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AETHER-SCS
OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
Intent: To bring together several existing stealth and countermeasures components into a single system for use in future submissions and role-playing.
Image Source: N/A
Canon Link: N/A
Permissions: N/A
Primary Source:
PRODUCTION INFORMATION
Manufacturer: Visanj T’shkali
Affiliation: Closed-Market (Restricted to ‘unique submissions’ with author’s express permission.)
Model: Aether Stealth and Countermeasures Suite; Aether-SCS
Modularity: Yes; can be scaled and configured to various ships’ size, designs, and types.
Production: Semi-Unique
Material / Components:
SPECIAL FEATURES:
- Provides full-spectrum stealth capability and effective countermeasures and electronic countermeasures to enhance ship’s ability to evade, prevent, and mitigate detection, targeting, and attacks against them.
- Reduces a starship’s signature both electronically and visually, making it incredibly hard to detect, track, and target for ships, gunners, and even guided weapons.
- Enables pilots to compensate for various conditions and situations, in space or when flying inside a planet’s atmosphere and gravitational pull, providing them with the means to fly stealthily and execute maneuvers and tactics that most other ships simply can’t match, and enemy systems can only rarely defeat.
- Combines several stealth technologies and countermeasures to make it better able to confuse, confound, evade, or even defeat enemy attacks.
- No Good Plan: For every better mouse, there’s going be – sooner or later – a better mousetrap. Aether-SCS is no different. Due to its scaled-down size, limitations to various technologies used within, and the prevalence of massive counter-stealth technologies, Aether just isn’t ready to go head to head with massive military-grade exploratory starships or heavy installations with powerful dedicated sensor arrays, integrated defensive grids, or similar potent means to defeat it. Such starships and systems will have much greater success in detecting, tracking, and targeting ships using Aether, especially if those ships using it are larger themselves, like small corvettes, medium freighters, or large transport ships such as dropships and cargo shuttles. Powerful as it might be, as Qui-Gonn once said, “There’s Always a Bigger Fish,” and this system – designed for and most effectively used aboard small transports and fighter-sized vessels primarily, lacks the versatility and adaptability for use on larger ships.
- Power Hungry: The Aether isn’t meant to operate on less powerful batteries and auxiliary systems, and is forced to be hard-wired directly to the ship’s main reactor. Lose that and the system becomes inoperable. This means too, ships which use the Aether and other powerful systems like it will require very advanced power management systems to prevent degrading one another’s effectiveness and a reactor that can handle the load, or else pilots and crews will discover lowered efficiency and possibly even malfunctions to one or more components.
- Hard to Get: The Aether-SCS isn’t sold at your neighborhood starship parts store, and just not any pit droid can put one in, fix one, or even reload one. A ship using it that finds this system damaged or its components exhausted is forced to make for a dedicated repair facility and expensive skilled techs to do the work. Field repair is purely and simply out of the question and the likelihood of repairs/reloads being made during combat actions, even aboard carrier ships isn’t high.
- It’s All Relative: Scaled-down sizing limits range and effectiveness of the various components found within this system, making them less effective over longer range or against more powerful, advanced systems. Excellent for use against starfighters, vehicles, probes, mines, small craft, and even smaller-sized capital ships, but when encountering a highly-advanced military grade exploratory ship or dreadnaught, effectiveness is seriously limited. This is the “Catch-22”, as when combined with the first weakness here (See Above), the Aether-SCS works best aboard smaller size ships like starfighters and transports and its effectiveness is degraded the larger the ship it is installed upon, but this also means the system has to be scaled to fit these smaller ships, and thus lowers its range and efficiency.
- Not the Bunny Hill: Not made for new pilots, unfamiliar with operating with such advanced systems. Aether users require time and training to hone their abilities to use this system at its maximum effectiveness, so just jumping into the cockpit of an Aether-enabled ship was no guarantee of success. In all honesty, only Force-users, trained to apply their abilities to piloting often ever had the capability to truly use Aether the right way.
