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"BPGD: Barghest-class destroyer"
 
   LAST EDITED ON Jun-18-09 AT 12:08 PM (EDT)
 
Babylon Project Galactic Database
Text Data Extraction Search: Jane's Fighting Starships
Search criteria: barghest class destroyer
SEARCH COMPLETE: MARCH 8, 2412


RSN CCO schematic, HMS Barghest SDD-501

Barghest-class destroyer
(Royal Salusian Navy)

Overview

Fielded during the darkest days of the Covenant War, the Barghest class of destroyers was an engineering update of the Mastiff class, which was venerable even then. The vessels were notable as the first ships in the Royal Salusian Navy to incorporate Zetan overtechnology.

Name/Model: Project 379 (Barghest class)
Manufacturer: Royal Saenar Fleet Systems
Combat designation: Stealth destroyer (SDD)
Entered service: April 4, 2172

Crew: 75
Length: 314 ft. 4 in.
Mass: 55 Kt

Power system: RSFS 3c33-E fusion reactor
Propulsion system: RSFS DriveLine 430 thermofusion thrust drive
Speed rating: 75 MGLT
Flight control system: RSFS Mark CCX reaction control system
Maneuver rating: 30 DPF
Navigation: Royal Saenar Compusystems HC-7513 computer core
FTL: RSFS Mark MDC motivator drive unit (hyperdrive)
Hyperdrive rating: 0.2

Shields: RSFS Deflectron-217 projective deflector shield system
Shield rating: 275 SBD
Armor: Composite reinforced tritanium alloy hull
Armor rating: 120 RU

ARMAMENT
Fixed armaments:
2x Royal Salusian Fleet Arsenal Mark LXXV turbolasers
10x RSFA Mark CX point defense twin blaster emplacements
Expendable armaments: 4x RSFA 30" special torpedo tubes
4x RSFA 20" standard torpedo tubes

TACTICAL COMPLEMENT
Royal Salusian Marine Corps complement:
12x Marine

History

The Mastiff-class destroyer was a mainstay of the Salusian fleet for centuries, starting with the class ship's commissioning in SY 1853. More than 300 of the vessels, quick, agile, and surprisingly sturdy by the standards of the time, were built in the years between 1853 and Earth Contact in 1999. By the outbreak of the Covenant War in 2169, however, they were outmoded and those few remaining in service had been relegated to rear-area assignments.

In 2170, as the scale of the Covenant threat became more readily apparent to the Admiralty and Salusia's Wedge Defense Force allies, the First Space Lord, Baron Vlatimyr Arconian, initiated a crash research program intended to find new and creative uses for obsolete weapons. Aided by WDF engineering officers, the Royal Salusian Starship Establishment and the RSN's Construction and Commissioning Office took a look at the older ships in the fleet's inventory. At first it was thought that the old Mastiffs might have some usefulness as remotely operated drone ships or even starship-scale torpedoes, but before those ideas got past the computer-modeling stage, WDF chief engineer Robert "ReRob" Mandeville came to a startling realization: the old ships' hull configuration and internal layout might make them a practical home for a new kind of stealth system he and some of the WDF's other engineers had theorized years before.

The vessel chosen to become the testbed for the system, dubbed IES ("internal emissions sink"), was HMS Barghest (DD-501), a Block VII Mastiff first launched in 1969. The reconstruction of Barghest took nearly two years and involved such complicated and extensive reworking of her internal spaces that the CCO chose to designate her the lead ship of a new class. With an "S" for stealth prepended to her hull number, she returned to service for trials in 2172.

The IES system, in contrast to active cloaking systems such as those developed and made famous by the Romulan Star Empire, was a completely passive system which worked by capturing the vessel's thermal and other radiative emissions in carefully engineered internal sinks. These sinks, made from a still-classified blend of Zetan overtechnology materials including obscurium-329, nearly doubled the Barghest's mass from her original specification, requiring a more powerful power core and drive system to be installed (this accounted for much of the time and effort involved in the rebuild). Though it did not affect the vessel's reflected-light visibility at all (unlike an active cloak), the IES system did effectively mask the Barghest from the passive sensors customarily used to direct a starship's visual acquisition sensors - and in the ship's combat debut, at Tjederad in June of that year, the system completely flummoxed the Covenant warships' detection grids.

Most of the remaining Mastiff-class ships were upgraded to the Barghest standard over the next two years, and an order for 30 new-construction Barghest hulls was partially completed before the end of the war. The Barghests that survived the war continued in service until the mid-23rd century. All had been retired by 2246; most were scrapped.

ANALYSIS

The Barghest-class destroyer was intended to be a stealthy fast attack ship, primarily geared toward first scouting out, then aiding in fleet actions against, Covenant battle formations. They carried relatively few weapons, but those weapons could be devastating when skillfully employed, and their unconventional stealth systems were highly effective against Covenant and, later, Kilrathi, Cardassian, and Klingon sensor doctrines. They could run silent for two to three hours or loiter in a low-power passive observation mode for several days, and unlike a vessel with an active cloak, they could fire torpedoes without "surfacing" (though the weapon track might give away their position anyway). Quick and maneuverable at sublight speeds (nearly the equivalent of some starfighters of the day), they also mounted the most powerful hyperspace motivators of any starship in the Salusian inventory, before or since, given them blazing hyperdrive speed even by modern standards.

CRITICISM

Barghest-class vessels were not without their faults. Their interior spaces were cramped and uncomfortable, and they required unusually large crews for such small vessels, thanks to a lack of internal automation (omitted to save mass). Each of their eight torpedo tubes had to be served manually to be effective in battle, as did each point defense blaster emplacement, and the turbolaser turret required a crew of no fewer than 12 able spacemen to operate properly. Their relatively primitive targeting system required considerable manual work and mathematical skill on the part of the ship's gunnery officers to achieve results, especially with the 30-inch ADCAP (ADvanced CAPability) or "super torpedoes", as they were known at the time. The IES system had a finite capacity to absorb the ship's emi


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