Vessel Name: Ark Royal
Vessel Type: Light Carrier
Vessel Class: Yorktown Class Light Assault Carrier (LAC)
Armament loadout: Ark Royal is lightly armed with what is mostly point defense weapons. She has beam lasers for close in protection, chemically propelled dual barrel rotary autocannons for medium range, and high gauge gatling lasers for longer range defense. For self defense she has a handful of smaller railguns. She is not meant to be doing the fighting, however.
Onboard vehicles: On her own flight deck she has:
20x SSS-7 Barracuda fighter/bombers, which are tiny tri-engined delta shaped craft capable of very high speeds and intense maneuvers but only carry light weapons. Crew of one, on an ejection seat and with an armored escape pod cockpit.
16x SB-12 Bighorn bombers/scouts. These are larger dual engined craft with a small autorailcannon in a turret mount facing backwards. They look like pill shaped pods with two engines vertically stacked on tapered and raked towers of struts with four radially arrayed streamlined hardpoints mounted forward for small torpedoes, cameras, or heavy railgun pods. They have a crew of two in an armored escape capsule.
12x ABS-70 Cougar medium bombers. These are the bad girls of the Ark Royal flight group, capable of long range long endurance sorties and can even perform two warp jumps with an expendable warp drive shaped like a ring around their bodies, which appear as a tapered wedge shape with the four engines mounted inline in the back. They can carry six light torpedoes, four medium torpedoes, a very slow firing but very painful pulse laser pod, or cameras and sensors for reconnaissance. They have a dorsal and ventral turret with dual autorailcannons in each and a forward facing autorailcannon. They carry a crew of three in an armored escape capsule.
6x CP-0 Transport Shuttles. General purpose wedge shaped shuttles for cargo and non combat personnel movement.
5x AS-220 Viper Assault Shuttles. These sleek VTOL shuttles with folding airfoils are fast and armored shuttles meant to land Marines wherever they need to be, whether that be on a planet, ship, or other vessel. They have a caseless twenty millimeter eight barrel Gatling gun on a flexible mount plus dual rocket pods on stub wings. They have a square body with a tapered tandem cockpit that is heavily armored and braced.
3x EWAAS-12 Copperhead Electronic Warfare and Support: This is an adapted version of the CP-0. They look similar but have antennae and sensor pods all over their bodies, plus three extra crew, better engines, and special electromagnetic shielding.
For her battlegroup she has three destroyers with her: Fornax, Ursa Major, and Taurus. These triplet sisters are general purpose light escorts with a small armament of heavy torpedoes facing forward plus a broadside armament of medium duty rail guns. The three hundred meter destroyers have a small but effective array of point defense lasers. They are lightly armored but fast with very good sensor arrays. They look like orcas with the "tail" being a boom with twin engines on the end and a bulbous maintenance pod between them.
Alongside them is the ancient light cruiser Orion. This poor old warrior has seen way too many battles and this will be her last hurrah before she is retired and scrapped. This porpoise shaped ship packs a decent punch in the form of a great number of unguided rocket banks, as she uses too much power in her huge engines for her frail old reactors to handle large rail guns. She uses chemical Gatling guns for her close in point defense and magnetically assisted autocannons for medium range defenses. For the long range secondary armament, various guided missile launchers are used. She is fast but this four hundred and fifty meter cruiser lacks in sensors and armor, like the rest of the battlegroup.
Crew: 1,400 including a regiment of Marines, flight crews, and command staff.
Overview: The Ark Royal is named in honor of the aircraft carrier that helped destroy the Bismarck hundreds of years ago. She herself was commissioned a decade ago as a carrier class that is supposed to strike hard, strike fast, and haul ass before anyone can mount a serious response. Ark Royal is a seven hundred and fifty meter ship shaped like a sperm whale with her "tail" holding four bulbous engine pods with a paint job of forest green with white stripes, also with color changing light strips for identification and signaling, a pattern shared by her whole battlegroup. She has slits in her side for launching her small craft and is covered in antennas and pods for sensors and shields.
The Ark Royal is considered a cursed ship. Two dockyard workers died building her. The champagne bottle was thrown dozens of times before it broke over her bow, and then a dockyard worker died when she was launched. During her space trials, a radiation leak killed two engineers and injured another. This dark trend has continued for her entire life with several accidents including fires, radiation leaks, collisions, and small craft crashes. She has been known as a "cursed ship" since her first sortie. Sailors are still scared of her. The latest incident is when she was rammed by a frigate but still managed to make it back to port, albeit with a hundred casualties, and ten fatalities. She has just finished drydock repair when she is called to action against Nemesis.
Captain: Felix Nevermor
M/F: Male
Age: 54
Rank: Rear Admiral
Bio: Felix is a brainy man with a strangely Type B personality for his rank. He is spontaneous and quick to react, but not the best planner, although he is capable of a good strategy or decent tactics. Felix rose through the ranks quickly because of his quick thinking and capability to contain any sort of crisis or catastrophe, but his career has stalled at Rear Admiral. He is just above the rank of Captain, at an age where he should be a full Admiral with a fleet under him. His years are running out, and he knows this all too well. He has no connections and appears on the outside to be lazy and uninspired... but he wants nothing more than to show the higher ups otherwise. He wants the full rank, and he is going to die to try to get it.