Attention, feeble surface-dwellers! Galfrazz the Effluvient is pleased with your latest tribute of kittens and cheese, and has thus bade his unworthy slave bestow upon you the second-greatest gift of all; knowledge!
Tremble and Rejoice!
Nightlord Battleship
Appearing during the later years of the Golden Century, the Nightlord-class Battleship is an odd duck. Part battlewagon and part troop transport, this WarShip is very much a product of the culture that, er, produced it. (Shaddup.)
While smaller than many prior battleship classes(and exactly half the size of its direct descendant), the Nightlord is nonetheless a big boy. 1.2 megatons leaves a lot of room to play with, and the Raven scientists and technicians tasked with bringing this twisted mockery of science into existence did not disappoint. A sublight drive producing a 3/5 movement curve is typical for ships of this size, allowing a Nightlord's helmsman to put the vessel through the usual combat maneuvers, take damage and keep burning, and occasionally spring a nasty surprise.
An SI rating of 85 produces a frame as tough as the renowned Texas-class, but the Nightlord takes this a step further by boosting armor coverage, producing a ship capable of absorbing a whopping 2038 points of capital-scale damage, greater than any battleship built by the old League. The Nightlord isn't invincible by any means, but it can afford to slug it out. Heck, even a Mckenna's legendary broadside won't threshold this shell when bracketed all the way down. You wanna get through this, you have to have time to spare, or be willing to close. Durability like this is also handy in the post-Jihad era. Many of you aeroheads have already noted that sourcebooks describing post-Jihad eras have very restrictive Forced Withdrawal rules for WarShips, to reflect their rarity and their owner's unwillingness to sacrifice them. For example, FM: 3145 requires that WarShips withdraw as soon as even a single armor facing reaches 50% armor. When a single decent fighter strike can push most medium-sized ships to that point in one go, most ships are thus locked in to hit-and-run missions where they must accomplish their mission as quickly as possible before their orders force them to pull back. The sheer amount of armor on the Nightlord means that it has staying power, and will have much more time to perform its mission.
The Nightlord's weapons suite is similarly impressive, though many observers are more impressed by the eclectic nature of the gun decks than their effectiveness. Like most ships, NACs provide the bulk of a Nightlord's firepower, though they're oddly placed, with mismatched twin mounts in each side arcs, and a pair of singly-mounted cannons fore and aft. Secondary weapons are similarly odd, with a single Medium Naval Gauss Rifle in each arc, a Medium NPPC aimed out the bow, stern, and broadsides, and Naval Lasers arrayed much like the autocannons, mixed bays on the sides and a single mount on the nose and tail. People who are used to ships like the Texas and Mckenna will be disappointed that the Nightlord cannot bracket near as effectively as either older vessel, and with many weapons in low-damage bays, generating threshold crits will be difficult as well. A complete lack of missiles is also worrying, putting this battleship at a disadvantage in the opening stages of an engagement. The Nightlord's bizarre armament seems like a throwback to ship design circa 1900 or so, while the Texas and Mckenna bear a greater resemblance of HMS
Dreadnought and her descendants. On the plus side, the Nightlord has more than enough heat sinks for handle the entire warload at once, so feel free to let 'em rip.
If the capital guns can best be described as weird, the Nightlord's conventional armament at least is very tightly focused. Nothing but ER Large Lasers in all directions and ER PPCs on the quarter-arcs are found here, mounted in twin turrets that means each bays has good range, and hits hard enough to generate crits a fighter squadron. Getting rid of enemy fighters this way will be time-consuming, but then again, it's not like they'll be eating through your hide anytime soon either.
As a Clan WarShip the Nightlord also has the expected Lithium-Fusion battery for strategic mobility, though at this time I cannot confirm the presence of an HPG, as 3057r does not mention one, and I don't have access to Record Sheets: AT2 at this moment. I suspect that any future publication of the Nightlord will probably incorporate one, so I wouldn't make any assumptions regarding this bit of kit.
Twenty fighters and four DropShip collars is a serviceable if underwhelming parasite craft wing, and a spacious cargo bays certainly serves the ship well both on long voyages and for supporting other vessels, but what makes the Nightlord truly stand out as a WarShip is what else is carried within that hull. WarShips carrying ground troops are hardly a new thing, but the Nightlord takes this to an extreme, as a hundred Battlemech cubicles and quarters for five hundred armored Elementals represents a full GALAXY of troops. Other troop-carrying WarShips might be able to drop the vanguard of an invasion or nick-of-time reinforcements, but the Nightlord's complement is fully capable of seizing major worlds
without outside assistance. Unless a world is very heavily defended, simply putting your Nightlord in orbit transfers ownership over to you. You've garrisoned the place, all that's left is some running and screaming dirtside.
