Defensive Capabilities
Practical combat experience in the theatre of space is scarce across the Alliance. What has been gleaned from skirmishes with SHADOW raiders and THRONE dogfighters has been applied to the defensive armament of the Ardent, which combines its idealistic mission of peace and understanding with a realistic strategy. In short: hope for the best, and prepare for the worst.
The hull of the ship and its modules is studded with electromagnetic point-defence stations, which use targeted electromagnetic pulses to disable interceptor craft and approaching missiles. These are co-ordinated by T/OM-Dali, while the drone fleet under the command of T/OM-Cardea pursues a deterrent approach, using FABREP torpedoes to distract and direct the foe into a disadvantageous position. Meanwhile, the otherwise dormant T/OM-Fury activates for an information assault, devoting its processing power toward hacking into the enemy vessel’s electronic systems and remotely disabling their weapons.
Supporting all of these efforts is an Alliance-standard Caul shield – an envelope of projected energy that covers the ship, protecting it from harm by diffusing the force of impacts across itself. While sustained fire and boarding capsules can penetrate the shield, the enemy must prosecute this strategy while under assault by the Ardent’s torpedoes and remote system attack. Few hostile vessels have the stamina for such an endeavour.
Complicating matters is the fact that Caul shields are incompatible with manifold collapse travel, which would otherwise be the Ardent’s easiest way out of danger. A manifold cannot be constructed through a Caul’s envelope, as the energy constructs output by the drive are simply absorbed by the Caul – and so the Ardent must strategically disable parts of its own shield so that it can construct the manifold tunnel, putting parts of itself at risk so that the entire ship might be saved.
A manifold collapse tunnel can, however, act as another means of defence. When it anticipates hostility, or needs to remain incognito, the Ardent’s drive can generate a looping manifold – a torus of spacetime, complete with the usual bubble around the ship itself. While it is “in the loop”, the Ardent can simultaneously destroy and reconstruct the torus as it revolves, idling, outside of real space – and therefore safe from all threats, and invisible to all conventional scanning technology.
This approach is not undertaken lightly, as the Ardent cannot be contacted until it closes the loop and returns to real space: ground teams and modules outside of the Ardent are stranded until it re-emerges. Supporting A-Com detachments are trained to act on their own initiative in such scenarios, in addition to following the orders left by their colleagues onboard the Ardent. The typical procedure is to set a time and place at which the Ardent will return to real space, allowing ground teams to evacuate and prepare for a rendezvous at that location.
