The Akoi Sensory Drone is an unmanned craft designed to provide the Elysian Celestial Empire and its navy superior sensory ability of Elysian teritory and that surrounding it as to ensure that they will never suffer from lack of intellegence - a fundamental asset in warfare.

The Akoi has two features which makes up effectively the sum total of the vessel - it is fast and it has good sensors. Beyond this it is designed to be cheap - it does not carry a crew and so does not have the need for quarters or life-support and it does not have weapons. As such it can be produced fairly easily by Elysia in order to increase its efficiency.

The Akoi serves two purposes - one is patrolling the border of the Empire to keep an eye on the neighbouring states in order to detect any possible prelude to invasion, the second to aid the fleets and Tactical Forces and provide them with a mobile and effective sensory unit.

The Akoi looks much like a smooth metallic teardrop punctured by four arcs which look much like blades coming out of the centre of the craft and pointing forwards.

The Akoi was developed as part of an ongoing project to grant the Elysins increased ability in all vital elements of warfare - a good commander and good weapons were one thing, but given that the ability to exceed others in this area was not certain the Elysian Celestial Navy and the The Elysian Senate concentrated on 'force multipliers', including knowledge of enemy movements and reducing the ability for others to use subderfuge against them. If they knew of Sun Tzu and could convince themselves he was an Elysian they would operate on the basis of “The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy”, or something along those lines. As such the Akoi was designed to support the potent Oris Sensor Outpost and be able to respond to calls for an advanced sensory suite as tactics required while keeping down production costs.

Class: El-R-01 Type: Sensory Drone Designers: Elysian Celestial Navy Manufacturer: Veritas Shipyards Production: Currently in pre-production Fielded by: Elysian Celestial Navy

Crew: None.

Length: 50 meters Width: 20 meters Height: 20 meters

Continuum Distortion Drive: 17,572 c Hyperspace Fold Drive: 0.6 LY/m Sublight Engines: 0.332c Range: Lack of pilot renders its range theoretically limited, although largely designed to operate within the borders of the empire Lifespan: 7 years Refit Cycle: Returns to a base every six months in order to have its sensors updated so that it remains at a military level of effectiveness

Being a drone the interior of the Akoi is nothing more than highly compact systems and equipment as well as organised mazes of superconducing wires and the like. There is no room for anyone to even stand up in.

This ship's armour is composed of Elysian scale armour, thousands of super-durable plates in a self regenerative based which is itself highly damage resistant and probe to dispersing energy very quickly due to its high surface area. DR 7

The Akoi uses a modified version of the Oris Sensor Outpost' computer, a very advanced organic computer utilising quantum computing and a localised CD field to transmit data between components at above the speed of light. It specialises in two things: tracking an enormous number of vessels or other objects in order to encompass complex military situations and account for information over its entire sensory range, and to look for the adnormalities which would suggest the presence of a cloaked vessel. The Akoi Computer System is capable of tracking 50 million targets.

The Akoi is equipped with a powerful Psionic Signal Controller, a device protecting against psionics and telepathy, and of nullifying any and all such activity. The PSC’s effect only protects the ship and one metre past the hull, and as such does not create a noticeable “dead zone” of psionics.

The Akoi, being a sensory drone, has an exceptionally powerful and adept range of sensors and follows the Oris in not having a Unidirectional suite, instead having all its sensors be Omnidirectional in order to provide the greatest possible sensory coverage. As well as its other sensors it has a veraible wide-band imaging clusters capable of seeing the entire electro-magnetic spectrum and noticing tiny discrepensies creted by volumetric projections and the like.

These sensors have a range of forty light-years:

These powerful sensors sense the presence of ships and other objects through the warping effect their mass has on space-time. While this sensor is not particularly good at getting exact information about the ship, it is extremely good at working out where something is, and the speed it’s moving at. It also beyond many types of cloaking device to foil this indirect form of scanning.

This sensor is used to identify what the targets hull is composed of, and also the other elements that compose the ship. Upon collecting this data it is compared with the ships data-base, and through this identify whether this variety of ship has been seen before, and possibly distinguishing the creator (a common trend in creations for example), or a weakness in design.

This sensor basically detects the radiation given off by hot bodies. In space almost everything is cold, space itself is only around 3 Kelvin, and the only things which are significantly above this are stars, planets and other celestial bodies. As such, if something is giving of Infrared radiation and it’s not a celestial body then it must be something artificial. This sensor won’t work on the more advanced ships out there, but can be surprisingly useful at detecting less advanced, or damaged, ships.

