FGSD/F Dark Lance

*"The ship in my vision... Now, laid out before me, a horrible, black abyss against the beautiful starlight of the cosmos. There is no turning back, now, no, no backing away, no retreating, no surrendering. I have doomed myself to be hated, to be a stain in the history books of Humanity, but here, now, with this ship, is where the war ends. This is where they surrender, or die fighting. I have the thunder to my lightning, and nothing will hold me back."*

*~Ar-i Ta-ora*

## The Pride of Ar-i's First Galactus

Commissioned for construction in the second year of the Clone Wars, and completed fifteen years later, the First Galactus Superdreadnought and Flagship, the *Dark Lance,* was a ship unlike any other, dwarfing nearly every ship of its calibre in history, save the First Order's *Supremacy*. While a somewhat older, more obscure model of Star Destroyer (*Vengeance-*class,) the Ann'mui Superdreadnought was fitted with an appropriately ludicrous array of cannons, fitting of the ship's scale, ranging from the standard Turbolaser batteries to the Ann'mui-made Ion-Py'xalos Fusion Cannons, which, while they did draw from the ship's own fuel source, remain the most effective superheavy armaments in history, capable of shredding even the strongest of the Resistance's ships. The most dreadful of all the weapons, dwarfing even the Ion-Py'xalos Fusion Cannons, however, was the ship's Superlaser, which, with its iconic, deep, trumpet-like bray, could bring about a nuclear winter with a single shot; So powerful, in fact, that it even mortified Ar-i himself to the point where it was only used three times on inhabited worlds in fits of rage.

At a staggering thirty-six kilometers in length, and sixteen from wingtip to wingtip, the behemoth scale of the *Dark Lance* was as intimidating as it was iconic, with Resistance propaganda frequently labeling the ship "The Spearhead of Death." To accompany this, the depth of the ship was, relatively speaking, obscenely shallow, at only four kilometers, forcing every inch of space within to be utilized to its peak, with well over eight hundred individual decks, which, occasionally, were so isolated from the rest of the ship by their functions, that certain decks developed their own miniature social ecosystem, though potential "Civil wars" between these castes were kept very much in check by fear of the Emperor.

## Armaments

### General

Despite the vulnerable design of the Imperial model of the ship, the tiered weapons dotting the ship ensured a complete defensive circle, with very few, narrow blind spots situated in mostly-barren regions of the ship, often where the armour was thickest. The guns themselves were mostly unconventional Boltcaster-like weapons, often relying on kinetic projectiles over plasmic, and, because of this, while the reload times for the kinetic weapons were well over double the others, the armour-piercing potential of the ship was unrivaled, with the sheer brute force of the cannons able to overwhelm armour of near any thickness and material. Due to the sheer number, despite the massive crew side, every gun was droid-operated to strike as precisely and intelligently as possible, making the prospect of launching an assault on the *Lance* all the more intimidating. At her peak, the *Dark Lance* had a combined total of sixteen-thousand, four-hundred cannons, mixing railguns, Ion-Py'xalos Fusion Cannons, Turbolasers, and Super-Turbolasers into a devastating hurricane that, even on its own, with no support, allowed the *Lance* to easily tear entire fleets apart.

#### Exterior, Long-Range (ELR)

The overall weakest of the seven layers, the ELR was composed of a total of three-hundred railguns, one-hundred-fifty to each hemisphere of the ship, all resting along the interior edges of the thin equatorial trench. The armour-piercing, multi-ton projectiles were laden with a miniature, remote Hyperdrive engine, which would later inspire the unlucky sister-ship *Warhammer's* primary weapon, that could be used to harass enemy fleets within a range of sixty light-years, effectively starting battles before the opponents could get even remotely close to firing range.

#### Exterior, Mid-Range, Superheavy (SH1)

Placed exactly above the ELR array, at double the frequency, the six-hundred Ion-Py'xalos Fusion Cannons saw, by far, the most use of any other array, due to their location and the tendency for ship captains to attempt a broadside, rather than utilizing the physics of space to their advantage. The superheavy quadruple guns could maintain an almost completely uninterrupted rate of fire, shooting off one round every two-and-a-half seconds on average, which, when combined with the other arrays, meant the ridiculous amount of cannonfire in one area of space could be nothing but a blinding light.

#### Exterior, Close-Quarters (CQ)

Behind the SH1 array, at, once again, double the frequency of the prior, sat twelve hundred railguns, though these, unlike the ELR array, were far smaller, with narrower barrels. The projectiles had no Hyperdrive, but were instead far longer, like a spear, dense enough to fire clear into heavy armour, and the delayed high-explosive charge would sort out the rest.

#### Mid/Elevated Medium, Mid-Range (M1-M2)

Between the exterior and interior arrays, the twin standard and Super-Turbolaser mixed cannon arrays served more as a secondary source of damage in conjunction with the Superheavy arrays. With five thousand of each, M1 and M2 made up almost half of the *Lance*'s cannons in regards to sheer number, and, despite being considered nothing but secondary arrays in the face of the Superheavies, their damage output was certainly nothing to scoff at, able to tear ships apart just as easily as the Exterior arrays.

