RDANS Insidious

Crewed by 33 officers and 363 enlisted personnel, the Insidious has a relatively small crew complement among her contemporaries. This small crew size is offset by the extensive use of automation and a half-dozen shipboard AI's, making the Insidious one of the most heavily-automated ships in space. An oversized company of the RDAMC's Special Operations Force fills the remaining crew quarters to capacity, though, with 6 officers, 222 enlisted marines, and their equipment occupying every additional free space.

Designed along traditional RDAN theories, the Insidious is built for energy range engagements, with 22 main turrets housing dual 2500mm bore gravitic-acceleration-and-compression plasma cannons. Each turret has a maximum elevation of -20/+80 degrees and a transverse of -165/+165 degrees. These heavy cannons have an astonishingly rapid rate of fire, enabling the Insidious to defeat battleships and even pocket dreadnaughts in brutal, energy-ranged slugging matches. Secondary energy armaments haven't been neglected, with 54 twin-gun turrets housing 450mm plasma cannons designed for close-in defensive work and area saturation fire against enemy escort vessels and gunboats.

Although twenty missile launchers is considered to be an insufficient number for a capital warship by most modern naval architects, the Dominion Alliance's technological advantages offset this numerical deficiency with superior electronic warfare and firecontrol systems. Each launcher ripple-fires two rounds per salvo, and have a cyclic rate of approximately twenty seconds. A standard RDAN missile is a five-meter oblong, massing 55 metric tons and carrying a trio of 250-megaton bomb-pumped X-Ray laser warheads. Accompanying the missile systems are ten energy torpedo projectors, five-meter-bore gravitonic disruption weapons with an energy throughput exceeding even that of a superdreadnaught's primary guns. These extremely short-ranged weapons enable the Insidious to gut most warships in a few point-blank salvos.

This offensive firepower is matched by a thick network of point defense pods, each a pair of 25mm rotary plasma cannons flanking a twin-tube countermissile launcher. These CIWS pods can lay down a literal 'wall of plasma' between the Insidious and incoming enemy fire, while the rapid-cycle countermissile tubes allow for extending the point-defense envelope to several lightseconds. Paired with the active defenses are multiply-redundant countermeasures and electronic warfare systems, passive defense systems designed to confuse and distract missile seekers and fighter instruments.

While active defenses and ECM constitute the bulk of the Insidious' protection, both armor and shields have their place. The armor matrix for the Insidious is designed to absorb and ablate energy attacks while retaining resiliency and durability against kinetic impingement, and is considerably heavier than most ships of her class would carry. The shields are localized hyperspace distortions, created and maintained by dedicated generators. Extending a few meters out from the hull, these regions of hyperspace instability distort and deflect energy attacks, while simultaneously providing extreme spacial sheer that destroys physical matter on contact. However, these shields are not invulnerable, and their generators can be overloaded with a sufficiently large feedback pulse from cumulative damage.

Providing power to the Insidious are a quintet of fusion-catalyzed hyperspace waveform generators, giving the battlecruiser nearly-unlimited energy supplies. The fusion powerplants provide the initial energy surge required to generate a field from which highly-unstable particles can be drawn from the violent quantum distortions at the realspace/hyperspace boundry. These plants are designed to operate in two modes, either pure fusion, for stealth, or in flux-distortion mode, increasing the energy yield exponentially yet releasing significant amounts of easily-detectable gravitic distortions.

A pair of Waverider Induction Drives provide realspace motive ability to the Insidious. These systems generate an unstable region between realspace and the alpha layer of kata hyperspace, drawing a relatively weak hyperspace current into a contained interface with realspace. This serves to form an 'energy wave' that the vessel literally surfs to provide pseudo-relative forward motion. The Insidious' drives are forward-optimized, giving this vessel the ability to reach .3675 cee in just under five seconds. This drive system allows for excellent forward motion and lateral, sliding turns. However, it's vertical turn aspect and reversing ability is limited by the standards of most modern systems.

Faster-than-light travel also relies on the Waverider Induction Drives, which simply generate a more powerful distortion effect for trans-light travel. The field completely envelopes the vessel within an artificial hyperspace riptide, pulling the ship into successively deeper layers of kata-hyperspace. At maximum immersion depth, the Insidious can travel at the equivilant of a realspace velocity of 32,000 cee. While it is possible to go deeper into kata-hyperspace, the risk of bring crushed by gravitic fluxes increases significantly with each lower energy layer. It was an encounter with an unidentified deep-hyperspace waveform that originally catapulted the Insidious into the previously-unknown Board/Sol system.