This highly sensitive sensor is capable of sensing the distortions of space which are created through CDD and CFS’, as well as other technology that utilises upon similar technology. In order to combat the danger that vessels cloaked using the CFS system could present, and so ships using a CDD could be tracked this device was developed, and it not only can locate the source of such distortions, but also discern certain information about it – such as power and possibly design.

This device combines the information from many different bands to create a far more accurate depiction. The Interferometer on the Crataeis is of such a complexity that it can pick up tiny in discrepancies from the data corrected, and through doing so discover the locations of even rather subtle spatial distortions and cloaking devices.

The Spectrometres measure the properties of light in particular sections of the electro-magnetic band.

These advanced sensors detect tiny variances in the Electro-magnetic bands across all of the spatial planes. It functions as an incredibly advanced visual sensor, but only more so.

These scanners are capable of measuring the density of Quarks and Gluons in space through a complex sensor system. These sensors are highly useful at tracking bodies, and find out what composes them by working out the mean density of a material and comparing it. By comparing such a collection of densities to the ships memory, it is possible to discern what the ship is, and where tactical weak points may lie.

Functions in the same fashion as the Spin Palarometre in the Ks-MIES-E3030.

These sensors have a range of twenty light years:

Operates in a nigh on identical fashion as the equivalent within the MEGAMI package.

This sensor scans the Electrogravitic elements of the universe much as the version within the MEGAMI package does.

This sensor simply detects mass in subspace, and its passage through this domain. This sensor also functions on the related hyper-space. It is vital for detecting vessels which are travelling through these domains. It is notably hard to hide your mass from these variety of sensors when travelling through Hyperspace or Subspace.

This sensor is the product of unified energy physics, which understands all mass and various forms of energy to be expressive of an underlying pattern - through this the sensor can detect and express an enormous number of different energy and matter states which allows it to gain almost complete understanding of the 'material' plane.

This sensors has the ability to detect Neutrino's and more significantly tachyons - the faster than light particle which is generated by many forms of FTL travel and also used for inter-stellar communication.

The Akoi has an advanced communications package to allow it to communicate securely to its superiors with the information it gleans from space. As such it has a large number of anti-jamming system and has the ability to deeply encode its message, including the option of quantum encryption and using obscure Elysian religious texts as a cipher.

An alternative method of faster-than-light transmission.

Full spectrum, Dual-Modulation, range theoretically unlimited except by interference. Practical range is short, since the waves only travel at light-speed. The Oris does have jamming capacity, but only in the form of white noise.

For close-range transmissions, it is more difficult for the enemy to intercept, because they have to be in the area of the beam. Limited to light-speed.

Quantum tunneling used for faster-than light transmissions. A tachyon is a photon without any mass. Tachyon transmissions, because they travel faster than light in normal space, appear to travel towards the transmitter from an observer's view.

The drone moves at superluminal speeds through the generation of distortions in space-time that are wrapped around the ship to create asymmetric peristaltic fields which drive the ship through space in a similar fashion to that of a Alcubierre Drive. The complexity of the system allows for vast superluminal speeds equivalent to many thousands of times the speed of light. The ship can stop completely or increase to full speed almost instantly due to the lack of kinetic energy in the ship – it simply required deactivating the special peristaltic effect.

The Akoi is also fitted with a Hyperspace drive when they are required to possess additional speed. These drives function through projecting the ship into another dimension – Hyperspace. The exact physics of hyperspace aren’t understood perfectly, but it is capable of achieving enormous speeds – relative to the normal universe.

For subluminal propulsion, and when the Spatial Distortion Generator needs to be diverted towards shields, the drone uses a Gravitic Drive. This functions by causing the ship to ‘fall’ through space at high speeds, and is a reliable and relatively manoeuvrable drive.

In order to protect itself, and to make up for the fact that it has no weapons, the Akoi uses its SDG to create a powerful Continuum Distortion Shield. The CDS sustains what is in effect a pocket universe around the Akoi by combining electrogravitic and electrostatic fields to make a form of ‘nest’ which the Akoi fits neatly in to. This protects the ship from both kinetic and energy based weaponry since they simply pass through the curved space around the ship – in effect the drone is not there to hit. The shields are automatically modulated by the computer, and cover most possible frequencies, planes and dimensions. By way of modulating the shields it is possible to make them more effective against the bands in which the enemy weapons operate, rendering them almost completely ineffective. DR 7

Zakalwe created this article on 2007/12/26 15:31; Wes approved it on 2008/01/19 08:01.