A Primer on How to Calculate Space Ships (in Space)

Inluding Example Ships for Fun and Profit

Calculating Crews

At the end of the day, crew sizes are very variable depending on technology, culture or biology used in a ship design. The 10m-tall Glorbulons of Argh-5 will obviously not be able to fit as many people into the same volume as the Tinians of Smallotron-6, who are averaging 0,2m in height. Likewise, a people that uses higher automation in their ships will have less crew then something insane like the Imperial Fleet of Warhammer 40K, where everything is done manually, including people grabbing giant chains to move huge reactors into position.

Still, before you tell your readers that there are 1000 Humans in you 50 m³ pinnace, it’s nice to do a sanity check first.

Take a step back and imagine a Human, or a Humanoid alien of roughly the same size. An average Human will be up to 2m tall, and probably either thin or blobby enough to fit inside a 1m² circumference. After having done this very abstract thought exercise, we can conclude that the absolute minimum amount of space you’d need for a Human/Humanoid is something like two cubes of 1m length stacked on top of each other, or in other words, 2m³.

Yeah OK, squeezing someone like Hulk Hogan into this volume probably won’t work out very well, but this gives you at least a base line to prevent your numbers from going completely out of bounce.

Next, imagine a tiny apartment. Let’s go with my own. Scrape some unnecessary parts off because I’m guessing not every space cabin will come with their own kitchenette. Round down. This gives us 20m² surface area (yeah I know, my apartment is tiny) and obviously, you can squeeze that into a square with a side length of roughly 4,47m. Let’s be generous with a height of 3m, to not only accommodate most humanoid species, but also give some head clearance for whatever tech shit like pipes or wires has to fit into the same space.

This slightly flattened cube will have a volume from a x b x c = 59,9m³. (As a reminder, this volume is probably still not completely cube-shaped, so you’ll need the formula for rectangular blocks instead of just taking everything to the power of 3 and calling it a day.)

Let’s round it! Now we have 60m³ space for the minimum amount of living space you can assume a space crew member to have. Can you theoretically shove more bunks into that space? Sure! You can also have bigger-than-normal aliens who need slightly more space to feel comfortable. It’s meant as an average number to help you, not as a universal law of volume usage!

In general, it is a bad idea to let your ships have crew numbers that can’t physically fit the volume your ship is supposed to have.

Let’s give an example: You created a 50k m³ space ship and wrote down that 800 Humans are crewing it. Does that make sense? Well, if that ship is just one big, solid block of cryogenic capsules and nothing else, up to 25k Human-shaped beings could fit into that volume, but that would be silly, of course. Using 60m³ as a less insane value, we’re noting that 50k m³ can physically fit 833 people. So your answer should be no, as your ship as written is literally just a big apartment block in space. Also everyone needs spacesuits to leave their apartments, as nothing except their living space is physically fitting into that “ship”. Back to the drawing board! Stuff like this is what a good editor should find and tell you about during the writing process, but sadly not everyone has an editor, or even “an” editor.

It also helps if you note down some elementary points of your ship design. If your setting e.g. needs your ships to use up 50% of their internal volume for their FTL-drive alone, obviously that’s space that you can’t cram crew into. In the example above, that alone would halve the available “maximum crew” down to around 400. Since the amount of space you can’t use for crew is insane, I’d suggest doing it the other way around: Think about what amount of crew and crew space your space people actually need to crew the ship you’re thinking off. Start with a ship, and determine how many space people are needed to keep that thing running. Then multiply with 60 to get the lowest possible amount of empty volume needed to fit people into the hull without things getting so crammed they’ll go space crazy in under an hour.

As a rule of thumb, if the resulting number for crew space would take up more than 25% of the entire hull volume, after using this really low-balling calculation, try again. It seems your space people can’t built ships that large and complex, or they’ll need to scale them up a lot more. (The solution is of course, entirely your problem. You’re the author! Come up with something!)

Let’s end with an example: The Ghoda-cruiser of the Hellenistic Republic is a rough cylindrical-shaped monstrosity. Half of its internal volume is taken up by its sublight-drives, and half of the rest is used up by FTL-drive, power plants and capacitors. Weapons, life support, the bridge, and whatever else has to fit into the 25% of total space remaining.

The cruiser is 250m long and has a diameter of about 40m. As the HR is barely capable of constructing space ships, the level of automation used is very low. Most tasks have to be done by hand. As it is barely above 21^st century levels of technology, hundreds of people are needed to keep the ship running. But let’s give them at least some credit and say they need 300 crew max. Taking our average space number, that’s 18000m³ minimum crew space needed without physics itself cracking apart. Let’s test this number!

As the cruiser is roughly a big cylinder, it’s approximate volume is π x r² x h, or in this case, 314159m³ (rounded). 25% of this would be the crew-available space of 78540m³. Here we can see that our rough crew space number takes less than 25% of the available space for crew: The numbers check out, the Ghoda-cruiser suddenly becomes real and 300 space soldiers climb aboard. OP success!

To summarize:

-2m³ is the absolute minimum space needed for something Human-sized

-60m³ should be the absolute minimum space you allocate per 1 crew member

-In general, look at the ship you made and roughly determine zones where machinery would block crew from living there, anyway. Subtract that volume from the available volume.

-Think about the social, cultural and technological factors influencing crew size and come up with a number (is 1 robot enough or do you need 500 space sailors?)

-Calculate the minimum crew space that number of people would physically need to fit inside

-Compare to the space available for crew: Is it less then 25% of the available space? That’s OK, you made a good ship!

-Your crew can take up more space as long as it isn’t getting ridiculous, but remember that the numbers we created are meant as minimum numbers for minimum comfort: Go to high and eventually readers will notice that your ship should be hilariously cramped, even if you try very hard to describe it as very roomy.

The Math of Volumes

Another stumbling point for authors seeking some kind of verisimilitude to physical reality is the volume of their vessels. It’s always better to have some sort of rough shape in mind, and grab a goddamn calculator to test your assumptions before you accidentally create a space carrier that’s only capable of carrying their stated number of space fighters if you fold the fighters into really thin layers first!

Most shapes will have some sort of formula to allow you to take the ship size and calculate the hypothetical volume an object of that shape and size could hypothetically have. Here are some examples:

Wedge Shapes

Think Star Destroyer, just without that dumb external bridge thing on top. Suited equally well for awesome space battle ships and small fighters. While nothing is forcing you to not use more exotic layouts, ease of calculation alone (and getting awesome Star Destroyers) means a Pyramid based on a rhombus/diamond surface gets you the closest. The resulting formula allows you to simply use ship height, width and length without having to mentally roll your imaginary ship back and forth to understand how to get the base surface you need to calculate a pyramid’s volume.

As an example, assume a more vertical wedge shape that’s more tall than wide. Kind of like a Star Destroyer tilted to the side. In the formula, “f” is the height, “e” is the width of the ship hull. “h” is the length (originally it’s the height of the pyramid, but “height” is a weird concept in space anyway).

The ship is 90m high and 30m wide, and also 200m long. With the rhombus-based pyramid volume formula, we get (((f x e) / 2) x h)/3 or 90.000m³. Nice!

While there are weaknesses (the formula assumes a totally flat base, for example), this is luckily only meant to give you a good idea of how big (and later, massive) your space battleship is. Like all formulas discussed here, this is not meant to make you able to draw your very own space ship blue prints, it’s only meant to create ships that make sense. A plausible ship is still better than a silly one, it doesn’t need to be so accurate some engineer checking your numbers can built their own from your novels!

As a late-stage editing addition, of course if you want a wedge-shaped ship that doesn’t have a rhomboid hull you can still use this formula, but of course you need to adapt to whatever shape the “flat” base would have. Look for example at one of those weird 1D4 dice. If you want a ship that looks a lot like that, you obviously need to amend the volume formula to use a triangle-surface for the surface bit. I’ll be honest here, this formula uses a rhomboid base because I happen to really like this type of shape. You don’t have to copy me.

Cylindrical Shapes

Space cylinders are another classical shape! Oh sure, Babylon 5 is probably a bit too complex a shape, but your standard O’Neal cylinder or some basic cylindrical space destroyers are perfectly fine. To get a nice, semi-accurate volume number you can use the simple formula π x r² x h. The radius (r) is simply half your ship’s diameter, easy! “h” is simply the length and Pi should be on every calculator. An example how to use the formula is in the crew chapter before.

Box Shapes

Really the easiest shape you can use: A simple, rectangular block uses a x b x c, while a true cube is simply a³. “a”, “b” and “c” are of course the lengths of the sides. Simple, but always useful! Mix some differently sized blocks to get slightly more complex shapes! The space world is your space oyster!

Sphere Shapes

Always nice: A sphere-shaped ship would make optimal use of space, so it’s easy to see why someone would want a sphere-shaped ship. The sphere volume formula is (d³ x π) / 6. As long as you have the diameter (d) of your space sphere, you’re good to go! If you’re not averse to heavy rounding, you can also just use 3,14 instead of frantically searching your calculator for the Pi-symbol.

More Complex Shapes

Regardless of if you just want to put a cone on your cylinder to get a basic rocket, or if you want to recreate something like Space Battleship Yamato, or just want to use this really great ship your artist friend drew, you need more complex shapes.

How nuts you go with this is entirely your decision. For most cases, e.g. making the approximate volume of an egg-shaped vessel the volume of a sphere minus 10% is perfectly valid! Everyone reading your stories is already clear on how what a huge step into the right direction it is if your ships can conform to the laws of physics without causing nightmares just by looking at their distorted shapes (except if that is what you want, of course).

The better you are at math, the more accurate you can make your numbers. Just look up how to properly calculate the volume of an egg first before determining how much accuracy you actually need.

Always remember: The entire purpose of this exercise is to let your ships make sense, not to specify your space ship class down to the last screw! We’re here to make your readers less sad about your bad math, not to fulfill some sort of strange compulsion to design perfect imaginary space ships.

Massive Space Anomalies

“Sir! The anomaly is thousands of miles long, and weighs millions of tons!” “Lieutenant, what is its average density?” “Slightly below that of Hydrogen, sir!” “So it’s just a cosmic dust cloud, then?”

Well, that’s not what you want your readers to realize about your perfectly normal space combat ships. I can understand this particular problem, of course: You’re probably coming from a long history of wargaming if you write military science-fiction, or you fall into the simple trap of assuming big numbers = big good!

I can see it happening like this: You want to make your ships resemble real ships as much as possible, and since real space ships aren’t really a thing, you take the next best thing: Water warships. You take e.g. the Arizona, and use their numbers for tonnage, crew numbers etc. to give you a rough idea what your own ships would be like.

