Behind the scenes writing stuff - Star Wars ship nerd-out edition · 6:44am Jan 7th, 2019
Hey there. I'm pleased to announce that the upcoming chapter of flash-backs while Titus is unconscious includes a full scene of when the X-87 Wraith prototype was stolen from the Kuat Drive Yards and the subsequent escape. While some of the following won't be included in the story, at one point Titus will be pouring over the ship's logs and will excitedly spout off some of it at an uninterested Krua and I figure maybe some of my readers might like to get the details that would otherwise be left out.
The backstory:
Walex Blissez was the designer of the Republic's Venator-class Star Destroyers we see throughout the Clone Wars. Walex has a daughter, Lira Blissex, and in 20 BBY Grievous kidnaps Lira as an attempt to not only "persuade" her father to join the Separatists but to scuttle implementation of improvements and upgrades to the Venator fleet and stop him from developing a new starfighter, which would end up being the Alpha-3 Nimbus that was produced for the final years of the war. This attempt is foiled when the Senate learned of Walex's situation and had the Council send our pair of Jedi to rescue Lira, although neither would encounter the General as he had left to personally oversee the Battle of Duro that was occurring at the same time.
Fast forward to the end of the war and Lira becomes Lira Wessex and her designs and ships are now used by the Empire, namely by the Imperial-class destroyer program. When she realizes the Empire has no dedicated ship to fulfill the anti-starfighter/corvette role she wants to capitalize on securing more contracts for Kuat Drive Yards and remembers a long talk with a young Jedi about centralized bridges and other elements which leads her to begin designing such a ship. To this end she uses her connections and clout within the Empire, and being married to a Moff she's able to gain access to classified records but also manages to covertly access much of what the Imperial Security Bureau secreted away from the Jedi Archives. From these records Lira comes to discover logs of something called the Sith Intelligence which made note of a ship advanced beyond anything else at the time and she uses all of her resources to gather as much information as she can on this Phantom-class ship, although in the end with much of the data lost or unobtainable she is unable to build an exact copy and must design the rest herself.
Even by Imperator-class Destroyer standards she pours an exorbitant amount of capital into her pet project because her fear of corporate espionage and a loss of the potential contract to another corporation leads her to damage one of the segments of Kuat Drive Yards so she can order the repair of the orbital ship yards. She cites severe structural damage during a manufacturing disaster which leaves it entirely nonoperational when, in fact, the damage was superficial or minor at best. Construction on the segment allows her to funnel funds and under this cover she uses the "damaged" section which has been blocked off and secured from the rest of the facility to construct her prototype to completion, including with it one of the last projects she worked on under her father: an integrated navigational assistant.
Shortly before she was ready to unveil the prototype to the Empire a security breach is thwarted when it is uncovered that an upper-management dock worker has active ties to the Corellian Engineering Corporation, but Lira's fear once again leads her to cover her tracks and heighten security while issuing a delay of the reveal to better secure her project. In addition to replacing all personnel assigned to the project's hangar with droids, making her the only organic lifeform allowed past the security checkpoints, she scrubs even her own personal Kuat terminals of all of the design information and the secret research she had compiled of the Phantom to be transferred onto a datacard which she stores aboard the Wraith in its main computer, along with the only copy of the I.A.N.A. program. Any development work on the Wraith from then on out was strictly done only aboard the prototype using its secure computer which she ensured had no outside connections that could be hacked into, and she even moved a CNC machine and industrial 3D printer into the cargo hold to make components as she designed them, all powered by the ship's own reactors to thwart outside observance.
As designing and construction finished and the more mundane tasks like wiring in consoles and testing systems fell to her droid staff, Lira began overseeing the specialty items that would help sell to her targeted client - Imperial Intelligence - which she knew from experience to be generally arrogantly full of themselves and they could be milked of credits due to this. Smooth, soft whites and deep black surfaces covered the interior and she converted the standard ship's galley into something more of an officer's lounge when she added cushy seating, expensive ceramic kitchenware, and luxury amenities like a bar and automatic coffee machine (among other things) to sell that the Wraith could accommodate such prestigious individuals. Lira used her contacts to reach a few influential members she knew would want such a vessel for themselves, but Imperial Intelligence was eager to counter a weakness in their fleet that the rebellion was exploiting and dispatched two officers for a surprise inspection of the craft just a day prior to its scheduled unveiling.
