The interrogator looked to one of the guards wich left the room and came back with the keys for the handcuffs.
What exactly did Locklear want to talk about with you? He did not leave any informative notes regarding your case before he sent you to me.
The guard removed the handcuffs and laid a pack of cigarettes and a lighter on the table in front of Drake.
Feel free to take one. I can only assume the Lord Commander wanted informations about the ship you commanded if it did not concern plans for war. Am I right with this ?
Busy with other tasks I suppose, he can not listen to prisoners all day.
What can you tell me about the Odyssey? Details are of interest as well as major things.
The interrogator took his notes from the desk and got ready to write down whatever the captain had to tell.
Drake took a cigarette from the box and lighted it.
"Well..." He exhaled the smoke and while looking on the interrorgator.
"The Odyssey is the proud and curently the only member of the Venture class dreadnoughts. Comissioned in 798 just 2 years before the nomad war. Altough from the outside it looks like an everday dreadnought its not. The Odyssey recieved prototype engines and power cores as well as a new type of armor plating similar but not exactly the same as the famous Osiris. I'm affraid if you want to know more you gotta ask more directly."
What kind of modifications were applied to the engines that differ it from a standart dreadnought? Is it related to the cloaking technologie in use, for example emitting a lower energy signature?
"We can say that. But in reality the plan was to create a ship faster than any of its predecessors without sacrificing armor and valuable space within the ship's interior as fuel storage. But as always nothing went as planned and the result was an engine that required less energy to operate along with an increased range it could cover without refuelling. A perfect candidate for a recon ship's engine. After the war the Odyssey recieved its first major refit. Or more like repair since the ship resembled a big piece of cheese with all those holes on her hull. Anyways when cloaking devices became available the ship recieved one and some modifications were made to the engine to emmit even lower energy."
"Well to be fair the Venture class ships had no cloaking devices in the begining so the idea was to conceal the ship's power signatures from long range sensors in order to be able to pass through potential enemy enviroments and be only detectable by visual contact. And on the other hand the Venture class recieved power cores capable of much higher energy outputs than its predecessors in the Overlord clas. At the end when it came to battle this higher energy output meant the weapons being able to fire for a longer period of time before they required to wait for the energy to build up. In reality the power core was capable of doing this only because it was a bit overloaded in a controlled way. Basically the Venture class ships did not sacrifice armor nor firepower of the Overlord class while being able to conceal its presence from long and mid range sensors."
A Dreadnaught on steroids as it seems, but I guess there is a downside to the overloaded powercore?
Normally instabilities increase once you overload the power arrays.
Has the Navy found a solution to this or... ?
"And now you know why the Venture class was never mass produced. In fact only 3 ships were built. Malfunctions were frequent and even thou the power cores were generally stable if the energy distribution system recieved a hit from an enemy energy weapon it had the chance to divert the energy back to the core and overload it. Generally this is no issue with a normal power core as it there is a limit when the overloading of the core becomes uncontrollable. The problem with this already overloaded power core is that the higher energy means the overall distance between the energy level with wich the power core operates is closer to the said limit. The navy never really solved this problem completly and thats why they decided to not produce more Venture class ships even thou none of them were destroyed because of said malfunction exept the prototype ship the Venture. Now what else do you want to know."