Too bad that the Arizona isn’t space worthy, and that space and oceans have some serious differences. For one thing, you can’t walk unprotected on the outer deck of Space Arizona, and you don’t need tons of empty space in your space ship to keep it floating in space. Space is perfectly capable of keeping your ship afloat on its own. The inevitable result is that when you just blindly base your ships on volume and mass of real world warships, your space ships will end up unnecessarily fluffy. Laws of scale being utterly cruel, extrapolating larger ships from those real world numbers will make things excessively silly. Up to the point where a many miles long super-dreadnought weighs an impressive 9 million tons, but if someone grabs a calculator and looks at the numbers, this really big ship may turn out to be less dense than a soap bubble. Oops!

You can’t even escape this phenomenon if you try to use the next best thing to real space ships: The old space shuttle orbiter for example weights 109 tons when fully fueled and its measurements are on Wikipedia. Nothing is easier then calculate yourself some approximate values for density and then go to town getting mass values for your ships. Bad news though: As the space shuttle was mostly used to ferry freight into orbit, it’s a mostly empty tube with some add-ons. So if you use those numbers unmodified, your ships will end up being empty hulls of nothing.

Now let’s talk structure. Obviously, your ships don’t need to be as dense as a solid lump of lead. But ships, even immobile stations like O’Neal cylinders, generally have to move. Which will put stresses on their internal structures. If you put a big rocket on a solid lump of metal, at least you won’t have to expect that lump of metal to immediately disintegrate if you push down the red button. What I’m talking about is: Even if your ships can be little bit soapy to account for all those empty spaces crew needs to move around, eat, sleep and so on, as big ships get bigger, they’ll not only get harder to move, getting them to move in the first place may snap everything inside like twigs. So a bigger ship will always grow in mass either geometrically, or even exponentially! A 100m sphere should be an order of magnitude heavier than a 50m sphere, not just twice as heavy!

Another trap: Not realizing that if you start with the assumption your ships have huge hollow spaces inside like real world water-ships, you will end up making those huge structural flaws bigger together with your new ship, until the average density will start laughing at you. The corollary to this is stuff like literal O’Neal cylinders used as space colonies: There you should have huge, empty spaces inside.

Starting with a submarine is slightly better, but runs in the same problem of a thousand-mile super-ship probably needing a slightly different internal life to the ones our own subs are gifted with. Also again: Space ships don’t need buoyancy. They don’t have to be as hollow as water-based vessels! (Except of course if you explicitly want a more primitive vessel that has to account for large oxygen tanks and stuff like that. Then go hog wild.)

To help myself (and you, the reader), I went ahead and crunched some numbers to get some nice, average volumes to help me out if I want to create a new ship class. Optimally, you can just use the assumptions and calculations in this essay to sanity-test your ships.

You can also easily use those numbers to crank out lots of new ship classes without having to worry that the last ten ultra-dreadnoughts down the line have some serious structural issues.

And if you don’t like my assumptions, you can feel free to modify my constants. They’re suggestions to help you be internally consistent with yourself, they’re not laws. I won’t send the Math Police after you if you change things a bit around.

Source of All Evil

Despite of what I said above, we have to start somewhere, and since real space battleships aren’t available yet to give some nice numbers for us fiction writers, we have to look at the same things I’ve just semi-dismissed.

One thing I thought of during this exercise was the realization that combat and civilian ships, especially freighters, probably end up with vastly different densities, since space freighters will very probably indeed be huge bubbles around hollow spaces -otherwise, space trade would not make much sense. The economy of space travel in most potential settings would demand either the transport of tiny amounts of luxuries that can only be produced locally (like strange art works or local wine variations, for example), or in extremely huge bulk numbers. And at least for the latter you’d need very efficiently build ships that have the most available volume for freight possible.

Luckily, as we remember, the space shuttle orbiter is basically this: As its main compartment is meant to transport shit into space, it’s basically a tiny space freighter already. And all those hollow parts inside for fuel tanks and cargo give us, when using basic Wikipedia-data and some rounding, a density of 20 kg/m³. A bit floaty, of course. You wouldn’t think by just looking at a photo of the space shuttle that it’s quite that hollow, right?

To be fair, the real density is probably a bit higher, since I’ve worked with approximations a lot: Basically, I assumed the space shuttle to first be a wedge, then when looking more closely at it, I instead used the wingspan to approximate a width, and then assumed a cylindrical shape since that’s closest to the main body if you squint really hard. Because the wings are of course still there, I shaved some meters of on all sides, but I’m fairly sure the volume I got at the end (ca. 6581m³) is closer to the truth then my first wedge-attempt.

That one gave me a nice, almost 60 kg/m³ value of density, but alas, it also assumed the cockpit of the shuttle was imaginary. On account of the pointy bit being a little bit too pointy in a wedge-shaped shuttle.

The re-do gave me something like 16,5 as density value, and I’ve rounded it up.

As I’ve explained before, unmodified values are kind of suboptimal for our purpose, as even the space shuttle isn’t a real space ship of the far future. So I added a next step, where I carefully laid out three assumptions and added simple modifiers to get a little bit more verisimilitude out of this exercise.

Most of it I’ve already explained elsewhere, but in short it went something like this:

1. Future space ships will have less hollow spaces inside, since they’re not needed and in case of this freighter-density, the same goes for the non-cargo spaces of the imaginary ship.
2. While a lot of future materials will probably be lighter and stronger, physics is cruel. Stuff like fancy future space ship armor will need to be ridiculously dense to have a chance at resisting what it is meant to protect against, and likewise the internal structure will probably also need to be a lot sturdier. Extremely high densities for hulls and structural parts means higher average density (and mass) for everyone!
3. Stuff that is needed in modern space craft (like huge fuel tanks), will not be needed the same way. They’ll be there, but they won’t be a huge percentage of a highly advanced FTL-ships mass, as I’m just arbitrarily deciding here (feel free to disagree for your own fiction, of course). Therefore, a ship’s mass will not as wildly fluctuate as real world space craft. Just compare the space shuttle orbiter empty and full, for example.

Since I’m not magic, I of course can’t foresee how much those factors would change future ships’ characteristics. To keep things simple, I opted for using simple multiplicators. After moving numbers around in my head for a while, the end modificator to turn my real-world base density into a future space ship density was 3. So, 20 x 3 is 60, therefore my space civilian ships and freighters will have their (empty) mass calculated with an assumed average density of 60 kg/m³!

Now that that madness is done, we of course need the same thing for fully loaded freighters and warships, so we can calculate their mass with some verisimilitude, too.

For my numbers, I went with the German Bremen-class of frigates. They worked out best because the German Wikipedia-page on the Bremen-class already had almost all the numbers I needed to get approximate volume and density. And the slightly blocky shape of the superstructure on those ships made it super-easy to use slightly modified block-shapes to get a volume that’s close enough to reality to pass the “good enough without going insane about it”-test.

After some cutting (most of a ship isn’t a solid block, after all), I got 253,8 kg/m³. But again, that’s only the average density of an object roughly shaped like the Bremen-class ships, with the same mass. After applying my “future” mods, and some rounding, that density grew to 780 kg/m³. Certainly a lot more impressive and a lot less bubbly!

To give you some ideas what all this math means, the “lighter” value is equivalent to some types of Styrofoam, while the “heavier” value is representative of something like seriously rotten spruce wood. And since a spaceship probably isn’t just a solid block of material, I’m arbitrarily declaring that there are still enough empty spaces around for this average density to work out.

As those values create ship masses that feel right and since both numbers are sourced from real-world objects and reasonable guesses, I feel comfortable using them. You can of course, use your own path! This sub-chapter only exists to show you how I got these weird, wonky numbers in the first place.

Summary

• The average density of civilian ships and objects, e.g. O’Neal cylinders, freighters, etc., is 60 kg/m³. The unmodified base for this value was the space shuttle orbiter.
• The average density of warships and -stations is 780 kg/m³. The unmodified base for this value was the German Bremen-class of modern frigates.

And now that we have all the formulas for volume and mass calculations done, we can now make up some example ships! For a fun exercise, compare the numbers to the ISS. The International Space Station has a mass of ca. 440 t and has a volume of ca. 916 m³.

Examples: Ship Classes Commonly Known in the Abyssal Union

Notes on Velan ships:

The Vela prefer ships that resemble roughly a very elongated wedge, like a long arrowhead or a needle. Some ships are stumpier, some are needlier, but not many of their ships will deviate from this standard form. For ease of use, this list list does not include many non-standard vessels. Imagine an imperial Star Destroyer, but with the bridge removed, and the rest flattened out a bit and then rudely stretched very long. That’s a good starting point to imagine how their vessels look. The ratio of length to width/height tends to fall into a range of 5:1 (most stubby) to 8:1 (most needly).

Shio-class, LAC, Lancer

The Shio-class of ships is purely a sublight design. Vela call a hull of this size a “Lancer” (translated) and classify sublight ships like the Shio-class as “LAC”s or “Light Assault Craft”. Their use, apart from search&rescue in peace times, is to use their oversized sublight drives to rush raiders or invaders, using speed, numbers and maneuverability to survive in the battlespace.

Generally, LACs like the Shio-class need huge numbers to do their work, and often take horrific losses if they’re actually challenged. Since they’re cheap and reliable, and their loss represents a lower economical cost then losing stations and real ships, they still see some use. In core systems they tend to be obsolete and are mainly used to support civilian authorities for disaster relief, observation, police actions and all manners of other non-military tasks. Often enough, core world LACs won’t even be fielded by the Abyssal Fleet at all anymore, and instead will be owned and operated by Clans and local Clan Militias.

The Shio-class is a classical combat model. Shio-class vessels were still widely in use several years before contact between the Velan and Human Spheres, especially in frontier systems.

Their armament is centered around a single, spinal-mounted particle cannon (called a “lance” in Abyssal Fleet terminology) with some smaller particle beam turrets to serve as point defense. Their oversized drives tend to take most of the space that is left, so a typical system defense squadron will often field variations to enhance squadron-capabilities. The standard Shio is a pure combat model and has decent armor and shields on top of its weapons, but not much else.

Variations of the original Shio may carry a smaller lance in exchange for better ECM, sensors and communication equipment, or stronger PD-systems. PD, E-War and Command Shios are often combined with multiple standard Shios into astonishingly destructive combat squadrons. Lancers like the Shio-class resemble what Humans would call a “heavy fighter” or a “light corvette”.

Void ships of this size are not in use anymore anywhere, as there is simply not enough space to make a combat-capable vessel after FTL-drive and jump capacitors have been fitted. Some minor Clans and Militias may still use FTL-Lancers as scout craft, however.

Shio-class System Defense LAC

Length: 45m

Width: 10m

Height: 8m

Volume: 600m³

Mass: 468 tons

Crew size: 3

Llian-class, Scout, Corvette

Llian-class ships are used as fast scout and recon units by the Abyssal Fleet. Sometimes modified variants can show up in Clan- and Militia-fleets. Some of the Free Traders also like to use them sometimes. Their range isn’t infinite however, their small size and crew make them unsuitable for independent operation. As a general rule of thumb, if you detect Llian-scouts, fleets or larger installations will be close by.

