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Description
The backbone of the Sovereignty Navy, the Azlein-class has served the Veclary Sovereignty for a little over 40 years, succeeding the previous Mahna-class, which the Azlein is primarily little more than some refinement of the internal structure and bringing the ship's technological specs up to date; to some, the Azlein is a 'Mahna Mark 2'.
The Azlein has only a few armaments, and lacks the heavier and more exotic weaponry of its larger or more powerful betters, but makes up for it with versatility and, by naval standards, bang for its buck.

During the Veclary-Orion War and concurrent Keystone Crisis, many Azlein cruisers had their zero-point energy reactors replaced by Starcradle Shards, with some minor modifications to their power systems to accommodate the considerably higher power output. For most of the war these dominated the inferior Directorate navy, though they nonetheless suffered several losses in the war, including the Siege of Outer Isecteid where the Sovereignty advance was finally, painfully halted. After the brutal losses the navy's 5th Fleet suffered during the catastrophic Attack on Inner Isecteid and subsequent ambush on the battlecruiser Celare, many Shard-powered Azleins on the front were pulled back to try and stop the Celare's advance into Sovereignty space, though many of these would be destroyed by the vessel. Only a few hundred Shard-powered Azleins were operational by the time the Keystone Crisis and Veclary-Orion War came to an end, the rest having been destroyed either during the war or by the Celare during the final weeks of the conflict. These surviving warships would go on to serve as a high-threat response force for the next few years, until their Shards finally gave out and crumbled to dust, at which point their zero-point energy reactors were reinstalled.

ARMAMENTS
x4 .6c Mass Beam Turrets: Mass Beams are a commonplace naval armament in the Cradle Galaxy thanks to their firepower; they are notoriously hard to stop even with energy shielding. The Azlein possesses three barrels a turret, or 12 barrels.
x1 .9c Mass Beam Cannon: A heavier weapon to allow the Azlein a chance at cracking harder targets, this more powerful, spinal-mount Mass Beam gun fires its beam at just short of lightspeed. While powerful against static or slow targets, this gun is functionally useless against agile ones.
x144 Missile Tubes: Missiles are an archaic weapon in origin, dating back to roughly the 20th Century. Still, as the technology driving and steering them as well as what they're delivering advances, they remain a versatile and deadly armament on the field. Veclary warships field a variety of warheads, such as fusion bombs and bomb pumped laser arrays.

DEFENCES
Battle Plate: Veclary warships are, for the most part, rather lightly armoured. Battle Plate leans more towards defence against energy weapons, shrapnel and explosive blasts rather than kinetics; what is some armour going to do against a beam of relativistic metal? Battle Plate offers substantial DEW defence, but all it particularly does against kinetics is compress them to minimise spalling.
Blast Shield: The energy shields of the Sovereignty are dual-layered. The outermost layer is a standard charged particle shield, but within that is a hyperactive particle shield, shredding anything that makes it past the outer layer. This can stop Mass Beam fire, though said weapons strain the generator notably to do this.
x4 Phased Laser Arrays: Capable and deadly anti-missile devices, these do not rely on a turret unit to aim, allowing them to fire on hundreds to thousands of targets a minute. The lasers do little to stop Mass Beam or other kinetic fire, however.
x44 Pulsed Particle Cannons: Heavyweight point defence, these guns fire low-relativistic particulate shots at a high rate, allowing them to destroy missiles, shatter kinetic slugs, and disrupt long-range particle fire. Focused fire from these can mitigate or stop Mass Beam fire at long range.

