BOTANY BAY
Class – Cyclone-Class Combat Freighter
Length - 80 meters
Decks - 2
Total Compliment – 19 Total
- 8 Crewmen
----- 2 Mechanics
----- 2 Helmsmen
----- 2 Operations Specialists
----- 1 Navigator
----- 1 Gunners Mate
- 3 Officers
----- Captain (CO)
----- Operations Officer (XO)
----- Engineering Officer (EO)
- 8 Passengers
Recommended Operational Period – 30 years
Maximum Estimated Operational Period – 60 years with proper refits.
Tactical Systems- Weapons
----- 2 light turbolasers
----- 1 proton torpedo launcher (rapid fire)
---------- 60 Torpedoes
- Shields
----- 1 Medium Capacity Shield Generator
- Cloaking
----- 1 Prototype Holographic Cloaking Device
- Stealth
----- Emissions Storage System
Power/Engine Systems- 1 Class 3 Hyperdrive
- 1 High Capacity CEC Engine
- 10 Ion Drive Maneuvering Thrusters
- 3 Cold Fusion Power Generators
POWERPLANTThe Botany Bay has a power core composed of three individual cold fusion reactors. One generates power for the weapons, one for the engines, and one for the shields/cloaking systems. All three generators are clustered together into one power core so that if one is damaged or has a heavy power draw, the others can pick up the slack.
Backup systems and auxiliary power comes from battery banks capable of running all ship systems at full power for up to 6 hours. This time can be lengthened significantly by shutting down non-essential systems such as combat shields and weapons.
ENGINESThe ship’s primary sublight engines are CEC High Capacity Engine Systems. They draw lots of power to give the ship great acceleration and to sustain the inertial dampening field to make sure the ship doesn’t rip apart while maneuvering at high speeds.
Maneuvers are conducted using a combination of ion drive maneuvering thrusters located all around the ship and a vector thrust system that’s part of the primary sublight engines. The Botany Bay can conduct high speed turns almost like a light freighter or heavy fighter but this causes a serious draw on the ships inertial dampener which in turn puts a big draw on the power core.
The hyperdrive has a class 3 rating and no backup. To enter hyperspace, the ship requires most of its power to be free so making jumps to hyperspace during combat is very problematic. It cannot make the jump when shields or the cloak is engaged.
WEAPONS-
TurbolasersThe Botany Bay boasts two light turbolaser cannons mount on either side of the ships cockpit. These two cannons are low powered and have low power draw in each blast. Increasing power to the guns does not increase the power in each blast but instead increases the rate of fire.
Heat is managed via giant heat sinks within the hull. In normal operating situations the guns can fire continuously for a full minute before safety systems shut them down to prevent them from overheating.
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Proton Torpedo LauncherProton Torpedoes are stacked and loaded in groups of three. They are loaded into a revolving firing mechanism which can fire off three torpedoes very rapidly by rotating one torpedo into the tube after the previous one is fired.
This way, three torpedoes can be launched in about 3 seconds. It takes about 10 seconds for the next group of three to be loaded and ready to fire.
SHIELDSThe ships’s shield generator is located just above the primary engine system and draws power directly from the power core. The hull is delicate so every effort to make the shields as strong as possible was made. The generator vents heat using the huge heat sinks in the ships engines as well as venting it directly through the hull. It even has its own emergency coolant system which will flood the generator with coolant to bring the temperature down to safe levels. This causes problems in the generator itself making it less efficient or powerful (its filled with super hot goo now after all) but gives it a few extra minutes of operation without melting through the hull and into space.
HULL/ARMORThe primary hull is composed of titanium with a thin layer of tungsten on the outside which is meant to help hide eternal emissions from leaking out. At it’s thickest (around the shield generator and engines) it’s six inches thick and rippled so that the most surface area is exposed in order to act as a simple heat sink for the engines and shield generator. The entirety of the armor is painted with a thick layer of radar absorbent material to help hide the ship from sensors.
Around the main hull is the armor. Coated in radar absorbent material and 4 inches thick, the durasteel armor plates provide protection against unshielded impacts. Plating is heaviest over critical systems like sensors, the cockpit and the engines but to keep down on weight and power requirements, the armor is almost completely absent from some areas. Chinks in the armor provide weak points for enemies to exploit but since these are non critical area’s damage is usually superficial or unimportant in combat situations. Shields are depended upon more than armor for protection.
CLOAKING DEVICEThe ship uses a new kind of Cloaking Device. While most every other cloaked ship requires the use of delicate and rare Stygian Crystals, the Botany Bay uses a prototype Holographic cloak. Sensors pick up information around the ship and projectors put up a hologram that mimics the ships surroundings perfectly. Things behind the ship are mirrored on the front edge of the hologram and visa versa. The hologram is a bubble around the ship so anything within it can see the ship just fine and it doesn’t protect the ship from sensors, just visual detection.
