The Sim

The SS Albatross is a former United Nations Navy war ship.

Formerly the UNS Michael P Murphy she was commissioned from the Bush Orbital Shipyards of Luna in May 2299, as part of the United Nations Navy Fleet 2300 Modernisation Program. This was a wide-ranging set of ship designs and overhauls that would see the UNN rise to meet the threats of an expanding and technologically more advanced Martian counterpart.

The Dillinger class corvette was designed primarily as a system patrol and light fleet screening unit. To that end, she was fitted with advanced radar, lidar, gravimetric sensors and a comprehensive Electronics Warfare Suite codenamed Witchcraft. Her hull was also designed to reflect and confuse all incoming active sensor sweeps, with baffles to hide her thermal and radiological signatures.

The Dilginer class was also armed for her role with six 1MW solid-state laser emitters scattered across her hull in place of more traditional chain fed Point Defence Canons. These had the benefit of no moving parts, and as long as the reactor was on line she would never run out of ammunition to shoot down incoming torpedoes and missiles. She also had internal racks for a variety of ship-launched ordinances from Hermes class plasma torpedoes to Zeus class Crust Buster nuclear missiles. She also had an experimental snub-nosed coil gun fitted along her keel that could fire titanium ball bearing grapeshot at 97c at a target in its line of sight.

In short, the Dillinger class escort corvette was a battleship killer. She was small, agile, and packed a punch.

She was also $80 billion United Nations Adjusted Dollars to build per unit. For the price of a single Dillinger corvette, a half dozen of the older Phantom class fleet escorts could be built. In point of fact, a great deal of the UNN Feet 2300 program fell into the bucket of ‘great idea, terrible price tag’, that saw a number of UNN Admirals and senior UN Officials indicted on corruption charges and insider trading for falsifying bidding contracts.

And so the USS Michael P Murphy was stripped for parts.

ECM/W-Witchcraft was taken out and put in a cold storage facility somewhere in the Nevada Salt Flats. Her missiles were taken away and put into other ships, as well as her furnishings. The laser turrets for her PD array were left intact if only because no other class of vessel had such a system: with access to the belt metal was cheap. The magnets for the coil gun were stripped, but the barrel was built directly into the keel so no point trying to remove it.

And her name was stripped from her hull, and so Hull No582 was put into a stable orbit around Luna awaiting the shipbreakers fusion torch. And there she orbited for nearly 80 years, awaiting a fate that would never come. She was bought up by a private scrappage company that, on the side, did a great job in refurbishing old ships. After a Belter rockhopper looking for a nearly leaky tube to go prospecting isn’t going to worry too much about where the hull came from. And there is always a market for ex-military hardware for the security-minded soul out there.

And so the SS Albatross was reborn from the shipyards of Calisto, fewer teeth on her than before but just as quick and just as silent.