OTHER
Graviton Point Drive: Standard Veclary propulsion system for all capital warships, the GPD propels the ship forward with a focused graviton beam. The Drive also serves to provide the vessel with artificial gravity. While not as advanced as some propulsion methods like the Skiena Council's Graviton Vortex Drive, the GPD is nonetheless a capable modern propulsion system in the 3600s that nobody could deny the reliability of.
Spacefold Engine: Many powers in the Cradle Galaxy of the 3600s use spacefold as their standard FTL, and the Veclary are no exception. Described as "Warp's 'roided up brother", Spacefold bends space until the point of space the vessel occupies and the intended destination collide, at which stage matter within those points swaps. While it takes time to charge and fire, transition from point A to B is otherwise nigh-instantaneous. However, the swapping of mass prevents a Spacefold-wielding vessel from jumping into any form of atmosphere as the ship will come to often-significant damage, forcing vessels to FTL either away from any one celestial body, or otherwise in high orbit.
Zero Point Energy Reactor: Like Spacefold, ZPE reactors are commonplace in the 3600s, though various nations use their own patterns. The Veclary model is respectable, and the Orion Directorate's mildly less powerful reactors are an attempt to copy the design. These reactors provide enough power to supply the fleet's needs, though larger vessels and more powerful armaments require either long charge-up times, larger reactors or multiple units.
Starcradle Shards: Chipped from the hole made in the Starcradle by the Keystone Excavator soon before the Veclary-Orion War began, Starcradle Shards are roughly spherical, coarse to the touch, glow, and are probably not safe to handle. Despite being the size of a football, these shards outdo basically all known ZPE patterns, vastly improving the firepower and defences of the ships equipped with them. The large crucibles conventional reactors use are still needed, instead flooded with coolant to prevent the power cables attached to the Shard from melting. Shards are not indefinite, however, and will lose their glow and crumble to dust after 2-3 years of use. It was the power afforded by these, and the resultant increase in firepower(all of the Azlein's weapons fired at .99c, for example, and their shields recovered much faster) that allowed the Veclary Sovereignty to cripple the Orion Directorate during the Veclary-Orion War. After the conflict and the Keystone Crisis ended, however, all Shards had crumbled within 2 years, putting them out of use until the start of the Veckla War.

There it is, lads. Probably the last thing I'll post in 2018.

Description
The backbone of the Sovereignty Navy, the Azlein-class has served the Veclary Sovereignty for a little over 40 years, succeeding the previous Mahna-class, which the Azlein is primarily little more than some refinement of the internal structure and bringing the ship's technological specs up to date; to some, the Azlein is a 'Mahna Mark 2'.
The Azlein has only a few armaments, and lacks the heavier and more exotic weaponry of its larger or more powerful betters, but makes up for it with versatility and, by naval standards, bang for its buck.

During the Veclary-Orion War and concurrent Keystone Crisis, many Azlein cruisers had their zero-point energy reactors replaced by Starcradle Shards, with some minor modifications to their power systems to accommodate the considerably higher power output. For most of the war these dominated the inferior Directorate navy, though they nonetheless suffered several losses in the war, including the Siege of Outer Isecteid where the Sovereignty advance was finally, painfully halted. After the brutal losses the navy's 5th Fleet suffered during the catastrophic Attack on Inner Isecteid and subsequent ambush on the battlecruiser Celare, many Shard-powered Azleins on the front were pulled back to try and stop the Celare's advance into Sovereignty space, though many of these would be destroyed by the vessel. Only a few hundred Shard-powered Azleins were operational by the time the Keystone Crisis and Veclary-Orion War came to an end, the rest having been destroyed either during the war or by the Celare during the final weeks of the conflict. These surviving warships would go on to serve as a high-threat response force for the next few years, until their Shards finally gave out and crumbled to dust, at which point their zero-point energy reactors were reinstalled.

