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General
Power Generation and Storage:
The Harpies have a tendency to use fusion reactors, a fairly standard but reliable form of generating power. Due to them being widespread, it is popular among the various exclaves of Harpies, due to ease of maintenance, sourcing spare parts, and the commonality of hydrogen fuel. Power storage is more limited, typically making use of generic energy storage mediums such as capacitors or chemical based batteries, though plasma batteries using contained plasma to store energy are popular.
Propulsion:
Harpy propulsion follows two main lines of development: fusion torches and plasma drives. The fusion torch is a powerful reactor driven engine type, typically used for main engines, while plasma drives typically are seen on small craft or for manuvering thrusters on larger ones.
F-T-L Propulsion: Blink Drive
The Harpy FTL travel method, the blink drive, is rather different from normal FTL drives in that it is optimised to be used in a sequence of short jumps in bursts, rather than being a long ranged FTL drive. The range of these drives is very heavily limited, but they have a rapid charge and discharge cycle, meaning that it is not uncommon to see a Harpy ship chaining together a large string of jumps in quick succession to transit between stars.
Due to the short ranged burst nature of the drives, enterprising Harpies occasionally take to setting up pit-stops or waystations along travel routes where the distance is particularly long, both for supporting their own ships, and acting as a small hub where they may trade with any other ships that travel the route. Over time, these various waystations and finding optimal routes to destinations has led to lanes of FTL travel much like a conventional highway, with various stopping points on long journeys.
These FTL drives appear to use some form of Alcubierre drive, creating an unstable and unsustainable, but very powerful bubble, leading to the effects as described above.
Computation:
TBD
Medical:
TBD
==faction-specific==
TBD
==faction-specific==
TBD
Military
Armaments:
The high manuverability of the Harpies means that the short ranged, but very powerful, plasma scattergun is seen commonly among military ships. These usually take the form of a plasma tank able to store plasma, and a short-barelled emitter, effecting a rapid fire burst of plasma bolts, though lacking in accuracy. This makes them very useful for quickly overwhelming an opponent, though they take a long time to fully recharge and have a very poor sustained damage output.
The laser is also seen in use, providing a longer ranged supporting role and typically operating on X-ray frequencies. These have a much better accuracy and sustained damage output, but lack the breakthrough power of the plasma weapons.
Plasma railguns are rarer, but combine the stronger hitting power of the scatterguns with the range and accuracy of the lasers. These are typically larger, and can be lacking in volume of fire as a result.
TBD
TBD
Active Defensive Measures:
Point defense systems typically take up the form of scaled-down laser or scattergun batteries. These are generally only to buy time for a Harpy vessel to use its mobility to get out of harm's way, and are not able to cope with large volumes of fire effectively.
Civilian ships are likely to use similar active defenses but with lesser scope, and may also be found operating commercially available systems from other nations where sold if they trade heavily with that particular power.
Passive Defensive Measures:
Armour is seldom used, typically being lightweight ablative composites or whipple shield arrangements. The mass is kept down, sometimes even hull plating with no armor at all except for critical areas, to avoid compromising the manuverability of Harpy vessels.
Plasma shields may be found in use on some Harpy ships, typically to dispense a 'wake' of plasma behind a retreating ship to cover it's escape or disengagement by melting or dispersing incoming fire, but is of minimal use on an attack run.
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