SF-101 heavy fighter

The SF-101 Vindicator fighter is one of the most profound examples of the differences in the approach to warfare by the North American Union and the Free Systems Alliance. Whereas the NAU prefers to fight wars with a scalpel, the FSA does so with a sledgehammer, napalm, and a case of beer. Taking a page from the Ahrugan doctrine of war fighting, the Freemen have embraced the concept of overwhelming firepower and armour, damn the costs, and this is very apparent in the design of the Vindicator.
Fairchild Aerospace Corporation had been providing the NAU with their fighters throughout the 22nd and early 23rd century, until they lost the contract to Corcran-Douglas Aerospace and their Kiowa fighter in 2221. For nearly ninety years Fairchild Aerospace Corporation’s fortunes faded, as their infrastructure and production capacities had been geared towards supplying the NAU with their top-tier fighters and small craft. When the Freeman War for Independence broke out, the CEO of Fairchild- Derek Hagman, who had been at the reigns for over a century and still held a grudge towards the NAU- chose to side with the underdog.
The engineers at Fairchild met in secret with the admirals of the Freemen militia and hammered out the details- a new aerospace fighter that was a flying tank with tremendous firepower, based in concept off of the A-10 Warthog of Fairchild’s pre-Fall predecessor and the F-30 Hellhammer of the K’Thari war. Built around the Grendel- a 1,500mm light naval APPC running along the keel of over half the airframe as a form of spinal mount- it is, in effect, a heavily-armoured cockpit sitting on the biggest cannon ever put into a fighter, with engines and missile pods attached for flavor.
The Vindicator does not lack for variable firepower, and has a standard fighter APPC under the Grendel, another mounted in the rear for defense, and an AP lancer ball turret on the ventral side between the engine nacelles. Missiles are a major offensive weapon for the Vindicator, unlike many fighters, because Freemen pilots have no compunctions about closing hard and fast with an enemy, mitigating the range problems with slower-than-light weapons such as missiles. It mounts four variable-ordnance missile pods that fold down against the wings until deployed for combat, and can be jettisoned if necessary.
The standard load for the missile pods is a mixture of LRMs and SRMs for combating fighters and small craft, and a two-pack of special short-ranged SSMs that are little more than a warhead with a short-burn fusion engine. Delivering these latter missiles requires the Vindicator to close with an enemy capital ship and unload them at fairly close range, bank hard, and then hard-burn out of the blast radius. Even with the retention field the SSMs use to compress the detonation against the target, the blastwave is still lethal to the Vindicator out to 1,000 km, and delivering these missiles is extremely risky.
The Vindicator is designed to operate in solar systems, preferably in the plane of the orbital ellipses where free-floating hydrogen is richest. The reason for this is the only real flaw with the Vindicator- it lacks large fuel storage tanks in order to cram the weapon systems into such a small, agile airframe. Gravitic engines still require either antimatter or fusion reactors to power them, and both require hydrogen to convert into anti-protons or deuterium respectively, and most fighters carry a high-pressure compression tank of fuel for long-range operations where hydrogen is scarce, such as deep space.
The Vindicator, on the other hand, uses its hydrogen ramscoop intakes to fill small reservoir tanks, which are in turn fed directly into the antimatter conversion and ionization chambers to fuel the AP and proton tanks that fuel the , with less than five minutes of reserve available. If the ramscoop intakes are all disabled, the Vindicator is dead in the water five minutes later, less if they use their AP cannons. Vindicator pilots bug-out in these cases to preserve the fighter, unless absolutely necessary. Fairchild’s engineers foresaw this problem and compensated for it by adding thick armoured cowlings on the leading edge of the engine nacelles where the ramscoop intakes are located.
The rest of the fighter is well-armoured as well, with thick atomically-bonded carbon-metallic hydrogen composite battleplate layered over a tenser-field-reinforced turinium honeycombed superstructure. The foam-like superstructure fills the whole superstructure, being molded around the weapons, engines, and other equipment, leaving no empty spaces. Without struts or beams, the fighter has no true structural weak points, making it incredibly tough and hard to kill. Rounding out the defenses are triple-layered deflector/ablative/deflector shielding with redundant emitters. This heavy protection balances out the heavy weapons to truly make the Vindicator a flying tank.



Copyright 2009-2011 Dark Nova Games
This artwork and any image based off of it is the exclusive property of Dark Nova Games. All rights reserved. Any other use of these artwork images, without the expressed written consent of Dark Nova Games, is strictly prohibited. This image is copyright protected by United States and International Law.