#### Interior, Heavy (IH)

As the final offensive array, the IH array consisted of eight hundred sextuple-barrel Super-Turbolasers, capable of pouring out a stream of fire with one round every half second. These guns narrowly made it to the classification of "Heavy," in the face of the much more powerful railguns and Superheavies, due to the sheer damage output, as, by the time the third barrel fired, the first had already reloaded and fired again.

#### Defensive, Mid-range, Superheavy (SH2)

The only exclusively defensive array on the ship, the four thousand cannons of the SH2 dotted critical positions aboard the ship, though they were mostly concentrated around the bridge, engines, and, especially, the dorsal superlaser. The gun platforms which housed the four barrels of these Ion-Py'xalos Fusion Cannons were spherical, unlike the more traditional sloping platforms of the rest, to allow for the guns to reach nearly every conceivable angle. These guns were moved to their positions within the third year of service, having originally been part of the SH1 array as the primary source of fire for their versatility and quadruple barrels, but, as the Fusion Cannons, engines, and Superlaser all drew from the same power source, they were moved to a defensive role, as their consumption of fuel rendered them inefficient for general combat.

### RDR Mk. VIII Light Dorsal Superlaser, *"Thunder"*

*"The 'Thunder' itself was as terrible a thing as I could possibly imagine: From the circle shot a quick streak of brilliant, blinding purple light, like an arrow from a bowstring, which blurred through my field of view for the briefest of moments before ascending up, straight for the planet. I rushed to press myself against the window, craning my neck rather painfully to look up in horror as the light grew fainter, then disappeared for a split second with a bright flash, and, in the place it had vanished, swelled a fiery plume, many tens of miles across, with an incendiary shock-wave soon to follow that tore across the surface. The crust physically rippled around the impact point, rising like massive, terrestrial waves of rent, mangled metal, like a stone dropped into a pond. The entire world flickered- The massive cities fighting the loss of power as the very earth around them shook with quakes unlike any they had likely ever felt. The atmosphere, once a glorious gold ring, subtly reddened as the wave of fire and destruction rushed across it, torching the surface into a blackened, charred, hellish desert, devoid of anything resembling the cities that once dominated it. Entire continents; Swathes of land hundreds of thousands of miles across, were utterly consumed in a fire of apocalyptic proportions, the ash, dust, and debris from the cities flying high into the air, some so high, in fact, that they sailed past the window and struck against the hull of the Dark Lance, some large enough to even send light tremors up to the bridge. The ones that did not rise into the cosmos, however, slowed, stopped, and fell back to the surface, raining hellfire across the world."*

*~Ar-i Ta-ora, describing the Superlaser firing on Coruscant.*

While the *Lance* was constructed over the volcanic world of Mustafar, with a long chain of supplies delivering the material Ar-i demanded the ship be constructed from, in the tiny Ring Driveyards over Volatara, he directly oversaw the construction of the Mark One variation of the *Thunder.* In the original blueprints, the *Thunder* was intended to be an ionic, ring-shaped blast, similar to the primary weapon of the Clone Wars-era CIS Dreadnought, the *Malevolence*, but, over time, as Ar-i, and, by extent, the First Galactus, became more warlike, the later models were progressively improved upon to deal more and more damage to ships, until, by Mark Seven, Ar-i completely scrapped the original function, replacing it with an experimental Ion-Py'xalos Fusion weapon many thousands of times the size and power of the Fusion Cannons dotting the exterior. The wildly successful initial testing of the weapon was swept mostly under the rug, though rumours of the Dreadnought's new superweapon were intentionally allowed to spread, and, with the advent of the Mark Eight, confirmation was finally made public.

While similar in concept to the primary weapon of the Galactic Empire's "Death Star," the Superlaser operated far different from any other known WMD, with the laser itself resembling a supersized Turbolaser bolt, and functioning much the same way. When fired, the laser would streak from the circular "Barrel" in a perfectly straight line, requiring the entire ship to be maneuvered to aim the weapon, and, on impact, the force was a devastating mix of kinetic and incendiary, causing ripple-like waves in the crust and a fireball which rose well into the upper limits of the atmosphere. However, due to the shallowness of the *Lance*, the Superlaser could only reach the tier of "Minor," as there was nowhere near enough room to truly take advantage of the power allotted by Ion-Py'xalos Fusion, and, in the end, the weapon was more akin to a mass extinction-level meteoric impact than anything else, with an inconsistent rate of damage, depending on the structure of the target planet, such as Coruscant. Coruscant, with its layers and layers of cities many miles over the actual crust, was able to take the brunt of the impact and disperse it, with the other side of the planet having nearly returned to normal within five years, though the actual impact point on Coruscant itself was never truly repaired before its destruction in the takeover of the Sith Allegiance.