STM-O Sternensturm — 40t, TRO3145:LC
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The Lyran OmniFighter force is a cruel cruel formation.
They don't put armour on them... they start with armour and carve out the room for the fighter parts. Even the Budget Omni Morgenstern is damn near unkillable.
With the Jihad leaving most of the Commonwealth’s infrastructure in tatters, and the scrappy little
Seydlitz simply too small to remain competitive much longer in the face of increasing amounts of ClanTech and other advanced weaponry (for all that it and its pilots gave it their best shot anyway), the LCAF needed a new light aerospace platform. The heavy
Eisensturm and medium
Morgenstern were already proving the worth of OmniFighters, so it was only natural that the
Seydlitz’ replacement would also be an Omni.
(For the record, the tongue-twisting name hung on this bird actually more-or-less translates to “
StarStorm”, but I’d imagine that didn’t stop English-speakers in-universe dubbing it ‘the Steiner Stutter’. :D I also have to wonder if someone was looking at the names of the other two Lyran OmniFighters and decided to play mix-and-match with their component words, but that might just be my strange sense of humour at work. ;D)
The first thing the Lyrans had to do was suck up the inevitable jokes about their national stereotype and accept that to be competitive with Clan birds like the
Batu and the
Avar, their new OmniFighter was going to have to come in at the upper end of the ‘light’ category and mount an XL fusion engine. Not cheap, especially when you need to field them in the numbers you do any light starfighter, but building the
Morgenstern with an SFE probably saved them enough to pay for a lot of the lead-in work. ;) At forty tons and packing a 320XLFE (with only the base 10 DHS), the
Sternensturm can keep up with a good many smaller birds and is competitive with most other lights, so Lockheed/CBM hit the sweet-spot on that score; that it only comes with four tons of internal reaction-mass is concerning in light of the long-standing industry standard of five, but the
Morgenstern managed fine with four tons of internal fuel and supplementary drop-tanks, so the LCAF probably learned enough from the experience to manage the
Sternensturm’s fuel-fraction just fine.
The next step was the armour-fraction. A search of the TRO suggests that the LC either doesn’t manufacture reflective armour or simply doesn’t use it for one reason or another, so the designers chose to wrap the STM-O in eleven-point-five tons of Heavy Ferro-Aluminium. Frankly, at 76/57/38 the
Sternensturm boasts the sort of toughness that would have been envied by fighters half-again or even twice its mass during the Succession Wars era. :o
All of this left the STM-O with ten tons of pod-space, and Lockheed/CBM’s ‘officially approved’ loadouts put it to good use. The Prime configuration is clearly meant for medium-to-short-range engagements or air-to-surface Strike passes: triple ERMLs in the nose offer decent hitting power and reach, while the SSRM-4 launchers in each wing share a ton of ammunition as they provide additional crit-seeking power, either through breaches in armour or simply hammering home ‘threshold’ hits against other fighters.
Sternensturm Alpha is clearly crafted in loving homage to the
Seydlitz, and possibly to ease transition training for former SYD pilots. Its only weapon is an ERPPC, backed by a PPC Capacitor(!) and a two-ton Targeting Computer(!!). Capable of delivering surprisingly heavy ‘sniper’ shots at extended ranges or dogfighting like the -Z1 of old, with the armour of a brawler so it can back up that swagger (even when charging the Capacitor, the whole armament is exactly heat-neutral), the STM-OA can put a hurt on the other side in virtually any circumstance. It does have to respect reflec-armoured foes, like the
Koroshiya, but anything else is probably going to have a really bad day.
Sternensturm Bravo applies the lessons of the Jihad to a fighter, much as the
Würger does to a small-craft. A nose-mounted Beagle Probe and a GECM module set into the tail provide the EW capability modern fighters need to keep its FCS-locks clear and the other side’s clouded, and each wing houses twin ERMLs and twin anti-missile systems (supported by only one ton of ammo, unfortunately, but them’s the breaks). Clearly meant to provide additional counter-missile support to larger craft, when deployed in squadron strength the STM-OB will form a wall that can stop or thoroughly thin-out missile salvos, even of capital weapons. And any attacker who thinks they can smash aside the ‘Stutters’ by directing their fire right at them is in for a disappointment, too. (Remember, in Aerospace conventional-scale missile-racks are assumed to roll a 7 on the Cluster Hits table, each AMS knocks down the CH roll by 4, and a CH result less than two is considered a clean miss. Even systems linked with Artemis-IV are going to be
completely ineffectual, and Art-V only gets you the minimum possible damage. Basically, when you shoot missiles at this bird, it just says “Hahahaha
nope!” }:))
Tactical advice on the
Sternensturm, both for and against, is pretty standard stuff for interceptors, including
the usual guidelines. The Alpha loadout in particular will be familiar to most of the LCAF, being that it’s essentially a tougher, slightly-slower
Seydlitz. One specific tip on the ‘opposition’ side: you might want to favour energy- or ballistic-weapons if you know you’ll be facing
Sternensturm-Bs, since otherwise, they’ll turn your Macross Missile Massacres into futile fireworks features. ::)
