SSA304 HAM-128 Corsair Battlecruiser

Saturn Syndicate Ascendancy

Hawkings Astronautics (Military) HAM-128 Corsair Class Battleship

The HAC-124 Nomad’s prevelance in the SSA’s spacelanes, and the SSA’s urgent need for new ship hulls and a fleet meant that is was only a matter of time before militarised versions were created. Many had already undergone conversion to serve as assault ships, or armed merchantment. The SSA commissioned Hawkings Astronautics to create a full military version, to serve as a combat starship: the HAM-128 Corsair Battleship. The Corsair’s main unit is not dissimilar to the Nomad’s. The drive unit has been expanded, and the hyper-ray blisters upgraded, at the cost of the the Nomad’s own internal cargo bays.

The bulk of the Corsair’s firepower comes from the HAM 1200M weapons module. Built on the HAC-1200 series cargo modules used by the Nomad, the HAM 1200M mounts supplementary shield generators, plus a partical pellet gun, an astroburster cannon, and several additional hyper-ray blisters, some for close-defence. Each unit has it’s own minuture command centre, with firecontrol and sensor array, and provided it’s own power.This unconventional design is considerably cheaper than designing and building a whole battleship. However, despite this, the vessel has something of a glass jaw. Despite the overlapping shields from all five components, the ship is much more vulnerable than a conventional vessel. Damage control teams cannot move between the modules, leaving only the local crew to repair and battle damage. In particular, destruction of the main body leaves the crews in the weapons modules completely helpless, assuming they survive the explosion.

Theoretically, it would be possible to interchange the HAM 1200M and it’s civilian counterparts on both Nomad and Corsair. However, this has not been attempted in practise, and there is some concern that the couplings on the Nomad may not be up to the strain of handling the more advanced modules.