Orithyia, and with all twelve drones deployed was on par with her more expensive sister. Later trials that increased the number of drones to eighteen and twenty-four found that resolution was 130% and 150%, respectively, of the baseline.
Additional types of drones were developed, though they were rare with the SAA drones being the most produced before the genocide.
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I'm going to have to write a vignette for them after this chapter because to tell their story will require a fairly decent word count. Suffice it to say, I think you'll like her commander...they're something we haven't seen yet from the Union. It will also show how President Marquette was playing hardball regarding the Erisian crisis.
