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Sirene class Spyglass Retrofit Tactical Battleship.


The Sirene is one of, possibly the only, surviving Spyglass Mrk 1 Dreadnaughts from era of the Vespucci Triurmivate. Attempts to analyse the history of the vessel by Unioner naval historians yield only patchy reconstructions of the vessel’s former owners. Recovered in 823 AS by order of the BDM and placed in the Thuringia system for total refit, the Sirene was stolen from its moorings by the actions of an audacious group of Unioner salvagers, in command of the Union’s sole jump vessel, the Lorentz Von Rohe. The Sirene has since been increasingly iterated upon by its successive commanding officers – first as a purebred warship under Admiral Abendroth, then as a technologies testbed under Schultzky.


Measuring slightly over a kilometre in length at the width of a city block, the Sirene is the longest vessel in the Union’s arsenal, and is only loosely less massive than the scattered Bayern class defence ships in service with the Syndicliga. Carrying a superficial resemblance to the Arbiter class battleships in service with the Hellfire Legion, the Sirene lacks the customised spyglass arrays of the Arbiter, the bladed naval ram at the prow, (despite an apparent mounting fixture for the ram), and much of the secondary and tertiary ECM antennae. The vessel has been resurfaced on multiple occasions, coated with Unioner proprietary defensive ablatives (UPDA), increasing the structural mass beyond that of a conventional Arbiter.

Despite being twelve metres shorter than a conventional Arbiter, due to the lack of a spyglass receptor tower in the vessel’s snout, the ship is considerably heavier due to the use of densified Unioner structural materials throughout the hull of the ship. The vessel’s structure has been further bulked by the insertion of crew-protective polymers into the vessel’s intercompartmental spaces to reduce neurological degradation from exposure to extreme electromagnetic fields.

Part battleship, part carrier, part advanced technologies testbed, the Sirene is officially designated as an “Aviation Dreadnaught”, due to its primary mission of shuttling other vessels, including evac craft, vessels that lack the range or security for intersystem flight, amidst other assets, around the sector. The General Exingency for Informed Spacecraft Tactics does not regard the Sirene’s most valuable asset as its abilities as a warship at all, but instead as its potential as a testbed for technologies that further the goal of the Unioner Cosmicists to create a true post-scarcity civilisation, bounded only by the resources of the stars themselves.



The most notable retrofit is the inclusion of the Multi-Mission Jump Module upon the Ventral Stern, covering what on a conventional Arbiter would be the ventral drive housing. The Multi-Mission Jump Module serves as both an astrometrics lab and an innovative example of Unioner over-engineering to the problem of repetitive, sustainable jump technology. Rather than continually expend rare and logistically impractical Jump Drive thermal shock batteries, the MMJM Bifrost device channels the thermal shock of a hyperspatial jump into the surrounding jumpspace during celestial transit, allowing the vessel to survive the massive thermal requirements of the hyperspatial transit without requiring continuous supplies of batteries. The MMJM is not without its shortcomings; the module is extremely outsize and thus requires specialist mountings on external pylons, and can only be equipped aboard vessels equipped with advanced EM-radiative abilities, effectively restricting the MMJM to the Sirene. Equally the massive complexity of the module, and the use of Cult of Technology-acquired hardware within the jump coil, prevents the MMJM from being miniaturised for use by smaller craft. The MMJM is considered to be the most valuable piece of equipment within Unioner possession, and is easily more valuable than the rest of the battleship’s structure put together. To the Unioners, the Sirene is something of a propaganda symbol – a vision of Unioner technical agility in a cosmos where the majority of the faction must make-do-and-mend with salvaged, smuggled, or otherwise less-than-ideal hardware. The heat exchanger does however depend upon the laws of physics; some outboard mass must be left behind during the dump cycle due to the limits of radiant heat in vacuum environments; around a hundred tonnes of high pressure steam is released into the vacuum upon completion of the drive cycle, requiring the vessel to occasionally take in additional water ice, lest the MMJM incinerate itself with sustained use. On balance, the MMJM still renders the vessel remarkably more efficient to jump than equivalent Sirian analogues.



The ship, however, is not without its critics within the Union. As much as two percent of the Direktorate’s organisational funds are known to be channelled to the maintenance and rolling upgrade of the spacecraft, whilst there remains those who object to the inclusion of Ancestralist imperial eagles embossed in silver against the armour of the hull. There exist those who view the ship as an inefficient dedication of Unioner resources; costing the same as ten cruisers to maintain and operate without equal utility. The question as to whether such a valuable ship is worth the risks of deployment remain fundamentally unresolved - for now, it remains a key propaganda tool.