While the Naval Upgrade Program of 2898 was primarily focused on modernizing the Impetuous and Hunt classes, it would also herald the creation of a small host of new and (hopefully) innovative designs meant to expand the Bastion's capabilities as both an offensive and a defensive force. The Adventurous class is the most well known product of this program (at least to the majority of the Bastion's planet bound populations), but engineers would also produce five additional designs, three of which would make it into production.
Of course "innovative" did not mean entirely unique. The Navy had grown quite accustomed to operating a capital fleet based around only two distinct hulls, and was in no mood to compromise the streamlined logistics that offered any more than they had to. As a consequence, all of these designs would share the same jump core, transit drives, control systems, and wherever possible the same hull form as the Impetuous class, while the majority of their weapons would be drawn from the same short list of offensive and defensive systems that had dominated the Bastion fleet all the way back to the creation of the SDS system. This would speed construction and simplify logistical demands, but it would also slow the design process quite a bit. After all, the Impetuous class was built to some very tight margins with little actual room for casual modification. Regardless of all the best wishes or pointed demands of the Admiralty, doing anything with it other than simply building more fast cruisers was going to require a lot of design revisions.
But the Bastion had a lot of talented naval architects to call upon, as well as the tremendous computing power available through AI assistance to rapidly run through near real world simulations of proposed desings, make the necessary changes, test those changes, make further revisions, and finalize six new designs, get four of them accepted, and see the first of those new designs laid down in just under a year. As an imperfect contrast, it took four years just to design the Agincourt class, and that had been during a time of national emergency.
While the Adventurous class would be produced for deep patrol duty, her three half sisters were intended to more directly support the main fleet, though only two of those were meant to offer that support in actual combat, in the form of fighter and long range fire support, respectively. The navy has never lacked for this support, but in accordance with the Coastal Defense Doctrine, it has been provided either by essentially fixed defenses or supporting dropships. The stated goal behind these new new designs, christened the Formidable and Relentless class, was to put these support capabilities onto a capital WarShip hull, giving them the mobility to follow the battle line more easily, and provide fighter and fire support into engagements where fixed defenses are limited or absent.
To achieve these specialized capabilities, the Formidable and Relentless follow the pattern set by the Adventurous by removing two of the standard five transit drives and removing most of the original weapon systems. In the case of the Formidable, the armament started with the same quad naval PPC mounts, missile tubes, and point defense carried by the Adventurous, but supplemented these weapons further with twelve mounts carrying sextuple dual purpose naval lasers, with six mounts covering each broadside. All on its own this represents a fairly respectable punch, as well as a fantastic anti-fighter battery, but the Formidable's primary weapon are the massive hangar decks that dominate its dorsal and ventral hull and give the ship its distinctively somewhat boxy appearance. These hangars allow the Formidable to launch and operate three full regiments of aerospace fighters, along with an expanded complement of support craft. The standard fighter complement of a Formidable class was originally intended to be entirely manned, however, budget constraints have generally compelled the navy to operate these ships with only one manned regiment of fighters, along with two regiments of drones. While this ensures that these carriers have a full complement and cuts back somewhat on manpower requirements, it has to be remembered that drone fighters operate at peak capacity under the control of an ATAC system, something the Formidable lacks. What the Formidable does have is greatly expanded fuel capacity and general storage to supply her massive flight group, along with two additional grav decks to see to the comfort of the ship's very large crew complement. This has led to some suggesting that the Formidable could serve as a viable mothership for Deep Patrol operations, however the Admiralty has consistently shut down any such suggestions, stating that most don't realize how quickly flight operations for such a large aerogroup could burn through the Formidable's stores if away from regular resupply.
The Relentless class was built for a different sort of long range support than the Formidable, and designers started out by completely stripping out the armament of the Impetuous (with the exception of the point defense bays), along with most of the fighter complement. The revised armament starts with the same twelve naval laser mounts seen on the Formidable, but laid out differently, with three in each forward quarter and single mounts spread out around the hull to maximize coverage. The true star of the show however are one hundred and sixty capital missile tubes, broken up into sixteen mounts of ten tubes each. Eleven of these mounts carried the standard Barracuda class missile, however five mounts were fitted for larger diameter Killer Whale missile tubes, which can provide additional conventional punch but have long made the class controversial due to the public perception that they were included purely as nuclear delivery systems. This was not entirely unfounded, as the Relentless was intended to have a secondary nuclear capability, and the conventional warhead of a killer whale missile could be removed and replaced with a module containing eight Santa Anna II warheads. But on the other hand, every capital ship in the Bastion's fleet, not to mention the numerous missile platforms defending the Bastion's worlds and every aerofighter in service, could also be used as nuclear delivery platforms. The Santa Anna II warhead was specifically designed to be mated to a Barracuda missile, and each capital ship already carried an undisclosed number of warheads for both their missiles and onboard fighter complement for use in extreme circumstances.
