The Navy Personnel that serve on tenders are much maligned but are as important to the war as the crew of a cruiser. Without tenders, fleets would not be able to operate efficiently and ships would always be having to go back to repair yards. While tenders are not really designed to do everything, they can effect very extensive repairs and many times are expected to repair ships that otherwise would have been dropped into the nearest star to prevent capture. Mobile Spacedocks are used for larger ships and some can even dock internal ships as large as battleships.

The Button class Tender was the main design from the Human Alliance Forces Navy and served them for most of their existence. Many of them entered service with the Consortium Armed Forces Navy and the last of them were retired only about twenty years prior to the present. Many of them still in the mothball fleets waiting for the day that they are needed again. This ship is the most common tender found in Independent Forces and several even serve in the New Coventry Navy, who often prefers to construct their own ship class. For ships serving in the C.A.F. and H.A.N., these ships are named after famous individuals who have served in the logistics and support branches of the military.

The basic ship is constructed from a civilian merchant ship hull and are not design for combat. Their design is simply to carry the equipment and supplies needed to repair other ships. While the hull of these ships is not equal to combat designs, the ships have military style variable shields, eight point defense lasers, two long range missile launchers, and six mini-missile launchers. New Coventry replaces the mini-missile launchers with two medium range missile launchers with 320 missile each and four tachyon scatterguns but otherwise does not modify the ships design. In situations in which there may be enemy ships around, the Tenders are escorted by one cruiser and four destroyers.

The ships have one hundred work shops and two heavy material areas. These give the ships the ability to repair virtually any system on the ship and have the ability to repair structural damage on ships. On cruisers and larger ships, this is restricted to medium damage but on smaller ships, any and all structural damage can be repaired. The ships can even totally replace engineering systems on ships smaller than cruisers. It is interesting that a few destroyers have actually been constructed by repair ships. One was a case where a repair ship in the Human Alliance Navy was trapped and the ship actually constructed a Ferret class Corvette to protect the ship when it was trying to get out of the trap. It is also fairly common for these ships to be used by smaller navies to construct smaller ships. The ship has a large landing bay but this is meant to repair fighters and if the ship carries fighters for itself, it will normally only carry four fighters. These ships do carry allot of cargo and most of this cargo is raw material, components, and extra missiles for ships that need to be supplied after being repaired. Often, these ships will need to also deal with medical casualties along with repairing the ship. For this reason, the Button class Tender has four state of the art operation rooms, advanced regeneration equipment, cloning banks for replacement limbs and organs, 500 medical beds, and 100 stasis chambers. The ship has a total of 150 medical personnel to support the medical facilities. While not equal to hospital ships, they can do the job in an emergency and often end up doing the job.

This starship design uses modified starship speed and ranges. See Revised Starship Rules for Phase World for more details.

Model Type: AR-866
Vehicle Type: Tender / Repair Ships
Crew: 1330 total [220 (25 Officers and 195 Ordinary Crew) for ships operation, 960 repair personnel, and 150 medical personnel]

Vehicles:
Fighter Compliment:

	16	Mini-Tugs
	20	Transient Fighters (Normally to be repaired)
	4	SF-69 CAF Scorpion Star Interceptor (Provisions for, Not always carried)

Shuttles:

	4	Passenger Shuttles (usually used for medical emergencies)
	6	Cargo Shuttles

Other:

500

Repair Drones

M.D.C By Location:

	Triple Barrel Defense Laser Turrets (8):	150 each
	Long Range Missile Batteries (2):	500 each
	Mini-Missile Launchers (6):	100 each
	Outer Hull (40 x 40 ft/ 12.2 m x 12.2 Area):	110
	Inner Hull (40 x 20 ft/ 12.2 m x 12.2 Area):	90
	[1] Bridge:	5,000
	[2] Main Engines (2):	6,000 each
	[3] Main Body:	30,000
	[4] Variable Force Field:	2,000 a side (12,000 Total)

Notes:
[1] In reality this is how much damage needs to be done for a weapon to hit the bridge through the ships hull. This ship does not have an auxiliary bridge. Even if the bridge is destroyed, the ship can still be piloted from engineering but ship is -3 to dodge and all weapon systems will be at local control. Weapon hits near the bridge that do not penetrate the ships integrity can injure crew members on or near the bridge.
[2] Destroying the main engines means that ship FTL systems are destroyed and maximum sublight speed is reduced by half.
[3] Depleting the MDC of the main body will put the liner out of commission. All internal systems will shut down, including life support and internal gravity. The ship itself will be an unsalvageable floating wreck.
[4] Shields positions can be varied and all could be combined in one shield. Shields regenerate at the rate of 5% (600 MDC) per melee round.

