| 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. |
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–In-Game Description | ||
Notes[]
The Drover is a destroyer-sized combat carrier, quite fast and can also carry a sizable large missile load. Its unique B-Deck hullmod allows a single rapid restoration of fighter capacity.
| REDACTED | ||
|---|---|---|
| Derelict | Defender · Picket · Sentry · Warden · · Bastillon · Berserker · · Rampart · · Guardian · · Mothership | |
| Remnant | Flash · Lux · Spark · · Glimmer · Lumen · · Fulgent · Scintilla · · Apex · Brilliant · · Nova · Radiant · · Battlestation | |
| Omega | Aspect · Dextral Shard · Sinistral Shard · Facet · Tesseract | |
| Other | Ziggurat | |
Change History[]
0.96a
- Improved acceleration and deceleration (not top speed)
- Added built-in hullmod: "B-Deck"
- Activates when the fighter replacement rate reaches 50%
- Relaunches fighters to bring all wings to full strength
- Sets the replacement rate to 100%
- Only happens once per combat
- Changed ship system to Active Flare Launcher
- Tagged is a "combat" carrier, meaning it will stay closer to the fight and engage
- If the only ballistic weapons are point-defense, it will try to stay in missile range
- So e.g. it should be possible to have a missile/fighter loadout and have it use both in tandem
- Increased ordnance points to 80 (was: 70)
- Reduced deployment/maintenance supply cost to 14 (was: 15)
0.95a
- Deployment/maintenance cost increased to 15 (was: 12)
- Cargo capacity reduced to 40 (was: 80)
- Ship system [[Reserve Deployment]] changed. See linked page.
0.8a
- Added to the game
Only up to date for version 0.96. It is likely still broadly correct but not verified for the most up to date data yet. Please double check the Version History.