Oddly enough, the idea that the Relentless was any different seems to be entirely due to the perception that the killer whale missile just wasn't good for anything else. This in turn seemed to be based on reports dating back to the Black Fleet, when the Navy still used the full variety of naval missile systems among their relic ships. Gunnery exercises during this period netted several reports from commanders requesting that their ships be refitted to standardize their capital missile armament on the barracuda system, citing it as the superior choice. While it is true that this was partly due to the superior accuracy of the weapon, what most fail to understand was that the Bastion already had large scale production of barracuda missiles underway, while white shark and killer whale missiles were being produced in much smaller numbers. This meant a ship equipped with barracuda launchers could fire their missiles freely on the assumption that a fresh supply was always available, while those ships using white shark or killer whale systems had to husband their shots carefully, as they could never be sure when resupply of these missiles would be available. Somewhere along the line, this nuanced logistics based argument gradually morphed into the notion that the only reason to use a larger missile than the barracuda was to carry more nuclear warheads.
Misconceptions aside, the Relentless is able to put out an impressive hail of missile fire, able to bring sixty missile tubes to bear against one target on the broadside or the aft quarters and sustain fire for twenty minutes before exhausting the magazines in that arc of fire. With some maneuvering to unmask other arcs, the Relentless can sustain a missile bombardment for over an hour, sending a total of thirty two hundred missiles downrange before the last of its magazines have been emptied. This compares very well with the standoff missile capabilities of the Bastion's fixed defense networks, with a single Relentless class able to sustain fire longer and launch more missiles than the entire complement of missile platforms typically assigned to a command node, while possessing similar target detection and tracking capability. Fixed defenses have some advantage in a prolonged missile duel, as if they exhaust their magazines they can be quickly resupplied from storage facilities close by, while a Relentless that has exhausted its own missile supply will have to return to a friendly base, but operating as part of the battle fleet in the defense of the Bastion means those bases are unlikely to be particularly far away.
The last design to make it into production was unsurprisingly the most complicated and expensive to engineer, requiring an almost complete redesign of the hull form, and the first keels for what would become known as the Everett class wouldn't be laid down until eight months after the first of her half sisters had entered production. Just a glance at the ship's enormous cylindrical hull makes it apparent why this was the case. While the Formidable and Relentless were intended to provide support to the fleet in combat, the Everett was designed to serve as a repair ship, and as such had to be built around its cavernous semi-autonomous repair bay as much as it was the jump drive. Essentially since its founding, the Bastion hadn't seen much need for a substantial fleet of large repair ships. With the navy entirely focused on its coastal defense strategy, it was assumed that any capital ships in the fleet that found themselves in distress could be simply towed to the closest naval base for repairs. Even when the deep patrols began, the Navy was confident that the Maury Island, their sole Newgrange class, would be sufficient to handle any emergencies among a patrol fleet that might require its services.
Attitudes would change during the Naval Upgrade Program, which planned to add twelve new Adventurous class frigates to the fleet and thus significantly increase the tempo (and the chance of an accident or incident stranding a ship far beyond the Bastion's borders) of the Deep Patrols. In addition, the Maury Island was beginning to show her age. One hundred and fifty years old and originally built in the Terran Hegemony, the Maury Island was beginning to suffer the same maintenance problems suffered by the ships of the Black Fleet due to having been built in an essentially foreign yard, only magnified because the Maury Island was so big that the Bastion didn't even have a drydock large enough to accommodate her for a full overhaul. Repairs and upgrades to the aging vessel could thus only take the form of an escalating and often confusing series of patchwork refits. Her actual repair facilities, though as massive as the largest shipyards operated by the Bastion, were also undeniably old, even basic in configuration, with no options of a pressurized work environment or any of the automated assistance available to a Bastion naval repair yard. Instead, the Maury Island threw manpower at the issue, requiring a crew of over eight thousand personnel and even an integral complement of workmechs to operate at maximum capacity.
