Cerberus

***Cerberus*** was a *Hesperia*-class battlecruiser of the Terran Alliance that served in its Grand Navy for ninety-six years. With a career marked by unusual luck, she was finally met and defeated in battle over the Wishing Well black hole during the Ravasect Wars.

## Characteristics

*For a full description of characteristics, please see here.*

The *Cerberus* was, as completed, a standard *Hesperia*: a high-speed battlecruiser with significant weapons and armour, at the cost of sheer pricetag. Despite outclassing most contemporaries—notably not Lucaelian contemporaries—and overwhelming even their successors of the *Luna* and *Venus* classes in both gunpower and strike capacity, their class was terminated after a relatively brief construction run thanks to their expensiveness: one *Hesperia* cost, after inflation, as much as two of the later *Iapetus*-class battleships. This made the construction of a *Hesperia* roughly equal to an entire Alliance star system's gross annual output: barely affordable in peacetime, let alone wartime, when larger (and substantially cheaper) ships such as the *Mars* class would naturally have priority.

Having survived the Alliance-Confederation War—a fate not shared by six of her sisters—*Cerberus* was duly upgraded in the early 2400s as part of a fleet maintenance programme. As six of the surviving ships went to either the Syndicates or the Galactic Council, they only received minor refurbishments: the remaining three still in Alliance hands were placed in reserve and received more complete upgrades. The extent of their modernization was considerable in scope and sum but called into question after an unexpected failure of *Cerberus*'s starboard auxiliary phase-shift warp nacelle during a routine maintenance cycle: it was later discovered that the director of the Luna Naval Yard had embezzled funds from her ongoing construction and used substandard equipment to cover the difference.

After the disaster—known as the *Cerberus* Affair—that was her first modernization attempt ended in failure, it fell to the Alliance Navy's state-owned Saturn Naval Yard to undertake a more complete revision of her subsystems and hull. All of her weapons were refurbished or upgraded to newer models, as was her hull armour: new hangar space was added when her engineers managed to slim down the necessary volume requirements for her twin forward-fixed boring lasers. This gave her the additional space needed to ship the newest starfighters and bombers. However, her point defenses were not especially upgraded in terms of quantity, as war experience against the Alinar had been mostly oriented towards large, fast combatants: the war had gradually evolved from one of full fleet actions into one of skirmishes and pitched battles between battlecruisers and heavy cruisers. When she finally re-emerged from stardock in 2420, *Cerberus* was then the newest and handiest fighting ship in the fleet.

## Service

### Ravasect Wars

#### Battle of the Wishing Well

*Cerberus*'s last fight would occur during the Ravasect Wars: on 6th June 2449, the 19th Fleet—Admiral Valerie van Kempen commanding—would engage the Ravasect Empire's own 7th Regal Swarm over the Wishing Well, a large singularity—a black hole—that a Metaform Combine gravity anchor had been built around. The Ravasect were using the matter decompressor to siphon materials from the singularity and rebuild their swarms quickly, using the Metaform facility's automated shipyard: the 19th Fleet was ordered to take the anchor, or, failing that, destroy it. So began the **Battle of the Wishing Well**.

A twenty-three-hour engagement ensued: the Ravasect fought bitterly and bloodily for every AU of space and every metre of station. Alliance ships surprised the outer system defenses at the outset and swept the defending 96th Lesser Swarm away, landing troops on the gravity anchor to capture it, when the 7th Regal Swarm—an Ravasect fleet led by one of the imperial family—arrived in-system in response to the anchor's distress calls. *Cerberus* thereafter led the defense of the station as Alliance and Syndicate marines worked to clear the Ravasect out of their hives.

It was in the final hour of the engagement that disaster struck: the Ravasect, having lost considerably more ships than the Alliance in their exchanges of fire (the war against the Alinar having refined Alliance gunnery techniques and fleet manoeuvres), decided to send numerous suicide ramming craft—known to the Alliance as **dartships** after the nature of their attacks—in mass wave attacks, hoping to cripple the Terran line of defense. While most ships shot down those that assaulted them, *Cerberus* was not so lucky: Admiral van Kempen's flagship was struck several dozen times by dartships. While *Cerberus* could withstand hundreds of such hits under normal conditions, the fourteenth had managed to critically damage a warp core deuterium fuel line's secondary control station in its attack. Unable to lock down and override the error thanks to damage sustained earlier in the battle, Captain Hamutama ordered all hands to abandon ship seven minutes after the attack occurred and—with deuterium and antideuterium being pumped into its warp core reaction chamber at a rapid pace—*Cerberus* exploded at 23:52, on 6/6/2449.