This image shows her entering the city of Milencia in 875.
History
Astute was the second vessel laid down at Blackridge Works in 862, alongside her older sister 4728 Avenger and soon followed by 6711 Accipiter*. After concluding fitting out, Empress Lana dio Alud assigned her to her first Captain, a young minor noble from the Lin Territory by the name of Kveta sen Hajek. After initial crew training, Astute participated in trials near the island of Alumar, alongside the N-Class aerial battleship Nebula. In early 864 she was part of the taskforce that participated in Operation Quadrant, the demolition of Old Aqua City. Afterwards, she was reassigned to the eastern border and participated in both the Battle of Sarren Valley in 869 and Operation Anvil early the next year, when she was part of the southern taskforce, supporting the 31st Armoured Division.
Captain Hajek proved a highly capable officer, and in 871 Empress Lana promoted her to command the S-Class aerial battleship Scourge. The Empress placed Astute under a new Captain, Enrieta Sala, a charismatic serval from Alumar known for her tendency to carry a nickel-plated Soren Special .448 revolver with a wooden holster-stock instead of her service sidearm. During the war of 874, Astute was part of the Karwen Islands taskforce, spending most of the campaign patrolling over Karwen-Mihan: she did not engage in combat at any point during the war.
Empress Lana recalled Astute to Aludra when the Karwen Islands returned to Chiran care following the Battle of Omar. She returned to Blackridge Works for a powerplant overhaul. As a result, when Aludra entered the Garam Civil War in late 874, she was not available to support Operation Nightfall alongside her sisters. Her overhaul was postponed several times in favour of servicing and repair work on the three S-Class Leviships. Finally, in 875 Astute received her new powerplant and was assigned to Taskforce Iron as part of Operation Tombstone, pushing ahead of the naval Taskforce Gold to assist paratroops holding the locks at the Eastern end of the 660-nautical-mile Ahad Canal.
She mostly served as part of the taskforce assigned to Milencia and Lake Arkhan from this point until the Battle of Akhmal (Operation Crypt) in 878, earning twelve battle stars during this period. She distinguished herself particularly during the air battle over Lake Arkhan in 876 (Emergency Order 579**), when despite heavy fire she assisted in rescuing sailors from the sinking D-Class cruiser Didact, and afterwards provided support to her damaged sister 0711 Auger. One notable activity separate from the taskforce was Operation Entomb. This operation occurred in late 877 when Empress-Consort Yasemin dio Alud assigned her to guard the Reformation War-era railroad gun Lady Rochelle as part of a plan to use her 11-inch gun Vendetta*** to distract government forces.
Astute was shot down in 879 during Operation Exhume, the First Battle of Sarnia Desert, after fire from one of the gun batteries defending the Garamese capital, Nihara, destroyed her powerplant. After a successful ditching, she was left in the middle of a dense minefield and forced to defend herself for three hours in a ferocious sandstorm, against repeated attacks from mortar teams and light armour. Without her main generator, she could not use her most potent defence system, her Cuirass-D laser CIWS. The sandstorm along with heavy jamming made locating her extremely difficult for the allied taskforce, with the Tarqueshi aerial battleship Scimitar giving up the search after two hours. A single wing of Aludran Griffon drones from Grimalkin, led by drone number 637, located the crashed Leviship after two and a half hours and provided support, but the jamming prevented them from calling for assistance. