Keagan class Fast Transport
The closest direct ancestors to modern civilian jumpships, Fast Transports were highly specialized vessels designed to maximize jump range in order to cut down the travel time of high value cargoes or priority messages. All of these vessels shared traits that would become much more familiar with the modern jumpship. They generally featured poor maneuverability, limited internal capacity, and minimal to no defensive systems. In the age before the modern docking collar, this left them as largely niche vessels, uneconomical for most uses and only really useful where the need for speed outweighed every other concern.
The Keagan class was the largest of the type (excluding the later County class, which, though classified by her Terran builders as a Fast Transport, was built to warship standards), an attempt to overcome the limits of the Fast Transport through shear size. Though expensive to build and operate, the first Keagans proved highly capable, able to transport sufficient dropshuttles and bulk cargo to compete directly with the smaller, shorter ranged freighters that handled the bulk of space transportation at the time. Even so, the high costs associated with them made them unattractive to all but the largest merchant conglomerates or government entities, and as technology marched on, they were being increasingly beaten out by larger and larger vessels with greater carrying capacity.
It was the advent of the WarShip that allowed the Keagan to find a lasting niche. The Dreadnought and her successors each possessed an unparalleled jump range which allowed them to respond to threats with unmatched rapidity. However, as demonstrated by the campaigns of persuasion, on the attack their exceptional speed was hindered by the shorter jump range of the transports they were escorting. Thus, from the beginning of the WarShip era the Keagan took on renewed significance as a vessel that could still carry significant force (as much as a reinforced regiment of infantry and armor depending on its dropshuttle complement) while not appreciably slowing down the pace of operations. These capabilities kept the Keagan in production, with regular technology updates, well into the WarShip era.
Keagan class transports, despite an effort to replace them with the County class WarShip, remained a mainstay of most of the house militaries for nearly two hundred years, and were a direct inspiration for the modern jumpships now so familiar. The transition to the modern docking collar spelled the final end of the class, and many of the Keagan class vessels in Hegemony service would be recycled to provide materials for the new Liberty class jumpships slated to replace them. The ship would continue to serve an active role in most house fleets for a few more decades, but in time these vessels would be either recycled or passed off to periphery powers, before largely vanishing by the end of the Reunification War. The last known Keagan class transport was sighted at the end of the 27th century. This ramshackle and highly modified vessel (still unidentified to this day) was part of a fleet of equally ancient jerry rigged ship that attacked a Star League convoy on the edge of the Periphery, scoring a scandalous victory over the Cameron class Saint Joan after the battlecruiser suffered a catastrophic systems failure. Following the attack, the unknown pirates escaped and were never seen since.
Mass: 500,000 tons
Type: Primitive Jumpship (2279)
Transit Drive: 33,000 tons
Thrust Capacity: 1/2
Fuel: 5,000 tons (11,363, 43.472 tons per burn day) Pumps: 100 tons
Structure: 5,000 tons Integrity: 10
KF Drive (25 light year): 400,000 tons Integrity: 18
Jump Sail: 138 tons Integrity: 8
Control Systems: 1375 tons
Crew: 27 officers, 133 crew, 1201 tons
Heat Sinks: 226
Armor: 100 tons
Primitive: 4 fwd/aft, 5 fl/fr/al/ar
Standard (by refit or upgrade): 7 fwd/aft, 8 fl/fr/al/ar
Equipment:
4 Dropshuttle bays, 44,000 tons
6 Small Craft, 1200 tons
20 Lifeboats, 140 tons
Cargo: 5,606 tons
Weapons:
NL-45, fwd, 900 tons
2 White Shark tubes, fl/fr, 240 tons
Ammunition:
50 missiles, 2000 tons
Variant notes:
Before 2305, the Keagan's weapons are still experimental, and thus would probably only be used by ships operated by Terran Alliance military and government entities. For the rare civilian users, these weapons should be removed and either replaced with period appropriate standard weapons (basically the AC-5 and machinegun) or just turned into extra cargo space (3140 additional tons of cargo, bringing the baseline model to 8,746 tons).
Keagans built after 2300 benefit from an improved transit drive, improved fuel efficiency, a lighter sail, and a smaller command deck. These improve the ship's stats as follows: Fuel points increase to 12,500, tons per burn day decreases to 39.52. Sail integrity decreases to 4 (due to the lighter mass of the sail), heat sinks decrease to 218 (due to the smaller mass of the transit drive). Cargo capacity increases to 8,814 tons (11,954 tons if the ship is likewise unarmed). Unlike more mass produced designs, the Keagan is probably valuable enough that it would be refitted to new standards rather than sold off in favor of a new ship.
