Fighters

Banshee-class Multirole Tactical Strike Fighter
Dimensions: 15m x 12m x 8m (approx.)
Powerplant: 2 x Micro-Fusion Power Cells
Propulsion: Twin pulse scramjets, doubling as fusion torches. One contragravity reactionless thruster unit.
Combat Accel: 4G (12G max)
Crew: 2 - Pilot and Navigator/Missileer
Weapons: 1 x Heavy Plasma Tribarrel, 200mm "Deeplight" Laser Cannon, or 200mm anti-armour railgun in nose. 12 missile hardpoints.

    The F-(e^i*pi) Banshee Multirole Fighter is a classic success story of the modern Board, often pointed to by Boardies when they admit that, y'know, FLEET aren't that bad for a bunch of genocidal jerks, and hailed by FLEET when they accept that, maybe, the Board are pretty good as Fortean freaks go. The little ships are, in fact, one area where both organisations experience a genuine meeting of minds - viz, "zoomy shooty death". Drawing their name from the distinctive scream of their turbofans during supersonic passes, the Banshee's combination of high speed and big guns has proven irresistible to many a fighter jock.

In the past, Boardies had built their own air and spacecraft using whatever bizarre materials were available, creating a loosely-organised air force designed along dozens of different lines. With the loss of so many experienced pilots and their ships over Mohaborad a replacement was urgently needed to prevent the Forces of Darkness making a bid for air superiority. With the Funky Horror offering construction facilities, and FLEET technology giving Weird Science all sorts of new principles to play with...it's amazing the designers ever found time to draw up the blueprints in between the crazed concept-toying sessions and abuse of wind tunnels. But draw them up they did, and the result was a highly advanced aircraft (if you can call a ship using grav-assisted engines an aircraft), forgiving to fly, cheap to build, and extremely manoeuvrable, capable of nearly on-the-spot turns. Advanced inertial dampers allow combat at high Gs that would kill an unprotected pilot.

Banshees are also heavily armed, with 12 missile hardpoints and a rotary plasma cannon in the nose. Ground attack variants replace the plasma cannon with anti-armour railguns, while an EW version used to keep away prying eyes covers the wings with ECM pods and laser-projection holofield generators, and the hardpoints often carry droptanks for extra endurance ("range" on a planetary scale is not much of an issue when carried aboard starships, since Banshees are designed almost entirely to operate around Earth, but carrying the fuel to climb back out of the gravity well can be a concern).

The very nature of the Board ensures Banshees are regularly seen alongside less sane craft, operating with the old Board's characteristic total disregard for physics in formations as diverse as they are bizarre - but as the numbers of such hard-to-maintain one-offs slowly dwindle, more and more Banshees come on-line to fill the gaps.