The designers of the Everett were thus given the unenviable task of building a ship with all the same capabilities of the Maury Island, as well as the automation and capability for the pressurized work environment the Maury Island lacked, on a hull only slightly more than a third of the total mass of the Maury Island. This meant compromises at every turn. Any notion of retaining more than token elements of the original hull form of the Impetuous were immediately discarded. Instead the Everett would have to have an enormous, lightly built cylindrical hull stretched out to the very limits of the volume that its core could safely jump through hyperspace. If protection hadn't already been compromised by the shear volume needed to be protected, it was definitely compromised by the need to save weight, and the Everett is very much not a combatant. This is only reinforced by the ship's almost token defensive armament of six quad mounts of naval lasers, six more octuple mounts of short range anti-fighter lasers, and a beefed up point defense system, all distributed evenly to provide some protection from every direction. All this scrimping and saving freed up the necessary tonnage for the all important semi-autonomous repair bay, which dominates the dorsal hull of the ship and can comfortably accommodate an Impetuous class cruiser or its various half sisters (with the exception of another Everett of course). Technically this is a significant reduction in capacity compared to the Maury Island, which was able to accommodate even the battleship Washington, but with the Washington no longer assigned to deep patrol duties, this was considered an acceptable compromise. To support and operate the repair bay, the Everett has quarters for a little over 3600 crew, technical, and security staff, less than half that required by the Maury Island, and for simple overhauls, maintenance, or resupply operations, the repair bay can actually operate with little to no human oversight. A large cargo hold and hangar space for a fleet of shuttles completed the redesign, though once again compromises had to be made. It was simply physically impossible for an Everett to carry the shear volume of replacement parts, machinery and other cargo that the Maury island can. This storage capacity is still adequate to handle most cases of a ship in distress, however. In more extreme cases, the Everett would most likely have to operate as the centerpiece of an entire salvage fleet, bringing along additional manufacturing and cargo units for support.
The Bastion would build twelve each of the Formidable, Relentless, and Everett classes during the first decade of the 30th century. Of these three classes, the Everett has been the most active by a wide margin. Though it has only occasionally been necessary for these ships to deploy to assist another ship in distress, they have also seen heavy use supplementing the Navy's existing maintenance capabilities. They would also be called in after the infrequent hostile encounters faced by the navy. In 3032 the Yardship Swan Island would be tasked with salvaging portions of the wreck of the Ministry of Communications ship Ptolemy, bringing the remains of its command deck, main computer, and crew quarters back to Martin's Landing. In 3069, the Bremerton and Portland would be dispatched to perform emergency repairs on the destroyer Eskimo and the frigate Cochrane after the engagement between Patrol Force 7 and a blakist task force, as well as assist in salvage and recovery efforts at the battle site, while a week later Swan Island would be dispatched to salvage the wreck of the last remnant of that blakist force, the Luxor class cruiser Thebes, after it had been caught and killed forty light years away from Martin's Landing. The Tacoma, Bainbridge Island, and Kirkland would, under heavy escort, accompany the mass sortie into the surrounding space that followed (commonly known as the Grand Tour), though this massive excursion would locate very few blakist ships for the yardships to pick apart.
Compared to the Everetts, the Formidable and Relentless classes have had effectively uneventful careers, having never once been called upon to fire their guns in anger. Also unlike the Everetts, the Formidables and Relentless's have regularly had to fight to justify their own existences in the Bastion's almost perpetually peacetime Navy. The nemesis of the Formidable class has long been the Lee class Fleet Escort dropship, which had the capability to carry two wings of aerofighters, was already available in large numbers, and most importantly to the Senate, was just so much cheaper to both build and operate than the Formidable, making it entirely practical and cost effective to field four such ships rather than a single Formidable. The Navy of course made the counter argument that it was not as simple as just counting fighters, and the Formidable also brought the tough hull, heavy protection, and firepower of a capital WarShip to that equation.