ARMAMENTS
x4 .6c Mass Beam Turrets: Mass Beams are a commonplace naval armament in the Cradle Galaxy thanks to their firepower; they are notoriously hard to stop even with energy shielding. The Azlein possesses three barrels a turret, or 12 barrels.
x1 .9c Mass Beam Cannon: A heavier weapon to allow the Azlein a chance at cracking harder targets, this more powerful, spinal-mount Mass Beam gun fires its beam at just short of lightspeed. While powerful against static or slow targets, this gun is functionally useless against agile ones.
x144 Missile Tubes: Missiles are an archaic weapon in origin, dating back to roughly the 20th Century. Still, as the technology driving and steering them as well as what they're delivering advances, they remain a versatile and deadly armament on the field. Veclary warships field a variety of warheads, such as fusion bombs and bomb pumped laser arrays.

DEFENCES
Battle Plate: Veclary warships are, for the most part, rather lightly armoured. Battle Plate leans more towards defence against energy weapons, shrapnel and explosive blasts rather than kinetics; what is some armour going to do against a beam of relativistic metal? Battle Plate offers substantial DEW defence, but all it particularly does against kinetics is compress them to minimise spalling.
Blast Shield: The energy shields of the Sovereignty are dual-layered. The outermost layer is a standard charged particle shield, but within that is a hyperactive particle shield, shredding anything that makes it past the outer layer. This can stop Mass Beam fire, though said weapons strain the generator notably to do this.
x4 Phased Laser Arrays: Capable and deadly anti-missile devices, these do not rely on a turret unit to aim, allowing them to fire on hundreds to thousands of targets a minute. The lasers do little to stop Mass Beam or other kinetic fire, however.
x44 Pulsed Particle Cannons: Heavyweight point defence, these guns fire low-relativistic particulate shots at a high rate, allowing them to destroy missiles, shatter kinetic slugs, and disrupt long-range particle fire. Focused fire from these can mitigate or stop Mass Beam fire at long range.

OTHER
Graviton Point Drive: Standard Veclary propulsion system for all capital warships, the GPD propels the ship forward with a focused graviton beam. The Drive also serves to provide the vessel with artificial gravity. While not as advanced as some propulsion methods like the Skiena Council's Graviton Vortex Drive, the GPD is nonetheless a capable modern propulsion system in the 3600s that nobody could deny the reliability of.
Spacefold Engine: Many powers in the Cradle Galaxy of the 3600s use spacefold as their standard FTL, and the Veclary are no exception. Described as "Warp's 'roided up brother", Spacefold bends space until the point of space the vessel occupies and the intended destination collide, at which stage matter within those points swaps. While it takes time to charge and fire, transition from point A to B is otherwise nigh-instantaneous. However, the swapping of mass prevents a Spacefold-wielding vessel from jumping into any form of atmosphere as the ship will come to often-significant damage, forcing vessels to FTL either away from any one celestial body, or otherwise in high orbit.
Zero Point Energy Reactor: Like Spacefold, ZPE reactors are commonplace in the 3600s, though various nations use their own patterns. The Veclary model is respectable, and the Orion Directorate's mildly less powerful reactors are an attempt to copy the design. These reactors provide enough power to supply the fleet's needs, though larger vessels and more powerful armaments require either long charge-up times, larger reactors or multiple units.
Starcradle Shards: Chipped from the hole made in the Starcradle by the Keystone Excavator soon before the Veclary-Orion War began, Starcradle Shards are roughly spherical, coarse to the touch, glow, and are probably not safe to handle. Despite being the size of a football, these shards outdo basically all known ZPE patterns, vastly improving the firepower and defences of the ships equipped with them. The large crucibles conventional reactors use are still needed, instead flooded with coolant to prevent the power cables attached to the Shard from melting. Shards are not indefinite, however, and will lose their glow and crumble to dust after 2-3 years of use. It was the power afforded by these, and the resultant increase in firepower(all of the Azlein's weapons fired at .99c, for example, and their shields recovered much faster) that allowed the Veclary Sovereignty to cripple the Orion Directorate during the Veclary-Orion War. After the conflict and the Keystone Crisis ended, however, all Shards had crumbled within 2 years, putting them out of use until the start of the Veckla War.

There it is, lads. Probably the last thing I'll post in 2018.