[ROUND] Brief to Round Table Assembly on project Gwennan

[Attn_Thaddeus_Reynolds]

Brief to Round Table Assembly on project Gwennan

After the quelling of the Warlord Uprising, craft with the capabilities of the older “corporate-scale” warbarges became increasingly less common, and in subsequent operations a clear need for those capabilities and more was realized throughout numerous theaters. To this end a project began in YC123, resulting in the launch of a Sotiyo class structure. This structure was ostensibly launched to provide pirate suppression and a base of operations in the Placid region, but was privately used to develop a new class of planetary support vessel to fit a wide variety of Warclone engagement profiles.

Background

Primarily Warbarges in use today are retrofitted Bowheads, Transports, or Capital type Vessels, with few of the older warbarges still in service. Warlord type Warbarges are still seen in somewhat common usage; however, they tend to have immense difficulty with local law enforcement due to associations with the Warlords Uprising in the Molden Heath region.

Corporate Scale Warbarges such as the ones produced by Ishukone were in common usage for quite some time; however, they themselves were purpose built for standard military logistics support operations on planetary scale invasions. To this end a project began to design and build a purpose built Warbarge designed to fill the needs of Warclone Units on a Corporate or Clan scale.

(Pictured, Left to Right, Warlords Era Warbarge, Bowhead class Freighter, Wyvern Class Supercarrier, ‘Schism’-type Wyvern Post-Modernization, Proposed Gwennan Hull, Caldari ‘Amaterasu’ Class Corporate Warbarge, Leviathan Class Titan)

[Attn_Thaddeus_Reynolds]

Project Requirements

The following were general and specific requirements of note outside of the basic spaceframe necessities that were required to accommodate these requirements at the time. These requirements are listed only in approximate order of priority, and may have changed or been added during the duration of the project:

1. Provide accommodation for the support of command and control and intelligence gathering capabilities for at least 5 planetary combat theaters.

   • Including the ability to deploy temporary intelligence gathering and communication satellites.

2. Allow for the integrated clone jump ability of Warclones to relays aboard the Warbarge.

3. Extend the range of Warclone Implants of those within the communication range of the Warbarge.

4. Maintain a quantum core connection to the AVALON construct to facilitate the above and ease of traversal for certain individuals.

5. Maintain and Improve on the previous Drop Uplink deployment system.

   • Priority on improvements should be reduction of lethality of traversal of the system.

6. Launch single occupancy and squad occupancy insertion vehicles to

   • Ground Theaters
   • Space Theaters

7. Launch, support, and maintain a fleet of Command Vehicles to at least 5 Combat Theaters on a planetary scale.

8. Be capable of providing Orbital Artillery support in the forms of at least:

   • Precision EMP shell strikes
   • Precision Hybrid shell strikes
   • Precision Laser Strikes
   • Area Denial EMP Strikes
   • Area Hybrid Shell Strikes
   • Concentrated Laser Strikes

9. Launch, support, and maintain at least 3 wings of Warclone Pilots under project MORRIGAN for the purposes of planetary Close Air Support

10. Capable of deploying Orbital Drop Installations including

    • Local CRUs
    • Turrets
    • Rapid Manufacture Supply Depots
    • Rapid Manufacture Vehicle Pads

11. Maintain and support a fleet of on-demand Rapid Deployment Vehicle drone dropships or piloted equivalent.

12. Maintain and support at least 2 wings of heavy dropships, landing vehicles, and ground to orbital logistics craft.

13. Capacity to store, maintain, and deploy ground vehicles in support of planetary operations.

14. Maintain the Capacity to rapidly manufacture Combat Vehicles up to and including Heavy Attack Vehicle class systems on an as needed basis.

[Attn_Thaddeus_Reynolds]

Build Proposal

From these requirements, engineers from across the cluster were called to collaborate on the project. In the end they brought the initial prototype proposal to the Warden for final drawing to be completed.

