Saratoga

N-808-B-305 Gudersnipe School Ship Saratoga, Glorious Heritage-Class Light Destroyer.

The Saratoga was the last ship off the line of the Glorious Heratige-Class production run. Though 350 were initially ordered, the run was stopped at 305, making the N-808-B-305 the very last. Scheduled for destruction or use in munitions tests, the 305 hull was taken to Utopia Gregaria and eventually lost.

Some years later, the incomplete hull was found and assigned to Hunter Jusenkyou.

Saratoga

The Saratoga should not be confused with the Saratoga-B-class of light destroyers produced by the Gailen Fleet Revision.

Notable Elements

The Saratoga was the very last N-808-B ever built, with production stopped while the ship was half-complete and not properly equipped for combat (only the frame, and several non-combat blue systems were complete). Various attempts were made over the years to finish her, but when the ship was finally assigned to Hunter Jusenkyou, she was still only about 70% complete and missing several key-components.

Decades had passed and the correct parts were no longer available, so the newly-assigned crew scavenged components from all over the shipyard to complete her. Since most of the components were taken from much larger ships, this lead to the Saratoga being very heavily over-built.

Among the changes made, the only shield generator the crew could find was designed for a ship three times the Saratoga's size. The crew fitted the generator and re-calibrated it for the Saratoga. The shield, while less power-efficient, proved far more effective in combat.

Control Centers

Like most Gudersnipe ships, the primary control center of the Saratoga is the main bridge. It utilized a extensive glass-cockpit system that allow most control functions to be duplicated on any capable terminal. The primary exception being helm control, which has only limited functionality if not accessed from a specially-designed interface(Cindy built her own, complete with gear shift, foot peddles, fuzzy dice, and more buttons than you can shake a stick at).

According to schematics, the Saratoga actually has a total of five command centers. The bridge and main engineering, as well as the Auxiliary Command Bridge(labeled "Sewage Tasting Room" on official documentation). Further, the ship has another room clearly marked Auxiliary Command Bridge on both official schematics and at the actual location. The room was meant to be a mock-up bridge, but was never completed, and is where the crew stores the ship's Christmas decorations. A final Backup Auxiliary Command Bridge appears on schematics, but the location is in fact a bathroom.

There are three functional helm stations onboard; on the primary and secondary bridge, as well as a "hot spare" kept connected to the system. According to regulations, the hot spare is supposed to be kept in main engineering, both so that the engineering staff can carry out maintence, and so the ship can be easily controlled from there in an emergency. However, after several complaints from Cloud, Hunter ordered the unit moved. Cindy re-located the station to the ship's gymnasium, where it is disguised as a weight-lifting machine. The crew has, on more than one occasion, operated the ship entirely from the gym.

Engines

The Saratoga uses Ion-Vacuum technology. The engines are speicifed to last for roughly half the ship's intended operational lifespan, which equates to 175,200 flight hours, or around twenty flight-years. This is less than the standard for Support-classed ships, which typically have an engine lifespan of at least thirty flight-years. However, the Saratoga, classes as a "light" destroyer, was meant to have a much less strenuous service carrier.

At one point, it is revealed that Cindy, having never read the ship's operations manuals (or, really, any manuals, for anything, ever, in her life), had configured the helm controls to run the engines at well past their design limits, including using War Emergency Power as the ship's standard cruising speed. As Cloud explains it: in the few short years they've had the ship, they've placed roughly 17,000,000 hours of wear on the engines (one second at W.E.P. is equivalent to ten hours of normal use). This equates to around 2,000 flight-years, or a 5,000-year service life. While extremely long service-lives are not unheard of, with proper maintenance it is not uncommon for ships to reach up to five times their intended operational lifespan. However, for the Saratoga, this would still mean 600 years and 12 engines replacements. To reach the amount of flight-years predicted by Cloud, the ship should have burned through at least 100 sets of engines.

The discrepancy is later explained by the over-all robustness of the Ion-vacuum design, combined with modifications made by the crew. Ion-vacuum engines use electromagnets and have few moving parts, which were replaced very frequently as the ship suffered damage. The electromagnets themselves are relatively small, easy to replace, and include several layers of redundancy, while the bulk of the actual stress falls to the superconductors supplying them with power. These were mostly salvaged from much larger ships, and the entire power-system was excessively over-built. The actual output and duty-cycles for the engines, as specified by the manufacturer, were based on the Saratoga's original design, which speced a much smaller power plant and a generally less capable power supply system.

Another key-change was with the magnetic constrictors. Instead of using a part designed for regular use, they took one speced for use on FTL-tugs(small ships used to tow much larger vessels at faster-than-light speeds). The components have roughly ten times the capacity and tolerances, but cost around one hundred times more to produce. The Saratoga still burns through them at double the rate of most ships her size. Given that the constrictors, when used on FTL-tugs, are meant to last the lifetime of the tug, this is worrysome.

