Infinite Sky: Units

Naval Units

Pre-Dreadnought

The decades following the widespread introduction of the Luftum Torus were heady times in the field of naval innovation. Nobody had any idea what they were doing or where ship design would end up next. The proliferation of explosive shells had made war both on land and in the sky a deadly serious business and military shipwrights responded with rapid escalation in size and protection. After half a century of experimentation, counter-experimentation and outright lunacy, the most advanced continental navies reached a consensus of design. These ships were the main fleet combat unit of the first half of the Continental War and large numbers survive in service today, up to half a century after they were first commissioned.

The pre-dreadnought battleship is the traditional arm of decision in naval battles – a matter settled by robustness of armour and weight of broadside. In contrast to the preceding era of transitional ironclads, even the oldest, least modern pre-dreadnoughts share critical systems – redundant and compartmentalized toruses, electrical power, face-hardened armour and armour piercing naval artillery. Most sailed with a main battery of four heavy guns, though a few had only two. Each also had large batteries of smaller guns at various sizes intended to pepper opponents into submission as range closed.

While powerful and surviveable to a point, pre-dreadnoughts are not modern – not by any stretch of the imagination. Most pre-dreadnoughts were built expecting to fight for and against Continental states, so range and stormworthiness were not priorities. As torpedo tactics became prominent, the protection scheme of the pre-dreadnought faced increasing challenges. In the modern sky, the exposed propulsion and antiquated artillery and fire direction of pre-dreadnoughts make them vulnerable to even significantly smaller ships.

Destroyer

The original Destroyer was secretly built in Sarland, a colony of the Kingdom of Jigash, by rebel forces. She came in the wake of two critical technologies – the Kleinssen Torus design that allowed unprecedented miniaturization of lift units for ships and the gradual development of useful rocket-propelled torpedoes. When completed in 11888, she weighed 2715 tons – almost all of it in its single lift unit and propeller arrays – and sank the battleship Gilgamesh as it held station off the coast. Although it would take many years for torpedoes to become fast and sophisticated enough to strike a moving ship and for the Kleinssen Torus to be further refined, the sensational sinking of a capital ship to a cobbled-together contraption a fraction her size put every major navy on notice. The Kingdom of Jigash itself became the first to commission a series of its own "destroyers".

Subsequently, traditional destroyers shrank in size for a time and grew in speed maximize their chances of launching a successful attack while others were built to destroy other destroyers and were constructed to greater size with more and larger guns as a result. During and following the Continental War, destroyers generally grew in size once more, adapting to higher stormworthiness and gun stability requirements and filling many duties traditionally filled by small cruisers. Some major differences (besides smaller size) that continue to hold are a lack of protection and a lack of endurance, requiring the deployment of destroyers in groups with tenders.