The Rebel Faction

Sinew Mk IK-class Support Cruiser

Name/Type: Sinew Mk IK-class Support Cruiser
Designer/Manufacturer: Galactic Coalition / Kashan Defence Industries
Designation: Communication’s ship
Crew: 250 + 24 Gunners.
Length: 800 Meters
Speed: 50 MGLT
Hyperdrive: x0.6
Shield Rating: 4925 SBD + 4925 SBD Back-up
Hull Rating: 2495 RU
Weapons: 24 KDI L-W4.3 Point-Defence Laser Cannons.
Fighter Complement: None.
Troops: 80 Kashan Shock Troopers.
Support Craft: 4 shuttles.

Description: The Sinew-class Support Vessel is an older vessel part of a long line of Coalition and Sovereignty support vessels that proved key to Coalition fleets. The Mk-IK is the Kashan version of the vessel equipped standard KDI tech, including Ultrachrome armor, back-up shields, hyperdrive, and point-defence weapons. One has been rebuilt for the fleet defending Genon with the production of more vessels of this type being discussed. Otherwise, the vessel is the same as the original Coalition vessel as described below.

Original Sinew:
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.

Added KDI tech:

Hull Construction: The Sinew Mk-IK uses the next generation of Kashan armor used on the Pegasus-class. The frame of the ship is still composed of Ferrocarbon, giving it excellent structural strength, laminated with carbon and Trimantium fibers to increase the frame’s tensile strength. The major innovation of the Pegasus is the addition of new quenched Ultrachrome armor placed over normal Ultrachrome armor.

Each Ultrachrome plate is made by liquefying the metal with ion fusers as on the previous Kashan ships. However, now the plates are flash-frozen in milliseconds with Cyron, making the Ultrachrome an Amorphous metal, that is a metallic material with a disordered atomic-scale structure. As a result, if a solid object (such as a PIM) hits the armor, it will bounce off the armor and thereby ejected back to deep space while putting in a small dent in the armor. And as another property of amorphous materials is that they soften and flow upon heating, a series of turbolaser bolts to the armor would actually would actually melt the nearby armor, which would flow into the dent and reharden into the vacuum of space, repairing the armor back to it’s original state. This quenched armor only forms a third of the typical Ultrachrome armor and retains all of the other properties of normal Ultrachrome.

The typical ultrachrome placed beneath the quenched armor is flash-frozen by the vacuum of space or any number of cooling agents. This process makes the metal abnormally dense than even typical Ultrachrome. (Ultrachrome is an incredibly-dense metal was used in the production of vibroshields and other forms of blades, since it could withstand high temperatures and maintain a razor-sharp edge despite hard usage. When connected to a power supply, ultrachrome became a form of superconductor, absorbing energy and shunting it aside… (CUSWE)). The Ultrachrome is connected to the ship’s power supply, allowing it to absorb energy weapon attacks and transfer that power to reserve power cells of the vessel’s Power System. In the advent of excess energy, the power grid system will automatically vent the excess energy into space as heat until more power storage becomes available. It should be noted that all weapons and other systems that bulge out from the main hull are equally protected as the main hull itself with Ultrachrome plating.

Kashan Hyperdrive: The Hyperdrive found on the Sinew Mk-IK is derived from that of the Seraph-class, which is in turn derived from the Acclamator-class Military Transport. While the design team did not have an actual Acclamator hyperdrive available to them, they did have several engineers and mechanics who worked on them during the Clone Wars. To the best of their abilities, it was reconstructed. Nonetheless, it still was slower than that of the Acclamators. In the end, the hyperdrive’s rating was raised to Acclamator levels by brute force engineering. It was modified to accept more power. In order to prevent the engine from overheating and melting, it was made with Dallorian Alloy and given an advanced cyro-cooling system.

KDI L-W4.3 Point-Defence Laser Cannon: The L-W4.3 is the reverse of most KDI weapon technology; instead of working of increased aim, the L-W4.3 is intentionally designed with a very short range. However, it’s bolts are as powerful as those of a heavy laser cannon. In addition, the Dallorian-plated weapon has been fitted with a Merr-Sonn advanced rapid-pulse energy module, giving it a high rate of fire. With it’s small size, the servos have little difficulty in rapidly tracking a fast target, making it an ideal defence against missile attacks.

Integrated Kashan Battle Computer: The Integrated Kashan Battle Computer is actually multi-purpose network that is connected to every vessel of the Kashan Fleet, whether it is a patrol starfighter or a War Destroyer. The main purpose of the Battle Computer is to intertwine, triangulate, and transmit sensor data collected from each ship.

This allows the ships to instantly gather target acquisition data and triangulate that data. The triangulation process ensures excellent target data, foiling most anti-targetting and sensor-jamming systems.

More importantly, the network can also provide navigational data from each ship along. Each vessel automatically transmits its location to the other vessel and shares navigational data with it as well. This allows the vessels of the Kashan fleet to act as navigation beacons for hyperspace jumps. As such, it is possible for Kashan ships to make instant intra-system micro-jumps to a Kashan vessel with the Battle Computer.

Security: Aside from the typical security monitors, security passes, and checkpoints, the Sinew Mk IK uses Ultrachrome for the bulkhead lining of the entire ship. When an intruder is detected, it runs electricity through those linings, which then. Thus, the intruder is fried by the electric current, whether it be a living being or a droid. The power settings of the electricity can be adjusted from a shock that will normally knock a living being unconscious to the highest level, which can start circuits on fire.