All this may at first glance look like an underwhelming ship with a rarely-used schtick, but if you look at the Nightlord in the context of Clan-style warfare, it starts to make a lot more sense. Many Clans pay plenty of attention to the orbital side of interstellar warfare, and some focus on it almost to the exclusion of all else, but the nature of their society means that all Clans primarily gain or lose resources in one way; ground combat using 'Mechs. The Nightlord is designed from the keel out to win the 'mech fight before the 'Mechs even hit the dirt. That large number of smaller bays may be ill-suited to a Star League-style fleet engagement, but they are very good at blowing up DropShips. A Nightlord defending a world can dive straight into the midst of an incoming flotilla and engage multiple troop transports simultaneously, even while reserving a few of the larger bays for dealing with WarShip escorts. They many not kill said escorts quickly, but remember: That armored hide means you're the one with time, not the other guy. Driving off the escorts and vaporizing even half a dozen DropShips can end a major assault before it even starts.
On the offense, the Nightlord is simply a one-ship planetary assault. Charge straight for a world, trust in your guns and armor to get you through the defenses, then drop overwhelming force on the planet below. In those rare situations when orbital support is called for, those numerous small energy bays make this vessel well suited to provide precise tactical support that won't lay waste to the world you're trying to take(or more importantly, won't gut your own formations even with missed shots). Obviously you can't land to pick up the troops again after your game of Grand Theft Planet is over, so be sure to bring at least a few transport ships to pick up the troops(and any loot) again afterwards. Given the kind of high-excitement missions that are going to call for a Nightlord, I'd go for durability over carrying capacity. Ships that can move your entire Galaxy back up in one go won't help if they get shot down, while a ship that can survive getting into scraps will be more useful, even if you're only moving a Trinary at a time. Similarly, consider carrying some Kirghiz as part of your fighter complement, to give you more flexibility in deploying and retrieving Elementals. Of course you don't need any such ships when assaulting spaceborne objectives, as your troops can simply jump out any convenient airlocks/bays doors, and that kind of complement is more than enough manpower to secure several asteroids, space stations, or ships.
If you find yourself stuck in a basic ship-to-ship fight in a Nightlord, don't despair. While this ship is nowhere near as efficient a ship-killer as other battleships, it still holds that title for good reason. Nightlord tactics are not subtle at all, and can be summed up very succinctly: Close and hose. You're weak at range, so get in close. You've got a crazy-overbuilt power grid, so get right into the middle of the other guy's fleet, and fire in all directions. Not only will this greatly increase the amount of damage you're putting out each turn, incoming fire will be less effective, because it will be spread over many more armor facings Finally, I don't care who you are, having a megaton of metal fly straight at you with every intention of dragging you into a phonebooth slugfest is damned unnerving. If you
really want to mess with people, make sure you've stocked at least some of those troop compartments, and then make a show of trying to get into their hex whenever possible. Boarding actions are difficult at the best of times, triply so when done without the benefit of assault shuttles, but that doesn't change the fact that nobody wants to find themselves flying through a cloud of five
hundred Elementals, especially ones that are cranky because they've just been chucked out of a perfectly good spaceship. 'Mechs are much less useful in this role, but they can still function as slightly-mobile minefields in a pinch. (You want to put an enemy between a rock and a hard place, fly directly at some immobile target they're tasked with protecting(JumpShips, space stations, a rock, etc), and drop a few Trinaries of spacemechs. Boom, they're suddenly forced to split their attention between stopping those 'Mechs from landing on their station/etc, and your still fully-mobile battleship.
(Warning: The high risks being taken by your ground-pounders on missions like these will NOT endear them to you, at least not the ones worth endearing. Recommend staying away from the GROPOS decks for a few days after pulling one of these tricks, or scraping together the cash to buy them a LOT of beer.)
Defeating a Nightlord is...difficult. That armor is the biggest obstacle, as fighting at long range will either take forever because your bracketed bays aren't critting anything, or your nonbracketed bays won't be hitting nearly as often. On the upside, his bays are both nonbracketing and individually small, so the Nightlord's damage output at very long range will be unimpressive. Keep the distance, and gradually wear him down. If you have large numbers of either, a fighter or missile-focused strike is also a good idea, as the Nightlord is ill-equipped to defend against such attacks and returning the favor is similarly difficult. In cases, focus your firepower. Don't bother surrounding a Nightlord, as that does nothing but dilute your attacks across more armor facings and greatly increase the number of guns he can point at any of your units at once. You can beat a Nightlord easily if you have enough time, but if he sets things up right, time is something you won't have.
