Why can't the Osiris be Liberty built?

[Denelo]

Mmkay.

I'm not here to talk about the Osiris, simply because I know little enough about it. I'm here because I know about the Spyglass.

Why, you ask? I'm HF's local lore and legend expert. I've made it my business to know more about HF's back story, beginnings, and the like than any other single person on Discovery.

And so the Spyglass. I'll give you the semi-short version here.

Firstly, a couple notes of import. No, the Spyglass is not the Osiris's "spiritual successor". Actually, the Spyglass was built around the same time as the Osiris, and was intended as a complement to the cloaked ship; where the Osiris could perform stealthed long-range strikes and was essentially an offensive powerhouse, the Spyglass excelled at detection and prevention, and, in regard to the Osiris, data collection and scanning generally performed by scout ships. In other words, the Spyglass wasn't the Osiris's successor so much as its targeting system and defensive coordinator.

Now, the Spyglass originally came into the Hellfire Legion's possession (note: Hellfire Legion, not Lane Hackers) when Drake Thastus and his crew defected from the Liberty Navy in the prototype in September 800 A.S., in the middle of the Nomad War. We didn't specifically steal it because we wanted the Spyglass itself so much as because it was the ship on which Thastus and his crew were serving. There's no actual background lore as to exactly why Thastus defected. He and his crew believed they'd been betrayed, bu they might not have been. Even if they were, perhaps the Navy was worried that he'd follow Orillion and go rogue. Regardless, they fled in the Spyglass. Some years later, when they'd managed to settle down in Vespucci, the Spyglass was taken apart piece-by-piece and examine, studied, and blueprinted. We've been improving on it and rebuilding them ever since.

So no, we did not go around destroying all the Spyglass blueprints. Even if we'd had time and weren't fleeing for our lives, we probably wouldn't have. So why doesn't the Navy have Spyglasses? That's a good question.

While it does have warship capabilities (albeit fairly limited for a battleship of its raw size; it's the second-longest battleship in Discovery, second only to the Nomad Battleship), its primary duty is that of a "scanning platform". The Spyglass exists mainly to gather data and watch for enemies, both of which it does quite well. Now, because of that, it's ridiculously expensive compared to more "stock" dreadnoughts, and not as effective in combat. Additionally, it's fairly tough to maintain. For this reason, it could be that, especially with the hostilities with Rheinland, it simply wasn't economical for Liberty to develop the design further.

Another alternative would be that the Navy decided to scrap the plans for some reason. Maybe they figured it'd be a moral blow to be serving on a class of ship that's in enemy hands. Again, that's Navy lore, not HF, so I don't know.

Still another idea would be that, in a last ditch effort to do as much damage as possible, the infected humans destroyed the plans before they were stomped out, and Liberty never tried to remake them (again, for any number of reasons).

Regardless, for some reason, Liberty hasn't been building Spyglasses, but the Hellfire Legion has nothing directly to do with it.