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(TEF) Hydra A Heavy Fighter (modless)

The Hydra A-class Heavy Fighter is a small grid single-seat assault craft which is equipped with strong offensive armament (including Lidar Guided Missiles-LGMs), durable Armor plating (for its size), good acceleration and manoeuvrability and it is built fully vanilla and survival ready.

Since I started to build Fighters in Space Engineers I wanted to build a replica of the original X-Wing Starfighter from a New Hope, but I soon realized that other people are much more talented in building awesome ship replicas, so I just used the ships from sci-fi franchises as inspiration for my builds. In this case I wanted to build a heavy fighter for my TEF faction, so I used the most recognizable feature of the X-Wing, its X-Foils and put it on a redesigned hull of my old Swordwing X2 Heavy Fighter. The result is the Hydra A.

• Manoeuverability - A good amount of thrusters and gyroscopes makes the ship well suited for dogfights.
  
• Armor Protection – The ship is relatively durable armoured for its size and weight class.
  
• Armament - The strong offensive Armament eight Gatling guns and eight sequenced 200mm rocket launchers.
  
• Lidar Guided Missiles (LGMs) – The ship is equipped with four homing Hornet Mk 1 LGMs, which can destroy nearly every small grid target with one hit.
  
• Survival-ready (but not recommended) - fully conveyered and without any kind of mod or dlc.

The Hydra A or F-16 Heavy Fighters, were designed and constructed as an answer on the increasing pirate attacks since the foundation of Black Sail. For the task of defending TEF outposts and hunting down enemy fighter squadrons or corvettes, the ship was equipped with the strongest armament of every TEF Fighter, featuring eight Gatling guns in the two bow mandibles and eight sequenced 200mm rocket launchers on the X-Foils. This special wing design was used to give the rocket launchers an improved firing profile. If the pilot wants to land the ship, the Foils can be folded.
In addition to the strong built in weaponry, the Hydra is equipped with the newest Hornet Mk1 LGMs attached on the wingtips. These devastating homing missiles were license builds from Taydir's LGM-S. IM-01 Spörr by his Valkyrja Maintenance & Engineering faction, and are able to disable or destroy every small ship with one hit. These weapons were used to counter the small lightly armoured attack fighters from Black Sail effectively, but the missiles can also deliver serious damage to Frigates or Corvettes.
The ship has also build in decoys on the wingtips, if the Fighter is under heavy AI turret fire, they can be turned on and the wings can be detached to draw the turrets attention away from the craft.
The designers decided to use a mixture of hydrogen and ion thrusters, but the ship was only build to be operated in non-atmospheric environments. It can be operated on moon surfaces with 0.25G conditions. If the pilot wants to hold the ship in air in 1.00G conditions, he can utilize the two main large hydrogen thrusters. If this doesn´t work the Hydra has two emergency parachute hatches.

„Quality is the key, not Quantity! “
The design philosophy of the Hydra A Heavy Fighters.

The first prototypes of these fighters were already built in November 2239, these four prototypes were used by the Special Operations Squad „Echo”. These elite squad pilots were the first that demonstrated the potential of these new ship design, during the defence of Gatopea 23 Station in 2240 and the destruction of the Black Sail command carrier „Ganymede” in 2241. Because of the success of these fighters the TEF Ministry of Defence ordered the production of two hundred of these fighters. Because they were very expensive, the pilots of these crafts were specially trained veterans and they were only operated in small squadrons of four ships.

I hope you like my first Heavy Fighter for my TEF faction, if you have constructive criticism write me!

The ships programmable blocks are loaded with these scripts:
Easy Lidar Homing Script by Alysius
Whip's Artificial Horizon Redux by Whiplash 141
Whip's Weapon Salvo Script also by Whiplash 141
Automatic LCDs 2 by MMaster
Thank you for your awesome scripts!

To use the LGMs, just use the the camera (named R_LIDAR), fire one of the four missiles, while in camera view aim with the crosshair at the grid the missile should lock on until you hear the alarm, BOOM!

Thanks to everyone who likes this ship I, hope you leave a like! If you don’t like it tell me why and I will try to improve it on this and future blueprints.