While they are far larger then similarly armed LACs for system defense, most of the additional internal volume is taken over by the jump drive, its capacitors, electronics and better crew accommodations, since Llians sometimes have to spend days away from their main fleets and bases. They also have better emergency pods, including more reliable FTL-beacons, to facilitate search&rescue ships actually finding them.

Their armament is basically identically to the smaller Shio-class Lancers: One big spinal-mounted particle cannon, several smaller versions meant as point defense. However, thanks to more space allocated to electronics, the Lllian has far better sensors and improved targeting abilities. They also can carry their own ECM-suites and have slightly bigger shield generators. A single Shio Lancer LAC is definitely no match for an incoming Lllian scout ship.

Llian-class Light Scout

Length: 67m

Width: 15m

Height: 11m

Volume: 1842m³

Mass: 1436 tons

Crew size: 6

Matrin-class, LAC, Corvette

Matrin-class vessels are a form of heavy system defense boats that are wildly in use across the Abyssal Union. Though towards the frontier-regions, cheaper LACs like the Shio are more common. Sometimes, Matrins are used in a command role leading squadrons of smaller LACs like the Shio.

Ships of this class have as main guns two heavy particle cannons, spinal-mounted like in most LAC-designs and typically facing forwards with a maximum firing cone of 45°. The Matrin-class also has multiple particle beam turrets for point defense, though their higher than usual number of those also means hostile ships drifting too close to a Matrin-corvette risk drawing a lot of fire.

The main feature of this class was the introduction of two small drone hangars. A Matrin-corvette can either carry two medium-sized drones or four light ones. When organized into squadrons, ships carrying light drones will take up point defense and command roles, while ships with heavier assault drones will carry the fight to the enemy.

Ironically, large numbers of these small sublight ships can be dangerous far beyond what their tonnage suggests, because every Matrin-class corvette will have at least two drone operators available. In combat, the small number of drones per ship and the high number of operators combined often results in vastly superior drone combat effectiveness when compared to the performance of the quite large swarms the operators on capital ships have to wrangle with.

Since corvette-sized ships are still cheap to produce, many system defense forces opt for the flexibility of this mini-capital instead of going with an even cheaper, but inflexible pure direct-fire design like the Shio. Since they’re also heavier armed, armored and have stronger shields than the Shio and her contemporaries while losing only negligible amounts of acceleration and maneuverability, it is no wonder that there are still many thousands of those small system monitors hanging around the Abyssal Union.

Matrin-class LAC Type ULDC (Ultra Light Drone Carrier)

Length: 90m

Width: 15m

Height: 12m

Volume: 2700m³

Mass: 2106 tons

Crew size: 12

Athinia-class, Surveyor, Frigate

While some Clans still operate ships like the Athinia, surveyor ships of this small size are generally seen as obsolete, as the ships simply cannot sustain the endurance needed for modern exploration missions. Service inertia has lead to the situation of the Abyssal Fleet still operating a couple dozen surveyors of this vessel, which often causes delays when an Athinia-class vessel is accidentally assigned a standard 3-year mission away from port, which no ship of this class, not even in top condition, could endure. When this common bureaucratic error is noticed, the resulting scramble to replace the “wrong” ship is often hilarious to watch. The situation is less hilarious for the affected crews, of course.

Athinias are by nature only lightly armed, with two light drones and several smaller particle beam turrets. The Athinias often don’t carry pure combat drones at all, instead there are often only sets of emergency weapon modules carried as cargo, to refit exploration drones for defense duty.

While reputedly some of the larger Free Trader Clans facing the Human sphere still own vessels of this class, first contact was made by a far larger and less aggressively harmless ship. Humans crossing the border never saw any Athinias for multiple decades, as this class has become exceedingly rare. It’s an extremely cheap option for a short-to-medium range explorer, though.

Athinia-class Surveyor Frigate

Length: 120m

Width: 21m

Height: 19m

Volume: 7980m³

Mass: 6224 tons

Crew size: 16

Oki-class, FRF (Fast Response Frigate)

The Oki-class is a repeat of what the Vela love so much: Fast, very maneuverable direct-fire ships to rush at the enemy and rip them apart with strong particle beams. Despite their simplicity, the Oki-class shouldn’t be underestimated: Three heavy particle cannons and eight particle beam turrets add up to a lot of fire power. The PBCs (Particle Beam Cannons) carried by an Oki are several sizes larger than common for frigates, in fact, even some heavy cruisers would struggle to keep a pack of Okis at bay.

The Oki reaches the point where this kind of over-gunning becomes more of a liability, but while larger ships of this design philosophy are nowadays seen as obsolete, the Okis themselves still fall into the sweet spot of being just small enough to make the fast assault concept work. Larger and heavier ships have turned out to be too sluggish to compete, and ships similar to the Oki (big guns, big engines, not much else) but heavier have been phased out. Putting some infamously huge guns on something like a battlecruiser just doesn’t work, since the engines and power plants needed to achieve a similar agility and acceleration as a frigate take a prohibitively large amount of available ship volume.

In fact, some FRBCs have persisted, but only as some sort of space museum, as even Militias and Clan-fleets have grown to deride the concept of a “Fast Response Battlecruiser”. Coincidentally, there’s even one in orbit around Juran, the colony closest to Human space, if you want to see one of those comically badly designed ships for yourself.

Okis have a small shuttle hangar also capable of deploying drones, though most Okis tend to carry an extra shuttle instead of the standard mix of four light drones and two shuttles. The Abyssal Fleet still uses Okis in a fleet harassment role: Those are the ones most known for still carrying at least the standard amount of drones. In their case, most likely configured as point defense drones to let the Okis actually survive closing in with a larger fleet.

The vast majority of the remaining Oki-class frigates serve across Velan space in an anti-piracy role. Or occasionally, in a pro-piracy role. Those ships tend to be the ones who replaced their drones with more shuttles, as those are more useful for boarding actions. Their ability to suddenly drop by and attack in an insanely fast assault is feared by both traders and pirates alike.

Oki-class FRF

Length: 180m

Width: 27m

Height: 25m

Volume: 20250m³

Mass: 15795 tons

Crew size: 48 (includes two 8-woman strike teams)

Crew size alternative: 56 (ships with three shuttles instead of two often cram a third strike team into the ship)

Denina-class, Light Freighter

A 60m sphere-shaped Velan freighter design. To quote the ship’s original designer: “Long, elegant space needles look great, but there’s not much free space to cram cargo into.” Ironically, a lot of Velan “freighters” tend to be heavily armed free trader vessels, which of course have to double as warships in a cinch, so only a minority of truly dedicated Velan freighters deviate from the common “fat needle”-shape of Velan designs.

The Denina-class is one of those rare dedicated freighter designs. It is also one of the oldest: Only three classes of dedicated freighter hulls are even older, and one of them was an surface-to-orbit rocket with a roughly cylindrical cargo hold. That one obviously is not in use anymore. The other two freighter designs of the early age of Velan spaceflight were big, blocky boxes used to transport terraforming equipment at sublight speeds. Those designs are not in use today either, for obvious reasons. (Though box-shaped ships sometimes try a comeback, sphere-shaped ships in the same role tend to outperform them, so they tend to have short shelf-lives for a class of void ships.)

The original Denina-design was invented to create a fast, cheap and reliable freighter hull that could easily supply young colonies. For a modern dedicated freighter the ship is incredibly small, but since a lot of Velan population is dispersed around what other species would consider tiny outposts, there’s still a huge demand for smaller freighters like the Denina. Therefore, even after thousands of years and countless upgrades and changes to the original design, the Denina-freighters are here to stay.

Denina-class Freighter

Diameter: 60m

Volume: 678584m³

Internal volume reserved for cargo: ca. 87%

Mass (empty): 40715 tons

Mass (max. load): 529295 tons

Crew size: 24

Enjinth-class, Light Freighter

A rare cylindrical freighter and even rarer for cylindrical hulls, a Velan design. Historically, the Enjinth-class is supposed to be based on a similar idea as the Denina-freighters, but in this case the designers wanted maximum speed in loading and unloading, and decided a cylindrical shape would work better than a sphere or box. Ironically, as the Enjinth-class can land horizontally on planetary bodies, but not many space-based docking facilities can actually take advantage of the giant loading doors taking up most of the middle of the vessel’s hull, the Enjinth-class turned out to be vastly outperformed in the role of a dedicated trader, but has found a niche visiting small backwater colonies.

Its odd design became somewhat popular among Clans heavily invested in free trading, and its still a capable ship when traveling to smaller colonies, especially ones without space-based cargo facilities. Nowadays this ship is a rare sight, but Enjinth-class freighters are still hanging around, especially in less developed regions. It is the perfect tramp freighter: Cheap, reliable and small enough even tiny Clans can afford one.

Enjinth-class Freighter

Length: 120m

Width: 30m

Volume: 84823m³

Internal volume reserved for cargo: ca. 87%

Mass (empty): 5089 tons

Mass (max. load): 66161 tons

Crew size: 12

Torero-class, LDC (Light Drone Carrier), Destroyer

This pocket carrier was born as a joint Vela/Human cooperative. It got settled with a cylindrical hull because the Human design bureau who worked with the Velan ship-designers had zero experience with space needles, while the Velan company working with them turned out to have some of the old designers for the Enjinth-class freighters among their staff. Since those are also large space cylinders, the combined design surprised everyone by looking like an old Velan freighter. The ships are FTL-capable, but at the cost of drone carrying capacity. A single Torero-LDC is basically a bad joke, but an entire squadron can ruin anyone’s day, as many pirates found out the hard way. Though some military historians comment that the design only worked out because nearly 50% of the available hull space of the entire ship consists of nothing but drone hangars. The ships often work together with other fast response units defending local space. They turned out to be not terribly useful for anything else, as the Toreros are horrifically cramped at the best of times and consequently, have a rather low range.

A later design variant replaced the FTL-drive with improved electronics, more crew facilities and additional shield generators and power plants, as their weak shields were another problem that reduced the effectiveness of their FTL-sisters. The STL-Toreros of course can’t even leave their home systems, and are therefore not exactly useful as a fast response force. Despite some success as the first joint Velan/Human-design, the Toreros are now considered obsolete. The few Toreros still in use by the Abyssal Union have a terrible reputation.

