Well, since Hellbie is… indisposed (*cut away to an emerald
Hellbringer with the hatches welded shut, with a faint banging noise from the cockpit*), I’ve decided to toss my hat back into the ring at least once. By request, I’m covering the
Wakamiya salvage destroyer, one of the new units from the back of
Handbook: House Kurita. Most of the entries in the Handbook series brought us a new large naval support vessel, ranging from Davion’s Rapier destroyers and their green-painted mirror in Liao’s service up to the mighty Jormungand. The
Wakamiyas are rather closer to the Jormungand in size but they’re not battlecruisers, operating as something of a large aviation destroyer in wartime with the firepower to make attacking one require a serious commitment.
To understand the
Wakamiya, you first need to read about the
Glomar Explorer. Built to raise the wreck of Soviet submarine K-129 from the sea for the CIA by Howard Hughes, she was the original inspiration for the
Wakamiya - a direction I was given when I was asked to put the design’s stats together. (Yes, that means I’m the idiot responsible for building the raging weaksauce here! You’re welcome.) The
Wakamiyas don’t canonically have a suitably mustachioed eccentric creator, unfortunately, but the idea was to build a ship that can operate as the hub of a salvage operation. That’s much of the genesis of the ship’s generous vehicle support space, in fact. In wartime, those vehicle bays are filled by armed submarines, attack and reconnaissance VTOLs, and military hovercraft and light surface escorts. In the Jihad, you might want to add Hiryo WiGEs to that list - the ship has space to convert into battle armor cubicles, after all, and the sudden presence of a couple of squads of Raiden suits on someone’s deck could be a persuasive “suggestion” to heave to. In peacetime, while a
Wakamiya might operate with a few escorts, she can also support the operation of patrol boats, transport and survey helicopters, or salvage submarines able to dive deep and find whatever it is the Dragon requires from the ocean’s bounty. The fluid guns, lift hoists, and support craft can also support search and rescue or maritime salvage work, showing the Dragon’s sheltering paw instead of its sharp claws. Historically, the ship was named for the
first Japanese aircraft carrier.
To start off the general specs on the
Wakamiya, let’s go with her size, 50,500 tons. That’s an oddly specific number, the same displacement as
Glomar Explorer, and trust me, that’s not a coincidence by any means. A fusion power plant provides them with the ability to cruise unhindered by fuel constraints and as a bonus, it also lets the
Wakamiya generate fresh water (meaning it has to carry less consumables or can refill its own tanks for fire suppression without support) or raw hydrogen to refuel any units with fuel cell engines.
Considering the size and complexity of the unit, I’m not going to this point by point, but the armor is solid enough that breaching it will take a lot of work, ranging from 200 points on the bow to 171 on the stern, with 160 points on each of the ship’s three turrets. All parts of the ship have 56 points in internal structure. That’s nice, although the risk of through-armor crits is high enough that the
Wakamiya is well-served to have her support units and weapons deal with a problem before too long. The centerpiece of the anti-surface armament (and the anti-air armament, for that matter) is the trio of Long Tom artillery pieces, enough to make the
Wakamiya a fair artillery battery all by itself. Each turret has a pair of PPCs while the bow and stern mounts have an array of LRM 20s – four racks on the front turret and two on the rear. It’s enough to make low altitude airstrikes considerably more interesting and the PPCs can make most aerospace fighters worry about the potential for being thresholded. Machine gun mounts ring the ship for suppressing anyone who feels like trying boarding operations or snuggling up close to the hull and detonating a bomb. The fluid guns I’ve mentioned before are on each side location in double mounts, allowing the ship to bathe targets in water or fire suppressant foam. Surface or submarine combatants are met with the ship’s array of torpedo tubes. A half-dozen twenty tube long-range torpedo launchers are spread across the front arcs with another mount on the stern. Four six-tube short-range torpedo launchers are also mounted and another one aft, potentially hammering anyone who gets past the submarine escorts and LRTs with a spread of torpedoes that may be able to force breach checks.
All the ship’s hardware is from the Age of War, so she doesn’t have anything fancy from the Star League era or the technological renaissance after the Helm Core. There are no known major variants but given their centuries of service and wide variety of duties over the years, I imagine some mission-specific configurations have crept quietly into service on the margins of history. The ships are fitted with just over 11,500 tons of bulk cargo space that can be sectioned off to support different types of salvage or mining operations – or defensive operations that can best be described as “aggressive”, as House Davion discovered in the Second Succession War. That doesn’t count the additional refrigerated storage or liquid tanks for various purposes. On top of that, a dozen light vehicle bays support a helipad aft of the conning tower while four more and a quartet of super-heavy vehicle bays provide docking for submarines below the water line. Eight heavy vehicle bays can carry surface escorts or hovercraft, as mentioned before. That makes for a formidable little vehicle complement on top of anything else the Dragon might have deployed on the waves.
Okay, that’s great, but if you’re not a son of the Dragon, you’re probably more interested in a different question: How do I kill it? I tried to make that at least a little difficult for you but these ships don’t dodge that readily provided you can bring weapons to bear. Artillery is one option but with their cruising speed, unless a
Wakamiya is operating close in to shore, she can frequently maneuver quite handily to evade fire from anything that’s not close enough for the Long Toms to return fire the same turn. Direct surface attacks are possible but complicated seriously by the ship’s own escorts, as are submarine attacks. That leaves coming in from above. If you’re going to do air strikes, the torpedo bombs on TacOps page 360 are worth a look but you need to be prepared for multiple passes or bring enough aircraft to hammer the ship hard enough to either sink her or force her to withdraw, which may be good enough for your purposes.
Reference: The only reference I could turn up is at
Sarna.net but you may also want to do a little reading about the ship's namesake,
Japanese seaplane carrier Wakamiya,
the Glomar Explorer, or
Project Azorian.