Initial Design - Early YC123

The initial design of this prototype was going to be based on the spaceframe of a salvaged schism era Valkyrie wyvern, salvaged from one of numerous battlefields. The refit of the schism era wyvern to modern standards proved to be too difficult to do at the same time as the proposed upgrades, and additional issues were found in routing of power relays and durability against anti-orbital defensive systems. Design and prototyping began

First Iteration - YC123-Dec-24 to YC124-Aug-01

After a return to the drawing board a new concept was advised, heavy armor plating surrounding key areas of the starship, focussing primarily on the Ventral Section of the starship. Additional power systems were routed through the new plating to accommodate multiple planetary bombardment arrays. Command and control was to be concentrated into a single bridge-like blister extending from the ventral hull. Cargo modules were added on the port and starboard aft sections, and additional propulsion was added from a number of Chimera class carriers initially purchased as scrap. The heavy armor plating came from sections of Archon class carriers, again bought under the guise of scrapping them. The overall hull length of this iteration ended up at roughly 7 km.

Second Iteration - YC124-Aug-08 to YC-125-Jan-06

The second iteration the side launch bays were scaled down in favor of additional armor emplacements. Additionally, two sensor blisters were added to facilitate the targeting of the ANNWN transit system (see ANNWN subproject below) to the ventral aft section. A full intensity laser emission array was added midship ventral. CIC for ship command was moved towards the central directly over the laser bombardment array with additional towers extending towards the new dorsal armor plating. Ventral forward armor plates were made to articulate, with two protrusions forward. The two Forward Ventral armor plates can close to cover the forward facing launch bays, providing cover from incoming anti-orbital weaponry. This approximately 8.2 km design would be continued to the final iteration with minor changes to the overall superstructure and hull.

Final Iteration - YC125-Jan-08 - YC125-Jul-07 Launched Incomplete

The Gwennan, the first of a new class of independently designed Warbarges, was created initially from the salvaged wrecks from two mostly destroyed Schism Wyverns, and combined with a number of components from various Carriers that were being sold for scrap as their pilots looked to switch to newer Dreadnought capital ships. The class was built to be a smaller, more efficient corporate scale warbarge with support for newer technologies, but still capable of supporting multiple engagements in different combat districts across a planet’s surface. She shares a number of features with Carriers, capable of supporting a fleet of Dropships and launched Mobile Command Centers and other various support ships, but sports little organic weaponry effective on the starship scale. The Gwennan was originally built with an experimental ‘Tidebreak’ FTL device; however, due to the incomplete nature of the ship, her emergency launch and subsequent activation caused the system to burn out.

The class’s keel is heavily armored with overlapping plates, angled to maximize defense against incoming anti-orbital weaponry, and articulable to further enhance and adapt. Lining the keel are a number of planetary bombardment arrays capable of supporting a large number of battlefields with orbital artillery. The class was designed with precision bombardment in mind rather than strategic bombardment, “A dreadnought may be a hammer, this should be more like a surgical team in an operating theater.”

Also lining the keel are a number of armored blisters containing various sensors needed for targeting smaller scale Spatial Conduits, allowing for quick and relatively safe deployment towards target locations. Though not as sophisticated as the Triglavian equivalents these systems replicate, still requiring a targeting beacon, they represent a vast improvement over the older Drop Uplink systems on Corporate Warbarges.

[Attn_Thaddeus_Reynolds]

Project ANNWN - Spatial Conduit Deployment

Project ANNWN was the line item representing the project to reverse engineer Triglavian Spatial Conduit Deployment systems used by their “Siege Elite’’ Tactical Combat Troikas. These spatial systems, while rarely captured with any intact, were able to be examined from sensor data from teams across Skarkon II, with efforts primarily from the clans Variyazi Clade and AEGIS Umbrorum. Efforts by both the Elysian Stewards and the Myrddin Institute proved successful in developing a system to replicate Drop Uplinks but with sufficient safety to the combat blank. Unfortunately though, despite the best efforts of all involved there was no found way to replicate the non-beacon targeted system the Triglavian Collective seems to be able to use.