Torero-class LDC

Length: 80m

Width: 22m

Volume: 30410m³

Mass: 23720 tons

Crew size: 32

Iria-class, Assault Frigate

Larger and less insanely specialized than the Oki-class. A case where the role determines the class: Purely by hull size, this ship-class should count as a destroyer, but that’s not how the Abyssal Fleet rolls. The direct armament is similar to the Oki-frigates, the three main lances are simply a bit larger sized and can project their particle beams farther out before losing coherence. The main differences are a greater number of turrets, both as PD and as additional main guns, plus drone hangars with twice the drone carrying capability of the Okis.

The Irias also have stronger shields and far heavier armor, and of course their maneuverability and acceleration are far below the fast and nimble Okis. Still, an Iria-class frigate could easily take on up to three Okis if their commanders are stupid enough to stay for a stand-up fight.

Irias are versatile enough that they are still a common sight around the Abyssal Union. Pirates/Free Traders, Clan Militias, the regular fleet, everyone loves the Iria. Even some plucky Humans have discovered the Irias and they now sometimes show up in Human Clans, too.

Normally, the ship can carry up to 4 strike teams, half a company of void troops, but on long-range missions parts of their void infantry tends to be loaned out to capital ships, since cramming over a hundred Vela into an Iria can get stuffy on longer missions. For the same reason, Irias not in fleet hands or not explicitly serving in anti-piracy roles often don’t have more than two strike teams on-board.

Iria-class AF

Length: 250m

Width: 31m

Height: 28m

Volume: 36166m³

Mass: 28209 tons

Crew size: 107 (includes four 8-woman strike teams)

Ylan-class, Point Defense Destroyer

Largely used as an escort for large capital ships. Very rarely seen without a bigger ship to protect. The Ylans are the very end of a long line of escort ships. Ylan-class destroyers are a rare sight outside the Abyssal Fleet for a reason: Only few Clan Militias have fleets big enough that dedicated point defense destroyers make sense to have. Refitting them for other roles is also not an easy thing to do, as the Ylan-class hulls don’t even have openings for more than the one heavy particle beam lance the ship has running along its spine. In a cinch, its many drone hangars could make for a good light carrier, but the case were a Militia or local system defense needs a small drone carrier, doesn’t have one, but then for some reason has Ylans lying around and the yard capability for extensive refits is a bit too conditional. In other words, extremely unlikely. Some big Clans have large enough fleets to need protection for their capitals, but mostly the Ylan-class serves only in the regular fleet.

And it does its job well: Since it is meant to protect large, ungainly capital ships, it can safely sacrifice a lot of acceleration to fit in more point defense. The ship’s shields and armor are also fairly strong for its size. Combined with a strong ECM-suite and extensive sensor systems, they can be deceptively hard targets.

The only reason Ylans aren’t seen more often in a offensive role is mainly logistical in nature: As they are serving as escorts to protect other ships, most of the time their hangars are filled with dedicated point defense drones, and most of their direct-fire weapons are point defense particle turrets with a limited engagement range. This limits their offensive capabilities drastically.

Since the Ylan-class has a lot of those PD-turrets though, getting too close to an Ylan- destroyer can be the last thing a pirate ship ever does.

Ylan-class PDD

Length: 280m

Width: 35m

Height: 34m

Volume: 55533m³

Mass: 43315 tons

Crew size: 115

Void troop contingent: 16 (two 8-woman strike teams)

Total crew size: 131

Nan-class, Recon Destroyer

Often found scouting ahead of larger fleets, the Nan-class was developed as a dedicated recon and E-War ship. After centuries of upgrades,the ship is still in service along the borders in frontier-regions and as a cheap alternative to more modern ships in Clan Militias and Free Trader fleets. Due to its specialization, it’s not as common among smaller Clans. And the only way this ship shows up in pirate hands is if it was taken by boarding action. The Nan, after all, is only “cheap” in comparison to other ship-classes with similar roles.

To join in when in formation, the Nan-class has a medium-sized particle lance running along its spine, and a nice assortment of particle beam PD-turrets, plus several small hangars for light drones, also generally equipped for point defense.

For a destroyer this size, the armament is practically nothing. The Nan-class instead has an incredibly oversized ECM and ECCM-capability. It also has fairly strong shields and armor, as the Nan often ends up being prioritized when a hostile fleet notices that the few small Nan-class destroyers in the opposing fleet jam their targeting systems.

Electronic warfare ships like the Nan are the bane of all ships armed with drones, especially drone carriers tend to worry a lot about them. Ironically, the enormous amounts of advanced sensors the Nan-class comes with is a far greater danger to any hostile fleet, but of course simply detecting and reporting stuff is far less flashy than first jamming it, then blowing it up with PD-turrets and drones.

Still, eventually the concept of specialized E-War ships fell a bit to the wayside, but fleet recons still remained a thing. Due to the necessity of modern fleet recons to keep ahead of their fleets more and less time spend in formation with their main fleet, the successors of the Nan-class ended up carrying more sensors, but less ECM and ECCM equipment. They also ended up being far bigger to allow them to stay in space unsupported for far longer.

Nan-class RD

Length: 285m

Width: 37m

Height: 31m

Volume: 54482m³

Mass: 42495 tons

Crew size: 113

Void troop contingent: 16 (two 8-woman strike teams)

Total crew size: 129

Pith-class, LDC, Light Cruiser

A versatile ship that’s often found accompanying smaller fleets, but also defending stations and colonies. The Pith-class is rather new, and its prototype was build less then a century ago. The first batch of production ships however managed to impress local AF-officers a lot, so more were ordered. By now there are several hundred of those light drone carriers, most of them inside the Abyssal Fleet. Some of the larger Clans managed to grab some, but no Human Clans so far seem to have managed this. Since the Abyssal Union runs on nepotism and Vela in general have only a low understanding of the concept of ownership, this is remarkably rare. Or maybe not, Human Clans are known for their disdain of the drone carrier concept, probably because they lack the empathy-link that makes a Velan drone operator such a terror in battle. Humans have to resort to more AI or less drones in their links, which of course degrades their drones’ effectiveness. A common Human tactic is to stuff really large suicide warheads into their drones and to overwhelm a target with insane numbers. Extremely inefficient, but it has seen some situational successes.

Pith-ships come armed with only two spinal lances, and half a dozen particle beam turrets. The ships have a solid amount of additional PD-turrets however, and of course a lot of space for drones. Pith-class LDCs can also launch the normally capital-sized super-heavy drones. Just not a lot of them. This can still be a dangerous surprise for ambushers if they manage to jump a squadron of Piths on their way to a larger fleet.

Velan fleets sometimes add some extra Piths just so they can artificially inflate their capital-class drones in a big fleet battle. Several times in their history, enemies have been lured into miscounting Velan drones this way, to their own detriment.

Pith-class LDC

Length: 375m

Width: 57m

Height: 40m

Volume: 142500m³

Mass: 111150 tons

Crew size: 148

Void troop contingent: 32 (four 8-woman strike teams)

Total crew size: 180

Tylan-class, Surveyor, Cruiser

Still a bit on the light side for a full cruiser, this ship-class represents one of the most used exploration vessel across the Abyssal Union. Even some Human Clans have started buying them for their own use! The original design is by now almost five hundred years old. Velan years that is, which means from a Human viewpoint it is in service even longer. The Tylan-class was made during the time the Abyssal Union experimented with the first Blue Sphere shield generators and was originally meant to be the first new class of fleet recons capable of carrying the new generators. But then development hit a snag due to unexpected complications and it turned out that the amount of energy needed to keep the shield bubble stable would have resulted in the Tylan-class being too small for the new generators. The original Tylan-design would have needed to rip out all weapons, the ECM-suite, sensors and even the crew quarters and drone hangars to make space for the generators plus the additional power plants and converters needed.

After some time spend rethinking the design, the Tylan-class was reborn as a surveyor-vessel: ECM and ECCM capabilities were mostly dropped from the design, drone and shuttle hangars were expanded to have room for sturdy surveyor probes and exploration shuttles, and since the older Libration Shields took up a lot less space then planned and further reduced the energy consumption of the ship, the hull suddenly had a lot of space for additional sensors and even some lab-facilities for extensive deep space research.

Even crew facilities and life support ended up being upscaled: The Tylans as we know them today are nearly unarmed space explorers with the capacity to stay in deep space for months. Even after many centuries of upgrades and alterations, the basic surveyor-design is still well-liked enough it’s sometimes jokingly called “the explorer that won’t die”.

One flaw of the design is that there is now no space for modern shield generators without completely redesigning the entire ship into something else. Luckily the older Libration Shields are still strong enough to make this not as much of an issue. Still, a Tylan facing an actual warship should just run away or surrender immediately. With only a couple drones and particle turrets meant as additional protection against space debris and not against serious threats, the ship is a sitting Jieka. (For our Human readers: This is not a good thing.)

Tylan-class Surveyor

Length: 450m

Width: 63m

Height: 50m

Volume: 236250m³

Mass: 184275 tons

Crew size: 250

Eris-class, Heavy Cruiser

The main tool the Vela like to use if they need to move a fleet fast, but battleships would still be an insane overkill while lighter ships might not cut it. They are often seen on the frontier, so Human pirates are very well accustomed to them. When accompanied by some of the lighter carriers, like the Pith-class, they can be deadly even to heavier ships. The Abyssal Fleet loves this ship, or at least ships like it: The Eris-class is by now nearly two thousand years old, and has not only been revised and updated hundreds of times by now, it’s also the 6^th in a line of similar designs. Designs that have been thankfully obsoleted entirely by now, not even Vela were willing to drag things out even longer.

Apart from having solid shields and armor, the ship is also fast and maneuverable (for a heavy cruiser). It also has enough drone capacity to either enhance its PD-turrets significantly, or to add heavier strike drones to aid nearby drone carriers. In a cinch, a squadron of Eris-class cruisers can be their own carrier strike force. Ships of this class are also heavy enough to justify a full company of void infantry (In Velan terminology, that would be 64 soldiers: A Void Company of Velan marines is organized into 8 strike teams with 8 women each.) and this makes an Eris both a hard target for boarders and bad news for any ships ending up disabled next to an Eris-cruiser.

The main armament though are 4 heavy and 2 super-heavy particle lances, like common in Velan designs, spinal-mounted. Apart from relying heavily on PD-drones and particle turrets, the ship is also equipped with a hyper-launcher and several paralysis emitters, something a lot of equally old designs do not have room for. The main reason being that both modern weapons and modern shield generators take a lot of space and energy, and with older ship classes it’s often the question of either having modern weapons, or modern shields. And since older ships with modern weapons but without modern shields tend to violently explode before ever getting to use their fancy new weapons, it’s not actually a question at all*. (Clan Militias and Free Traders will of course sometimes retrofit paralysis emitters into their ships, as they’re useful to have and not that expensive. They also don’t have the insane space and energy requirements of other modern weapons.)

