The Rebel Faction

GC-Sinew class Support Ship

The Sinew class Support Vessel is the latest in a long series of Coalition and Sovereignty vessels that have been designed to complement and massively increase the chances of success in battle even though they don’t do large amounts of actual fighting.

At 800 meters the Sinew is unique among ships in that it has very little space that is habitable. Most of the ship is dominated by the engines, shields and the large complex jammer/communication system. Maintenance access to these areas are limited except for an un-pressured passageways. The Sinew only carries a crew of 250. The bridge crew comprises 25 men with 25 replacements and the other 200 are responsible for maintenance, though only 100 men would ever be on the job at once except during battle. As such the Sinew has a limited repair capacity and it won’t be subjected to actual combat if that can be avoided. The Sinew is designed to remain behind the action and support from there. It relies on it’s extremely high speed, 50 MGLT and its relatively strong shields to keep it safe. If the shields were to fail it is always ordered to retreat to hyperspace because the hull is extremely weak and even a few shots could cause catastrophic damage.

The Sinew’s primary weapon is the G10 Jammer/Communications Encoder (see below), however it does have a few of the “gimmicks” that are common onboard Coalition ships including the Graviton Detector, Defender Ion Shields and Elite anti-missile Defence System as well as a self-destruct system. On the off-chance that a Sinew is disabled the Coalition would prefer that they lose the ship rather than have their communications and jamming systems compromised.

G10-

The G10 is based on an idea that the Outer-Rim Sovereignty was playing with for years. Following the merging of the Coalition and the Sovereignty the idea was put on hold but it was rediscovered a few years ago by an expatriate Bakuran scientist searching through the Coalition’s databanks. This scientist was Bourny Kevein, unfortunately he suffered a fatal stroke before the completion of the project but one of the scientists working under him completed the project and saw it through to its completion.

Like all jammer systems the G10 is a brute-force device. It functions by sending powerful waves of static and seemingly random white noise across all known communications channels overwhelming the communicators on both enemy and friendly vessels. Thus a jammer system is like a double-blind cloak. It has a positive and negative side.

The G10 however gets around this problem due to a very recent breakthrough. All communications that the G10 transmits also act as jamming. The communications encryption is designed to sound like normal jamming and just like jamming it overwhelms the communication systems onboard starships. However ships equipped with the appropriate software patch (a relatively simple job, something that is done nearly every day on most capital warships) are able to communicate with each other and the Sinew which acts as a sort of giant telephone exchange. A ship transmits a message to the Sinew which instantly retransmits it to the target of the message. There is an extra 100th of a second delay in the message transmission but that is an acceptable loss. As an added precaution all messages are sent so that they channel hop, the communicator only stays on any one channel for a 10th of a second. As long as all the ships have the appropriate algorithm there is no problem.

Of course it would be catastrophic if knowledge of the codes, the appropriate algorithm for the channel-hopping or even knowledge of the Sinew’s job became known to the Coalitions enemies. Codes and channel-hopping algorithms are changed after every engagement, they are hand-transported to every ship by a member of the 10th Fighting Legion, the phantoms, a group of men and women hand-selected who have achieved the highest security clearance and whose loyalty to the Coalition is beyond any doubt. These men and women live on CN-1344 or CN-1653 and thus it is nearly impossible to turn them. They are the only people with the necessary knowledge of how to access the codes on a warship. Once the codes are on a ships drive they destroy the disk containing the codes. These agents are instructed to destroy the codes if there is even a chance of them being captured and the codes are transported in a special box that will self-destruct if a 10 character code isn’t entered properly or even if it was jarred suddenly. To keep knowledge of the true characteristics of the G10 from the enemy, nearly everybody is informed that the Sinew functions by opening extremely focused communication channels to all ships in the fleet. The problem with that solution is that there would be a huge power-drain on the Sinew whereas the G10 uses its jammer to communicate with minimal power drain. The Sinew can thus communicate with more ships and sport stronger shields and faster engines. The crews of Sinews are all Scorpion Agents as are those who build them.

Sinews are designed to be implemented in fairly limited numbers. Most fleet engagements will only have one Sinew present at the most though there will be occasions when there is more than one or less than one depending on the situation.

The Sinew will provide Coalition fleets with the ultimate advantage in all nearly all future engagements. An enemy who can’t communicate is disorganized, demoralized and inefficient.


Basically it jams everything but lets us communicate and covers a system or thereabouts.