Okay, here's a space fighter design I patched together. The name itself should already tell something of it, but here's a little piece of history behind it.
This craft was designed shortly after the second Shivan incursion and is, unlike other terran fighter designs, not a result of corporational design but rather a design patched together by GTVA's own engineers and just built by mentioned corporations (Nankam and other corporations mentioned in FS2). Therfore it combines prominent and tested features of the former, noticed-to-be-good terran fighters. Mainly it is influenced by GTF Perseus, GTF Hercules 2, GTF Erinyes and GTB Artemis, but it also bears some resemblance to GVF Tauret. It is best at maintaining space superiority or assault role, having a reasonable payload capacity while being much more maneuverable and faster than GTF Hercules and being as fast as the GTF Myrmidon while slightly faster than it. The fighter is intermediately shielded, while hull plating is where it exels.
The fighter manages to be as strong as the GTF Ares while achieving much higher maneuverability and speed than "The Potatoe". This is due to advanced (read: Shivan) reactor technology, thrust vectoring systems and optimized angular momentum hull configuration.
The design is two-seater by default, but most of the missions can be, and often are carried out with just one pilot. Additional pair of eyes is always a good thing to watch the six, and the back-seater can also serve as a battle leader, sending commands to the wing while not forced to concentrate on dogfighting himself. In simulations, having one such co-pilot in a wing increases performance by 15%, but this is yet to be confirmed in real combat.
The fighter measures 19.00 metres in length, 12.80 in width and in total it is 5 metres high. It has six primary weapon hardpoints, two near the center of aim below the cockpit and four on the extended side pods for heavy bombardment for large targets. Next to these primary weapons is a pair of secondary weapon launchers that can be fitted to launch anything up to Harpoon missiles, while the upper secondary banks fitted further back on the side pods can carry missiles of size of Piranhas, Infyrnos and, most importantly, Trebuchets. It can also carry most Great War era bombs (like Tsunamis) if they are available and it's absolutely necessary, and in forced conditions it can be used to carry two Cyclops missiles, but that's not feasible for obvious reasons - let the bombers do their job.
As a bonus, the fighters side pods can be replaced with wings and a tail section. Also, the side pods can be ejected if they are heavily damaged. They are relatively cheap to manufacture, consisting basically of just thrusters and weapon bays. Dropping these behing allows the central section to achieve much greater speed while still having ability to fight back with the nose guns.
The fighters name, obviously, comes from two important fighters that have rent features onto it - GTF Perseus and GTF Hercules 2. But there's more to this name, too. The leader of the design team happened to have Finnish roots, and Perkules is actually a Finnish mild curse that derives from the word
perkele, which was kind of a demon creature in old Finnish mytology, nowadays also used as synonyme for devil (which is lame, IMO).
Percules was originally a project name and is yet to be confirmed as official type name by GTVA Headquarters, and it might be replaced with some more typical name from either Greek or Roman mytology. (In other words, do you have suggestions for name of this ship?)
Also, only prototype currently exists and mass production, much less deployment, can not start very soon. (Read: I can't model, at least not yet. As of now, the model exists only in paper and in my head of course.)
Poll
