Ashin Varanin
Professional Enabler
Image Credit: Coronet, canon starship, Clone Wars
Intent: To refit a unique ancient vessel, the Coronet, and make it suitable for use by Ember Rekali.
Development Thread: Here - team formed, Coronet's location uncovered, vessel reclaimed (46 posts)
Manufacturer: Kalevala Spaceworks, refit by Silk Holdings
Model: Coronet-class, a product line of one ship
Affiliation: Personal
Modularity: No
Production: Unique
Material: Beskar, durasteel, glasteel
Description:
The ancient vessel Coronet, the personal armed consular ship of Duchess Satine Kryze, was made of the finest materials the Mandalore system had to offer. Beskar was a significant structural element, though the Coronet was not a warship and certainly not invulnerable in combat situations. Structurally significant beskar was confined to the reinforcement of the bridge, the Duchess's personal living quarters, and the superstructure; by and large, it was not used in hull plating. As a result, while the 'bones' of the ship are supernaturally durable -- necessary to keep the long, thin superstructure intact under the stresses of combat, severe gravitational pull, or intense maneuvering -- the vessel's outer hull is of average durability.
After the death of Satine Kryze, her political opponents took control of Mandalore and her starship vanished from history. It is believed that her family hid the starship to keep it from being melted down for the war effort. Their hiding place, a point in deep space near the Mandalore system, was supposed to be short-term, but Kryze's opponents remained in power for some time, and eventually the grip of the Empire made the ship's recovery difficult or irrelevant to whatever family remained. The ship sat untouched in deep space, a good distance from major or minor hyperroutes, for almost nine centuries. Eventually, of course, someone stumbled upon the ship, an unimaginative Hutt Cartel gangster named Agragorn. Lacking funds to renovate his find, but incautious in his competitive tale-telling, the compulsive sabacc player soon found himself owing rather a lot to Ember Rekali and Anija Ordo (who may or may not have cheated). The debt proved sufficient leverage to extract the ship's location, and Ember paid half a million for it in good faith once the vessel was recovered.
As any remotely competent shipwright knows, refitting a centuries-old starship is no easy task, nor cheap. Another one point five million nearly wiped out Ember's retirement fund, but secured a top-notch refit. Virtually every system had to be replaced, and even most of the hull had to be reworked, welds checked or redone, windows replaced and so forth. The end result, however, is one of the deadliest frigates ever built.
A Mandalorian hibridium cloaking device, obsolete by modern military stealth standards, protects the Coronet from sensor or visual detection through an ovoid field. As with all hibridium devices, it is double-blind, meaning that any viewport within the ship will give a crewer a view of uninterrupted black. This absolutely inhibits complex maneuvering or long-term flight without Force-enhanced piloting, and drastically increases likelihood of collision. For example, to get cloaked starships into a solar system, Grand Admiral Thrawn resorted to flying his vessels alongside a comet, allowing the cloaking field to overlap a sliver of the comet so navigators could use the comet for guidance. Such are the downsides of hibridium.
One Silk Holdings innovation partially counters this, though only fractionally. A handful of shockball-sized sensor/camera modules can extent, individually or collectively, through the cloaking bubble, allowing a very limited awareness of the ship's surroundings. Obviously the most secure configuration for their use would be to use only one at a time, as space debris does not normally travel in perfect parallel, and if the ship maneuvers the tiny bit of 'debris' will have been seen to change course. Whether this would register as an anomaly on other vessels' sensors is an open question, dependant on range, intensity of search, density of debris, degree of maneuver, and so forth. This system is based on a jury-rigged implement -- a holocam on a stick, essentially -- used by Silk founder Jorus Merrill aboard the freighter Gypsymoth. Even with this system, a gravitic modulator, and a thrust trace damper on the engines, the hibridium cloak is still vastly inferior to a stygium cloak. Additionally, hangar capacity has been almost completely sacrificed to fit the cloaking device into the narrow spaceframe.
The frigate boasts a small assortment of Silk Holdings countermeasures modules, including a 'Crybaby' for luring pirates or enemy patrols, a bank of tractor shrouds for escaping larger ships' tractor beams, and a pair of cap drain modules which provide temporary resistance to ion cannon fire, electromagnetic pulses, and Connor nets.
The demands of a militarized vessel have nearly tripled the crew requirement, from the original 75 to 210. The minimum crew, however, remains the same as the original crew figure, as the original ship was just as fast, and nearly as heavily armed.
Main weapons systems are relatively basic, but the vessel isn't designed to have unique overpowered guns. Instead, it's designed to win pretty much any close-range, high-speed contest of tracking rate. Advanced tracking systems and fastmounts not only allow its single capital guns to better target vessels up to class 4 in speed and maneuverability, but, far more importantly, allow the Coronet's gunners to at least partially keep up with the complex maneuvers of which the Coronet is capable. Careful turret placement on the blade-like hull allows all capital guns to be brought to bear against any target fore or aft. A target directly beside the Coronet would face only half of its firepower.
The vessel contains limited training facilities for Ember's Mandalorian and Witch students, as well as members of the Shardrock Clan.
Naturally, the vessel can only land in certain docking facilities.
Classification: Frigate (Support)
Role: Personal transport, raiding, anti-pirate operations
Height: 212m
Width: 55m
Length: 125m
Power Core Generator/Reactor: Solar Ionization Reactor
Hyperdrive Rating: Class 1
Minimum Crew: 75
Optimal Crew: 210 + 12 Z4 Cargo Loader Droids
Armaments:
- 4 heavy turbolasers on fastmounts
- 2 single ion cannons on fastmounts
- 16 antimissile octets (4 PD batteries)
- 3 QQ-T-05 Hushaby rotary ion cannons (6 PD batteries)
Hangar: (6/48 fighters, 0/4 gunships, 6/8 dropships)
- 4 Niathal-class Shuttles
- 2 personal freighter berths
- 6 assorted starfighters
Non-Combative Attachments:
- Communications Array
- Encryption Network
- Escape Pods
- Holonet Transceiver
- Standard Deflector Shield Generator
- Standard Detention Cells
- Standard Life Support Systems
- Standard Navigational Systems
- Standard Sensor Array
- Advanced Targeting Systems
- Tractor Beams
- QQ-4U85 Tractor Shroud x4
- QQ-543N/53R Cap Drain Module x2
- QQ-C1R-C3 "Crybaby" Decoy Module
- Hibridium Cloaking Device
- Gravitic Modulator
- Thrust Trace Damper
Passenger Capacity: 100
Cargo Capacity: 1,600 tons
Consumables: 3 months
Sublight Speed and Maneuverability: 4
