HEAVY COMBAT CARRIER (CVH)
Design of this new class of heavy warship took place in ______ when the federation of Allied Races (an amalgamated interstellar nation of many alien races) decided it needed a new striking carrier designed to survive on the modern battlefield without hiding.The Heavy Combat Carrier program within the FAR was initially overseen by naval staff at the Harn Shipyards, located deep within the Federation territory. After nearly 20 years in development, the heavy carrier design was becoming a failure; it was horribly over budget and behind schedule even in the most basic electronic network of the ship. In addition, a serious bribery scandal within the FAR naval ranks during the project also crippled its construction timeline. Five high-level corporate officials pleaded guilty to criminal intent and a retired rear admiral (Zain-Zu Yarrow) was also charged in the case. Technology issues, design and construction problems, and the outbreak of the ________ also led to cost immense overruns on the project.
Eventually serious and sustained talks with the Fringe leadership allowed the PSU to gain access to much of the design information it needed (in 2458 AD). This information was passed to PSU naval command, which sent it to BuCon to finally begin initial construction. The senior FAR naval official overseeing the project was Commodore Javier Medina, who already had an extensive career within the career-burdened Federation Navy, and was quite adept at negotiating its complex bureaucratic halls. At the time he had had a very successful career within the Navy, advancing rapidly due to his popularity and his specialized command abilities, which culminated in one of the largest naval projects to date, the CVH construction.
The keel of the very first Calvador-class carrier, the Bopanna, was laid down on ______ and construction took over a year to complete. Later, Commodore Medina was forced to improvise when designing the launch facilities aboard the carrier since the previous Terran Civil War had badly gutted the number of pilots within the Navy. A special robot fighter plane was developed and a new "mechanical link" created to launch the fighter into space. Since these new fighters (called Arrow Pilotless Drone-APD) were so small they doubled the number of fighters that a CVH could field (more than 240 in number).
On the battlefield, the heavy combat carrier had mixed results since the first conflict it engaged in was the lop-sided genocidal Armageddon War against the highly-advanced Hre'Daak aliens. Commodore Medina had deployed only three CVHs by the time the conflict erupted; the Kitty Hawk, the Nimitz, and the Freedom. During the initial Battle of Hamyang, the majority of the human and allied fleets were quickly wiped out by the overwhelming technological advantage of the Hre'Daak forces. The Yeager-class carriers were able to launch all their fighters against the enemy, but to little avail, and all three warships were eventually destroyed by long-range missile fire from the hostile Arbiter-class vessel. After the Galactic Holocaust ended, some of newly formed minor nations like the Rim and the Ivy League adopted much smaller carrier platforms such as the small carrier (CVV) and microcarrier (CVX) but most major powers continued to build the immense heavy combat carriers for their core fleets. In the end, the CVH remains an untested platform within most navies of Known Space.
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