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 earlier.

This allowed the ships to launch a caft over 40% larger than the Hawk-class escort fighter 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.

Design Features

The Harpy's design was unique and inovative, abandoning many long-standard conventions.

Engines

The Harpy is propelled by two bi-directional Ion vacuum drives designed specifically for it. Previous fighters tended to rely on Bussard Ramjet engines for main acceleration thrust, making the harpy the first fighter/bomber to rest exclusively on the Ion-vacuum drive.

Numerous advancments in small-scale Ion-vacuum technology made durring the late Fifth Age were encorporated into the Harpy's engine design, along with a few new tricks. A revolutionary and contravertial feature at the time was the unequal bi-directional engine.

Starship-scale equal bi-directional engines had been in wide use since the begining of the Fifth Age, which allowed a spacecraft to reverse direction without turning around. The system worked by simple running the engine backwards, turning the forward intakes into mottors and the rear mottors into intakes. This of course required a significant re-design of the engine, but was still a very useful advancement. Since each end of the system essentially had to function as both an intake and a motor, they became substantialy more complicated and bulkier.

This was a minor tradeoff for a starship, where extra mass was fairly inconsequental, but would have been crippling to a fighter. The solution employed by the Harpy was unequal bi-direction, essenially the forward intakes could act as motors but only provide 30% thrust equivalant to the rear, while the rear motors acting as intakes could only draw in about 20% equivalant to the thrust. This meant the Harpy could not effectively 'fly backwards' without burning additional fuel, but allowed it to whip around at high speed.

Essentially, the Harpy designers had taken an element intended to allow large starships to change directions without turning, and employed it to make their spacecraft turn very fast.

Armament

An unusual decision was for the Harpy's payload to consist of missiles instead of bombs. Traditional bombers carried proximaty-fused magnetic bombs, that once released would be pulled towards the target. The Harpy instead carried a payload of N2 missiles. This allowed it to launch it's attack from much further away, and ensure more direct hits as the missiles had some ability to manuver where as magnetic bombs moved in a straight line.

Additionally, an attack launched at close range would allow the Harpy's payload to have an even deadlier impact, as the field stored in the rocket motors could act as a secondary to the N2 warhead.

The final advantage, and reason for the decision, was that this allowed the Harpy to use it's payload for defense as well as offence. The only other weapons carried by the craft are two Plasma Gatling Guns carried in the wing section between the fusolauge and engines. These are very similar to the type carried by the Nimbus, but were chosen for power reasons.