As the Eris-class is still in active military use, most of the ones built are part of the Abyssal Fleet. Very few have been built for some of the larger Clans, and there are three that are currently known to be in the hands of larger Free Trader fleets, but that is all. A century ago, the Abyssal Union allowed proliferation of a special export model, the Eris-B. The Eris-B is almost identical to the Eris, but the hyper-launcher has been removed. The hull space was instead used for additional crew facilities, including a miniature forest, due to concerns by the designers that the Humans targeted for this export model may struggle to live comfortably in the normally more “cozy” crew spaces of a Velan vessel. An odd example of cultural misunderstanding that has confused and baffled new crew members on Human-crewed Eris-Bs to this day.

Eris-class HC

Length: 600m

Width: 80m

Height: 65m

Volume: 520000m³

Mass: 405600 tons

Crew size: 800

Void infantry contingent: 1 full company (8 strike teams, 64 soldiers)

Total crew: 864

*There are always attempts to try and mix and match equipment to squeeze new weapons and shields into older hulls, but the performance of these types of hybrid designs tends to be so bad it often leads to the retirement and replacement of the entire class. Replacing the shields with newer ones however, ends up working in a lot of cases, especially if the ships were mostly unarmed in the first place or are supposed to act as part of a larger fleet. Being able to survive in those instances is worth a lot more than just adding one more hyper-launcher to the capitals’ barrages.

Uriel-class Freighter

Uriel-class freighters are known to Vela mostly from historical recordings, as the last Uriel has been decommissioned nearly five hundred years ago. They didn’t even have Libration Shields, as this technology was lost to the Humans at the time and has only recently been rediscovered thanks to reverse engineering of shield generators from bought or gifted Velan ships.

At the time they were used extensively (approximately 900 years ago), the Uriel was classified as a ultra-heavy freighter, but apparently different Human Clans created bigger and bigger freighters during the nearly 400 years this design was used, and the Uriel-class had to be re-defined several times. It ended its last years as just a middle-sized space box. Of course at that point construction of new Uriels had already been stopped for nearly half a century. When Vela and Humans first met each other, the Uriels were only some data left in historical documents and old blueprints.

Uriels were known for being slow, as maneuverable as an actual box, very cheap in construction and maintenance, and eventually gained a reputation for being extremely reliable. But eventually they were simply overtaken by the expansion of early Human space trade, and not fast and cheap enough to survive in smaller markets.

Uriel-class Freighter

Length: 600m

Width: 300m

Height: 400m

Volume: 72000000m³

Internal volume reserved for cargo: ca. 92%

Mass (empty): 4,32 million tons

Mass (max. load): 56,16 million tons

Crew size: ca. 300-500 (first introduced) / ca. 100-200 (last design change)

Lathina-class Battlecruiser

A big ship-class, and less insanely reworked and redesigned then the Eris-class has been. The Lathina-class battlecruisers were among the first designs meant to fit the new Blue Sphere shields, and the first prototype was made “only” about three hundred years ago, with the first production models being commissioned into the Abyssal Fleet shortly after. The Lathinas are almost 2,5 times the mass of the Eris-class heavy cruisers, and it’s amazing what you can all fit into a hull if you don’t have to work around the idiosyncrasies accumulated by a dozen void ship design bureaus tinkering away for over a thousand years.

The Lathinas not only have Blue Sphere shields nearly four times as strong as the smaller Eris-class, they have three hyper-launchers instead of one, and each one bigger and more powerful on its own then the single launcher inside an Eris. They still retain large drone capabilities and have enough particle turrets for near-space defense to make any hostile approach a very exciting adventure.

For cases in which hyper-launchers would be absurd overkill, the Lathinas still have the almost traditional particle lances mounted along their spines: 6 medium lances, 4 heavy, 2 super-heavy lances. Nothing against BS-shields, but still a viable threat to ships only equipped with Libration Shields and shields even older then the LS can easily be pierced straight through.

The Lathina-class was designed from the keel up to utilize the back then brand-new gravitic drives, and it shows: Despite its higher mass, a Lathina-class battlecruiser manages to reach the same acceleration rate the smaller and lighter Eris-class can achieve. In fact, since the first ships of the Eris-class were still equipped with by now primitive seeming particle drives for their sublight-flight, the modern Lathinas would even have been able to outmaneuver the older Eris-cruisers. Nowadays, all Eris-class heavy cruisers have been upgraded to use the same type of gravitic drive as the Lathinas, but a Lathina fresh from the yards will still come very close to the performance of an Eris.

The Abyssal Fleet of course is aware of this, and there are already rumors the Eris may finally be retired in favor of a 7^th heavy cruiser class soon. On the other hand, Lathinas have been outperforming the Eris so massively, they’ve started to replace them in many roles anyway. If they weren’t so much more expensive, they’d probably end up being the final replacement for their smaller brethren. But as long as a smaller, cheaper version of battlecruisers is needed, heavy cruisers will continue to exist. Penny-pinchers throughout the galaxy will make sure of this.

Lathina-class BC

Length: 800m

Width: 105m

Height: 95m

Volume: 1330000m³

Mass: 1,04 million tons

Crew size: 1500

Void infantry contingent: 2 full companies (16 strike teams, 128 soldiers)

Total crew: 1628

Kithalla-class Fleet Recon

Originally, the Kithalla-class fleet recons were developed as a new generation of E-War ships, outfitted with the newest in sensors and electronics, to replace the smaller cruiser-sized vessels of earlier ages in that role. Ironically, later the smaller recons ended up taking the Kithallas’ and similar ships’ role of advanced fleet scout, while the actual fleet recons like the Kithallas ended up becoming military explorers, going farther and farther away from the fleets they were nominally attached too.

Eventually, this lead to a split, with several Kithalla-variants emerging that saw a reduction in their massive ECM and ECCM capabilities to add the necessary crew facilities their new long-range endurance missions would need. The Kithalla-A, -B and -D up to Kithalla-F variants eventually became the first precursors of the new long-range fleet recons that were more heavily militarized explorers then actual combat ships. Meanwhile, the Kithalla-Cs remained as primarily E-War ships directly picketing their fleets instead of roaming around as semi-detached fleet explorers.

Essentially, the Abyssal Fleet evolved ships like the Kithalla into two different branches: Ships that emphasized the “fleet” in fleet recon, and ships that emphasized the “recon” in fleet recon.

The Kithalla-C is even today a remarkable ship: Not only because of their massive E-War equipment or their oversized sensors, they also remain fairly substantially armed for a fleet scout. This is mostly because the Kithalla-Cs of today, long after the split in their design history, have evolved into becoming slower and less maneuverable, as their engines were downsized again and again when it became clear a Kithalla-C was not supposed to leave their larger capital sisters behind anymore. In return the ships became ludicrously armed and since the ships needed oversized power plants already for their massive electronic suites, the shield generators ended up multiple times stronger than with the first Kithallas.

In straight terms, the Kythalla-C is comparable to an Eris-class heavy cruiser in fire-power, while its heavy armor and shields makes it approximately two times as hard to destroy than the Lathina-class combat battlecruisers.

The long-range roaming variants carry almost the same amount of weapons, but their armor and shields are also almost as weak as an Eris, too. Though thanks to their design histories, those roamers ended up having also nearly the same acceleration and agility as the Eris-class. The Kithalla-E and Kithalla-F are still in use today and occasionally new ones will be built to replace older ships finally succumbing to wear and tear. From the older roamers, only some Kithalla-Ds have so far dodged their final scrapping.

As the modern Abyssal Fleet is slowly rethinking its stance on using heavily specialized ships, the Kithalla-C is now also one of the last remaining fleet “escort” recons and new constructions of this class have started to dwindle down in recent years. The cold, icy wind of time can be cruel.

Kithalla-class FR, Type “C”

Length: 750m

Width: 100m

Height: 90m

Volume: 1125000m³

Mass: 877500 tons

Crew size: 1170

Void infantry contingent: 2 full companies (16 strike teams, 128 soldiers)

Total crew: 1298

Parathas-class Troop Transport

Troop transports have a checkered history in the Abyssal Fleet. For most of their existence as an organization, the Vela were not in contact with any species that would make it necessary to invade them, or in the case of the truly alien ones, even feasible. After meeting the even more aggressive Humans, the AF eventually learned from Human designs and created some adequate troop transport designs. This is not one of them.

The Parathas-class was thought up during the “Aeon of Exploration”, and remained theoretical for centuries as the distinction between military personnel and civilian is rather fluid in Velan societies, so in cases were military personnel had to be shuffled around, the young Velan military would simply stuff soldiers into combat ships, or civilian passenger ships. Often without a second thought, as the “civilians” taking the passenger ship would be heavily armed, anyway.

When Velan material and engineering sciences advanced far enough for the first battleship-sized void ships to appear, the old concept of a ship solely for the transport of soldiers was dusted off. The AF, due to even more nepotism than usual, ended up giving the design task to a Velan Design Cooperative on the homeworld, but also to another one on a small colony thousands of light years away. The resulting communication problems were just the peak of a never-ending flood of disagreements, as both cooperatives decided on utterly different design philosophies, which turned out to be incompatible with each other and created a flurry of blueprints that were physically impossible to turn into actual hardware.

The Homeworld-Vela wanted a design that was mostly a big freighter, but with added armor and shields for protection. The colonials on the other hand envisioned a fast-moving ship that was essentially just a big cruiser, but with added facilities to shove more crew inside.

The end result of this mess was a ship the colonials considered too big and too slow, while the homeworlders considered it too small to be useful.

Luckily, the still young AF had actually not put much thought into what a troop transport should be, besides “we probably need one at some point”, so the frankensteined design was approved. The Parathas-transports looked unusually short and thick, resembling more a wedge than the thin, needle-like arrows most Velan designs tend to look like.

Velan crew and soldiers soon nick-named this unusual design the “fat arrow”, and despite the Abyssal Fleet eventually churning out Parathas in their hundreds, their reputation just continued to collect derision and scorn. Parathas were mostly used in moving entire troop divisions from place to place if needed. Historically, not a single Parathas was ever used for an actual combat mission. Several of them even ended up as passenger ships in civilian hands, as transporting people was something they were very good at.

Luckily for everyone involved, their meager defensive capabilities were never put to the test, and the last one was scrapped over four thousand years ago.

Parathas TT

Length: 300m

Width: 200m

Height: 125m

Volume: 1250000m³

Reserved for transport modules: approx. 625000m³

Mass: 450000 tons (odd hybrid of civilian and military design concepts, also very empty)

Crew size: ca. 651

Transport capacity: max. 5184 soldiers*

*In practice, this limit was chosen arbitrarily to confirm with Velan military ideas on how to properly organize military formations. 5184 soldiers are exactly 648 8-woman strike teams or 81 companies of infantry**.

