The Drover design was ordered by a new Cruiser-school-dominated Domain Naval Procurement Committee to provide a strategically versatile (though tactically limited) fighter platform with a low logistical overhead. The contract was won by Orion Shipyards, the traditional Armada ship-builder, in an effort to recover lost market share from the newer naval producers. The result was the 'flying landing strip' design, maligned by Domain officers as a command more fitting for a logistics bureaucrat than a fighting ship-captain. Complaints in the lower ranks were used by elements in the navy who followed the old Capital-school to send the Drover back to committee, citing insufficient firepower for the ship weight class to meet standard guidelines (which were not written to account for strike potential of new classes of fighters). Set up to take the fall for a massive overspend, the committee simply ordered an enormous number of simple missile hardpoints installed on the front of the Drover - this met the firepower requirements handily and allowed the Drover programme to proceed with only minor alteration.
The fighter complement of the Drover is unmatched for its size, which is as designed. The unanticipated development of Drover command is its role as something of a test of character for junior officers; will they use the fearsome alpha-strike potential to seize victory in a sudden attack or hold back and use the potential of its threat to curtail aggressive moves by the opposition?
The Drover is a destroyer-sized combat carrier, perhaps the best in its class due to its good fighter capacity and Reserve Deployment ship system. It is also quite fast and can also carry a sizable large missile load.