The system consists of three parts consisting of the Annwn spacial conduit generators, targeted by the Arawn sensor array, and the ‘Ci’ designation beacons. A planted Ci beacon can be designated by the sensor array, at which point a special conduit can be generated towards the targeted area, allowing for near-instantaneous deployment into the field or extraction from the field. The transit from point to point still remains painful for those traveling, but the radiation dose absorbed does not significantly affect the lifespan of Combat Blanks; however, transits are not recommended for baseliner or otherwise mortal individuals outside of significantly shielded vehicles.

ANNWN Systems necessitated a significant departure from initial build proposals, with several in-house systems gutted to create room for the testbed technology and diagnostic tools (accounting for the significant increase in overall size for the design iteration). ANNWN Layouts are designed to copy older systems recovered from Sisters of Eve testbed data recovered by the Varyazi clade. The Gwennan class prototype units include an ANNWN system based on this data, but necessitated building into the prototype the sensor and drive systems of Stratios-class vessels. This simplified production greatly for initial testing, but remains far too large for mass production units. Block 2 testing was significantly delayed when the Variyazi Clade withdrew their support for the project in early YC125.

Block 2 resumed with AEGIS Umbrorum recovery of multiple examples of Siege Elite combat exoskeletons and Triglavian war machines. Additionally, AEGIS Umbrorum reported to GLATISANT that a further refined version may have been added onto the Variyazi flagship Gallahad, and been used in limited service following the collapse of the Skarkon II Orbital Dockyard. Investigations are ongoing with the Draugr division in order to determine the extent that ANNWN systems are already in use by non-accorded entities. Allegations by AEGIS Umbrorum with limited evidence have resulted in the Varyazi Clade being flagged for investigation in their alleged role in leaking proprietary technology, and suspected espionage related to potential advances made in the technology.

[Attn_Thaddeus_Reynolds]

Current Capabilities

The Gwennan currently is capable of operating almost anywhere in the cluster, providing orbital support over a number of planetary theaters or providing support for counter-boarding actions. Her rapid deployment capabilities are currently relatively limited due to the breaking of her ‘Tidebreak’ experimental FTL system; however, her Jump Drive and Warp Drive systems are fully functional.

She has 10 separate divisional berths designed to each house and support a Warclone Force of up to 35,000 Warclone Combatants, with additional berthing for support personnel for each division at a rate of 3 Support Personnel for every 2 Warclones… Each Divisional area maintains its own CRUs capable of sustaining up to 70,000 Combat Blanks and an additional 6,000 Vanity Clones. These are replicated for each divisional berth, for a total capacity of 350,000 Warclone Combatants, 700,000 Combat Blanks, and 60,000 Vanity clones in stasis units in addition to her crew and the 525,000 combat support personnel.

Aboard she carries manufacturing facilities for and the capacity to deploy a number of prefabricated base structures, including the standard orbital drop CRU, Turret Platforms, and Supply Depots as well as larger structures transported down by heavy dropship including rapid manufacturing plants and resource extraction nodes. Additional facilities are capable of manufacturing armored fighting vehicles of various descriptions as well as atmospheric craft on-demand.

Her complement includes at least five active Warclone Pilot wings at any one time, three of which are Close-Air-Support squadrons under the MORRIGAN program, two of which are independently operating wings, with wing members operating on a shift rotation to keep a constant screen active. Each wing has their own individual berth area further broken down by squadron, including additional space for pilot redundancy. Additionally she carries a complement of 2,100 Bolas RDV Drones, 1,800 Light Ground-Orbit Dropships, 300 Vaunted-Class Heavy Cargo Dropships, and 150 Super-Heavy Dropships for the delivery of fabricated structures to the ground.

In addition, she has capacity for up to 75 Mobile Command Center (MCC) class combat support skimmers and 15 BL-2 Heavy Command Vehicles (HCV), the latter of which must be delivered on-world by Super-Heavy Dropships. Currently though she only has 30 MCCs and 6 HCVs on board.