**For those interested, while some of the details have changed across the ages, Velan tradition would then further divide the transported troops into battalion-equivalents of four companies each, and then regiment-equivalents of four battalions each. This means a Parathas could theoretically carry up to 5 regiments of void infantry, which is 5120 soldiers, and then an additional company. (The additional company would often be a separate support element of a division or brigade, meaning the Parathas could in fact fit a whole division of troops in a cinch***.)

***Even though the Vela are a very traditional species in some aspects, over the size of “regiment”, Velan army formations tend to get rather fluffy. There’s no real distinction between brigades and divisions, for example. Corps are known as an ad-hoc group of divisions,and larger armies and army groups are equally just formed as-needed. Alien species with a more rigid way of thinking, like Humans, often react with confusion to the way Velans will just throw larger formations together seemingly at random. For added confusion for aliens, the logistical and bureaucratic apparatus of the Abyssal Fleet has its own, separate organization to keep track of what supplies have to go where.

This organization uses the exact same army terminology, since in Velan minds’, it’s always perfectly clear that e.g. the 12^th Army supplying the 12^th Army on planet X has nothing to do with the 12^th Army of another sector supplying the 11^th, 12^th and 13^th armies on planet Y. Aliens often need at least some more context to understand Velan military nomenclature.

Minon-class interstellar Passenger Ferry

The old Minon ferries were one of the first truly civilian interstellar void ships ever made. Their history dates back to the early days of Velan voidfaring, and is actually older than the Abyssal Union. The old Global Directorate ordered this design when it became clear that the first young interstellar colonies couldn’t just depend on the small number of exploration ships available to the Vela at the time. The GD had made a couple of unique one-time colony ship designs, but nothing capable of sustaining long-term support. Bad planning meant that the Velan Clans of the GD had already spread to four Exovelan planets before the need for a real space fleet became so critical even the Global Directorate couldn’t ignore it any longer.

The Minon-class were one of several civilian ship designs that were finalized by the great communal effort the GD organized after the scope of the problem became clear. The other designs hurriedly made during this time were several classes of freighters, tankers, interstellar mining vessels, and even several mobile construction yards to support the young colonies. Luckily the GD had spend a lot of its early efforts into colonizing the Vel-system, and industrial capacity for the new ships were available in spades.

One of the great ironies of history was that the repeated need for the GD to ask its component Clans to assist in overcoming its own shortcomings eventually lead to the GD being replaced by what later became the Abyssal Union.

From today’s perspective, the Minon-class is of course archaic and primitive: Its main sublight drive was a cheap, reliable, but very slow ion engine and the still new jump drive technology lead the designers into dead ends several time during the early design phase. Many of the first generation interstellar ships were just upscaled versions of their older sublight sister-classes, but the special requirement of having to transport lots of people safely lead to some problems along the line: Three different sublight ferry designs went through the design process until they were ultimately discarded due to it not being feasible to put adequate shielding into the hull.

Eventually, a completely new design was chosen: The Minon was essentially a long tube made of three distinct cylindrical segments: A segment housing the sublight drive, a middle segment housing the FTL-drive surrounded by its capacitor rings, and a front segment with everything else.

And while a large piece of shielding was put inbetween the segments, as an additional oddity all facilities for housing people where put in front, just behind the main shielding against interstellar debris and cosmic radiation. This was necessary since even with the for the time excessive amounts of shielding armor keeping the individual segments apart, there were concerns about the safety of the passengers.

The even older colony ships build by the Global Directorate didn’t have this problem, since the early Velan colony ships were massive objects formed out of hollowed-out asteroids with a “radiation shielding” of many million tons of rock keeping the people inside safe from the engines.

Those safety concerns eventually made the Minons almost as heavy as comparable military designs of later ages, but the design also turned out to be robust and reliable, and dozens of Minons were built in the following years. Even with the fast advances of the early space age, the Minon kept being built for nearly three hundred years. The last variant, the Minon-E, was even switched to the by then almost reliable particle drive. It never became a very fast ship, though.

Minon IPF

Length: 450m

Width: 40m

Volume: 565486m³

Mass: 101787 tons (roughly 3x the mass of other contemporary and comparable civilian ships due to the mass of the additional radiation shielding)

Crew size: ca. 80

Passengers: max. 2900 (inter-system, short range trips / max. 1400 for long range trips)

Athis-class Battleship

One of the oldest battleship-classes still in active service, the Athis is also one of the biggest ships you can expect to show up in Clan Militias or Free Trader fleets. It also has the curious distinction of being the only capital-class vessel that is sometimes sold to Humans or other allied species.

It is actually smaller than many battlecruisers from later designs and has therefore ceased to be a real capital in all but name, though limited hull space for sublight drives makes the Athis still as slow and ponderous as the real thing.

Over the last couple centuries, the number of Athis-battleships has steadily declined in favor of modern battlecruisers or in case of Athis still serving in main battle fleets, in favor of modern capitals.

After extensive refits, an Athis can still fit two hyper-launchers of medium size (barely) and has a shield strength that’s comparable to maybe 1,5 Eris-cruisers. It is very heavily armored, but against modern weapons the additional mass is more of a liability, as it makes an already slow ship even slower. Human observers have called the Athis the “most Human-like” of the Velan ships serving in Human fleets when referring to their turn-rate. This is not a compliment.

The Athis in combat has to rely mostly on their huge number of particle lances and several drone hangars -and the hope that their enemy combatant has vastly inferior technology. On the other hand, it is also the cheapest of comparable vessels, so even though more and more yards have stopped building them, there are still those who are willing to take them off the regular fleet’s claws.

Athis-class Battleship

Length: 750m

Width: 95m

Height: 85m

Volume: 1009375m³

Mass: 787312 tons

Crew size: 1600

Void infantry contingent: 2 full companies (16 strike teams, 128 soldiers)

Total crew: 1728

Thetis-class Battleship

This ship-class deserves special mention since it was the first regular warship encountered by Velan visitors. A Thetis-class battleship lead the strike force reaching the Human-facing border region just eight months after first contact. Historical records of the Abyssal Union recounts how the smallish tribal alliance ruling that particular sector of Human space reacted with a mix of terror and excitement at the sudden contact with a seemingly huge and indomitable alien empire. After the chaos of the first months abated, the local capital of the tribal alliance, a system known back then as “Luminaire Excelsior”, send a small fleet of eight ships to protect the border from hostile incursions, something the contemporary Velan commentators seem to have regarded in good humor.

This tiny tribal alliance was known by their Human name as “Luminaire Republic*” and due to growing entanglement with Velan politics, was swept up and integrated as another independent nation of the Abyssal Union a couple centuries later, moving the official border of Velan space deep into Human space.

From the viewpoint of Velan aesthetics, the Thetis-class was a big, ugly cylinder with some long antenna sticking out of it, seemingly at random. A nick-name that was often used back then, not even derisively, was “big worm”.

The ship did not use any particle lances, instead still using a variation of the ancient laser systems of amplified light. The ships had a huge number of deceptively small drone hangars, and bafflingly oversized drone storage segments. There’s not much mention in ancient sources from this time about how their FTL-drive worked, apart from some rather unhelpful comments that it was “a little bit like ours”.

Their sublight drive was a primitive particle drive, though of course back then not that much behind our own drives in technology.

Human ships pre-contact like the Thetis battleships used some unusual material compositions in their hulls, apparently derived from their alien engineering traditions, but overall the Thetis had comparable armor protection to Velan ships of the same era.

The Thetis-class however had astonishingly weak shields. At time of first contact, Velan technology had already moved to a system of staggered shield bubbles and the Libration Shield was already in use, even if not exactly common. In comparison, the Thetis could only create one singular bubble, and due to what is now assumed to be a weird deficiency in shield generator programming, would have had some real trouble adapting to impacts from high-density particle beams. For what is probably a very similar reason, the Human ship utilized its drones in a “dumb” mode used primarily for suicide runs, using large fusion warheads instead of the usual set of normal drone equipment and weapons.

It may sound strange to a modern woman, but the drones of a Thetis-class battleship were apparently meant to overwhelm any enemy with massive waves of suicide attacks!

Though to be fair, Velan military strategists have pointed out whenever this is commented on, that massive waves of cheap suicide drones aren’t the worst of weapons. They’re terribly inefficient and a waste of good resources, yes, but from a Human viewpoint, a little bit of wastefulness is a small price to pay for victory.

The laser-armament of the Thetis turned out to be another surprise for Velan engineers and scientists: Studying the weapon-systems of the first Thetis-class ship ever encountered (the “Exorbitant Victory”***, which lead the strike force send to protect the local Human borders) revealed that the lasers of this ship were far from the primitive spear-chuckers the first-contact crew had assumed them to be.

To elaborate, in Velan history improvements in high-density energy storage systems eventually allowed the creation of advanced particle beams, with far higher ranges and better damage potential then a corresponding laser could have had. Especially vexing was the diffusion-problem a conventional laser system was plagued by: Even something as simple as a dust cloud moving between ships could drastically reduce the effective range of laser weaponry, while a particle beam could often just cut straight through low-density obstacles like dust clouds (though occlusion was still a problem, of course).

After a certain point, the main weapon used in Velan ships therefore moved away from laser emission systems. For a while, interim-systems like the Electron Beam Cannon were used, but technological progress soon left those weapons behind, too. After that threshold had been reached, the main weapon left, both in space and on the ground, was the particle lance.

Human history must have taken an odd turn somewhere. Instead of slowly changing to a better weapon system, the Human engineers in question just doggedly toiled away at their peoples’ favorite weapon, the laser, and very slowly improved it. The lasers the Thetis-class was equipped with were the end result: A highly advanced weapon system with similar range and damage to contemporary particle weapons. Human lasers used higher electromagnetic frequencies and some quite frankly odd emission systems to create purely photonic beams, while still keeping the beam coherent up to almost particle beam ranges.

In a real battle, the “Exorbitant Victory” would have been able to do serious damage to unshielded ships, especially as technologies like anti-laser coating had fallen into disuse a long time before first contact with our sister-folk. Sadly, even the staggered gravimetric shields of that time alone would have partially broken and reflected huge amounts of the incoming laser-energy, sapping their strength down to nothing without ever fully breaking.

Also, as a lot of Velan military historians are not tired to point out over and over again, tediously: A weapon that can be defeated by a dust cloud is not the most reliable weapon.

Later, this running discussion of Human technology evolved into a complicated debate around the issue of how much Human technological development may have influenced the end result as seen by our people at first contact. The main argument that started this debate claimed that Human deficiencies in AI-programming lead to bad shield generators, which in turn lead to an underestimation of how good shields could be at blocking laser beams. But this debate would go far beyond the scope of this text.