The processors and projectors cannot keep up 100% with real time so if the ship is moving or if there is movement around the ship the hologram will be slightly distorted by a time delay of the projection. Nearly impossible to detect at any kind of distance and difficult to track if the ship is moving but it can give the ships position away if spotted at close range.
Computing power for the hologram puts a big draw on the ships main computers, slowing down most other systems. Weapons targeting is next to useless and long range navigation is impossible but sensors and stealth systems will still work at 100% efficiency.
STEALTH SYSTEMTo help protect the ship from being detected by sensors, the ship is equipped with a stealth system. All non-essential systems are shut down or put on low power. All exhaust switches over to internal storage tanks and primary heat management is switched to internal heat sinks.
The ship can’t run like this forever and the more active it is the less time it can run silent. Without much maneuvering, in open space with the cloak active the ship can remain under stealth for about two and a half hours before the heat sinks an storage tanks need to be vented.
To hide the ship from active sensors, the ship modulates its shields to scatter sensor beams. This makes the shields useless as deflecting incoming attacks, but combined with the sensor absorbent material the ship’s sensor silhouette becomes almost nothing. At long range it’s completely invisible to sensors. At close range it might show up as an anomaly or a hiccup in background sensor readings, below the threshold of an actual sensor blip. A concentrated sensor scan can still reveal the ships general position, but not accurately enough to target weapons.
LAYOUT
Botany Bay has two decks. The first deck houses crew quarters, the Ships Office, two cargo bays, Briefing/Conference room, Galley, Medbay and communal refresher are located.
The second deck contained Main engineering, Navigation Room, Stealth system storage tanks, internal heat sinks and Cockpit.
Deck 1Crew Quarters - There are two standard crew quarters for the crewmen. Each room holds four racks and four lockers for personal stowage. There is one room for officers quarters which consists of two racks, two lockers and one desk. The two common crew quarters and the officers quarters are on the starboard side of the ship right next to one another.
The captains quarters consists of one bed, one desk and one oversized locker for personal stowage. It is on the port side along with the passenger quarters which are merely slightly larger versions of the common crew quarters.
MedBay One of the passenger quarters has been converted into a makeshift MedBay. Two of the racks have been removed and a medical scanner was installed on the ceiling. The lockers are filled with first aid supplies, some plasma and prescription pain killers. People in critical condition won’t last long but it might by them some time to get to a hospital.
Common hallways - Hallway space is kept to a minimum to maximize room size but what hallways there are large enough to accommodate extra cargo should the need arise.
Cargo Bays - Botany Bay has two cargo bays. One is used mostly for ships storage (Food and other consumables) while the other is used for transportation. The ship doesn't have room to carry large quantities of anything, sacrificing space for tactical systems but this ensures that it can carry it's cargo into combat zones with some measure of reliability.
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Cargo Bay 1: Contains most of the ships stores and one of it's two boarding ramps. One wall of the cargo bay is set aside for a small and simple contingent of exercise equipment and for three large gun lockers for the ships supply of guns.
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Cargo Bay 2: mostly empty for when the ship actually needs to transport something. Contains the ships second of two boarding ramps.
Briefing/Conference Room - The Briefing room, otherwise known as the conference room is a simple room adorned with one table and one holoprojector. It's used for crew meetings and announcements, as well as something of a communications room for the ships officers to receive orders. Crew and guests usually take their meals here as well.
Galley - Ships galley is small and simple. It is the collateral duty of one of the mechanics or Operations specialists to act as ships cook and provide three meals a day for the crew and guests.
Ships Office - The ships office is a communal room where the crew can perform administrative tasks or study. It's a small room with a single desk, computer terminal and stowage alcove for datapads, disks, or other information storage devices.
Deck 2Main Engineering - Main Engineering is the most aft chamber of the ship and is the direct connection to the two main engines. At it's center is the main power core where all ships systems draw their energy from. 90% of all ships systems can be maintained or altered from here.
Navigation Room - The Navigation Room contains a complex General Synthetics Computer and Holographic interface for projecting stellar charts to provide the best visual information possible when planning hyperspace routes. It can also be used for navigation within a single solar system or the galaxy at large, displaying trade routes and information about stellar bodies.
Cockpit - The cockpit is a maze of buttons and switches. Normally the ship requires only one pilot, but during combat situations, two pilots working in tandem are usually required. One flies the ship while the other handles the tactical systems such as torpedo targeting and the shields.
Space behind the pilots is reserved for either the CO or XO to issue orders and overview the ships status. His chair has a readout on one of the arms that displays any and all ship status information the captain could want and gives him access to the ships intercom for announcements.