To many, however, that argument would ring hollow. After all, what threats did the Bastion face that warranted the commitment of a twenty two billion dollar carrier on top of all the cruisers and destroyers and escorts the Bastion already had? Similar arguments would also bedevil the Relentless class, augmented by the popular perception about that ship's design role. The two classes were commonly seen as the last gasp of a paranoid past, built for a war against an invader like the SLDF that simply did not exist. The discovery of the Clans in the 3050s might have reversed that trend, but instead it only made things worse. As the old guard that dominated the Senate pushed relentlessly for open war, the public began to see the Formidable and Relentless, and to a lesser extent the rest of a navy, as a potential tool for those same warhawks to exercise their centuries old grudges. As the Blue Revolution swept through the Bastion, the old guard saw itself forced out of power, and economic uncertainty and brutally slashed defense budgets followed, the Formidable and Relentless classes found themselves at the head of the chopping block. Only a herculean effort by the Admiralty managed to spare the classes from the mothballs or the scrapyards, but all twenty four ships between the two classes would find themselves placed in extended ordinary by 3056, along with seventy five percent of the fleet's other capital ships.
As the economy returned to stability, the political aftershocks of the Blue Revolution began to die down, and the Senate acknowledged that regardless of their own intentions the Clans still remained a potential threat, the Navy would also begin to recovery, pulling ships out of ordinary and working back up to a total fleet strength of three hundred capital ships by the mid 3060s. Initially however, the Formidable and Relentless were not part of this revitalized navy, having failed to win out against their critics in the aftermath of the Blue Revolution. Their reprieve would not come until the encounters between the Bastion and the blakists in 3069. The apparent eagerness of the blakists to rely on nuclear weapons during the battle with Patrol Force 7 as well as the sights of the badly damaged destroyer Eskimo and other damaged ships from the force not only shook public perception but also shook the Admiralty out of its own complacency. Almost every capital ship on the navy roles would be mobilized, and this included the Formidable and Relentless classes. While the entire fleet would move to higher degree of nuclear readiness, including ensuring that each capital ship would have their warheads already fitted missiles and ready to fire in the event of another encounter with the blakists, the Relentless class would take this preparation to its logical extreme. As though in acknowledgement of the public perceptions surrounding the class, the Navy would authorize the activation or assembly of anywhere from thousands to hundreds of thousands of additional Santa Anna II warheads, and possibly larger Peacemaker II warheads as well, to equip the Relentless and her sister ships as nuclear strike platforms.
Fortunately, outside of "shootex" weapon testing, the Navy was not called upon to actually use these weapons, and the Admiralty would gradually reduce the active fleet back to pre-war levels as it became clear that the blakist threat was largely confined to the inner sphere. The Navy would return to standard peacetime operations by 3080, which included moving most of the Formidable and Relentless classes back into extended ordinary. Six of each class would be retained with the peacetime fleet, sufficient to keep two of each active continuously. Though the Formidables primarily rely on drones for their fighter complement and most of the vast numbers of nuclear warheads once carried by the Relentless have been either returned to storage, repurposed as rockbreaker charges, or dismantled, these ships serve as core elements of a heavy reaction force intended to serve as the first response to any major incursions by foreign powers.
While the Formidable, Relentless, and Everett classes would make it into production and service, two more designs would fail to make the cut. The arguably more conventional of these two was the Incomparable, which took the mass gained from the same downgraded propulsion systems seen on the Formidable and Relentless and poured it entirely into more guns, adding an additional thirty nine Whirlwind/Imperator guns to the existing armament of the Impetuous class to produce what the designers claimed would be a battlecruiser able to engage full sized battleships on an equal footing. Of course, the Bastion was not expecting to actually fight battleships anytime soon, and some of the oldest members of the Admiralty felt that a slower cruiser carrying what was described as a "classically American" gun battery was just a little bit too close to the failed Agincourt class to get the green light, and the design was rejected.
The second rejected design was somehow even more visually striking than a pile of naval guns masquerading as a WarShip, even though it seemed to really only be working towards the same intent using different methods. Instead of numerous standard sized guns, the designs for the Thunderous class instead called for one massive gauss gun to be added to the standard armament of an Impetuous class cruiser (along with an additional quad mount of naval PPCs mounted aft likely as an afterthought). Though the simulated models of the Thunderous looked undeniably impressive, the actual projected performance of its spinally mounted gauss cannon seemed to leave much to be desired, and the Thunderous' designation of "Siege Cruiser" only came about after careful deliberation over what this massive weapon might actually be useful for. Despite the Thunderous being an otherwise fairly capable ship, and the popular memes about "a gun you mount capital ships to", the design would not be selected for construction, as it didn't really have any useful capabilities that the standard Impetuous didn't already share.
