Aar'ika-class Prowler

Aar’ika-class Prowler

Files:

Top:

Side:

Rear:

Front:

LXF:

Stats:
Armament:
-12x Mk. 2 MLS-S

Defenses:
-100cm dielectric composite armour underneath 50cm multi-spectrum baffling & absorbtion panels
-1x spatial distortion cloak (makes a temporary slipspace bubble around the ship to hide from extremely high intensity scans, but requires its own reactor & backup power system to run)
-10x chaff deployment modules
-10x decoy deployment modules
-2x DRFM jammer modules
-2x Pulse jammer modules
-4x Sweep jammer modules (each module sweeps its jamming from frequency to frequency in such a way that they cover part of each other's non-jammed frequencies at constantly changing speeds)
-2x Barrage jammer modules (these try to jam the frequencies that the other jammers don't)


Storage & Complement:
-2x SOIC deployment modules, 4 pod reserve each

Drives:
-1x Specialised Alcel Slipspace Drive (2,500 ly/day)
-1x SAS-C Mk. II

Dimensions:
185 metres long
70 metres wide
35 metres tall

Description:

After the debacle that was the Prudii-class Prowler, the Aar’ika-class was built from the ground up for minimum visibility, from its baffling panel system to its signal jammers. Extensive application of the latest technology gives the ship unprecedented levels of stealth, even when entering and exiting slipspace. The 12 MLS-S missile launch systems and two SOIC deployment modules give this prowler the ability to cause quite a sting, not counting the 12 MLS-TO warheads onboard.
However, the Aar’ika doesn’t come cheap. A single craft costs nearly as much as a Sarad-class Battlecruiser, although both have their strengths and weaknesses. All the equipment fitted to the Aar'ika means that if the ship were to have a crew typical of its size, their quarters would be almost unbearably cramped. Instead, this prowler is fitted with a dedicated smart AI, enabling the craft to be operated with only 8 crew onboard, providing additional room for 8 Vorpan Airborne units.

Quite a nice little ship! It's small but the gradual tile sloping over the double sided bricks combined with the craft's shape gives it a very good feel - dimensionally it feels right. The tile bottom for the nose also fits very well. I like.

Very nice design. These smaller ships can be annoying at times, so good on you for squeezing in such a small SNOT work into such a tiny space.

As per the usual with your ships, my issues with the design emanate from the description, not the model. First off, I maintain your stealth tech is still underpowered as heck. Secondly, eight crew for a 185-meter-long ship is absurdly small, even with extremely extensive automation; I'd bump that up to fifty, at the very least, maybe a bit more. Third... was evidently not that important, as I seem to have forgotten.

All in all, very good ship.

That's a NICE little ship! I love the design! You have a really cool, unique style!  Good ideas on the rest/description/ideas behind it too, although I agree with Tetrah on the crew count (and possibly the stealth systems.) I just LOVE this neat little thing's design!

@Everyone: Thank you. I wanted to try a stealth ship that was a bit smaller and didn't have that "I'm an amazing pointy sneaky ship" style that a bunch of other sci-fi stealth ships seem to have.

@Tetra & Dino: The stealth tech stats may not be clear (reminds me, forgot about the comms and scanning suites, I'll add those later) - you ain't gonna see this thing, visually or on other sensor systems. It's dark-coloured. It's highly absorbent (kinda like a paper towel ). It's tiny.
Arik had mentioned on my older prowler (which, yes, was a little larger in parts ) that the average ship wouldn't have the sensors to detect the mass of a "barely-there-by-comparision" ship - which, while that older model was thinly armoured and just thin in general, was still nearly three-quarters of klick long. This new one isn't even a third of that, and while it does carry as much armour it doesn't require nearly as much fuel, pressurised/gravitied (is "gravitied" even a word? ) decks, just space and stuff to carry in general.
Also, there's that spacial distortion cloak. Yes, it requires its own reactor to use, but that's a dedicated reactor - it'll run for a while. "Temporary" slipspace bubble means weeks at a time, and if you're scanning something for that long... well, it sounds interesting and I'd like to buy it. Unless you have slipspace probes and sensors - and I'm pretty sure a goodly amount of the PCG doesn't - you aren't going to see the Aar'ika in cloak unless you straight up run into it, and even then, the slipspace bubble might slide you over like water off a duck's back.
All that to say, it is terribly compact and hard to spot by a variety of sensors, cloak or not.

Now, as to the crew. The UNSC Port Stanley of Halo fame was a smidgen shorter than my Aar'ika at 160m, but was far more sophisticated in some respects (though not in all). Similarly to the above prowler, it was enhanced to run on a small crew, but in the case of Port Stanley it was able to be run by only one "smart" AI unit. I think that 8 crew and an AI would be sufficient for intelligence gathering duties and running the Aar'ika, with an additional 8 Airborne units to do the fighting. Yes, 8 crew may seem small, but on a ship where secrecy is key, most systems are run by the dedicated onboard AI, and a good deal of the space is either A) nonpressurised & without gravity or B) taken up by ship systems, 8 crew is just fine.

Considering basically every other cloak can do the exact same thing indefinitely, maintaining stealth for a few weeks isn't that impressive. As for crew... well, that's one ship, and a ship enhanced with Forerunner tech, no less. We're operating on much lower tech levels here.

Not every other cloak. Star Wars-type cloaks can't hide from gravity sensors, Force users, or being tracked by magnetic signature, and Star Trek cloaks were flat out outlawed by the Federation by 2311 (even then, they were able to be penetrated on multiple occasions and weren't always stable).

Now, enhanced with Forerunner tech - I'd make the opposite argument, actually. Forerunner technology is definitely a good deal harder to run electronically (forget about understanding) than human tech (although a human directly interacting with Forerunner tech seems to have less problems ), meaning that a craft using a lower tech level would probably get by using an AI a good deal easier. Port Stanley used Forerunner slipspace comms and slipspace drives, which no one really knows much about, but I'd make an educated guess that a human-based, human-made AI being able to run them almost guarantees a human-based, human-made AI being able to run other UNSC ships (and by proxy, a "smart" AI being able to run a similar tech level of ship - the Aar'ika - here).

Not quite; the fed's didn't outlaw'em, they were just banned from using them (except on special ships, like the Defiant- and even then, only a Romulan was allowed to operate it). Cloaks were actually quite stable; they were usually only penetrated by the standard Deus-ex-machina faire ST is known for (Though, because of the prevalence said DEM, I suppose you could argue that pretty much all ST tech fell under that category). But seriously, exceptions aside, the only thing capable of rendering a cloaked ST ship detectable was a tachyon detection grid, or the cloaked ship firing it's weapons- and even then, there was at least one ship that could fire it's weapons and still remain cloaked. And heck, we've still not gotten into the super, phasic, teleporting-into-another-universe cloaks that would be standard for SpecOps ships.

But I digress; at this point, we're just splitting hairs.

Yeah, all of the hair-splitting. I'm still not quite sure why you'd even need to be in cloak for more than a couple weeks at a time - a prowler's sensors really should be strong enough to allow it to hide somewhere in the outer edges of the target system/asteroid belt/literally any part of space that isn't near (within a few thousand km of) a station and just scan from there.

On a separate note, I think I might start drafting up actual blueprints for some of my ships. There's a few little details that I can't quite get right in Lego:

Aar'ika drawing:

The sensor antennas, the shape of the ship, all that. Lego gives me similar to what I want, but not the same.