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.
