The Rebel Faction

The Firewall Bomber - GC

Another ship intended for Second Wave Technology's 'Second Wave' of warships after their first run of fast ships, the Firewall Bomber is designed to compliment the Western Fleet Cypher fighter (which is also still in it's design phase) and build up the intended image of a fleet that is slippery and difficult to tack down.

The Firewall Bomber is not a conventional bomber in that it is not a slow, slugging ball of metal meant to withstand the heat of fire head on, dump a cargo of explosives, and then (depending on how much command likes the pilot) get back in one piece. The Firewall is instead designed to be a bomber that is hard to attack, even when on a boming run, to take pressure off the pilot and allow them to focus on hitting their targets.

The ship itself resembles half a circle, with the rim facing forwads and the thrusters along the back. The pilot sits in the front of his flat ship, with a rim extending either side. This is the first of it's deceptions, for the 'wings' of this circle can fold into the body and a second two 'wings' can fold out, recreating the half-circle except now the pilot has a wing above and below. The effect is somewhat similar to the B-wing, except where the B-wing's extra wings were meant for the purpose of stability in flight, the Firewall is instead designed to confuse and redirect, not to mention allowing for some strange and tight maneauvers as the folding of the wings can happen very quickly indeed and the thrusters can entirely change the direction of the ship quite fast.

The idea for this design came from a type of bird found on Fwillsving, which uses it's two sets of wings to dodge large, unwieldly predators by suddenly changing direction in mid-air. The effect was neatly carried over to aerospace design.

Besides this little trick, the bomber possesses the Argon, an anti-gravity device also employed by the cypher. This allows the bomber to accompany units of fighters to make surprise raids on enemy installations and space forces, appearing where they think themselves safe.

There is also one more feature that makes the Argon hard to attack, a defensive measure that could only be sensibly employed by a vehicle such as a bomber. Across the surface of each of the extending wings as well as the body of the bomber itself, are vents connected to compressed charges of an inert gas. The blasts of gas shoot out in all directions and make the bomber almost impossible to pick out within it - even sensors, wether heat, sonar, or any other you care to name are confounded by it in space, showing nothing but a blobby mass. This gas is limited, and might somewhat blind the pilot as well - but considering a bomber is meant to attack large, comparatively static targets this is much less of a problem so long as the bomber figures out their approach vector beforehand.

This is an unusual tactic, but it has proven effective - single fighters are at least somewhat harder to hit in the expanding cloud-mass, and a whole wing of them will be shrouded in a fog-bank so thick it's like shooting fish in the ocean.

The clouds of gas themselves present little strategic value - they aren't explosive or poisonous, and tend to completely disperse harmlessly within a half-hour - but for a short-term concealment they can provide a surprising irritant to attackers.

Now, you may have begun to wonder just what this ship mounts as weapons. It is first and foremost a bomber, although it does have forward-mounted las-weapons so that enemy fighters have to at least tread carefully. The payload it carries is, however, no common Proton or Concussion style weapon, it's a new weapon developed for the Firewall.

Named the Juker for it's flight-style, the bombs fired by the firewall are designed to devastate large enemy vessels, stations, and installations. It contains less explosive force than the other types available, but it makes up for this with improvements in the style of the Western Fleet. The Juker does not simply barrel down at a target, because many defences these days on warships are meant to shoot down such targets. Instead, the missile follows a randomized and erratic flight-path, difficult to predict or to follow.

The missile carries a normal seeker system, allowing it to lock on to specific targets or points as designated by the bomber, and should such a system be implemented then the missile will plot a flight-path that will ensure it will be on target by the time it gets there. If the seeker system is not used, however, the missile will instead continue to 'juke' around an indefinite point directly ahead.

There is no risk of the missile juking so much as to turn around and hit the bomber, or even of veering off course - it's flight path is always a straight line, it simply is thrown in random directions by thrusters. Only a damaged missile presents a threat to others in space (beyond the one it's being aimed at, obviously).

The missiles have proven to have less-explosive results, but many more can avoid point-defence countermeasures and even the most skillful pilots have a challenge when shooting them down. Overall, the missile is best employed against large but lightly armored targets where the most important thing is saturation rather than piercing armor, but it is still effective in it's primary role as a fleet bombing weapon.

The ship, of course, carries all the vageries of a Coalition ship of war. A hyperspace drive, a shield (specially calibrated to be porous to the gas employed as a defence mechanism), life support, a cup-holder, and so forth. The armor plating is merely average for a ship of it's size, where usually bombers carry the thickest available - lighter armor is needed to allow for the wing-trick and the gass venting, but overall the defensive tricks are suspected as being better than sheer metal.