Silence-class Missile Frigate

Silence-Class Missile Frigate

The Silence-Class is a missile frigate that, while a full-cost frigate as opposed to HDK's economical HDK Missile Frigate, is versitile and can function as a regular warship.

It has a cylindrical hull (with the bases of the cylinder at the front and back) that doubles in radius to accomodate a large array of engines. It also increases even more in height than it does in width, giving it an elliptical cross-section at that point. At the very top and bottom, it widens a good bit. On the top and bottom of this are two turrets (one pair on top, one pair on bottom), side by side. The turrets are ball-shaped, for optimal fire range, and fairly large: the two turrets side by side with the spaces between and next to them nicely fill the width alloted to them (the top and bottom of the engine array is squared off to be flat). These turrets each house a concussion missile battery, and although this gives the ship two less batteries of launchers than the significantly cheaper HDK missile frigate, their turretage gives better targeting capability. Note that the side-by-side configuration of the turrets allows all four to fire forwards easily; in fact, the only time targeting is an issue is when an enemy is beside the ship, where the turret on the far side would have to shoot through the one on the near side. This is easily solved by the ship's captain by putting the ship into a bank.

The ship has four forwards-curving wings, rooted on the engines. From the front, the configuration looks like that of an X-Wing, but with the roots of the wings slightly closer together vertically (looking from the front) relative to the total height of the craft; also, the vertical tilt of wings is very slightly less extreme than X-Wing. The wingtips are still closer to the craft's horizontal centerline than the turrets, which can therefore shoot over them.

On each wing, there is a large box containing an assault concussion missile launcher. The Silence has both an unusually high amount of engine and an unusually high amount of manuvering jet for a vehicle of its size; its light build helps it further in pwerformance. The Silence lacks energy weapons, and thus can get away with a small reactor, which in turn leaves it with enough space for quite a good amount of ammunition for its weapons. The wings have external docking points for a squadron of fighters; the ship also contains 200 troops and three landing barges; thus, the Silence is a versatile, good-all-around light warship.

An early version of the Silence sported arrays of turbocharged laser cannons and some quad laser turrets; however, this version was less versatile, plagued by power and ammunition issues, and highly unstable, which caused it to be removed from production. As a result of this, the current version of the Silence is sometimes referred to as the Silence mk II.