HISTORYThe Botany Bay came off the line 3 years ago. It was the second Cyclone-Class Combat Freighter to be constructed in the new Corellian shipyards. It’s sister ship, the Cyclone was pressed immediately into Republic military service but the Bay was selected by Republic Intelligence as a test platform for a new stealth system and cloaking device.
Botany Bay was installed with this new ESS and Cloaking device 6 months after it rolled off the line at Corellia. It began testing and shakedown 3 months after that. General Synthetics was contracted out for outfitting the ship with upgraded computers to deal with the processing draw the holographic cloak required as well as installing a shipboard AI system to handle smaller ship systems while the ship was undermanned.
The ships first real mission was to Mandalore itself. Using the cloak and stealth system to loiter and monitor traffic within the system, hiding in the systems ort cloud to vent it’s tanks and heat before returning to monitoring station.
Overconfidence among the command crew lead to a critical mistake and the ship was detected when it began venting before it was fully hidden within the ort cloud. Mandalorian Ships sent to investigate played cat and mouse among the cloud for 6 hours when the Bay was struck by stellar debris and damaged.
An emergency hyperspace jump was conducted but the ship and its crew was lost. Its records were sealed and its crew disavowed by Republic Intelligence. No one had heard anything about the ship for a year until a long range survey team discovered evidence of a crash on a moon in an unexplored system within the expansion region. The Botany Bay had lost main power, ran on batteries for as long as it could in orbit around the moon trying to effect repairs. Once power was completely lost, gravity took hold and the ship crashed. All hands on board were killed.
The ship went unidentified due to its records being sealed. It was flagged for salvage by the survey team and transported to Ord Mantell. When Jor Halcyon was looking for a ship large enough and tough enough to carry a team of Templar into hostile territory, he made a trip to Ord Mantell to have a look at the junk piles.
The Botany Bay caught his eye and he purchased the wreck for cheap. He used rebuilding the ship as a training exercise for Genie, his apprentice and the two of them along with some help from a Jedi named John Paul Jones rebuilt the damaged systems. Jor recognized the ESS as soon as he saw it and was soon able to work out the holographic cloak as well with the help of his AI, Rita.
It took the Jedi 8 months of back breaking work but the group of them got the Bay back into working order. Jor used some of his contacts at CoreSec to get his hands on some lower grade radar absorbent material to paint the hull and used pieces of his old ship, the Memory of Corellia to put the finishing touches on. Genie Antilles christened it upon its first launch after being repaired and Jor named it flagship of the Templar.
CREW-
CaptainJor Halcyon acts as Captain of the ship and occupies the captain’s quarters. While he maintains a room at the Jedi Temple on Ilum, Jor mostly lives out of the ship and carries most of his belongings on board.
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Operations Officer/XOJohn Paul Jones is the Operations Officer and XO for the vessel. He handles the ships day to day operations and acts as second in command to Jor. He shares the officers quarters with Genie Antilles. He is the only other one with admin access to the ships computer systems as well.
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Engineering OfficerAs
Genie was the one who did the most work rebuilding the ship with guidance from Jor and John, Jor made her the Engineering Officer. Her skills in mechanical and electrical engineering grew to new levels during the rebuild project and she knows the Botany Bay specifically, very well making her a great choice. She spends her spare time studying chemical engineering and metallurgy for her college degree.
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Primary Helmsmen / NavigatorZeus Johnson was coaxed away from the General Synthetics team with the promise of helping out the Jedi instead of corporate interests, as well as greater opportunity for aerial combat situations. While Cyclone-Class ships usually require a co-pilot during combat, Zeus can hold his own easily with the help of Rita. As he is no longer in any formal military like structure, he prefers to wear very bright and very busy Hawaiian shirts in the cockpit. He also handles the ships navigation, again, with help from Rita.
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Operations Specialist 1Jonas “Tank” Blane of the former Republic unit known as Gray Team acts as one of the Operations Specialists as well as the ships medic. His technical as well as medical expertise made him the best choice for the job.
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Operations Specialist 2Face “Runt” Templeton is the secondary Operations Specialist. His communications expertise makes him the best choice. When communications aren’t the issue, and he isn’t on mission he serves as the ships cook.. He’s also the unofficial briefing and training guy.
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Mechanic 1Danny “Senior” One is the ships primary mechanic aside from Genie. He handles the day to day maintenance stuff when he isn’t on mission with the rest of his team. He’s also the Command Chief of the ship, handling the administrative issues of all the “enlisted” personnel on board.
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Mechanic 2 / Gunners MateGeorge “Hefty” Spartan is the ships secondary mechanic and primary Gunners Mate. His main job is to maintain the ships weapons. This includes the small arms stored on board as well as the ships main guns. He also acts as the secondary helmsman when Zeus is unavailable or needs an actual co-pilot.