At the same time of starting work on the Wraith, Lira utilized another discovery from her recovered Sith Intelligence files for intended use with her prototype that would guarantee its sales to Imperial Intelligence. Lira brought on her most trusted engineers to a special project, but even then she made them work individually and shared only enough for each to reverse engineer and build a few components with no knowledge of what the others were working on. Over the course of construction of the Wraith she eventually acquired all the parts necessary and used her marriage to the Moff to acquire the last component before having a droid assemble the device within the ship (saving her from disposing of an engineer that knew too much). She was in her lavish planet-side office planning a final test run of her integrated Sith Adegan crystal cloaking device prior to the Wraith's reveal and also finalizing her sales speech when the shipyard came on the comm to inform her two Imperial Intelligence officers had muscled their way past the security checkpoint with their flashy badges and the authority they carried. She scrambled to her shuttle in hopes to intercept them but by the time she arrived the Wraith had somehow been stolen from the disguised hangar, the datacard still aboard.
The partial destruction of the shipyard that occurred during the theft was enough to cover up the Wraith's disappearance and was used as an excuse for the delay necessary for Lira to design and build something to satisfy the Empire's growing curiosity of the ship she had been boasting of. Lira hastily came up with another ship for the role, the Raider-class corvette, which used many of the parts and schematics already available in the Drive Yards so the cost of building the prototype was subtly rolled into the numerous other projects going on simultaneously.
She had spent many sleepless nights designing and then overseeing construction of the stand-in vessel, and despite Imperial Intelligence's expectations of a luxury vessel for them not being entirely met she breathed a heavy sigh of relief when the inspectors were impressed by the Raider corvette nonetheless and began the process of ordering it into actual production for the fleet. Once the Imperial visitors were gone she immediately passed this task off onto one of her many aides, instead eager to seek the services of a bounty hunter to track down whoever stole her prototype Wraith and make them pay dearly.
Specifications:
The original X-70B Phantom found in the Sith documents that Lira's X-87 Wraith was based off of was 80 meters long and 95 at the widest point. The X-87 is slightly larger at 100 meters long and 115 wide but both share roughly the same height of 20 meters so the Wraith would look a just little sleeker if they somehow were side by side. In the story I will likely reference the YT-1300 light freighter platform as its familiarity will give something to better illustrate for readers (some of whom would only know it as the Millennium Falcon) that the prototype Wraith is nearly three times the size while still only calling for a crew of six - pilot, navigator, communications, engineer, and 2 gunners.
The original X-70B was documented to be equipped with heavy lasers and missiles, but because of the Wraith's size and Lira Wessex wanting to improve on the platform to sell it as an anti-fighter and heavy corvette to fill the void of such a ship in the Imperial Navy, the Wraith features a larger armament. While no production models would be equipped to the extent the prototype was, Lira's well-practiced tactic was to ludicrously outfit a ship so she could quote an exorbitant price to those interested which would then lead to the prices of the actual production models to seem much lower and even somewhat reasonable when, in fact, Kuat would still be making off with a huge profit. To this end she jammed every bit of tech and weaponry she could fit in any unused space within the hull which sometimes pinched wires or connections and lead to components or systems needing a firm whack with a fist or palm to get working properly.
Included in the prototype's armament are:
- 6 quadlaser cannons. These were dotted evenly over the hull as an anti-fighter measure: two on top, two under, and one on either external edge - port and starboard - closer to aft to have overlapping firing arcs behind its engines. The Wraith was planned to be a modular platform featuring different armaments for different models, however on the prototype that was stolen all of these retract covertly into the hull (because it was being pitched to Imperial Intelligence, specifically) so for outward appearances it could pass as a luxury yatch. This feature of retracting into the hull takes the space of additional armaments (namely those that are fixed, like concussion missile tubes and proton torpedo launchers) and is part of the reason the size of the ship is larger without much of an increase in livable space on the interior. Due to this restriction on crew size, Lira has these turrets connected to a dedicated targeting computer for automated defenses, however it is later discovered the targeting computer module installed as a stand-in for the demonstration doesn't possess the processor power necessary to run all of these effectively.
