I was just dinking around, trying to think of something to do, and got an idea for a small fighter launchable from a large missile tube on a big capital ship.
I lopped the nose off one of my asymmetrical series ships and extended a fairly simple body behind it. The engine nozzle is what I made for the Aion rebuild. The stubby black fins are where reaction thrusters are for manuvering. The slight wasp waist section came from needing a place to put the RCS thrusters while keeping the size small enough to fit within the hypothetical missile tube. The manned version has a single missile bay on the centerline- making aiming and hitting with dumbfire ordnance easier, and one gun or energy weapon mount to either side of the missile bay.
The unmanned version is identical except for the upper forward area. The cockpit is left out and the nose thip is thickend some and brought up to center. Plenty of room for ordnance or ECM/ECW for a decoy or target drone. Since the lower forward hull is identical to the manned version, it can be built to accept any weapon the manned version can, plus a smaller warhead or electronics package.
Visually and to remote sensors, the two look almost identical, especially from the rear and ventral aspects. Almost guarranteed to fool any aspect seeking missiles.
Another launch possibility would be to mount these two on top of large rocket boosters. They'd be a ready defense capability without the expense of maintaining a full fighting force constantly in orbit. A small training and practice flight would be based in orbit. Others could be based on smaller moons or asteroids within a solar system.
Other missions could include wings of manned versions escorting any unmanned version to hit space stations, large capital ships or installations dug into asteroids.
The primary defense of these ships is sheer speed. Given a high initial velocity by the rocket booster or missile tube launcher, they can cruise for a long period with high efficiency. Full throttle kicks them up even faster and a long afterburner endurance helps survivability during attack runs.
It's best to keep the throttle on full because that long afterburner time means a long recharge time- so the escort pilots had better be good at their jobs to get the big bomb on target the first time.
Weapons space is limited, but special orders for different loadouts can be accomodated. These ships are an exception in the Galan Aerospace line- having no external hardpoints for our ordnance pods. They're designed to be affordable and easy to produce, even for systems with minimally developed industrial bases. The models shown are equipped with some of our most advanced engines, yet the design is easily adaptable to just about any propulsion system that can physically fit the spaceframe.
Contact Galan Aerospace's toll-free hypernet node for information on licensing these designs for your military needs. (In other words, download, be happy, do whatever you want with them.)
