Commonwealth / Renegade Legions

The Commonwealth is a Human-Baufrin civilization at the far end of the Orion Arm, comprising some 40,000 stars, and stretching across an arc of space roughly 45,000 light years in length. New Britannia is its capital.

War began with the Terran Overlord Government when the Baufrin Regent refused to hand over the Renegade Legions. Invasion quickly followed and after a century of war, TOG controls 8 of the 21 Commonwealth Grand Dukedoms and is fighting for a 9th.

Currently, the most bitterly contested theatre of war is Shannedam County, where TOG fleets and legions are fighting their Commonwealth counterparts for control of 40 worlds.

Organization

The Commonwealth is in the unusual position for a government, of having a dual military structure, the larger part of which is not technically under its control. The Renegade Legions are the backbone of Commonwealth defence and fighting alongside them are the Commonwealth Armed Forces (CAF). There has been animosity between the two militaries in the past, but there are few bad feelings now.

Naval organization is based on the Titan squadron.. This force is powerful enough to handle most missions and serves as the basic building block for larger formations. The typical squadron is made up of a single titan acting as the flagship, a single superdreadnaught, two dreadnaughts, four battleships or battlecruisers, and a single squadron of escorts.

A reinforced squadron adds a second superdreadnaught or a third dreadnaught or both, at the expense of the escorts. Carriers are usually assigned to squadrons on a mission basis, but there are many traditional squadron-carrier combinations.

Repulse

An older design, the Repulse is usually found as the flagship of a battle squadron. Mounting an unusually powerful fighter strike force, most captains prefer to close with the enemy rather than standing off at long range. Its offensive power is rounded out by a size 4 mass driver and 5 missile pack batteries. Despite its age, the Repulse has many advantages and is likely to be around for a long time to come.

Carthage

The Carthage was designed to be the most powerful SDN in space. The basic concept was to sacrifice the spinal mount to carry more powerful beam batteries. Original designs mounted considerably more firepower, but field trials showed enormous problems with the power distribution. The beam batteries were reduced in size. The addition of a small mass driver and 2 missile packs kept the design viable, and the 6 fighter flights gives it a powerful strike force.

Valiant

Mounting a huge number of secondary batteries, the Valiant has a deceptive appearance. Although it looks formidable, it has limited striking power at long range. Used as an anti-fighter platform it is an effective ship, however many young captains try to close with larger ships, paying the ultimate price for their inexperience.

Exeter

Commonwealth designers often create battlecruisers that are more effective in independent operations and usually able to escape from larger ships. The Exeter class is a typical example. Mounting a respectable array of short range weapons, the ship uses its agility to maneuver into position to attack.

Ajax

The Ajax has developed a reputaton as a ship to build a career on. Because the ship can perform so many different kinds of missions, assignment to an Ajax battlecruiser ensures captain and crew lots of opportunities for independant action.

County

The County is fairly typical of medium carriers, and uses its abundant power to increase its maneuverability. Its fighter facilities are cramped and weapons have been added almost as an after thought. Regardless of these problems, the ship still performs its main function of delivering an entire Fighter Group to the scene of battle. This class contains a slower variant, with standard thrust of 2 (36 pts).

Pegasus

The Pegasus is a newly commissioned Commonwealth Frigate. In addition to typical escort duties, pairs of Pegasus frigates will patrol uninhabitable systems within the Commonwealth's borders, searching for TOG raider bases. Operating in squadrons, they make deadly close attack ships.

Fighters

The Commonwealth uses a wide selection of fighter types, some which are shown below. For example, the Commonwealth heavy/slow bomber is called the Slingshot. The only type not used is the torpedo bomber.
Cheetah - light/fast interceptor Guardian - heavy/slow standard Space Gull - medium standard
Penetrator - medium standard Fluttering Petal - heavy/slow standard Avenger - heavy/slow standard

Conversion Notes

Converting the enormous Leviatan ships was more difficult than I expected. Originally I had intended to convert the mass figures given in the books to a number of hull boxes, and calculate the weapon factors from that. Unfortunately the masses given did not seem to follow any logical pattern. Then I considered using the box counters included in the game to calculate mass, but this also failed to give consistant designs. Nothing left, but to do it the hard way. Using the weapon factors given in the original rules I 'reverse engineered' the ships.

One problem was the Leviathan ships were so BIG. Even ships labelled 'destroyers' were big enough to be titans. I knew I would have to decrease them in size a bit, but not so much they would lose their 'leviathan' feel. Plus they normally had two types of special weapons.

Leviathan rules have many different types of beam batteries, each with different strengths and ranges. I split them up into three main types, heavy - max range 10 to 20 hexes, medium - max range 5 to 10 hexes, light - max range up to 5 hexes. For my calculations I used the strengths given at range 1. All heavy strengths in a given arc were added together to make the primaries. Light strengths became the secondaries. Half the medium strengths were added to primaries and half to secondaries. This resulted in ships far too big, so I divided all strengths in half. This resulted in very weak secondaries. Since Leviathan rules allow you to fire at fighters with primaries, I decided to include 10% of the heavy values in the secondary power, and only 90% for primaries. This finally gave reasonable strengths for the beam weapons. Since the beam power was divided in half I did the same with the number of fighters. Leviathan mass drivers were supposed to be more powerful than ASFOS's so I left them as is. The last conversion was their missile batteries. I decided to make them missile packs due to the way they are used in Leviathan, and decided to allow approx 1 pack per 100 pts of damage under the original rules. Once I'd finished these calculations, I 'smoothed' the numbers out a bit to make sure they were useful designs, and the result gave me the mass. When designing the carriers, I discovered I had to decrease the fighters by half again just to make them fit into their given classes.