Speed:
Driving on the Ground: Not Possible.
Sublight: Has a special sublight engine that allows the ship to travel up to 60 percent of the speed of light maximum due to military shields. Star Ship can accelerate/decelerate at the rate of 0.75 percent of light per melee.
Atmospheric Propulsion: Maximum speed is 250 mph (402 kph), can enter an atmosphere and can leave but is not designed for atmospheric flight
Stardrive: Uses a Gravitonic Drive system that allows the ship to reach a maximum of 3 lightyears per hour.
Maximum Range: Effectively Unlimited by either Drive system. Carries about two years worth of supplies on board for the small crew but normally does not operate for that long without resupply

Statistical Data:
Length: 980 feet (298.7 meters)
Height: 300 feet (91.4 meters)
Width: 340 feet (102.6 meters)
Weight: 496,000 Tons (450,000 metric tons)
Power System: Anti-Matter with a 25 year life span
Cargo: Can carry up to 100,000 tons of cargo in addition to crews supplies.
Market Cost: Ship would cost about 6 billion credits to manufacture in present time in the Three Galaxies. Ships are no longer being produced. When available, these ships sell for 7 to 8.5 billion credits.

WEAPON SYSTEMS:

1. Eight (8) 2 cm Point Defense Lasers in Triple Mounts: used as an anti-Starfighter and missile weapon. Each laser turret can rotate 360 and has a 180 arc of fire.
   Range: 2.5 miles (4 km) miles through atmosphere and 250 miles (40.2 km) in space.
   Mega-Damage: 2D6x10 M.D.
   Rate of Fire: Equal to the combined hand to hand attacks of the Gunner (usually 4 or 5).
   Payload: Effectively Unlimited
2. Two (2) Long Range Missile Launchers: Missile has a top speed of Mach 20 in an atmosphere and in space has an acceleration of 8% of light per turn (faster than any starship). Since star ships will no longer engage at rock throwing distances, whether weapons can be shot down is calculated from the speed of target, launcher, and missile. When drive goes dead, missile will still cruise unless set to self destruct but has very low odds of hitting star ships (Great for hitting bases and planets because target does not move and missile when dead at -25% to detect.) Long range missiles do not have minuses to hit small targets unlike cruise missiles and are all considered smart missiles. Batteries can launch on multiple targets each. Batteries have a lower number of actual launchers than the modern CAF long range missile batteries and each individual launcher is slightly larger in size.
   Range: Missile range is 3400 miles (5470 km) in an atmosphere and 1,800,000 miles (2,89700 km/9.7 light seconds) in space.
   Mega-Damage & Properties: See Phase World Missiles (Fusion does 2D4x100 MDC).
   Rate of fire: One at a time or in volleys of 2, 8, 16, or 24 per launcher, per melee attack.
   Payload: 480 total, 240 long range missiles per launcher.
3. Six (6) Mini-Missile launchers: These are missile turrets used for point defense against enemy fighters and missiles. Missile has a top speed of Mach 10 in an atmosphere and in space has an acceleration of 2% of light per turn (slightly faster than any starship except if it is exceeding it maximum safe acceleration).
   Mega-Damage: varies with mini-missile type (See Phase World Missiles).
   Range: Missile range is 2 miles (3.2 km) in an atmosphere and 100 miles (161 km) in space
   Rate of fire: Can fire missiles one at a time or in volleys of 4 or 8 missiles
   Payload: 128 per launcher for a total of 1,024 mini-missiles. Cargo hold has an additional 3,072 mini-missile. Reloading launchers from cargo hold takes 1D6 minutes.

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By Kitsune (E-Mail Kitsune ).

Copyright © 1999, Kitsune. All rights reserved.