Thetis-class Battleship

Length: 750m

Width: 125m

Volume: 9203884m³ (including a lot of drone storage)

Mass: ca. 3,59 million tons

Crew size: ca. 4500

Void infantry contingent: approx. 400 soldiers, organized into two companies (very roughly the equivalent of two Velan battalions)

Total crew: ca. 4900

*”Republic” is a deeply Human concept and refers to a form of government in which representatives of local Clans or Tribes select leaders in strange and arcane rituals, often turning the simple idea of elections into a confusing, for outsiders hard-to-understand mess. Velan historians therefore often refer to Human “republics” as tribal alliances, as this means essentially the same thing and makes a clearer distinction to other Human forms of government, like the extremely authoritarian [Blights]**.

**Unknown term, full translation not possible.

Quiax-class Mobile Yard

While Velan designers are perfectly willing to turn anything into a space needle, when making the Quiax-class of mobile yards, sanity prevailed: The Quiax mobile yard platforms resemble nothing as much as giant rectangular plates, with docking and servicing stations covering both sides. It is an unusually utilitarian design, based on a lot of experience in void ship building. (For the first thousand or so years of Velan voidfaring history, even a lot of purely industrial vessels were squeezed into roughly wedge-shaped hulls, even if it made the resulting ship perform worse than needed.)

As the Quiax was the first mobile yard equipped with gravitic sublight drives, it makes a nice template to understand Velan mobile yards in general, as following the construction of the first Quiax, not much changed. Interstellar construction and support ships like the Quiax have since then almost always had the same rough shape. Size and mass may change, and the internal technologies used may change, but the Quiax proved so versatile, Velan designers never really had any reason to change this basic hull design, ever again. An often made joke among Velan void engineers is that mobile yard designs “only change in size”, as of course the inflating sizes of later capital ship-classes made it necessary to upscale support ships like the mobile yards so the Abyssal Fleet could continue to service their bigger monsters in the void.

A Quiax-class mobile yard, while build quite sturdily, has not much in terms of real armor protection, though massive arrays of shield generators give it at least some protection. A lot of the drone hangars put in around the four non-main sides are capable of putting out large swarms of drones, not all of them purely for point-defense. This, plus the tons and tons of small particle turrets hidden across the hull have been an unwelcome surprise for a lot of pirates and raiders through the ages.

The yard platform has some FTL-capability, but as its not common military strategy for the Abyssal Fleet to include support ships in the main battle line, the FTL-drive of the Quiax (and consequently, of all successor designs) reaches only maybe 1/10^th of the jump range of an average Velan warship. As far as Velan military thinkers are concerned, a mobile yard does not need more speed.

Quiax-class Mobile Yard Platform

Length: 1800m

Width: 2200m

Height: 250m

Volume: ca. 990 million m³

Mass: ca. 118,8 million tons

Crew size: ca. 525000 (including yard workers and families, but several million robots are excluded)

Void infantry contingent: 8192 soldiers (2 “old” divisions/brigades or 1 “full” division today)

Total crew: ca. 533192 sapient beings

Xanyth-class Dreadnought

Dreadnoughts like the Xanyth were once among the predominant capital ships of the Abyssal Fleet, but over time capital ship sizes eventually grew so much, ships like the Xanyths were slowly relegated to backwaters and then to scrapyards. In the minds of Velan ship designers and military strategists, the difference between a battleship and a dreadnought is mostly one of convenience, as until the first superdreadnought left the yards, capital ship sizes fluctuated wildly between heavy cruiser and slightly above battleship.

While civilians and Free Traders will often use “battleship” and “dreadnought” interchangeably, the common definition of a dreadnought is “main-line combatant with a focus on endurance and fire-power over speed and agility”, while a “battleship” is simply any big ship that’s heavily armed and could feasibly end up leading its own little fleet. It is not actually a real term in the Abyssal Fleet. That said, traditional convention turned a lot of older capitals into “battleships” simply because they were either larger than battlecruisers, or older and slower. In contrast, battlecruisers are still associated with speed and agility, even if some classes ended up massing more than some older battleships.

In the years of planning and prototyping before the first real Xanyth was created, the modern definition of “dreadnought” was defined for the first time, as it was decided that after the disaster of the first conflict with the Aberrants, the Abyssal Fleet would need some serious re-organizing.

The Xanyth, one of the earlier results of this reform project, is the first big Velan capital that is slow on purpose, not just because it masses a lot and the engine designers were bad at math. Correspondingly, the Xanyth has enough shields and armor to outlast an entire fleet of Lathina-class battlecruisers and the weapons to crack their shields and armor in under a minute. As this ship-class has the hull space for it, it also includes a lot of the E-War capabilities normally outsourced to specialist fleet escorts. And while common fleet composition demands that capitals of this size are escorted by smaller ships serving as dedicated point-defense platforms, the Xanyth (and really, all the capitals who followed later) has enough point defense, in both turrets and drones, that only a similarly-sized dedicated drone carrier could hope to penetrate their defenses.

And even then, their immense shields and armor would still be in the way.

The conventional weapons are equally heavy: The center line of a Xanyth is filled with 6 gigantic spinal-mounted lances, four of them particle beam emitters, the other two newer matter disintegration beams. There are dozens of smaller lances and nearly a hundred turrets with particle beam and matter disintegration cannons along the hull in addition to the six big guns, and the paralysis emitters of the ship can probably immobilize an entire fleet on their own (as long as their shields aren’t working, at least).

The main weapon system however are the 16 variable hyper-launchers, 4 of which were the largest ever built when the first Xanyth was commissioned. The older hyper-launchers could either send ordnance (most likely high-density fusion warheads) directly into another ship, or create massive rifts in space-time by “hucking some big loogies of hyper-energy into the region of hyperspace roughly equivalent to the enemy ship’s coordinates in normal space” as Admiral Denil Ab Sorissa famously declared when asked by a journalist how the less well-known function of a hyper-launcher worked.

Switching between those two main modes was not easy, the first hyper-launchers couldn’t be switched between modes at all, even: Your ship got what it got, and that was it. A “variable” hyper-launchers is designed to switch between sending ordnance into normal space or targeting a region of hyperspace on the fly, almost at the flip of a button. Current hyper-launchers are even more advanced of course, and not even limited to just two main modes anymore, but back when the Xanyth-class was made, this innovation was a big deal.

To explain the context a bit, a hyper-launcher sends ordnance on a one-way trip through hyperspace, which neatly bypasses small trifles like shields or armor. And even if the launcher only manages a near hit, this normally results in a high-density fusion warhead materializing right next to your shield bubble (or hull, in the worst case). Even Libration Shields would have trouble surviving more than a couple of hits like that.

The other mode however, disrupts shields like the Libration Shield and the Blue Sphere shields. Conventional weapons can’t really do anything against a Blue Sphere, as those shields are using exotic particles only native to hyperspace to form a shield bubble which automatically rejects any incoming energy and displaces it into hyperspace. When using the more conventional mode, the Blue Sphere shield can not only block incoming ordnance, since it also exists in hyperspace, the energy released is harmlessly shunted right back to hyperspace.

In fact, with Blue Sphere shields it can sometimes happen that a full “hit” with a hyper-launcher in conventional mode is worse than a near-miss, as in the latter case the shield at least has to work a bit to shunt the energy off, while a direct hit has the ordnance collide with the shield bubble in hyperspace, which results in the ordnance being dispersed as a harmless cloud of hyper-energy.

To put this into numbers everyone can understand, 13 Xanyth-class dreadnoughts firing at a 14^th one could crack their conventional gravimetric shields just using their conventional weapons, without any hyper-launchers at all, while the Libration Shields are strong enough at least half the ships would need to switch on their hyper-launchers in conventional mode to finally overload the shields.

When the 14^th ship has its Blue Sphere bubble active, all 13 other ships would need to fire all their hyper-launchers, and concentrate their fire on not only that one ship, but also on a surface area of the shield bubble that is not allowed to grow beyond 11%, otherwise the shield will just effortlessly deflect all incoming energy. And even with all those conditions met, the chance to actually create a rift in the shield bubble is tiny.

Hyper-launchers in hyper-mode however, can destabilize a Blue Sphere shield so badly, two Xanyths could square off in a duel with each other and would have about equal chances at winning. The 13 Xanyths from the example above would just utterly obliterate their 14^th sister ship in this case.

Before the fist Aberrant-conflict, this and other observations were mostly theoretical, as the number of species capable of similar technological feats were very small, and they were all more or less friendly to the Abyssal Union. The Aberrant and their relentless hostility forced a lot of changes in a short amount of time, as the Aberrant had both the numbers and the technology to challenge the Abyssal Fleet.

Xanyth-class Dreadnought

Length: 1500m

Width: 215m

Height: 130m

Volume: ca. 6,9875 million m³

Mass: ca. 5,45 million tons

Crew size: ca. 7000

Void infantry contingent: 1 full battalion (4 companies, 32 strike teams, 256 soldiers)

Total crew: ca. 7256

Nyna-class Heavy Drone Carrier

Nynas look a lot bulkier than most Velan ships. The idea behind this ship-class was to give a carrier more surface area for hangars, to launch more drones in a shorter amount of time. Later drone carriers went back on this a bit, as the Aberrant-conflicts took a heavy toll on the very concept of drone carriers, leading to modern carriers having to carry a lot of additional long-range weapons that are not based on easily destroyable artificial objects.

Due to the lessons of those conflicts, modern carriers and modern super-capitals tend to be rather close in design, with super-capitals having marginally less drones, while carriers tend to have marginally less heavy energy weapons. This of course also means those later carrier designs all ended up looking more like the common “needle” shape of Velan warships, instead of the bulky arrowhead-shape of the Nynas.

Nynas have only four hyper-launchers, and their Blue Sphere shield generators were purposely a bit undersized, as the common logic of the time dictated a drone carrier would be too far away from the main battle line to take serious fire, while additionally the Blue Sphere shield was considered as so strong, that it seemed to make sense to cheap out on expensive generators and power equipment. It wasn’t as if there was any huge space empire capable of matching the Abyssal Union in technology, or even in industrial capacity.

Thousands of Nynas were built during the last peaceful phase of Velan history, and even though thousands of those died during the Aberrant-conflicts, there are still several hundred of them hanging around, either as part of garrison forces, or in the hands of some of the more powerful Free Traders and Clans. As the Nynas turned out to be such a liability the one time they were needed in earnest, the Abyssal Fleet tended to look away when the old Velan joke of “oops, seems the ship went missing on the way to the scrapyard”-played out. As far as the Velan military is concerned, the loss of resources due to ships going “missing” this way is sad, but spending effort and time on dismantling more Nynas is even sadder.

