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INX-Siren - Incarri Interdictor/Drone Boat

To reduce lag, the ship has NOT been outfitted with drones in all drone bays. At full capacity, this ship carries 88 drones. I do have a different save file where the ship is outfitted at half capacity - 44 drones - but even that caused a lot of lag for me.

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Quick Guide:

To deploy the drone bays, simply control the ship , press ‘k’ to go to the control panel, and find the group called *Drone Bays* and reverse the pistons.

Drone construction is done with the button panels at each station. Pressing ‘1’ will start the welders, and pressing ‘2’ will start lifting the projection into the air to allow all of the construction to finish. Once done, you can manually detach the drone from the construction facility by grinding away the single yellow conveyor block.
To do another drone after that, simply press ‘1’ followed by ‘2’ to turn off welders and lower the projection again. Then start over.

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Author’s notes:

About the visuals.
Conceptually, I really wanted to make a drone carrier with drone bays that extend out like ‘shelves’ when deploying its drones. In addition, I’ve always liked vertical ship designs since you mostly see horizontal, back-to-front designs.
You might notice a bit of a bee/wasp theme in the visual design of the ship and that is no coincidence; “Siren” is of course the mythical creature that we all know, but can also mean wasp in Latin, so I played on both meanings and decided to give the ship a pupa design. You can see the legs on front of the ship, and the window panes along the sides are supposed to resemble insect wings. Additionally, I've used a hexagonal pattern in many places, especially around the rear thrusters.

About the function.
The INX-Siren is supposed to be a capital class ship that fills the very crucial role of Interdictor. That is, causing all sorts of logistics havoc for the enemy fleet using its potent electronics warfare capabilities to disrupt communications, scramble scanners, hack ship mainframes etc.

Since I imagine that the kind of broadband needed to control scores of drones would also come in handy as a way of boosting the ship’s capacity for electronic warfare, I feel like these two features go well together.

The INX-Siren has a total of 8 drone bays, 6 of which are located on the sides of the ship and can be extended and retracted. The other two are on the front and also act as docking stations for drone repairs and replacements. Behind these two drone bays are facilities which allow construction of additional drones, should any drones be lost.

Finally, the light bug means that I can only have each color value at either 0 or 255. Hopefully it’ll get fixed soon and I will then update the ship with the color scheme that I was originally going for.

I hope you enjoy :)

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Fluff:

Following the Calamity of Koltyr, it became immediately apparent that the Incarri was the single greatest threat ever faced by the Coalition of Independent Colonies. A formal declaration of war was issued by the CIC against the Holy Incarri Empire on the 153rd day of the year 3646 N.E., 5 days after the Calamity. Thus began the 5th Great War.

While the Incarri proved a more formidable foe than any previously encountered, they seemed reluctant to allow even minor losses on their side, electing instead to retreat from such engagements as would result in their fleet trading blows evenly with their enemy. It was believed that taking advantage of this knowledge could ultimately lead to victory over the Incarri. That is, until a new class of ship made its appearance on the battlefield.

Perhaps as a result of meeting substantial resistance for the first time in their military history, the Incarri quickly came to the realization that prolonged fleet warfare could present situations which were not resolved simply by pointing a blaster at the problem and shooting until it went away. Incarri engineers started looking elsewhere for ways to effectively dismantle the enemy forces.

This is how the Siren was conceived of. While any one ship’s strength lies in the toughness of its hull and the caliber of guns in its arsenal, a fleet’s most important assets are its ability to gather and distribute information, and its logistic capabilities. The Siren targets these very areas of fleet operations.

Disrupting communications, inhibiting scanners, scrambling warp cores, causing power blackouts; its countless arrays of CPUs and massive bandwidth make it a powerful platform for electronic warfare, even over the vast distances that are often involved in fleet-to-fleet combat.

It is not until you let the Siren get close, however, that its true power comes to bear. On the Incarri home world, there is an indigenous life form that lives in communities of thousands upon thousands of individuals. All of them serve a common purpose. All of them were spawned from a single entity called the queen. And all of them move as one to eliminate any threat to their collective.

There has been some speculation as to whether this most fearsome weapon of the Siren was not actually an original part of the concept, but rather a byproduct of its extreme capacity for long-distance transmission of data. For these are the very properties that are sought after in ships specialized for drone control.

When the Siren engages its drone bay modules and redirects power to its drone control cores, it becomes clear where the Incarri engineers got their inspiration. Like the vespids of their home world, a swarm of drones is unleashed to protect their matriarch. And should any drones fall to enemy fire, facilities inside the Siren stand ready to begin birthing replacements, even in the midst of combat.

Truly an icon of the 5th Great War, this ship was the first and arguably still the mightiest of the Interdictor class. A class that would later be populated by a myriad of ship designs in the years following the end of the 5th Great War with the signing of the Heiratuul Treaty and the tentative peace that followed.

-- Excerpt from “A Universe at War VII, Incarri Interruption” by Record Keeper Keslar Fernheim, 5617 N.E.