Vessel File
SPC Assault Corvette
The smallest classified warship in Federation service. A corvette is not a warship. She is a control room that flies.
Registry Summary
The corvette is the bottom of the classification scale. When threat computers sort a contact list, the range runs as small as corvettes and as large as dreadnoughts. When a commander wants to say a force is trivial, the phrase is they won’t send a corvette.
Purpose
Fighters in Federation service cannot operate independently in space. They coordinate only within a few light-seconds of their parent, and they lack the combat computers needed to calculate a target’s trajectory, speed, and distance. Left alone, fighters are near useless.
The corvette exists to solve that. She carries the pilots, and the pilots fly the drones.
Crew
Ten total. Half of them fly nothing.
The five supporting crew are a basic flight, engineering, and medical detachment. There is no command staff, no tactical section, and no gunnery department, because there is nothing aboard to command, plot, or shoot with.
A medic on a ten-man ship is not standard practice. She is there because the corvette routinely subjects her crew to accelerations the ship is not rated to mitigate, and because the oxygen-carrying fluid injected into a pilot before an extreme burn is a medical procedure carried out under way.
Drone Complement
Control tether. Drones fight only as long as they hold connection to their corvette. When a corvette breaks off, or dives into hyperspace, the drones still in space continue fighting until the link drops, and are then lost.
Habitability
Why she has none of it. Inertia dampeners, gravity plating, and anti-gravity generators demand more power than a small hull can produce, and are fitted only to ships carrying more than one military-grade MK-VI fusion reactor. Corvettes and Frigates do not qualify. Neither do some Destroyers.
The 5-G rating is not a limit on the ship. Corvettes have been observed burning hard at 7 G. The stabilizers mitigate five of those gravities. The crew absorbs the remainder.
What this means for the people aboard. There is no true inertial dampening and no gravity subsystem of any kind. What the corvette has is a crude stabilizer with a hard ceiling, and past that ceiling physics is applied directly to the crew. Every manoeuvre is felt. Every burn is survived rather than experienced.
Corvette duty is among the most dangerous flying in the Navy, and the danger has nothing to do with the enemy. A pilot in a fleet fighter is at risk from what is shooting at him. A corvette crew is at risk from their own ship.
Flight and Sensors
The directional array is an operational weakness. A corvette watching one contact is not watching another, and a decoy will pull her sensors, and then her engines, away from where the real threat is.
Survivability
Why she is not armed. It is not a question of power or tonnage. It is real estate. Fifty drones are stowed on the corvette’s outer hull, and that hull is the only place a weapon mount could go. Every square metre given to a gun is a drone that does not deploy.
The Navy made the trade in the drones’ favour, so the corvette carries a light point defense fit and nothing else. Enough to swat a stray round, not enough to fight.
A cruiser-sized hostile can therefore stalk a corvette like prey, match her speed without effort, and close to capture rather than destroy her. Her crew’s options in that situation are to run or to be boarded.
Everything dangerous about her is somewhere else, flying on a control link.
Mobility — The Defining Limitation
A corvette cannot go anywhere by herself.
A corvette has no faster-than-light capability of any kind, neither the experimental drive nor a conventional hyperspace jump. She cannot cross a system on her own initiative and she cannot leave one at all. Every corvette in Federation service arrives where she is needed clamped to the outside of something larger, and leaves the same way.
This is not a shortfall the Navy intends to correct. She is a component, and components do not travel.
Range from the control ship. Even in normal space her operating radius is short. She has no meaningful endurance, no protection, and no way home if the parent leaves. A corvette that strays from her control ship is not on a long patrol. She is lost.
Deployment
The battleship is the floor. Below that displacement a hull cannot spare the external berthing, the drone servicing volume, or the power margin. Battle Cruisers, Cruisers, Frigates, and Destroyers embark none.
Carriers hold the most. A carrier’s entire design premise is projecting small craft, and the corvette is the control layer that makes those craft work. Where a battleship carries a handful, a carrier carries the fleet’s deepest reserve of them.
Why Destroyers carry none. Displacement is only half of it. A destroyer is maneuverable enough to serve as the control point herself. Her pilots direct their drones from the ship, and the corvette layer is skipped entirely.
The F.W.S. WarpStar carries none. She is too small to support a complement of assault corvettes and fighter drones, or even a full wing of fighters, but not so small as to carry nothing. She embarks five crewed fighters instead.
Archive Assessment
The corvette is the least glamorous hull in the Navy and one of the most important.
She has no guns worth the name, no armor, no gravity, and no ability to defend herself against anything larger than what she launches. She is a pressurized box containing five pilots strapped into gel couches with oxygen pumped into their bloodstream, five crew keeping the lights on, and she is the reason the Federation fighter arm functions at all.
Every other class in the registry fans out into four variants — heavy, fast, command, guided missile — because every other class is a warship line, and warship lines get specialised.
The corvette family has two entries, and they have nothing in common but a hull size. One is a control room full of pilots who cannot defend themselves. The other is a listening post that must never be seen. Neither is a warship. Neither was meant to be.
That is not a gap in the registry. That is what the hull is for.
Return to Archive
Continue through the Fleet Registry or review the hull designation standard.