There are six primary orbital artillery bombardment arrays on the ventral hull, each is capable of providing either precision or saturation bombardment with both projectile artillery or hybrid charges via railgun, with each array also including limited precision laser emplacements, allowing for precision high-energy strikes, making the total armament in each array 6x 280mm artillery cannons, 6x 150mm railguns, and 2x 10GJ focussed beam laser emplacements. In the midship there is the primary laser bombardment array, capable of high energy bombardment in a single area. Located in the center of this array is a nanoshield dome projector to which energy from the array can be diverted. At full power this projector can project up to a 25km radius nanoshield dome over a target area

Additionally, she maintains a large amount of empty space to support training, practice, and other facilities as-needed. In addition, large amounts of negative space are used to help protect against hypervelocity kinetics in the event that the primary armor plating fails.

Weaknesses

After production, a number of shortcomings of the design were noticed. The design is expensive, large, over engineered, unable to be scaled for production, and often represents too large of a commitment of forces to a single vessel for most Warclone combat deployments.

While she is capable of weathering significant anti-orbital fire due to significant spacing of layered hull and armor plating, operational redundancy, and heavy shielding systems, and is more than capable of maintaining presence in multiple combat districts simultaneously, the number of operations it can support is rarely in evidence for most deployments.

All together, while an excellent test-bed for various technologies, the Gwennan represents an expensive single design not suitable for mass production and deployment given her cost and capabilities.

To that end, the production run of her is being halted following both the loss of her production facility and examination of the overall system. However, the design lessons learned can be leveraged to produce a true-purpose built warbarge type vessel to support warclone operations and produce derivative prototypes for Integrated Planetary Invasions between Warclone and Baseline forces

[Attn_Thaddeus_Reynolds]

Planetary Scale Derivative - Changes for Mass-Production Derivative - Integrated Planetary Support Vessel (IPSV) - [GWENNAN G2(a)]

Proposed changes are as follows

1. Slightly smaller overall size to reduce production cost

2. Reduce area from training space and consolidate to reduce overall redundancy

3. Repurpose additional space to convert support personnel berths for additional combat personnel to increase effective capacity

4. Allows it to support more baseline operations for export

5. Increase storage Capacity for pre-built armored vehicles to avoid as much reliance on rapid manufacturing

6. Reduce number of redundant factories

Production of the first of these prototype vessels is slated to begin soon, they will have a similar overall profile to the original Gewnnan and bear her name as the class name, but will only be roughly 7.1 km in overall length. 24 Vessels of this phase are planned with lessons learned from their production to be placed into a mass production second iteration of the IPSV. Update YC125-OCT-24 - Retroactively designated Block 1.

District Scale Derivative - Changes for Mass-Production Derivative - Light Planetary Support Vessel (LPSV)

Proposed changes are as follows

4. Significantly smaller overall size to reduce production cost

5. Limit scope to compensate

6. Maintain combat operations for at least a single planetary combat district

7. Including able to launch and maintain at least two Mobile Command Center platforms

8. Maintain crew complement of up to approximately one company of Warclone and support personnel

9. Maintain a complement of up to two squadrons of Warclone Pilots in Fighter Squadrons

10. Allow for the integrated clone jump ability of Warclones to relays aboard the Warbarge.

11. Extend the range of Warclone Implants of those within the communication range of the Warbarge.

12. Maintain a quantum core connection to the AVALON construct to facilitate the above and ease of traversal for certain individuals.

13. Remove concentrated laser strike array

14. Maintain rapid production facilities for ground vehicles up to and including heavy attack vehicles

Iterative Update as of YCC-125-OCT-24 - Changes for Mass-Production Derivative - Integrated Planetary Support Vessel (IPSVB2)-Block 2 - [GWENNAN G2(b)]

Production lessons learned from the first block of 24 vessels integrated into smoother production more suitable for wide dissemination. 48 planned production samples to send out to PMC units throughout the cluster for independent evaluation and usage. Current planned production variant.