Nyna-class HDC

Length: 1400m

Width: 315m

Height: 130m

Volume: ca. 9,56 million m³

Mass: ca. 3,44 million tons (a lot lighter then comparables ships,as a lot of internal volume is just empty space to put drones into)

Crew size: ca. 5000

Void infantry contingent: 1 full battalion (4 companies, 32 strike teams, 256 soldiers)

Total crew: ca. 5256

Erithan-class Superdreadnought

There are still some later classes of warships even bigger than the Erithans, but at this point in Velan ship development, the number of noteworthy changes to later designs starts to drop steeply. Titans, Ultra-Dreadnoughts and Leviathans may be even more insane wastes of resources than the Erithan, but neither design philosophy nor combat role changes much from this point forward. Titans may be over 3km long, UDs up to 4 and a Leviathan may sometimes even breach the 5km-length mark, but internally they’re all just either a bigger Erithan, or a bigger carrier.

This text therefore does not include any examples of the even bigger capitals of the modern fleet.

The Erithan-class superdreadnought started development immediately after the first Xanyth-prototype left the yards. It is in every sense simply upscaling the concept to even larger size. It wasn’t the first superdreadnought ever built by Velan claws, but the first designed and constructed after the first Aberrant-conflict, and it shows: Like the Xanyths, sub-light drives were downscaled to fit more shield-generators, power plants and weapons, and likewise, acceleration and maneuverability suffered for it.

But the largest difference to the smaller Xanyths is the sheer scale of the Erithan’s guns: To match Aberrant weapon-ranges, the main guns of the Erithan SDs were built 50% larger than the main Xanyth lances and launchers. The Erithan is in fact the first Velan ship that could possibly engage an Aberrant-splinter even just with its conventional particle and disintegration lances.

Back when the original design study for the Erithans was done, some voices claimed a super-dreadnought of this size would not be necessary, as the new Xanyths had already started to show their worth. But after a lot of debate, the Abyssal Union decided to push the design through. Which turned out to be a good decision, in the end: While the Erithans came too late to influence the first Aberrant-conflict, when the Second Infection flared up, only Erithans turned out to be oversized enough to safely engage the newest horrors spawned by the crystalline Aberrant.

And even though all following conflicts with the Aberrant resembled mere clean-up operations then real wars, the Vela never forgot the destruction of those first two wars, and the Erithan and its design as a gigantic hammer was just the first of many.

Erithan-class SD

Length: 2250m

Width: 310m

Height: 190m

Volume: ca. 22,09 million m³

Mass: ca. 17,23 million tons

Crew size: ca. 12000

Void infantry contingent: 1 full regiment (4 battalions, 16 companies, 1024 soldiers)

Total crew: ca. 13024

Oligarch-class Super-Freighter

Oligarchs are among the biggest Human ships a citizen of the Abyssal Union is likely to ever see in their lives. They are essentially, titanic trashcans in space. While Humans have built even larger freighters for some awful reason, the Oligarchs are already large enough only very few of the larger, trade-oriented Human Clans are capable of sustaining an Oligarch-class freighter, or even a small fleet of them.

As Vela on average, tend to be less obsessed with trade, the Oligarchs are commonly known as the only Human super-freighters that have established trade lanes into the Abyssal Union. Occasionally, one of these monsters will even appear inside the Vel-system itself! Only very few Velan systems even have the infrastructure in place to make unloading and loading an Oligarch an economically viable task.

Like many cylindrical freighter designs, the entire middle section of the Oligarch is just a big set of gigantic doors. Or more precisely, movable pieces of hull to allow maximum access to the internal space. If a loading dock is massive enough to accommodate an Oligarch-class super-freighter, it can load and unload the ship in under an hour.

The Oligarch truly teaches a lesson about differences between Humans and Vela: The largest Velan super-freighter ever built could only maybe carry half the cargo of an Oligarch, and there are several classes of Human super-freighters even larger.

Velan Free Traders, not even the largest and richest, wouldn’t even be able to use a ship like the Oligarch, as it is nearly completely unarmed and too expensive to maintain. And as the planets inside the Abyssal Union tend to create a lot less trade volume than comparable Human planets, it is seen as far too large for sensible use by most of the Velan Clans. Currently, only two Oligarchs are operated by Velan Clans, and only to service the trade lanes into Human space, as only this way could these monsters ever hope to run a profit.

Oligarch-class SF

Length: 4000m

Width: 900m

Volume: 2,544 billion m³

Internal volume reserved for cargo: ca. 90%

Mass (empty): 152,64 million tons

Mass (max. load): 1,984 billion tons

Crew size: 1060 (heavily automatized)

Vivaria-class explorer (only two ever built, gigantic)

While the Vivaria-class explorers are among the most titanic ships ever built by Velan claws, they still ended up looking like a typical Velan ship. No-one who looks at the fat needle of a Vivaria-class explorer would ever go “this is clearly not a Velan ship”.

The Vela have dug up a lot of really strange ruins in their days, and their innate curiosity was just spurred on again and again by what they found in them. Even today, a lot of pure combat ships still carry enough exploration equipment to do a dig or two in a cinch.

When the Abyssal Union eventually grew to cover a sizable portion of the galaxy, so did their explorers. Thanks to the range and endurance of modern jump drives, modern exploration and surveyor vessels can easily reach any possible point in the Milkyway galaxy. The journey may take months, but eventually a ship with jump drive will be there.

But something that became apparent pretty damn early: While jump drives have no problem jumping into empty space, even in the halo-regions, where the home cluster of the Vela is situated, there are limits. To put it simply, a jump drive depends on opening an Einstein-Rosen Bridge across a couple of artificially generated black holes. They depend on a lot of for less advanced species esoteric seeming knowledge of physics. Since a jump drive has to create twin black holes connected together with a stable wormhole, there’s a lot of energy involved: Even today a jump can only be initiated after hours and hours of slowly filling up the capacitor-rings surrounding the drive itself.

How much energy is necessary depends on many variables, but distance and mass of the ship are two of the three most important ones: The bigger the mass, the more energy a jump will cost. The higher the distance between the dual-singularities generated, the more energy the jump will cost. But another important variable is the form of local spacetime: If spacetime is too distorted due to local gravity wells, the jump will cost more energy. But all three variables work into both directions: If the artificial quantum singularities are generated too close together, energy consumption will skyrocket. Similarly, a mass too tiny will likewise cause a catastrophic spike in energy use.

And of course this means a spacetime too “flat” will also cause issues. As it turns out, the relatively flat space of the halo surrounding the Milkyway is close to the sweet spot for jumps, but approximately 98000 light years outwards from the Vela star cluster (for Human readers, the globular star cluster the Vela inhabit is approximately eighty thousand light years from Terra, and already itself deep inside the halo), jumping becomes so costly, FTL-travel stops being feasible.

This held true for thousands of years, but the Vela never gave up and eventually developed a form of FTL-travel that can warp space itself. Originally, those experiments were supposed to create some sort of add-on machine to allow conventional jump drives to start functioning again when surrounded by extremely flat spacetime, but it then turned out that a ship warping space faces a lot of the same problems a jump drives does: For one thing, warping spacetime into a bubble around the ship was harder the flatter the spacetime was in the first place.

But then the first prototype managed to close their spacetime-bubble, abusing a nearby gas giant to cause maximum distortion (and destroying it in the process). And then the ship, instead of moving at FTL-speed, just vanished.

Only to appear a short time later, hundreds of light years away. After the initial confusion was done away with, it became clear that for only the spirits know what reason, a ship completely surrounded by its own bubble of spacetime will leave the standard universe and become adrift inside the outside-medium. You know, the same medium wormholes tunnel through: Hyperspace.

After a lot of screaming (debate), a lot of plans were changed. Especially when more (and less destructive) testing was done and it was revealed that while a ship inside its own spacetime bubble wasn’t exactly moving instantly, due to it essentially careening nearly uncontrolled through hyperspace, a little bit of mathematical calculation and more controlled exits meant this new system was potentially even faster than a jump drive.

And while this new drive has to start and end inside a big gravity well, it in practical terms doesn’t need to cross any zones of flat spacetime inbetween. The end point of this development were a new series of experimental explorers, meant to survey the utterly alien regions far away from the gravity well of the Milkyway.

Eventually, the urge to explore nearby galaxies became overpowering, and in a big cooperative effort, the Vivaria-class of mega-explorers was born: Shaped like an arrowhead and eight kilometers long, it is to date the crown of Velan achievement in voidcraft construction. It is of course equipped with the new Vortex drive to “skim” through flat spacetime hidden inside hyperspace, and can therefore go everywhere. As the new Vortex drive can reach a travel speed that would equal an unbelievable one hundred million light years per year inside the standard universe, the exploration of other galaxies is not only possible, but also rather easy.

Well, until something breaks, of course. Which is why the Vivaria (“moon star”) explorers are so huge: They are more an independent habitat with everything the crew could possibly need, and less a mere voidship. The ships even include vast internal zones for recreation, including multiple forests and two lakes (the first draft only had one lake, but some engineer asked “what if something happens to the lake” and then there were two). This city in space was originally meant to be a one-time thing, but when the original Vivaria came back from Andromeda, the resulting excitement made the Abyssal Union spend another ruinous amount of resources to built its sister-ship, the Velaria (“sun star”). The Vivaria is currently on a tour exploring the galaxy M33, and is slated to return in five years.

The Velaria is preparing for its second journey right now, towards M87. This galaxy was chosen to take a closer look at the gigantic jetstream leaving the core of M87. Depending on what those two ships will find, everyone in the Milkyway is holding their breath for the inevitable third insanely huge explorer the Vela will build in the future.

In fact, there are rumors several of the Human Clans are now, after seeing the success of the this ship-class, willing to chip in if the decision for a third mega-explorer is made*.

Vivaria-class Exogalactic Explorer

Length: 8000m

Width: 1100m

Height: 500m

Volume: ca. 733,333 million m³

Mass: ca. 264 million tons

Crew size: ca. 750000 (including families)

Void infantry contingent: 1 full division (8 regiments, or 8192 soldiers**)

Total crew: ca. 758192

*Though the ongoing success of the project already means hundreds of Human scientists and their families are serving on the Vivaria itself, and it is projected over a thousand Human scientists plus their families will have joined the Velaria at launch day.

**At the time these titans were built, military tradition had changed enough for a force the size of 4 regiments to be downgraded to short or “half-” division. A full division is now counted as 8 complete regiments, and one of them will be considered the “command”-regiment of the entire unit. Brigades still don’t exist, though. And Velan ground officers will get cranky with you if you try to translate half-division with “brigade”.

The End:

OK, I guess this is enough. Sorry for the absurd amount of examples, I wanted only a nice spread from small ships all the way up to the largest ships I could come up with and then got kind of carried away. Anyway, I’m satisfied with how my calculations ended up working in practice. If you have any comments on my work, or if you are a writer who uses a different approach, please comment! I always like hearing how other writers do their thing.

Also I’m deeply sorry for turning this short essay into what is essentially now a little collection of weird short stories.