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Public RelationsBrock Highway is paid by General Synthetics to be a member of the Botany Bay crew and while he takes his orders from Jor or whomever is in command of the ship at the moment, he makes regular reports to Charles Carmichael, CEO of General Synthetics. Jor allowed this “Corporate Exchange Program” to exist because in exchange, the
Botany Bay gets free repairs and spare parts at any General Synthetics facility.
Brock is jokingly referred to as the ships Public Relations Representative although the term is probably more true than not. In actuality he’s just muscle for hire. His only skills are in fighting and combat so aboard the ship he is more like the Security Officer. While the others are busy with their duties, he protects the ship from intruders, repels boarders and keeps an eye on prisoners.
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Ship AIRita is a military grade Artificial Intelligence originally programed for star cruisers or other large military craft. Jor purchased her basic program and installed her aboard the Memory of Corellia. During her time on board the old ship, Jor allowed her to edit her own code to streamline her processes aboard the much smaller ship.
When transferred to the Botany Bay, she expanded and flourished. Expanding into the much larger space of the Botany Bay allowed her to conduct far more self edits to her code. She uses a holographic avatar or a simple disembodied voice to interact with the crew. She can not leave the ship normally but she can "hitch a ride" on Bubbles, the ships astromech droid.
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T7-D2T7-D2, nicknamed Bubbles by Genie, was the original Astromech droid that was assigned by Republic Intelligence to augment the ship’s crew. It was found on board the wreckage when the ship was salvaged and was never removed. When Jor and Genie found it during their rebuild project, Jor took the droid, wiped it’s memory and reprogrammed the droid to serve on board as part of the new crew. Being a Republic Intelligence droid, it has an expanded computer slicing capability along with a long range communicator so it can send messages to a ship in orbit with little trouble. RI also took the time to install a holdout blaster on the droid which it can draw and fire at will.
Genie took the time to install a vocabulator, unfortunately it was a junk unit off an old HK-51 assassin droid. Physical modifications include multiple flower, and rainbow stickers all over the droids exterior with a single “Hello my name is” name tag next to the droids photoceptor that with the word “Bubbles” crayoned into the blank space.
ArmoryThe Botany Bay armory consists of three large, heavy, gun lockers in cargo bay 2. They contain an assortment of weapons that Grey Team and other members of the crew use including guns, grenades, spare parts and power cells.
BlasTech SB-400 Scatter BlasterThe SB-400 Scatter Blaster is a Semi-automatic weapon with a randomized splitter at the end of the barrel which splits a single powerful blaster bolt into eight separate bolts. The pattern of the bolts are randomized from shot to shot in order to make them unpredictable. One powercell has enough energy for 25 shots before it needs to be reloaded or recharged. There are four of these weapons in the armory.
General Synthetics M-55 Battle RifleThe M-55 is a general purpose battle rifle designed and developed by General Synthetics for the Republic Military. Gray Team uses them as their standard rifles for combat operations. They are semi-automatic rifles which fire accurate, medium powered blaster bolts. Their light and easy to maintain as well. Mostly used for medium range engagements, the M-55 is a versatile rifle capable of laying down a rapid (depending how fast you can pull the trigger) suppressing fire with its 200 round capacity power cell as well as making quick, precise, shots. A host of attachments can also be fitted to the weapon to make it even more versatile.
BlasTech Viper SMGThe Viper is a new BlasTech design for VIP Security. It’s small, light, easily carried and easily hidden. Bodyguards can conceal them within clothing or cases. They are short range, rapid fire and high capacity but low powered. The bolts won’t do much against an armored opponent but for general defense they are excellent in fast, close range or closed quarters fights where the winner is usually the guy who fires first and the most.
Coruschal WeaponWorks M41A1 Coil RifleUsed as a squad automatic weapon by Grey Team or as a crowd control weapon in large engagements the M41’s rapid fire and solid slug rounds are the preferred weapon of Hefty. He works hard to maintain these maintenance heavy rifles most every day. Ammunition for the M41’s is stored separately in its own container within cargo bay 1.
Cerb S-150 Sniper RifleRunts rifle which he calls “The Cerb” is a long range sniper rifle of exceptional power. Runt can make it dance at even extreme ranges. He’s become so familiar with this rifle he prefers it over even other rifles of the same type. This one is personalized to his own specifications and is the only rifle Hefty doesn’t clean since Runt won’t let him for fear of messing up its settings.
Cerb P-50 Heavy Blaster PistolThe standard side arm for Grey Team, they have enough of them to arm the whole crew and then some. These blaster pistols are high powered enough to give a Mandalorian in full armor pause but their short range and limited ammo capacity is disadvantageous enough to keep it from being standard military issue.
