Harpy

The Harpy is a multi-roll fighter used by the Gudersnipe Foundation. Originally commissioned as a long-range bomber, the Harpy's high degree of utility made it the primary fighter for the entire Foundation.

Design History

While Gudersnipe School has a long history of producing new technologies for the Foundation, when something really needs to be done right the first time, they turn to the Crimson Blade Corps of Engineers. The Harpy project was originally considered too mundane for school involvment, despite possing a handful of interesting design challenges.

Lieutenant Commander Harlem Beck of the CBCE was placed in charge of the project. Bombers were nothing new, the Foundation had been operating varying designs since the heady days of the old Gudersnipe Army, and essentially had two requirments: the ability to carry bombs and to survive enemy defenses long enough to delever those bombs to a target.

The old Horseman-class of long-range bomber had been phased out a decade earlier, following only a 50-year service run. The Horseman had been an engineering disaster, but proved the need for a long-range bomber. Short, and mid-range bombers already in operation came with a variety of setbacks that made them problematic. Traditional bomber-carriers carried their payload in radles arranged perpendicular to the forward-axis of the ship. While bombers could typically be launched at speed, the carriers only had a 30PSL flank. With the large payloads required at the time to be effective, conventional bombers came with a long acceleration curve.

However, a new type of weapon had recently been developed: the N2 warhead.The requirments specified for the Harpy indicated that it must carry an equivalant payload to the Gargoyle-class mid-range bomber, but be able to launch from the catapults carried on fighter-carriers.

This seemed like an impossible task at the begining, but Lieutenant Commander Beck immediatly brought fourth an important breakthrough. Before joining the CDCE, Beck studied military history for tw years. He knew that the catapults still in use aboard fighter-carriers still conformed to standards established Ages before, specifically a standard that allowed them to carry the Condor-class reconnaissance fighter, phased out over a millenia before.

This allowed the ships to launch a caft over 40% larger than the Hawk-class escort fighter the ships typically carried. The extra room in the design window made possible a fighter capable of meeting and exceeding all the requirments, especially when coupled with the new N2 technology.

The Harpy is the blanket name for a class of spacecraft deployed by the Gudersnipe Foundation. It is technically classified as a long-range bomber, but has become the primary multi-role fighter of the Crimson Blade and Gudersnipe School.