Mythos
The Mythos is the namesake ship of a new class of Earthfleet battleship, one that signaled the fleet's return to the old days of battleship design and deployment that focused heavily on firepower over speed and maneuverability. It's a big change from the Clayton Doctrine that was set down by Grand Admiral Mike Clayton after The Battle of the Oort Perimeter, which stated that Earthfleet, going forward, would focus exclusively on smaller, powerful, more agile and faster ships that could provide the fleet the high degree of effective, defensive firepower that it needed, without requiring the corresponding the large crew compliments of previous ship generations, thus abandoning the ages old doctrine of using crew heavy battleships and battle cruisers for Sol Sector's primary defense.
This doctrine came about after the incredible poor showing by Earthfleet's myriad of available battleships, that were in service at the time of the Battle of the Oort Perimeter, which resulted in the near total loss of all frontline battleships, including the Nova Class, whereas only two of the fleet's shipkillers present at the battle were lost. This demonstrated their incredible resilience in a fight compared to their larger battleship counterparts. This was exacerbated by the fact that the two existing classes of Earthfleet shipkillers at the time so outperformed their battleship counterparts that they made the older, larger ships redundant, and superfluous just by their mere presence.
Even so, the building and deployment of the Mythos class, despite a return to the older battleship doctrines, isn't a complete return to those days. Instead, the Mythos applies the same idea of creating a weapons platform focused on overwhelming firepower in the same way as its shipkiller counterparts and predecessors, making this new class of fast battleship more or less an oversized shipkiller itself, rather than an actual battleship. The Mythos class, being as overpowered as it is, was designed and built with the purpose of taking on entire fleets of enemy battleships, numbering upwards of 250 ships at a time, and winning in much the same way that its smaller cousins, the shipkillers, were designed to do when taking on battlecruisers in one on one combat. So a Mythos class battleship is more or less just a super sized shipkiller.
Only instead of killing just one ship at a time, it's designed to kill hundreds of them single-handedly. The entire class, save only for its namesake ship, takes their names from characters found in Earth mythology, including Roman, Greek, and several others. A Mythos class battleship, however, does not fight alone. It is equipped with 6 landing bays, three each along its port and starboard ventral hull respectively, each one of which is capable of landing two shipkillers apiece, allowing for it to carry 12 total support ships, all shipkillers, within those bays. The bays can also be modified, and adapted, to take in four additional support craft, or two more shipkillers each if needed, increasing the total docked support ships to 24.
The typical deployed compliment of shipkillers each Mythos brings with it includes six of the Raven class, and six of the Wolfpack class. This allows a Mythos to operate both as a solo vessel, and a small battle fleet at the same time. This doesn't mean that the Mythos can't defend itself against smaller craft, as its point defense systems are exquisite, accurate, and devistating. Instead, the shipkillers that it carries with it act as both support, and secondary defense for the parent ship, and a screening force as well, allowing the parent ship to focus on its primary subject of concern. Namely, the capital ships of the enemy fleet.
That's because it's primary duty is to kill those ships first, and leave the screening defense of the parent ship to the 12 included shipkillers. Also, in the event that the six landing bays are full, be that with cargo, shuttles, refugees, equipment, or other things, should the shipkillers need to dock, and their crews be taken aboard the parent ship, there are twelve hard points on the exterior of the ship onto which the 12 shipkillers can dock. While they prefer to dock in the regular landing bays, under special or extenuating circumstances, they can use these hard points to dock with their parent ship.
The ship is also designed to operate without these supporting shipkillers if needed, allowing them to be spread out much thinner over a wide region to do recon, exploration, resupply, or other missions and duties that are required of it. Currently, while the total number of ships in this class is not known, there is evidence that up to 12 ships are in operation at the time of Dark Earth, with more being laid down. The total anticipated number of ships of this class that is planned by the fleet to be built is unknown. But, with Earth beginning to expand its reach beyond Sol, and the eventual integration of millions of more inductees from Earth, that total number of ships in the class is expected to easily grow into the hundreds, if not more.
Ship Details
Not much is known about the ship overall, but there are some things that were laid out in the novels that can be verified. Each ship, despite its size, only sports a standard crew compliment of 137, with a maximum crew of 250 and a minimum compliment of 20. The reason for this incredibly small crew size, given the vast size of the ship, is because newer ships in the fleet are heavily automated. Thus less crew members are required to run and maintain the ship. This is especially important given that, despite it being several decades since the devastating Battle of the Oort Perimeter, the fleet still struggles with maintaining personnel numbers. Thus, to get around this continuous shortcoming, the fleet has ships designed and built for them that require the fewest people possible to run them. As for the ship's armaments, while not much is known, it is understood that it employs a newer, more advanced version of Fluidic armor in its hull design, as well as a Linear Hyperdrive for its primary FTL system; a system similar to the Coaxial Drive, however, far, far faster, more reliable, and less vulnerable to attack than its older counterpart.
Linear Hyperdrive also enjoys the ability of being able to draw energy directly from Inter Dimensional Space, without needing to process, or filter the energy in the same way as Coaxial Drive, thus allowing for what amounts to FTL "afterburner" for periods up to 8 hours without needing to stop to purge the nacelles, and reset the system. This need to stop and reset is due to the dirty nature of pure ID energy that has a corrupting effect on the FTL fields. If the nacelles do not have this dirty energy residue purged from them, it will slowly rob the nacelles of their FTL capabilities until the ship is no longer able to jump until that energy is purged. For purposes of protection, the ship's bridge is located deep within the superstructure. The ship's overall body design is roughly delta wing in design, allowing for a maximum forward spread of firepower, while also giving it a wider area of attack when engaging enemy fleets.
Known Ships in this Class
- Mythos
- Prometheus
- Apollo
