Grange Class YardShip

[This has been sitting on my desktop for ages. Haven't got around to full stats yet.]

How do I not remember the Sales Bug of the Year?

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Grange
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130 kton, 428m
9.5 kton yard (380 kton capacity)

By 2462, the Terran Hegemony had diverted so many resources to its new BattleMech arsenal that its WarShips went a whole year without regular maintenance. Disgruntled yet still underfunded, the Navy spent almost two decades developing a jump-capable fleet tender. The first slipped its moors in time to support the famous battle at Oriente, and roughly five more following every three years after.

La Grange is the archetypal YardShip. Essentially a spidery repair yard anchored to a jumpcore, it could manage the Hegemony's many corvettes and freighters, and in teams of two could accommodate the Hegemony's largest WarShips.

The ship possessed exercise and recreation facilities for displaced crew, and six small craft to shuttle passengers or supplies. WorkMechs often replaced half these shuttles to assist with repairs.

Critically, it also boasted sufficient arms and armor to navigate a debris field, and could manufacture many of its own supplies. 


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Newgrange
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195 kton, 642m
19.5 kton yard (780 kton capacity)

As the Hegemony's needs expanded, each generation of la Grange added more luxurious passenger facilities, more storage and more workshops. Popular myth came to view the ships as self-sufficient factories in space, capable of ingesting asteroids and extruding destroyers.

Those built during the Reunification War, being newest, became known as the "New" Granges. They were longer and more massive than any civilian ship. They could serve singly for the first time, though ever larger WarShips would soon force them to resume working in pairs. Eventually the McKenna, at ten times the Newgrange's mass and double its length, would require teams of three.

The Fall of the Star League made YardShips easy prey. Their names were sometimes adopted by nearby space stations, many of which retain their 'grange' names today.

Two derelict Newgranges have turned up in recent years. One was restored by the Word of Blake and deployed to attempt repairs on the Aegis-class Immortal Spirit. The other has been visited by a number of renowned historians, all of whom performed their own surveys of the vessel and have put forth theories about how it came to be abandoned. (Most of these have been disproven.) Only six other ships--ComStar's much larger Faslane-class support vessels, themselves based on the Newgrange--are known to be equipped with maintenance/repair yards.


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Rattenkönig
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Rumors from the Lyran periphery speak of a twisted mass of ships, matted together by their tails, whose appearance portends doom. How such a mass could maneuver--let alone form a stable KF field--is unclear.

The most credible account comes from the FCS Hypernaut, which limped into the Somerset system in August of 3070. Its crew claims to have boarded the Rattenkönig after misjumping beyond known space in 3051.

As best as can be determined from their description, it consists of three yardships, two fighter carriers, countless passenger ships, and an Explorer Corp mineral surveyor lost in 3043.