Vessel Class File
Federation Frigate Line
The smallest hull in Federation service capable of independent interstellar operations. A corvette is carried. A frigate is dispatched.
Registry Summary
The frigate is the point at which a Federation hull stops being a component and becomes a ship.
Character
Federation doctrine is blunt about what a frigate is and is not. Not very strong as far as firepower or defense capabilities, but swift and agile. She is not built to trade fire. She is built to arrive first, see everything, and leave before anything closes.
Agility against capital ships. Her defining tactical property is that she is small enough to manoeuvre around a capital ship almost as fluidly as a fighter. A battleship cannot track her the way it tracks another battleship.
Propulsion
The frigate is engineered around her drive. Everything else aboard is subordinate to the decision to fit an oversized fusion plant into a small hull and accept what that costs elsewhere, which is armour and guns.
On reaching 0.9 c. Five gravities is a modest burn, and the velocity is not reached quickly. What the frigate has is not brutal acceleration but the fuel efficiency to hold a burn for as long as it takes. She gets there because she can keep pushing, not because she pushes hard.
Habitability
This is the frigate’s quiet luxury, and the clearest line between her and the hull below.
A corvette crew floats. No plating, no dampening beyond a crude 5 G stabilizer, and every manoeuvre delivered directly into the body. A frigate crew stands, sleeps in a bunk that has a floor, and works a watch rather than surviving one.
The acceleration ceiling is the same. The living is not.
Why the fit is limited. Full inertial dampening and gravity plating demand more than one military-grade MK-VI fusion reactor. A frigate carries one very large plant, not several, so what she gets is a reduced installation. Enough to hold a deck down, not enough to erase a hard burn.
Mission Profile
Reconnaissance
Sent ahead of the main body. Covers a vast volume of space.
Search and Rescue
Speed makes her the fleet recovery asset.
Precision Strike
Destroys small targets on enemy ships. Communication arrays, individual weapon turrets.
Picket and Watch
Long-duration station-keeping over a planet or installation.
Screen
Fleet formations field them in numbers.
Precision strike is the unusual one. A frigate cannot kill a capital ship. She can get close enough to remove that capital ship’s communications, or blind one of its turrets, and then be gone. That is a fighter’s job performed by something with interstellar legs.
Embarked Craft
A frigate drone is not a corvette drone. A corvette’s fifty assault drones are fusion-powered combat craft pulling 100 G, each flown by a human in a flight pod. A frigate’s hundreds are hand-sized, single-use, autonomous, and would fit in a locker.
That difference is why she carries hundreds in a hull smaller than a destroyer’s, and why she needs no pilots to do it. Nobody flies these. They are launched, they do one thing, and they stop existing.
Drone Doctrine — The Variant Is The Payload
The frigate hull does not change between variants. The racks do.
Every frigate is the same ship: the same oversized fusion plant, the same 5 G ceiling, the same thin armour and weak guns. What distinguishes an Escort Frigate from a Fast Attack Frigate is not weaponry or tonnage. It is what she launches.
The Patrol Frigate is the baseline. No specialist rack, a mixed light load, and the most numerous frigate in service. She is what the Navy sends when nobody has decided yet what the problem is.
There is no guided missile frigate. The hull is too small to carry a magazine worth firing. A frigate that spent her volume on missile cells would arrive with too few rounds to affect an engagement, and would have given up the drone racks to do it.
That absence defines the class. Every frigate in service is a drone platform. There is no variant that fights conventionally, because at this displacement conventional armament does not scale. The Federation does not build a small warship. It builds a small ship that launches things.
Scout Drones — SFFE
Why the sphere beats the hull. A frigate’s own sensors sit on one small ship and see from one point. Hundreds of drones spread across a volume see from hundreds of points at once, and the distance between them becomes a ranging baseline no single hull could carry. Parallax across a sphere kilometres wide resolves a contact’s range, heading, and drift far more precisely than anything mounted on the frigate herself.
The second advantage is silence. The drones can go active while the frigate stays passive. Anything that lights up a scout drone reveals itself to a ship that has not radiated at all, and killing that drone costs the Federation a disposable sensor while telling the frigate exactly where the shooter is.
The cost. Coverage is bought in one-way units. Every drone launched is a drone spent, and a frigate that has emptied her racks is blind again with no way to reload until she resupplies.
Assault and Breach Drones — SFFA
The Fast Attack Frigate exists because a hand-sized object is very hard to stop.
Defeats Point Defence
Point defence is built to intercept missiles and torpedoes. A hand-sized drone is below the profile those systems are designed to engage.
Defeats Sensors
Negligible radar cross-section, negligible thermal signature, no drive plume worth tracking.
Arrives In Numbers
Hundreds launched at once. Interception rates that would defeat a missile salvo barely thin a drone swarm.
Neither one kills a ship. That is the point, and it is doctrine rather than a limitation. A capital ship is compartmentalised, armoured, and enormous. A hand-sized charge is never going to gut one. What it can do is strip her of the things bolted to her outside, take her eyes, her voice, and her ability to shed heat, and let something larger finish her.
This is the frigate’s canonical role stated precisely: destroy small targets on ships, such as communication arrays or various weapon turrets. The Fast Attack Frigate is that mission with a rack behind it.
Repair Drones — SFFS
The Support Frigate is the only hull in the lower fleet that puts anything back together.
Her drones work the outside of a damaged ship, sealing what can be sealed and replacing what can be swapped, while her charge is still under way. They cannot enter a hull, cannot reach a reactor, and cannot save a ship that has been opened up. But a cruiser that has lost a radiator bank or taken a compartment breach does not have to leave the line.
Note the symmetry. The same hull, the same racks, and the same hand-sized drones that the SFFA uses to melt through an enemy’s outer plating are used by the SFFS to weld a friend’s back together.
Fleet Composition
An observed Federation defensive formation at Neptune:
Frigates are common. They are lost in numbers, and the record describes them as a handful when a defence is inadequate.
Known Federation Frigates
Non-Federation Frigates
The frigate is not a Federation concept. Every major power fields them.
Archive Assessment
The frigate is the first rung on the ladder where a hull can decide for itself where to go.
Below her, the corvette is cargo, carried into battle clamped to something larger and useless the moment its mothership leaves. The frigate has her own engine, her own legs, and nine tenths of light in reach. She pays for it by being unable to survive anything that catches her.
She is the ship the Navy sends when it does not yet know what is out there. That is a role that gets ships killed, and the Federation builds them in numbers accordingly.
Return to Archive
Continue through the Fleet Registry or review the hull designation standard.