Halcyon Swordship render

Done in blender 2.80 beta, with use of principled bsdfs and better, optimized use of cycles and compositing. Looks a lot better now!

This is the Halcyons' most commonly seen type of spaceship, dubbed as swordships by most species. This is primarily due to their overall sword like silhouette and aggressive behavior in conflict. At 125 in length, swordships are considered as frigates by most galactic species and factions - which is certainly an odd choice as primary military workhorse of the ancient aliens' fleet.

Swordships are considerably as much biology as they are technology. The main internal hulling and "skeleton" of these ancient spacecrafts are built from an organic form of grown quantum processing crystals. These crystals are grown through being fed water, carbon and crystal. This forms the "skeleton" of the ship, which behaves as main power conduits, processing and data storage. The nature of this strange material is considered sentient at its core, featuring an advanced artificial intelligence. Above this "skeleton" are the devices, modules and structuring of the ship which confer it a sleek, clean and technological appearance.

Each swordships have a biocrystal "core" which behaves as the "heart" of these ships' intelligence and sentience. Over the years, these crystal cores produce "nodes" which can be used to grow new ship hulls. The overall process is poorly known and understood by most external forces, and the hidden, nomadic nature of most Halcyon clans and their shipyards keep this a well hidden secret. The reproductive "nature" of the core of their ships (and their AIs) has led to the ships belonging to families or dynasties, each with their own little quirks. The most common type of Halcyon swordships are of the "Harzan'I" dynasty, which have witty, playful personalities and balanced efficiencies across the board. 

The surface of swordships are almost always covered in intricate carvings, surfaces or patterns. These seem to be implaced less because of subfaction or identity, but more out of personal taste from the shipyard, crew or ship AI itself. These can range to the more classic and standardised hexagonal surfaces, to intricately carved, complicated nordic patterns, to just chaotic carvings. Halcyon ships almost always take on neutral color schemes, save for the lights their ships produce. These lights are purely to denote their presence as well as allow excess or unneeded energy to be burned off. These can be disabled for strategic reasons, however.

Halcyon ships employ an array of "spinning" and angled, drill like shields pointed to the front - shields which are not designed to absorb, but instead slow down and deflect impacts. The same is true for their armors - being both polarized at different angles and reflecting most lasers. Their armors is angled and optimized to bounce impacts from the front. This, in turn, makes swordships difficult to deal with at range. Their superior ability to target, hit and penetrate at range alongside this strong frontal resistance makes them extremely bothersome. The rear, top and bottom are very "soft", however, and the crystaline guts of Halcyon ships are quite fragile.

Power wise, Halcyon ships have highly efficient but unusually weak reactors. In most cases, a swordship will feature one or two small and compact multidirectional fusion reactors which can fuel the ship at basic comfortable function and cruise speeds. A Halcyon ship out of conflict can function for millenias this way with little mass for their efficient, small reactors - but these reactors are more secondary energy sources than anything.

The way Halcyons power their ships is far more unusual in nature, and comes a far more unusual vector - stars. A Halcyon ship has the innate ability to glide dangerously close to stars and open up "anchors" which will grab a star's external plasma mass, and convert it straight to the ship's capacitor banks. This process requires the ship to have enough energy in its banks to keep its shields up for the act, but the result is undeniable - a fully charged up, dangerous alien ship.

The ship's most interesting point regarding energy, however, is their ability to store it. Halcyon ships are run through by several arrays of their super-nano-capacitor banks (which are essentially hyper fancy surface area based energy storages). This is the main source of the swordship's innate threat and terror. Despite being small, their efficiency and ability to store an insane amount of energy enables them to punch several belts above their weight class. It is not unheard off for a relatively small Halcyon swordship to cut apart a full on 20 kilometer dreadnought while only draining a fourth of it's full energy storage potential.  

This, however, comes with its fair share of problems. This method of function by primarily stored energy (as there is no way the reactors can do anything more than sustain long term basic cruise) grant the swordships a limited endurance, and the requirement of a lot of energy control and management. Each shots and movements cannot be wasted, and enough must always be stored for a next potential conflict. Stars are not, however, the only way swordships can obtain power, although they are definitely the most viable form.

Halcyon swordships can often be found hidden deep underground or underwater in hibernation, hooked up and charging over years to locally produced geothermic or tidal power generators. 

These ships feature three main different propulsuon systems and two different FTL travel solutions.

The first and main propulsion system is within the ship's 'diamond' wings, and are best described as gravity engine. Inside these structures are phased and pulsed, synchronized particle accelerators which are capable of producing powerful, controlled and sustained singularities. These singularities can be used for a variety of reasons, but are generally used to allow the ship to anchor, pull and move itself from a larger stellar object's gravitational net - be it a star or planet. This very often makes a swordship look on sensors as if it had spider arms, grasping and moving at gravitational fields. This system can technically be used to pull the ship towards a direction in deep space alongside a variety of other utilitarian moves, but these are very rarely done.

