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.

Crew Compliment

As a Glorious Heritage design, the Saratoga was intended to carry a crew of 310: 160 for ships operations, and a Lancer regiment of 150. The ship is equipped with large egress ramps, and was intended to double as a troop transport and large-scale drop ship(See: Life Support bellow).

However, since the vessel was never completed as specified, the crew arrangement was somewhat different. Generally, they operated with around 180 people onboard, though as few as 70 could easily manage the small ship. In particular, the Saratoga is famous for being one of the first Crimson Blade warships to have a designated "Science Officer" as part of the bridge crew, and to devote one station on the bridge to scientific functions.

Ship Sections

Like most starships, the Saratoga is not neatly divided into levels. While almost the entire ship is accessible as a shirt-sleeve environment, the bulk of the internal volume is taken up by major components. Crew compartments largely fill in the space between

On Crimson Blade ships, the term "deck" is often used to refer to multiple, often disconnected sections of the ship by function, not location. So the "Command Deck" would refer to all of the ship's control centers, even though these are located in often disperate regions of the ship and require passing through multiple other "decks" to reach. This also means that, in the Saratoga's case, the gym and one of the bathrooms count as part of the Command Deck.

Command Deck

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.

Battle Deck

The Battle Deck encompasses all three torpedo rooms, eight missile bays, weapons storage magazines, and even the weapons lockers.

Engineering Deck

Probably the largest deck, and the most porely defined. It includes Main engineering, seperate engine rooms for each of the ship's Ion Vacuum drives, plus various other un-manned control spaces, all workships, all parts storage locations, etc.

Crew Deck

Heavily spread out, the Crew Deck includes all crew quarters and interconnecting passages, mess halls, recreasional spaces(excluding the gym), and anywhere else specifically designated as "crew space"

Ships Systems

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.

Life Support

The Saratoga has particularly robust life support. According to standards put forth by the Foundation, triple-redundant systems must be able to support three times the intended crew compliment. For the Saratoga, this is 930. However, since the design was intended to double as a troop transport, the actual number is more like 3,000.

Further, smaller support ships are required to carry auxillery systems that let them act as life boats for larger capitol ships. For short durations, the ship can keep up to ten thousand people breathing. This is actually less than regulation, but it was pointed out during the Saratoga's design trials that you physically could not FIT 10,000 souls aboard, even using every available inch of space within the pressurized compartments. So, massive C02 scrubbers exist for emergency use and the ventalation system is over-built. Suffocation is not likely.

It should also be noted that, even in the highly unlikely event of a complete and total systems failure, the volume of breathable air on the ship divided by the relatively small crew size means that even with the maximum planned compliment of 310, the crew would have three days of "Shuttle Breathing" before they would asphyxiate.

Shields

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.

Shield power is ran off of the primary buffer instead of the combat buffer, due to increased power demands. The entire power sub-system had to be re-built, with much larger-capacity super conductors added to improve capability.

The Saratoga's main emitter is a standard dual-band type. Due to a mistake caused by missing schematics, the Saratoga went on it's first few deployments without the requisite array of small backup emitters. See After-Market Retrofits for how this problem was remedied.

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.

FTL Systems

Standard FTL Drive

The Saratoga's standard Python Reactor-driven propulsion systems are, at best, rudimentary. The ship's standard FTL drive was left stock and completed with spare parts scavenged from the junkyard. It is one of the few systems to which the crew did not make major upgrades or modifications(unless you count "cobbling bits of it together" as a modification). The drive has been known to break down and requires frequent, intensive maintenance.

When the crew first obtained the ship, again not fully up to speed on the systems, the Python Reactor was operated like a Python Inverter.

Out Of Design Limit Incident

The Saratoga's photonic core suffered a breach. It is unclear exactly how it was repaired(fixing a breached photonic core is considered a technical impossibility), but the drive was never replaced.

Jump Drive

Like nearly all school ships, the Saratoga is equipped with a Shoten Jump system, which at one point is modified for time travel(quite illegally). As with other ships, the Saratoga is not able to generate enough power by itself to use the drive over any great distance.

Other Systems

The Satyaran-designed Hyperspace window generator was kept in-tact, even though the system was never made to function properly. On a few occasions it was used to defeat various obstacles, and even eventually formed the basis for a weapons system.

The Saratoga also posses a device referred to as a slip-stream drive, though details are shoddy at best. Like the hyperspace window its known to be experimental and highly temperamental, possibly having never worked successfully at all.

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.

Nimbus

On most missions, the Saratoga carried the semi-disposable Nimbus fighter, but on later missions and whenever able, carried the Allapa Dismissive multi-engine vehicle. While somewhat limited as a star fighter, it was much more valuable as a multi-role assault craft.

After-Market Retrofits

AP Cannon

During the Remus Star Cluster mission, the crew designed and built a powerful anti-proton cannon, the first such weapon of its type. Originally built to dig them out of trouble(the ship had become trapped within a deep fissure on an astroid), the device proved extremely effective as a weapon, though only at close range(an AP stream travels at only around 80 PSL, not much faster than the fastest sublight speeds most ships travel at). The weapon is typically not charged to more than 20%, with 20% easily able to anhialate most targets. However, the AP cannon has very high energy requirements and is extremely fragile.

