Cubicle Fighter

Cubicle fighters are special small fighter craft designed to be stored in standardized small craft cubicles, often mounted within a larger ship or station. The Planetary League Cubicle Fighter depicted in the illustration was a standardized design, mas-produced by a number of manufacturers throughout Era-1.

These inexpensive craft were widely used by most Planetary League agencies as light defensive fighters. There was also a very active private surplus market for these craft, and a wide array of variants, including many re-purposed versions were widely available.

The Planetary League standard cubicle fighter was designed solely for use in space. Having no landing gear, it could only depart or dock at a standardized craft cubicle. These cubicles were used for a number of small craft, including the also widely used Cubicle Shuttle, a sister craft produced by the same government programs and private manufacturers as the fighter. Docking and deployment was facilitated by robotic arms, and the pylons that connected the main guns to the fuselage had built in grip points for this system.

H-31 Medusa Heavy Star Fighter

History

First made in YE 8542 (GSC 9457) by Antares Fleet Works, the Medusa Heavy Star-fighter was  designed for use by the various nomad armies, mercenaries, breakaway states, bounty-hunters, and pirates during Era-2.  As such, it's spherical cockpit was originally designed for an Ool-tyr pilot.  After it was picked up by the military of the Midori Republic, a human-pilotable version was mass-produced as well.  The H-31 had a fairly long production run during the later years of the War of the Empires.

Capabilities

The Medusa was heavily armed and armored, but had relatively slow acceleration. The slow acceleration was somewhat mitigated by a superb array of maneuvering jets, backed by sophisticated pilot-assist AI, that made the Medusa one of the most agile fighters in the galaxy.

Stock main armament was two forward-mounted plasma-bolt cannons.  These were augmented with a pair of forward-firing guided-missile launchers, and a pair of rear-mounted mine dispensers. 

The H-31 was built with a gimbaled pilot's seat inside a spherical cockpit, allowing the pilot to maintain a consistent orientation while rolling the craft.  One of the most popular modifications of the H-31 was to replace the armored cockpit with a transparent one, although this traded better visibility for poorer protection of the pilot.  The structure of the Medusa was built symmetrically, so it could easily fly or land "upside-down", because the top and bottom were the same.

The Medusa's spatial compression system was capable of traveling up to 10ly at a time with a compression ratio of about 250,000:1.

The H-31 Medusa could navigate most planetary atmospheres as well as space, and its Whitman-Imperial high impulse ion propulsion system gave it the lift needed to depart most inhabited worlds.

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Seed-pod Fighter

The "Seed-pod" is the most common ship in the navy of the Empire of 1,000,000 Suns.  It initially went into production in the early days of the empire, well before the 1,000 Years war, and saw service throughout the empire's history.   The simple design and low cost of the Seed-pod were key to its popularity and longevity as a design.

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Pictured: the version of the Seed-pod in widest use late in Era-0, through early Era-1.

The economics of the Seed-pod, and its wide-spread use caused it to be continually modified into thousands of variants, including substantial civilian use as a single-passenger transport.  In the Empire's continual contact and conflicts with the breakaway states and the Nomad Armies, the design of the Seed-pod was copied and stolen many times, making it the most common fighter-craft in the galaxy before Era-2. 

Internally, the design of the Seed-pod breaks down into three modular units, the cockpit unit takes up front of the craft, the center position is occupied by weapons, fuel, and special equipment, and the main engines are in the aft.  Each of these sections were made in a variety of purpose-built variants in local factories throughout the empire.

The main variant of the Seed-pod was built as a short-range interceptor without FTL capability.  High acceleration made it agile in dogfights, but the twin plasma-bolt throwers that made up its sole armament had little to offer in the way of firepower.  Light armor and a lack of deflector shields made the survivability of a mission in a Seed-pod poor for most pilots.  But, what it lacked in endurance, range, and firepower, the Seed-pod made up for in sheer numbers.  Seed-pods were cheap and easy to manufacture, modify, and maintain, and this made them a mainstay of the Imperial Navy.

The Seed-pod saw substantial use in all of the Empire's major conflicts, usually swarming in overwhelming numbers to bog down and gradually destroy whatever they faced.

An imperial carrier prepares to launch a large flight of seed-pods.

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