Vincent Mk. 39/42 Corvette
The words "light" and "WarShip" are rarely seen in the same sentence, but today we are indeed going to be looking at the lower end of the mass curve, even if it is a mass curve that bottoms out at a hundred kilotons. Long a mainstay of navies across human space from the Terran Hegemony all the way to the Clans today, the Vincent-class Corvette has been performing patrol and picket duties for over seven hundred years. It may not be much compared to other WarShips, but when you can express a machine's service life as a noticeable percentage of
recorded human history, it's gotta be doing something right.
The Vincent is actually quite heavy for a Corvette, topping the scales at 420,000 tons. That's almost twice the mass of any other corvette-class before or since. What do you get for all that mass? Not much, I'll admit. The Vincent compares decently to most other vessels of her day, but is no match for any post-Star League vessel. Admittedly, that's more because of shifting roles, with modern corvettes forced into combat roles any self-respecting navy would use a destroyer or even cruiser for. That's not the Vincent's job, that's not what we're going to look at.
With a thrust curve rated at 2gs and a 3g maximum, the Vincent's maneuverability is respectable, if not as flashy as the Pinto or the spleen-congealing Mako. It can avoid trouble by outrunning(or at least pacing) most other WarShips or DropShips, while Vincents assigned to SL Pursuit squadrons are well-equipped for catching their prey. My favorite part of this thrust rating is that if you get into a close fight with enemy DropShips and they get on your tail(they will, trust me), you can maneuver like a normal 3/5 WarShip while keeping a bit of thrust in reserve for an ECHO maneuver to try and clear your baffles, as it were. (Note to self: Find out who to pester to get the SLS
Crazy Ivan canonized.) The thrust curve also gives you some redundancy, allowing you to soak an engine hit while still maintaining decent performance, while 3/5 vessels can find their maneuvering options severely curtailed or even crippled with only one or two such hits.
Of course, no amount of speed will prevent you from getting hit. Speed ain't armor,
armor is armor. People have long derided the Vincent-class for sporting a mere 108 points of ferro-carbide armor(lamellor on Clan-refitted vessels), but it's actually quite respectable when you stop and look closely. This armor level is noticeably higher than the Vigilant our Vincent replaced, and much tougher than the Pinto that was its only real rival. This edge grows even more when you add in the Vincent's 40 SI for a total of 188 points of damage absorption. This is 42% more than the Pinto's total of 132, and brings the Vincent to parity with the Bonaventure, the only other comparable vessel of the era.
So the hull of your Vincent may be respectable, and even nigh-on sturdy. You're still not tough, so don't act like it. Every single capital weapon known to man will threshold you save the Barracuda, and that's solo. It's not physically possibly to create a capital bay that cannot force critical hits on a Vincent, and there are plenty of ships out there that can reduce your hull to faintly glowing dust with a single salvo. Just accept the fact that crit happens, and try to stay the hell away from anything bigger than you. The good news is that any other corvette you find will be just as vulnerable as you. In addition, your damage threshold is just high enough that no fighter-carried weapon can threshold you until we see the development of such things as the Heavy Gauss Rifle or Anti-Ship Missiles. Most pre-Clan DropShips are in the same boat, either completely unable to generate a threshold crit, or only capable of it after closing to short standard range. Unsurprisingly, the only exceptions are recently-released designs like the Pentagon. As a result, non-capital enemies will have to slog through your armor the hard way, hopefully giving you time to either finish them off with your own weapons, or escaping to the cover of friendlies.
(You may have noticed that I'm largely ignoring the Mako-class, the only other known corvette class of the pre-Succession Wars era. This is intentional. Despite being named a corvette, the Mako is pretty clearly a destroyer. It's built like one, and the vessel's stated role of escort is a destroyer job, not a corvette's. Comparing it to a Vincent or any other pre-Clan corvette is a pointless waste of time.)
I guess you're all wondering when I'm going to get around to the warfighting end of this WarShip, and I guess I can't string you guys along forever. The Vincent's main armament is composed of four 10-class Naval AutoCannons, one in each fore-quarter and broadside arc, backed up by a twin mount of Barracudas poking out the bow. Closer in, this is packed up by a pair of large lasers riding alongside each cannon as a last-ditch fighter defense. Much like the armor, this may seem criminally light, but on closer inspection isn't bad at all. Those NACs give you good reach and a punch that cannot be ignored by medium WarShips, to say nothing of the chunks they'll tear out of any DropShip's hide. You won't one-shot many combat ships, but a second salvo will do the job more often than not. Their placement in overlapping arcs allows you to concentrate your fire on single targets, allowing you to land heavier salvos than expected, and actually outperforming the more heavily-armed Pinto. At this scale of combat the Barracudas also represent a healthy chunk of firepower, giving you an extremely accurate and long-ranged hit that can threshold many WarShips, put a serious dent in any contemporary DropShip, and leave a fighter wondering why its front half decided to go wander off for tea. Throw in all the fun tricks you can do with any capital missile, and a Vincent's bow tubes alone can represent a major asset in any light space engagement. Heck, they'd even make decent infantry support weapons when you throw in all the accuracy bonuses capmissiles(especially 'Cudas) get when used an an anti-surface role, as well as their reduced blast radius making them less of a risk to your own troops.
The Vincent's small array of lasers may seem like a token armament at best, but they're well-placed to do their job. Their positioning alongside the big NACs means they're probably already pointed at the enemy, and like the NACs you can combine two bays onto a single target. Their placement in twin mounts means that these bays are just powerful enough to generate threshold crits on any fighter squadron, exactly what you need to be doing if you hope to drive them off.