Have you ever dreamed of having that one special toy? The toy that ranks above all other toys? Visanj had that dream. She dreamed of a stealth and countermeasures system so potent that it could be used to create a whole wing, or even wings, of super-sneaky, hard-to-catch, hard-to-kill ships that could rain hell on her enemies before they’d even know they were there. Sure, lots of kids just want ponies, but Visanj wasn’t like lots of kids.
She dug through her inventories and found three components – the Wight ECM – Phantasm Edition countermeasures suite, the Obscura countermeasures package, and the Yokai stealth package – and sought to combine them into a single system, one which offered her ‘bleeding edge’ stealth capabilities and countermeasures able to confound and defeat the most relentless of foes. She and her team worked for months to perfect it, applying the most advanced miniaturization and design she had available, but at every turn, the same conundrum always appeared.
The conundrum is this: If you use Aether-SCS on a larger ship it can have increased range but it doesn’t provide as much insulation against detection, tracking, or targeting as it does on a smaller ship. However, to be used on smaller ships such as fighters and transports, it has to be scaled-down to be included into those designs, which in turn lowers the range. There was no way to avoid this dichotomy, and Visanj was forced to settle for a highly-effective system for starfighters and personal transports that lacks the range of other systems. This way, the small silhouette of starfighter, combined with Aether’s stealth and countermeasures capabilities, renders it practically invisible in most cases, but unlike larger ships that might be able to offer the power and range needed to better withstand detection, tracking, and targeting by larger, military-grade starships, those ships using Aether just have to take that risk.
This fact, combined with the complexity, cost, and availability attached to making repairs, replenishing spent components, etc. and its requirement of an equally powerful and complex power system to operate it meant that any hope of mass production was gone. Instead, it became a terrifically powerful system able to be used on custom starfighters or small personal transports, where the conditions for best functionality were able to be planned and allowed for. Visanj was disappointed that her dream of entire wings of ships able to covertly conduct their missions and evade harm at the hands of the enemy was dashed, but the exceptional stealth and countermeasures offered by the Aether wasn’t entirely a pipe dream: Instead, it made the ideal accoutrement for a handful of special ships, able to operate with terrific stealth and impressive countermeasures to make them less than a blip on the radar. So she wouldn’t have her ‘invisible fleet’, so what? She still had the sneakiest ships this side of anywhere, just not nearly more than one or two. She was just going to have to learn to be happy with that.
The Aether-SCS triple-component system, when used on say, a thoroughly-customized one-of-a-kind type fighter, would provide its pilot with a measure of stealth and means to counter their foes that far surpassed most other systems ever designed. It could render that ship practically invisible to all but the largest, most advanced, most sensitive dedicated scanners and sensors, the kinds that only very large military-grade capital ships and installations had. The kind that could make targeting it with anything less than a full-scale integrated defense grid bristling with sensors an accomplishment more of luck than likely. The kind that even if you could see it, find it, and try to kill it, the enemy would have to work like hell to make their dreams come true too. The Aether is that system.
Now, that’s not to say that it will always work. There is, after all, always a bigger fish. Super-sensitive and highly advanced sensors were being created every day. Large military ships of the superpowers were being outfitted with all manner of new weapons, targeting systems, long-range detection arrays, and so forth. No system is perfect, and even the best system can and almost always will become obsolete one day. The Aether-SCS was powerful, there was no doubt. So powerful in fact that running it on any power cell other than a ship’s main reactor just wasn’t going to happen. So powerful that if that power system went out, the Aether would become a very expensive paperweight, and if it wasn’t properly managed and balanced, it had the ability to make a whole starfighter become a very, very expensive paperweight. Yet, even with that risk, in the right ship, in the right hands, the Aether was hard to beat.
Pilots who use Aether are given a thorough and exhaustive series of briefings and training regarding its capabilities and limitations, from its limited range to its ability to shrink a ship’s signature to virtually null, everything is considered. Force-using pilots were often the only ones with the skill to truly utilize Aether properly. In their hands, Aether lived up to Visanj’s dream, perfectly.