- 4 turbolasers. These are easily procured by Lira for her prototype as Kuat Drive Yards already builds the Imperial-class Star Destroyers so secreting some off is a simple matter of fudging the books. Similar in design to the quadlasers, a twin-cannon turret is mounted centrally on the hull with one dorsal and one ventral (one top and one under) that could retract into the hull. While the ship was intended for an anti-fighter role, at the same time Lira wanted to it to boast some capability of engaging against larger ships after it had dealt with, or while simultaneously dealing with, their fighter escort. Standardized arrangements without the retracting turret feature would allow an upgrade to 2 additional twin-turbolaser turrets or the addition of ion cannon batteries thanks to the additional space saved within the hull.
- 1 forward-facing M.A.S. cannon prototype. This weapon took the place of mounting points for additional forward-facing fixed turbolasers, concussion missile tubes, or proton torpedo launchers that would be present in other models and was mounted dead-center of the ship. With the idea that her Wraith would be flying with the Imperial I-class Star Destroyers as an escort, Lira also wanted a means for the specialized ship platform to target and cripple ships that would routinely outrun the slower capital ship and quickly outrange its Tie squadrons. Rather than have a Wraith pursue and leave the Destroyer behind it defenseless, she wanted to create a long-range weapon to effectively snipe at the fleeing vessel, though heavy proton torpedoes generally used for this purpose were slow enough to be a target for the skilled pilots of the Rebellion. She wanted something faster with greater range, so she secretly developed the M.A.S. cannon... although not actually having any measure of expertise as a weapon designer, what Lira did was simply took the premise of a slugthrower rifle and blew it up to a ship's scale before tinkering with several ideas until she got it working. The Magnetically Accelerated Slug cannon took a physical projectile of slag metal (one of the perks of the design being ammunition could be acquired by simply scavenging debris and melting it down even within the Wraith's cargo hold where the auto-loading breech mechanism was, and slug size could be adjusted to accommodate salvage availability) and magnetically suspended it within the barrel that ran two thirds the length of the Wraith from its nose and fired it forward at tremendous speed, and in unobstructed space the M.A.S. cannon outranged even the heaviest of turbolasers by a significant margin. It doesn't take a lot of mass moving at a high speed to do a lot of damage and, despite the slow rate of fire and difficulty aiming the unguided system, Lira was surprised with how the slugs could pierce even the heaviest duralloy plating. It was of sufficient note that a scrapped CR90 corvette - a favorite of the Rebellion and sure to win her some favor - was brought in for the demonstration of how a single, fully-charged round fired from behind could punch through the entirety of an engine and would continue tearing through bulkheads beyond before coming to a stop. Consequently, this was a very power-hungry system, and as such the space that would have been used for the additional turbolaser capacitor and cooling systems was taken up by a dedicated reactor and capacitor bank rather than tax the main reactor system. As with the rest of the project research and files, after the thwarted security breach the only blueprints for this weapon were kept securely on the datacard left aboard.
In addition to an extensive armament the Wraith prototype was equipped to demonstrate it would be ready to take a severe beating, as it would in its anti-fighter/heavy corvette role, although actual production models were planned to have significantly less of both shielding and armor as one of Lira's tactical cost-saving measures to sell ships. Its shielding was spread over three generators that worked in tandem with each other to share the load, allowing damaged shields to recharge at an incredible rate and putting the overall shield strength somewhere just above 800 SBD - unheard of in a ship this size. Of course the ship didn't depend on shielding alone to protect it, and with a helm located centrally in the hull rather than sit atop a tower this eliminated one of the largest targetable weak points in almost every other design of her ships at the time. This let the entirety of the hull be encased in duralloy plating, granting it a 250 RU rating.
Sublight travel was achieved by a single large ion engine set in-between two engines engines in the main body of the ship and then two more small engines in either wing, all of which made the ship capable of reaching an acceleration of 2400 G the stock configuration. Shortly after being brought online during the ship's theft, Iana analyzed and computed adjustments to optimize their engine outputs to get this to 2800 G, and then later she would walk Titus through the physical modifications and upgrades which brought them to a stable maximum of 3000 G. In atmosphere the Wraith has shown to have a top speed of roughly 1000 km/h.
Layout:
With my usual trash-tier drawing skills I mapped this out:
That's all I've transcribed for now from my notes and idea dumps folder, hope you enjoyed the read!
I know water proofing is a thing, but why do I feel like having the showers next to the computer core is not a very good idea.
4992655
It's a distance down the hall, but yeah... I wouldn't worry, if Luke can just climb into his X-Wing after it had been sitting in swamp goo for days without even letting it sit in rice first a leak here or there wouldn't hurt Iana.
4992706
Yeah, that's fair enough.