Transport is not one of the Vincent's main roles, but it can do the job in a pinch. A lack of docking collars means it cannot carry any DropShips through hyperspace, and any that wish to dock will have to use one of the bays doors. That said, a ninety-kiloton-plus cargo bay does give you plenty of room for hauling bulk gear, as well as supplies for your own extended cruises. In a pinch, a Vincent can definitely work as an armed transport. As far as auxiliary craft go, the Vincent is pretty well-equipped. A squadron of fighters gives you a nice screen, as well as possibly extending your combat reach well beyond that of your guns. Four shuttlebays can be loaded with cargo shuttles or gunships, though in light of the Vincent's role as a picket, I'm probably advise at least a couple of long-range scouts.
A bit of attention should be paid to the Mk 42 variant of the Vincent, those vessels that have been upgraded to Clan standards. Armor, speed, and capital weapons remain identical to the Star League's Mk 39, though the conventional lasers have been upgraded to Clan ER models. Raw punch remains essentially unchanged, but the increased range will help in scoring a few extra hits before enemies get in close. Like all Clan WarShips the Mk. 42 also gains a harjel system and lithium fusion battery, gaining a bit more durability and allowing it to keep up with other Clan capital assets or serve as an effective fleet scout. We've been told that Clan vessels also mount HPGs(as well as those of certain Spheroid fleets), but there is nothing confirming the presence of such on any Mk. 39 or Mk. 42, so nothing can be assumed there.
With even less confirmation than the HPG, very little can be said of the Vincent's detachable jump sail. Barely a footnote in the original TRO 2750 and even less in TRO 3057, we know nothing of what it can or cannot do, or if it even still exists or is destined to be retconned the next time a developer hears about it. No real idea what benefits or drawbacks such a system might have, though it would probably be useful for a vessel that must react quickly while charging the drive.
How do you use a Vincent? That really depends, as it was built for one set of roles, while the vagaries of fate have forced it into entirely different ones. Post-Amaris, Vincents are likely to operate by themselves or even as command ships as they are to be in a proper WarShip division. A captain of such a vessel has been given command of a huge concentration of resources and prestige. Problem is, he's expected to operate as such with what was meant to be a cheap and almost disposable asset. He cannot place his rather fragile vessel in great harm, but at the same time he is expected to pit the awesome power assumed to be available to any WarShip captain against modern ships that are tougher, faster, and nastier than his, and constantly growing more so. My advice would be to operate in a fire-support role, using the range of those NACs and missiles to back up your own DropShips and fighters while staying out of the thick of things. An ideal usage would be to send your smaller craft well ahead, and use off-map Bearing-Only launches to support them as a kind of spaceborne artillery battery. If anything truly nasty breaks through and heads your way,
run. Even for Clan officers, the loss of personal honor is a far lower cost than the loss of the ship. If you can spare the thrust, don't forget that evasive maneuvers have no effect on capmissile to-hit numbers, so you can use your Barracudas to try and dissuade pursuers even while making their own fire more difficult.
But what about large operations, you ask? With the bevy of information being released these days about eras when the word "fleet" wasn't accompanied by a snicker or sad sigh, this deserves attention. To understand this role, we must take a look at large fleet operations. Fleets have two parts, one defensive and one offensive. The offensive part of the fleet is fleet's core. Be it a battleship division, carrier group, or troop transport squadron, their job is to get to the enemy and do impolite things to him using weaponry carried onboard or on smaller units carried within. The rest of your fleet is the defensive escorts, whose job is to foil the plans of anyone seeking to prevent the aforementioned impoliteness. In order to intercept these threats, you have to detect them first, and you have to do so with enough advance notice that you can catch them and stop them before they reach your core. Now spacecraft have pretty good detection ranges(about 100,000 km for large craft radar, to say nothing of other sensor types), but space is a lot, LOT bigger, and system-transit speeds let you cross distances like that in no time. Therefore, you have to detect them further out. As a result, the deployment of a fleet's escorts and scouts looks a lot like this:
In this metaphor, your fabulous fleet's core is in Tony Stark's fabulous head. Your fleet will actually have multiple shells of glowy things, with each one represents an escort or picket. The innermost shells will be your most powerful escorts, be they cruisers, carriers, assault DropShips, whatever. Successive shells will be additional escorts, even down to fighter screens carried by things as small as a Leopard-CV. Your outermost shells are your picket ships, whose job is to detect threats at a great distance, and vector interceptors and escorts towards them so they can be stopped long before reaching the Big Giant Head. This is where a Vincent belongs. Sure you can use it as an escort, but you'll get the most out of your investment here. The Vincent patrols out here far beyond the sensor range of the fleet's core, making sure that no enemies are approaching along its vector. If it does find something, it can engage the enemy directly if appropriate, or send a message to fleet units further in, withdrawing while keeping tabs on the interlopers. Ideally, the Vincent's detection range would be boosted even further by pretending to be its own Tony Stark and deploying a shell of glowy bits using its complement of shuttles. Their sensor range is far smaller than the WarShip's, but every bit helps.
In contrast, killing a Vincent is rather simple. You catch it, you shoot it, and you keep that up until you can see out the other side. The placement of all weapons along the sides and bow creates an obvious hole to take advantage of, and fighters and DropShips are advised to use it. Be careful though, as a Vincent can always ECHO and swing around to point a broadside where you least expect it. I don't care what you're commanding, nobody enjoys getting hit by a pair of NAC/10s.