The second type of propulsion for the system is a remarkably low tech, basic and simple ion thrusters which serve as cheap cruise.

The third and final propulsion system is used for both athmospheric and strategic propulsion in tandem with their gravitational drives - powerful, cascaded plasma thrusters with air or fuel intakes. 

When it comes to FTL, there are two systems available.

The first is their "warp" drives. A strange piece of technology which allows the swordship to open a tear in dimensional timespace, forcefully bending and hooking space across dimensions. This is an extremely dangerous method of space travel which has the ship covered in a form of exotic matter called "dimensional ice" which will form around the ship before travel. A swordship can open this warp and cover another ship for travel. This, however, cannot be used near a gravity well (only in deep space).

The second form of FTL is a far more "bruteforce" method. The ship projects itself at multiple times the speed of light, sealing itself in a dimensional pocket. This however comes with its intricacies - this can only be used to travel between two nearby stars. This is often used in combat however, as the "bubble" will hold onto matter taken during the travel. This is terrifying, as when the ship leaves its travel method and slows down, all matter that got ahead of the bubble (if their matter annihilation or harvesting was not selected) to be accelerated at these insane speeds towards hostiles with devastating effects.

Needless to say, for their low numbers and small sizes, swordships are utterly terrifying. And through the Halcyon species' eons of activity, they have never managed to make a ship as compact, effective and varied in abilities as the swordship. Rumors go that swordships were designed at the apex of the aliens' existence, an era which they have since devolved from.

The ships do have armament. These are separated in targeted range, and are all of the same armament: particle projection weaponry. These are the Halcyons' combat bread and butter - accelerating sheets of matter at relativistic up to FTL speeds towards a target, causing tremendous penetrative damage.

The first consists of the four wing mounted turrets. These smaller turrets each have four cannons each which are fired in chained for sustained rate of fire. These are primarily used as point defense and short range. They have extremely fast tracking, but geared precision was sacrificed to achieve this. In general, a ship within 10 kilometers can be assured of its safety from these guns at a range of 60 kilometers - where the guns will simply not be able to aim there. These are best used at tackling fighters and missiles, but can be utterly devastating if allowed up close.

The second, and secondary combat armament are the dual cannon turrets mounted at the upper and lower front of the ship.  Unlike its smaller brethern, these turrets are armed with much larger guns and feature the ability to bias their projection, allowing for arching shots. These turrets are generally found firing sheets and meshes of mono filament (extremely durable string meshes) which cause tremendous damage on impact. These are great at ripping apart enemy ships' weapons and modules. Halcyon ships often alter the power of these guns to be <just> enough to penetrate and incapacitate guns. These guns can generally aim at targets within a good 500 000 kilometers - but the ability to curve their shots (at the cost of penetration) often double this range.

The final armament is their main gun, and is a full on sniper styled artillery weapon. These are one or two cannons which are nearly as long as the ship themselves and burried in their hulls. These frontal guns are terrifying both in range, penetrative capability and precision, able to nail pretty much any target so long as it is within the gun's limited .25 degrees of aiming. These guns project large sheets of (generally ionized or polarized) mass at insane speeds in bursts - very often punching through entire ships if not fleets. This gun is the real deal - capable of targeting targets even out of a local star's range. 

Halcyon particle projection weapons by nature are purely penetration based weapons with very little actual area damage. This is supplemented by the "type" of munition used. A "Fusion" shot bathes the projected sheet in fusion mass, causing severe fire, melting and radiation at the target. Magnetized ammunition will cause severe magnetic and EMP damage, often taking out entire power sectors. "net" monofilament munitions also exist, where the projected payload will widen and unfurl, causing terrible damage all over a ship's surface, causing deep grid cuts.

Halcyon swordships can sometimes be equiped with missiles and fighters, but these are very rarely seen equiped - primarily because Halcyons have shown to prefer neutralising and disarming enemy warships rather than destroying them, and capturing hostiles, whether for release in the enemy force (which would cause social and morale damage).

It is <extremely> rare to see a Halcyon swordship travelling alone - them usually travelling in trios. If alone, view with extreme caution - it's either a lone, renegade or somebody on a dire mission.

Halcyon swordships are controlled through a variety of systems, primarily a mind-machine interface. Crewed by nonsentient drones (bug like of various size) and 2 to 3 pilots, the ship can sustain the active life of up to 200 Halcyons or 421 humans, or 2000 individuals in stasis.

Swordships feature an advanced sensor and communication suite. These include a variety of "camera" sensors of various sorts and wavelengths, missile and bomb like strategic drones, gravitational detection suites, quantum entanglement analysis and many, many more. One particularily nasty trick Halcyon weapons have is the ability to "mark" impacted hostile, where they show near instantly on their sensors. This generally requires replacement of the entire impacted area to get rid of this mark. 


All in all, these small alien crafts are very well balanced threats, or your best allies. Their standardized designs makes them relatively easy to maintain and jury rig, although proper repair is usually only possible in Halcyon shipyards.

Oh and their guns totally fire with a "tzaaart" sound.