All of the crew's modifications effectively give the ship an engine system on par with that of a dreadnought. It can tow much larger vessels and exert high levels of delta-V, giving the ship an acceleration curve that has been described as "terrifying". The ship can "stunt" and preform maneuvers no vessel her size should be capable of.

Weapons

Going by official specs, primary armaments of the N-808-B include:

• 10 Torpedo Tubes, 6 mounted forward and 4 mounted aft.

• 40 Offensive Missile Tubes mounted 0/90

• 20 Defensive Missile Tubes, also 0/90

• 4 Close-in beam cannons, fixed forward-facing

• 4 Long-range beam cannons, fixed forward-facing

• 8 Defensive Beam Cannons, track-mounted.

• 4 Drone Bays designed to launch hunter-killer drones.

• 4 Nimbus-Class Light Assault fighters.

This compliment was, of course, substantially augmented before and during the Saratoga's service.

Beam Weapons

The initial design called for a total of eight fixed, forward-facing beam cannons(not to be confused with the "Forward Facing Gun" found on many large dreadnaughts, small fixed cannons are very common on lighter ships wich cannot support turrets). The guns were placed in two 'banks' on either side of the ship, with two in each bank. The smaller, further-forward cannons were were set to a convergence point near the ship(hence "close in") with the further back cannons being configured for longer range. The guns were considered under-powered and obsolete even by the Gailen revision, but war-time constraints on supplies and the ship's lack-luster power capabilities limited what was available. The cannons, then, were planned only for post-war patrol duties, with the ship relying on torpedoes and missiles for most of is offensive capacity.

In the yard, the sub-systems to support these cannons were never installed, and the parts missing from inventory. Forced to improvise, the crew hand-built a scaled-up model of a point-defense Charged particle cannon. Charged particle weapons are significantly more powerful and offer far greater range than standard beam cannons. But instead of a contiguous beam, point-defense weapons fire many small pulses. In a point-defense scenario, this is meant to conserve power. In the case of the Saratoga, it allowed them to fire charged particles without over-stressing the gun Barrels. They did also assemble the necessary sub-systems to use the weapons as beam cannons by cannibalizing parts from other ships. Due to a missing portion of the schematics, they were forced to "improvise. As a result, the Saratoga's fire systems are modeled on a battle ship, and it can if neccessary deliver a staged barrage.

Thus, the Saratoga has two main fire modes: all guns on a rapid-fire charged particle attack, or one cannon at a time each using the full-force of the ship's power.

Torpedoes and Missiles

Unlike most other weapons systems, these remained largely unchanged. The tubes were upgraded and modernized, and, unlike the initial design, can fire a wide array of projectiles. Initially, the ship was intended to carry only a single type of standard-issue, variable-yield torpedo and a single-type of single-yield N2 missile.

While no physical changes to the ship had to be made, Rian Wildfire added a sophsiticated selection system to the tactical station, allowing him to quickly order up a wide range of available weapons from the ship's arsenal, including variable-yield and multi-warhead missile systems.

Drones

The drones were not much used past the Saratoga's early deployments. The original drone-compliment was actually delivered and placed in the magazines, then left to rot(something which rather surprised the crew, since the drones were nuclear-armed). Exactly how and why this happened remains a myster, regulations state that expendable weapons such as drones, missiles, etc, are not to be brought aboard until a ship has completed initial space-trials. The presence of drones in a bay on an unfinished ship is quite problematic.

The original generation of drone, while armed with very high-yield N1, was effectively useless as a weapon. N1 bombs lacked the destructive power required to take out most ships, hense drones were saw very little use. Though N2 was available at the time, the risk of a drone falling into enemy hands was considered far too great to risk the technology. Weight limits and materials availability confined hunter-killer drones to maximum payload of around 25 megatons. Considerable by any standards, but not very menacing when delivered by an N1(N2s explode with much greater pressure and velocity, making them considerably more destructive even at lower yields).

The Saratoga crew initially re-armed all of it's drones with N2 warheads, upping the yield to a variable 40 to 400 megatons using 4 warheads. They also modified the units to accept a wide array of payloads, and even built several sensor kits(the drones were much more effective as probes than the ship's usual compliment).

However, hunter-killer drones were long out of production by the time the Saratoga was commissioned, and replacing the compliment was very difficult. In most cases, the crew had to hand-build the units in the ship's machine shops, so the stopped using them. The drone bays were also retrofit for mine deployment.

Name

In the short story Against the Wind from The Road to War when Hunter is first told he will recieve a "Glorious Heritage-class" light destroyer, he comments that "I think I'll call her the Saratoga". Astute readers may notice that this is the name of Ryo's father's flagship in the Antelope Books.