Defender: FR2765:AFFS
Before writing this article I spent a few minutes reminding myself just how the Defender plays. It is a lot of fun. It is also one of the most luck dependent units you are ever going to play. We are talking spectacular success or demoralising failure. The very essence of eggshells with sledgehammers. So, without any further ado, the Defender-class battle cruiser.
“A battle cruiser has the guns of a battleship but gives up armour in favour of speed.” If you have spent any time around heavy aerospace in Battletech you get sick of that line. It wasn’t true in 1910 and it certainly isn’t true in Battletech. There are six known battle cruisers. The SLDF had the Black Lion I and II, and the Cameron. Basically operating at battleship thrust, cruiser sized but lacking LF batteries. The SLDF inspired Conqueror, battleship thrust, cruiser sized, and impossible to tell apart from a cruiser. There is the Mjolnir. Well, nothing light about its armour, though arguably it is an overgrown light cruiser. Then we have the Defender. Described by one author as “giving the customers what they want.” So just what did the customers get?
The Defender basically owes its existence to a reference to the FSS Golden Lion sacrificing itself in a throwaway line in the House Davion Source Book. The name’s similarity to the Black Lion led to years of speculation of a Davion battle cruiser, obviously of unsurpassed potency. How else could it defeat the Draconis Combine at Cholame? So it remained a myth until Field Report 2765: AFFS. Picking up another stub of history, Strategic Operations’ Defender-class, the Field Report combined the two giving us the ship we know today.
The basic story of the Defender revolves around the Terran Alliance getting a big ship (the Dreadnought) and the Federated Suns wanting a better one. If this wasn’t a family website I would mention just how perfect the art for the Defender is right now. This being the 2300s no one really knew what a WarShip should be like let alone how to build a big one, let alone how to fight one, let alone which technologies would be useful. So it took the Federated Suns forty-five years to build their response. Space ships are just big fighters right? Well, no as the earliest known aerospace fighter dates to 2314, a year before TAS Dreadnought. But the Suns’ thinking wasn’t far off that. Hairy big auto cannons were the name of the game. That’s what Dreadnought had! And mobility, the ability to dog fight wins battles. The problems started when the Suns wanted to pack more thrust than anyone had had before into a hull that stretched the Terran Hegemony’s capabilities. And the Federated Suns proved once again why they are known for their armies.
First the Federated Suns had to build a yard capable of building a 960,000 ton ship. Then they had to pack some engines in there. (Literally 288,000 tons of engines. Nothing gets close until the Texas 300 years later.) Then they had to make sure that turning corners at high thrust didn’t snap the 870 hull in half. The end result is that they had to make a few compromises.
First up the guns are damn good. How good? The broadside is better than a Cameron good. Better than a Texas. Okay, its bottom end of a modern ship its size, but for a ship its age? Damn good. The problem is the broadside. Getting all those engines in meant a little problem at the aft of the ship. No room for guns. Even all the way up into the broadside arc. Those guns the Defender does have are remarkably easy to use. Thanks to strong fore quarters you can consistently put 12 NAC20s and 2 NAC35s on target wherever the bow is pointing. Of course favouring bow-on combat means you are vulnerable to CIC and sensor hits. Fortunately they aren’t much of a problem for the Defender.
That big long hull with huge engines at one end and heavy guns at the other is highly stressed. Something the authors chose to simulate with a Structural Integrity that would make many a corvette cry. In turn this means armour is a bit lacking. It is not as bad as an Agamemnon and that’s my position and I am sticking to it. Come up against a modern cruiser and you can be sucking void really quickly. On the other hand you can pick your range against any target. That high thrust means you can choose to engage or not. In many cases the key word is “not”.
The other big compromise is the lack of docking collars. It was the 24th Century. Who knew what would be successful? So the Defender got four huge DropShuttle Bays instead of docking collars. Given that they can swallow anything short of a Mammoth there is not much to complain about. But the four bays could have been six collars. A typically big cargo bay and 20 Small Craft bays (a Fed Suns Wing) round out the internal capacity. AA is meh with the ever popular AC5 getting a workout. Point defence is very solid, especially aft.
The Davions finally got their battle cruiser in 2360 and it really truly could take on a Dreadnought. They got to enjoy it for eight years, then the first Monsoon launched. More ranged gun power, more armour, more cargo and fancy smanchy fighter bays and docking collars. Oh, and the Hegemony could build them faster. The Aegis in 2372 just made things worse. Not as bad as a Monsoon, but statistically just beyond what a Defender could handle. Realising that they were fighting a losing battle the Suns swallowed its pride after the first half dozen Defenders and lived off Hegemony scraps until the Davion I in the 25th Century. The Defender-class did not like peace. Basically hanger queens they spent most of their lives demobilised, coming out for the Reunification War, and Amaris Coup. The Succession Wars would be their last hurrah.
I said before that Defenders are fun. In the first test I took on an old Narukami. Both ships are glass cannons with huge guns and thrust to burn. It all came down to positioning, denying the enemy that extra to-hit modifier. No bracketing. The Defender’s advantage was it was firing five bays to the Narukami’s three. Over multiple rolls the chances add up. On the other hand, a single hit from the Narukami would penetrate the Defender’s armour, while they second hit on that location would be fatal. It was a dance of daggers and ultimately it came down to the luck of the ECM rolls.
The second test put the Defender up against an Aegis (2372). I played it straight with the time period being before Hegemony bracketing. The Aegis had no chance with positioning. It just had to rotate and hope for the best. The Aegis’ has a weaker salvo than the Defender, but it has much better armour. And the weapons it has are almost tailor made to not quite breach the Defender’s armour. A fight to a stand-still was the result. Luck played far less of a role as both ships had similar weapons, but when the dice went against the Defender it hurt a lot more. A Dreadnought would play out in nearly the exact same way.
The important thing in both of these battles was the Defender could win. Especially against light opponents it can run them down and beat them up. The high thrust makes driving it a dream compared to traditional cruisers. The guns are still dangerous enough that anything with flanks less than 150 points are vulnerable to a lucky salvo, making a Defender a threat to big ships, right up to the end of the Star League. Basically you are driving a million ton WarShip with the ethic of a hover tank pilot.
Defeating a Defender is a matter of staying calm. They are soft. Oh so soft. I can’t say how soft they are. Cruiser weapons bleed them like nothing I have seen. You go from “float like a butterfly” to “where the heck did my engines go” in single hits. Hellbringer pilots would know the feeling. Still, Defenders can take hits. Typically it is peck, peck, smash. As an opponent you have to stay calm and wait for that smash. Don’t try and turn and burn with the Defender. It’s not going to happen. Keep your broadside on them. Maximise your chances of hits, and hope your armour lasts. Lack of bracketing means the Defender is going to want to brawl. Anything can happen there.
