Spectre

## Creation

The spectre was created in 1052DE, after an extensive series of prototyping and is the most advanced fighter craft ever developed. Its design was the basis for the later Spirit Class Corvettes. The ship's hull incorporates Arsium, a prohibitively rare and difficult to work with form of metamatter that radically strengthens the atomic structure of the hull. Thus, even though the hull plating is only between 2.5 and 5% Arsium by mass the ship has the durability of a cruiser (as well as the cost) of one. The ship is made up of a large number of technologies that were not seen in standard military hardware.

## Systems

### Reactors

The spectre utilizes an extremely small specialized pair Materium reactors. This highly maintenance intensive and expensive power source provides an extreme amount of power, more comparable to a much large gunship. However the reactors did not function as a conventional reactor did and was geared more towards reverse-entropy matter and antimatter production respectively

### FTL

The spectre utilized an extremely small subspace spinner. This spinner was very power intensive and only allowed for short range jumps at low subspace levels, though it was still considered a technological marvel considering several dozen Spectres could comfortably fit inside the office-building sized subspace spinners utilized on proper capital ships.

### Vector Vane Engines

Rather than conventional fusion candles, the spectre utilizes vector vanes, forming the "wings" of the craft. These can be imbued with exotic matter that allows them to interact with virtual particles that normally have no interaction. The engine exploits these particles and the effects created by them to achieve incredible speeds but as it does, it also causes the ship to behave more as though it is in an atmosphere with a maximum top speed before the "drag" created by virtual particles evens out with the engine's power output at around 25% of lightspeed (though it takes around 12 hours to reach this top speed) These vanes are in fact the most durable components of the ship and are on a series of pivots and joints allowing them to flex and rotate as the ship maneuvers. These engines are incredibly advanced and difficult to produce but allow for vastly higher accelerations than reusable fusion candles, and similar accelerations to non-reusable fusion candles.

### Slipstream Generator

The slipstream generator is a device that allows a Spectre to fly in atmosphere (or even through fluids) at higher than normal speeds without exponentially increasing drag or shock heating. The system works by dragging along nearby atmospheric particles with a gradating effect, creating layered shells of compressed air moving past one another at more reasonable speeds. This does not completely negate the effects of sonic booms or shock heating but greatly reduces them, and thus the drag on the ship. This also aids it in achieving higher speeds in space and functions as the ship's inertial dampening system.

### Hardlight Shielding Generator

Hardlight shielding was very rarely employed, however the Spectre can project hardlight hexes around itself to absorb large amounts of damage.

### Pulsed Hardlight Vector Cannon

Internally mounted below the cockpit, this was the fighters primary forward weapon. The weapon was effectively bomb pumped with quantities of matter and antimatter being produced and isolated by the Materium reactor, stored, and annihilated with matter on extremely rapid timescales. Displacement fields would be used to absorb the energy produced by the annihilation and channel it into the weapon. Hardened projectors would produce an hairline arrow of super-compressed hardlight with an energy of around 5x10^14 joules (or 100 tons of TNT) but fired at a rate of 6000 rounds per minute at full power. This gave the weapon more than enough energy to preform effective strafing runs on capital ships.

### Antimatter Missile Launcher

The ship's secondary weapon system contained hundreds of small missiles roughly the size of large soda cans. These missiles would be fueled with matter and antimatter fuel and were propelled by small high energy reactionless gravity engines similar to Hoytachian craft, drawing power from the antimatter-matter annihilation reaction. Fueled with just a few grams of antimatter these devices could net a yield of a modest nuclear warhead (around 100kt) though this energy could be burned up in flight and converted to kinetic energy. The missiles had immense acceleration and maneuverability utilizing a gravitational guidance system which would lock onto the mass signature of its target and fly to it. This guidance was not particularly advanced but was very quick, as the missiles simply relied on getting to their target as ascertained by the ship as quick as possible rather than countering jamming, stealth and point defense measures. Thus a more apt description would have been miniaturized GRRKVs.

## Pilots

Spectre pilots were always Cies with highly augmented digital consciousnesses (though some still utilized demiorganic bodies) who would directly interface with the ships systems allowing for near light-speed reaction times to situations.