Chapter 37: Interlude Solfire Class Heavy Cruiser

Perhaps one of the most successful warships of its age, the iconic Solfire is among the oldest of Solean warships. Designed in the age of the Solean Alliance as a successor to the venerable Battlehawk class heavy cruisers. The ship class would prove remarkably successful, and updated variants would later be employed during the early years of the Solean Empire. The class was ultimately retired and sold on the civilian market where it gained enormous popularity among certain groups. In the modern age variants of the class remain in service to civilian elements of the Empire.

The ship class features a highly streamlined hull and a distinctive tri-split quad nacelle configuration. This unusual engine configuration provides a significant advantage in the area of speed without significantly inflating the ship’s engine configuration. While the streamlined hull minimizes the ship’s profile. Solfire class ships have the highest top warp speed of any ship class ever employed by the Solean empire. It is able to reach warp sixty-two, the maximum limit for warp-based propulsion systems. That equates to one hundred thousand six hundred thirty three times the speed of light. Naturally, the ship cannot maintain that warp speed for extended intervals. Like all Solean ships, she is designed for a much lower cruise speed. Unlike modern vessels, the Solfire class has an optimal cruising speed of warp five(1000C). Whereas all modern solean ships have an optimal cruising speed of warp twelve(82500C).

The Solfire remains impressively fast on Sublight. The class features an equally unique configuration for her Plasma Pulse Wave engines. A configuration born of the unique needs of the alliance. This configuration results in a practically nonexistent sensor profile for the ship’s sublight engines while providing enough high-energy thrust to achieve an impressive acceleration profile. Since Pulse Wave engines are reactionless, the Solfire class can change directions with virtually no energy loss making the class very maneuverable even at high speeds.

Also of note about the class was that the Solfire was the first Solean ship class to be designed specifically to employ several key technologies including Phased Plasma Beam weaponry, and hyper-graviton shields. Hyper-graviton shields were the first shield technology employed by the Soleans rated for combat. Hyper-graviton shields have the key advantage of being highly resistant to the energy of Electro Cannon fire, a weapon popular with the Solean people of that era due to its ability to defeat energy shields in very short order. These hyper-graviton shields relied on their namesake particle the Hyper-graviton layer to create an energy barrier. A barrier that unlike previous generations of shielding exists partially in hyperspace. As such hyper-graviton shields can function in hyperspace, unlike their counterpart graviton shields. These generators were also uniquely configured with a rather unusual feature. A feature carried on to all future Solean ships. This feature is called Shock Detonation, the shields in this case are deliberately overloaded to unleash a high-energy shockwave extending in all directions. Doing so would collapse the shields, but do serious damage to any ship within twelve light-seconds of the equipped ship.  However, it is important to note that the modern civilian versions of this ship are unshielded, as the Empire outlaws civilian ownership of shield generators.

In addition to new shields, the ship features adaptive cloaking shields. A staple of the era, these shields constantly adjust to prevent sensor lock. In addition, unlike many of the other cloaking devices of the era, they did not prevent the cloaked ship from firing her energy cannons. As the adaptive matrix can rapidly compensate for the disruption caused by the associated energy burst. This same feature means that even if the cloaked ship takes a hit from an energy burst her cloak will remain unaffected. Since the Solfire was intended to fight mainly while cloaked she features a robust armor configuration, able to shrug off hits that would cripple other ships of the era. Solfire class ships were originally armored with mark thirty-seven Overlord armor made from an Adamantium-Titan IV Alloy. This was changed with later versions of the ship.

Of course, the most important feature of the class is the power plant. No ship can function without power. The first generation of Solfire cruisers predated the advent of Omega power, as such, it used a very different composition of technology for power. Main power was supplied by four primary Antimatter Plasma Reactors, while auxiliary power was supplied by a series of Phased Plasma cells. Phased Plasma Cell technology was also linked into the primary weapons array, every beam emitter was supplied power by its own Phased Plasma cell in addition to a dedicated array of plasma cells, improving weapon recharge rates, and yield by thirty-five percent. This gave the Solfire cruisers a significant firepower advantage over older designs who merely had the technology retrofitted into their design. An advantage that was incorporated into successor designs. Improved versions of the plasma cell technology remain in heavy use throughout the empire as a cheap source of power. Often used in weapons ranging from small arms to starship weaponry. Some ships even use them as a secondary power source for the primary systems, although they can struggle to adequately supply energy to the more powerful imperial shield generator systems.

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