In later missions, a second AP cannon was added and the system made more robust. The crew was eventually called upon to design a fleet-ready variant to be mounted on ships in the Gailen fleet revision.

Auxiliary Missile Systems

Its heavily implied that the Saratoga might be carrying a Bedlam, though the ships size and total armament would severely limit the fire power of such a system.

Hunter: "God bless the man who figured out you could scale up a belt-fed machine gun to the point where the bullets could be replaced by N2 missiles." Cindy: "How do you know it was a man?" Jason: "Let's be real, here: it was a man."

Rail Guns

The Saratoga has also been outfitted with forward-mounted railguns, thought these are typically considered a "backup" armament. The projectiles fired are roughly a foot long and three inches across. According to the specifications of the system, they are made from depleted uranium. However, Cloud admits that, since ammunition has to be custom-tooled, they are usually made from plain old steel or "Really, whatever the hell we have lying around." Due to the speed of the projectiles, the impact of using other materials is negligible.

Rail guns offer a few important advantages. By firing solid projectiles, they generally bypass shields intended to scatter directed energy weapons. It also requires significantly less power to operate. The range is limited compared to beam cannons, restricted to first radius, but as a close-in weapon it is second to none.

The primary downside, of course, is ammunition. The Saratoga typically has enough ready slugs on hand for about twenty seconds of continuous fire.

Light Hawk Wings

The Saratoga's standard shield compliment initially called for one large emitter and eight smaller emitters to both augment and backup the main. The crew instead used a single large emitter that was three times more powerful than necessary, negating the need for augmentation. Initially, the backups were completely forgotten (See: "Schematics" for details).

During a refit, the crew was tasked with adding the missing backup emitters, and Jason suggested using tri-band shield generators. When it was brought to Jason's attention that there was no such thing, Jason suggested they invent tri-band emitters.

What came out of the team's effort was a device capable of creating deflectors, bubbles, and projected shields. Since the Foundation was not presently using projection-shield technology at the time, the Eighth Power was also required to re-invent that technology largely from scratch.

The finished product was really just a standard if better-designed dual-band emitter alongside a projection emitter in the same module. It used a variety of highly exotic compounds and called for a great deal of energy. Still, the crew opted to install sixteen instead of the eight called for in the design. Any four emitters should have been able to protect the ship, but with the new design, just two of them could provide full shielding for a limited time(equivalent to one-half the main shield, but adequite to protect the small vessel). Further, any one emitter could replace the navigational deflector.

The projection shields ended up being one of the most important aspects. Though they could only use them for a few minutes at a time(ten to fifteen, depending on power demands), sixteen separate shield projects in an over-arching formation rendered the ship immune to most conventional weapons. The crew had fused technology from ground-based projection shields with that of the space-based counterpart, allowing them to create graceful arcs and complex shapes. The only area of the ship not covered was the engine intakes and outlets, so only a very lucky shot could hit them.

The system was named after the Light Hawk, one of the Monster Gods and King of Protection.

Schematics

Like most ships built by the Foundation, a full set of actual schematics(not the fictitious ones widely circulated) would be highly classified and available only to a small handful of individuals. The original design team, the yard commander, and the individual dock commanders on the production line. Construction teams would only have access to the blue prints that pertained to their specific sections, while the sub contractors who built the individual support systems would have had only the plans involving their components. Prints would have stopped just after their sections.

A full set of schematics would be accessible on both paper and computer form, in a highly secured room at the ship yard. The computers would be non-networked, official schematics are hand-delivered by special couriers. All tolled, less than two hundred people would ever have seen a realistic set of the ship's blueprints.

This caused some issues as, by the time Hunter and his crew inherited the ship, the actual schematics had been lost, along with most of the operations manual. A single, incomplete, and very precious set of schematics and manuals was found at Utopia Gregaria, and quickly lost by the crew(Cindy famously lost one of the most vital manauls, and attempted to replace it by writting it from memory. She had never read the original manual).

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.

Destruction

During Retrospectus, the original Saratoga was destroyed, the crew being forced to abandon ship. This occurred in an alternate timeline, so the crew stole the Saratoga from THAT timeline and brought it back to the main. The ship was unofficially renamed the Saratoga Infinity, as it's archboard indicated. However, all internal insignia and computer systems retained the old Saratoga name. As such, the name Saratoga Infinity was only ever used when directly referencing the fact that it was a different ship.

Retrospecus is canonically the second to last Gudersnipe story, making the ship used in Line in the Sand the Saratoga Infinity(the "refit" referenced at the beginning of that story concerns a careful examination of the new ship), and all subsequent appearances of the Saratoga are actually the Infinity. It is important to note that the ships are functionally identicle, the alternate timeline version of Hunter had stopped using the Saratoga very shortly after his time at Gudersnipe.