With the billion-heavy success in selling data and pilfered loot from derelict stations, depots, abandoned ships and salvaged Cult of Technology remains, Captain Vertiga provided a generous budget of 2.000.000.000 (two billion) credits for upgrades of the Apahanta. While these upgrades are not absolutely necessary, they will optimize ship's and crew's efficiency, survivability and resourcefulness, especially in the long run.
After Commodore Kaze Dagon purchased the entire sortiment of the Advanced Weaponry Catalogue, boosting the Captain's wallet with 2.1 billion credits merely for data, the engineering teams got assigned to make a list of all aspects of our ship that could be updated, improved, optimized, replaced or altered. The following pages will provide in-depth information on what our team concluded.
Noel also provided some cool pictures for you, Captain.
Undine is a long-term project. It is pretty much impossible to give estimates on when we can expect progress and the final result. Too many uncontrollable factors come into play.
APM designed the Mako as a brutal, highly dangerous and cost-efficient light battleship to play in the same league as their opponents in the Omicrons and Omegas. Given the rather small territorial claims of the Core, the Mako was never designed as a long-range warship. Instead, the focus went fully on the combat capabilities of the ship, both offensive and defensive. The ship is highly customizable, being able to be deployed as support craft to provide effective firecover for snub wings; as Hit&Run long range assault ship or as recklessly pushing streamroller. Where comparable warships like the Order's Osiris have a slightly more optimized shape for manouvering, the Mako opts for ending a battle before hostile reinforcements arrive.
The Mako comes with an excellent turret coverage:
⫸ 2|5|7 Forward
⫸ 2|4|6 Backward
⫸ 1|3|5 Left
⫸ 1|3|5 Right
⫸ 2|5|5 Up
⫸ 2|4|2 Down
The turret coverage and the Mako's defining shape turn it most vulnerable from the sides and the most underpowered from below. Compared with the Osiris-class Order Light Battleship, the Mako is definitely, by design, in the role of the chaser instead of the chased. This, at least, for battleship-to-battleship combat. While the ship, as light battleship, is performing with peak manouverability for a ship of her size, it is more vulnerable to cruisers and battlecruisers because of her shape, as these are able to engage it with Hit&Run manouvers, unloading mortar-type charges at optimal range followed by gaining additional distance to dodge incoming shots. Fortunately the Mako performs exceedingly well against gunboats. Without matching weaponry, the ship is however rather vulnerable to bombers despite countermeasure launcher at the outermost rear segment of the ship.
In battleship-to-battleship combat, the Mako benefits mostly from her optimized thin shape, allowing it to dodge incoming fire even at mid-range by using strafing thrusters at the left and the right of the ship.
As for the non-combat performance related aspects, there would be a lot of things to mention. A reminder: We are talking about subjective flaws in the design of the Mako for our own purposes with the Apahanta. We, by all means, do not use the ship as intended and definitely not as optimized.
The Apahanta is used as a mobile headquarters, stealth operations, jump-drive enhanced sanctuary. Other than the Mako is supposed to be, the Apahanta is required to run independently from stationary bases. We do not have a faction backing us up. We do not have a shipyard at our leisure that can repair heavy damage in short time. We do not have replacement crews. We also don't have laboratories and workshops purely assigned to improve the Mako-class series further and further. The only resources we have plenty of are range, money and charme.
Range is one hell of a factor to us. We can move around freely in what feels like half of Sirius. Exclusions to our range are: Liberty, Rheinland, Kusari, Omicron Alpha, Epsilon, Mu, Iota, Psi, Phi and Major, the GMG controlled Sigmas, Bering, Omega-58, 54, 47, Inverness, Drake and everything controlled by Gallia. These regions are either way too dangerous for us to enter because of hostile forces - at this point of time this goes for the straight away hostile Order, the unpredictable Maltese and to a certain degree the rather unorganized Corsairs - or off-limits to us for the sake of respecting territorial claims to not be entered with a foreign capital ship. This includes the Nomads and the Wild as we are fortunately protected from them by Captain Vertiga's Non-Aggression-Pact with them, under the condition to not interfere with their actions. Obviously, not related to the latter, there are cases of us making exceptions when it is convenient.
Money is the other big factor. Captain Vertiga made the restoration of the Apahanta possible by using the money he got from selling his family's company. Despite having managed to get some cash back in, the maintenance and upgrades ate holes into his wallet. Now that we have started to trade salvaged and looted technology and our own Apahanta-produced battleship armaments with everyone who is not hostile to us, money is way less limited. And we can use this money differently than APM does with theirs.
A big company like APM needs to make a compromise between quality and quantity. They can either invest in one giant warship with the irks and quirks of it being one giant warship, or they invest in multiple light warships which allow for more strategic deployment, costumization and faster maintenance. This is backed up by APM having access to a large pool of workforce. They can man fleets.
We, matter of factly, can't. While we have the funds to build one or two additional warships, technically, we don't have the crew, the shipyards or direct access to the required resources. While we could try to do it like Auxesia or Battlegroup Harmony and try to recruit as many people as possible and become our own battlegroup, it would absolutely be against our ideology. Why the fuck would we go that way? Instead, we can focus these provided funds to update, upgrade and develop the Apahanta further, using every resource we can buy from money. Luckily, there are enough groups and companies willing to take Captain Vertiga's money. Thanks to his charme!
We are a lone wolf out there, in a horribly dystopic galaxy. Sirius is a hilariously small part of it, but it is, by all means, the part we need to deal with as we can't sustain ourselves forever. Captain Vertiga is luckily a rather charismatic and clever individual, which allowed us to be good on terms with groups and companies and the Kingdom of Bretonia to benefit from their friendship. The Zoners helped us staying alive, Bretonia allows us to make use of their stations and gives us free passage through their territory - something no other house does, as far as we are aware of it. Our very diplomacy is based on the Captain's way of representing us, and so far we're only hostile to three groups: the Lane Hackers, the Order and the Corsairs. The Captain must be doing something right, because nobody would want to be friends with these unlawful sourpusses anyway.
After that little excourse we need to look at the exact things that allow us to use the Apahanta more efficiently. Noel made this cool graphic to point out what exactly we should slash could do wit the chassis in general. Based on these proposals for the external amendments, as seen on the graphic, as well as the internal ones, we began to create multiple variants of a possible successor to the Mako-class Apahanta. While the final form is at this point still in the making - and requires the Captain to vote on - there are a few sketches provided by our little hobby artist we could show off at this point. One thing is for sure by now already: No matter how the future Apahanta will look like, it will no longer be identified as a Mako-class Light Battleship.
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