Vastator

Vastator

The Vastator was a Rakatan starship designed for long distance exploration. It was lost approximately 30,000 years before the Battle of Yavin. It was rediscovered by the Galactic Alliance five years after the end of the Yuuzhan Vong war.



Offensive and defensive systems
The Vastator was built with a semi organic hull which was capable of repairing itself, given the proper raw materials. To gather these, the ship was equipped with a Matter Harvester, essentially a hybrid ramscoop and wide field tractor beam array. Precursor to the Star Forge's Stellar harvester.

The ship would dive into the atmosphere of a gas giant planet to gather hydrogen, carbon dioxide, oxygen, methane, tibanna, water vapor, nitrogen, and other available gasses. The material was then seperated and shunted off for use as fuel, raw material for the ships auto-repair systems, base matter for the crews food and water supply, etc.

Lightning Cannons These could channel and amplify a Force Users powers to create a powerful electrical discharge similar to an Ion Cannon. These discharges were capable of harming capital ships. The disadvantages of this weapon are that it requires a Force-user to activate, and is relatively short range.

Disruptor Field - The Rakatan Disruptor field had two modes of operation. In Field mode, it could shut down fighter-class ships that get too close. In Focused mode, it could be trained on one single capital ship to interfere with its systems. This was capable of attacking at a longer range than the Lightning cannon.

Energized Projectile Cannon A starship scale version of a Wookiee Bowcaster. Solid Metal/Ceramic protectile were wrapped in plasma energy and magnetically fired from bow of the ship. It had a slow rate of fire but caused massive damage to opposing starships.

Turbolasers The Vastator had turbolasers but they are not as advanced as those used by the Galactic Alliance. On normal use they were less powerful, but they were able to have their power ramped up at the expense of a lower rate of fire.

Torsion Beams The main weapon of the Vastator, the Torsion Beam was a weaponized use of Gravitational manipulation technology. A focused, high-powered Tractor beam was wedded to a focused high-powered repulsor beam. The weapon was able to tear chunks out of enemy starships or fragment asteroids.

Propulsion Systems
As the Rakata were masters of artificial gravity technology, the Vastator used a combination of repulsor technology and Fusion drive for sublight speed.

The Rakata never fully developed an equivalent to the Navi-Computer. They relied on something similar to the Jedi skill of Force Astrogation. This involved a navigational interface tank that a Force sensitive floated in, like a bacta tannk. The interface connected the Force sensitive to the ships hyperdrive.

If the navigator did not have the ability of Astrogation the ship would locate and lock on to the nearest Force locus, usually a heavily populated planet. The hyperdrive could be misdirected by other anomalies in the Force, such as Black Holes, Force Storms, or even extremely powerful Force Users.

The Rakatan Drive is relatively slow compared to later hyperdrives, though a talented Navigator could use the Force to find the shortest route and save time.

Auxiliary craft
The Vastator was equipped with six short range shuttles. They were heavily armored and equipped with three blaster turrets. They were also designed to act as combat drop ships.

In addition, twenty four two man fighter craft were available. Like the shuttles, these lacked hyperdrives. The fighters, nicknamed Batfish by the archeological team, were armed with a pair of forward facing blasters. A set of swiveling thrusters on the wingtips gave the fighters extreme maneuverability.

History
Designed as a long range exploration ship, the Vastator was built to operate for long periods with no resupply. It was lost with all hands during an accident where the ships hyperdrive dropped it out into the vicinity of a star going nova. The hard radiation from the nova killed the crew, and without a Force user to operate the hyperdrive, the ship was stuck drifting in space near the Unknown Regions.

30,000 years later, the ship was discovered by a scouting vessel for the Galactic Alliance. Archeologists were sent in to recover the vessel, repairing some systems and integrating a unique system to power the Force based systems. This device was essentially tanks of bacta, gene-spliced to have high concentrations of Midichlorians. Though not enough to power the ship back to full capacity, the device was able to get the basic systems back on line.

Unfortunately for the archeological team, the Vastators central computer, an artificial intelligence that may actually be a living consciousness trapped in a Rakatan Mind Prison, had gone mad from the long eons of solitude.

At the same time, agents of Darth Krayt's One Sith had learned of the discovery, and sought to capture the vessel for their own use.

Behind the Scenes
This ship and story were inspired by the TV show STARGATE: UNIVERSE and Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.

I liked the concept of a bunch of people stuck on an ancient broken down starship, and wanted to translate that into the Star Wars universe. My original idea was that the ship would be Celestial in origin, but decided that it would be better for the story if the ships AI, unlike the Destiny on SGU, was actively trying to do the characters harm. Originally I considered modeling the AI in the style of GlaDOS, but then remembered AM from I Have No Mouth and literally said out loud to myself, "you poor guys are so f***ed"

I'm planning on doing this as a RPG game.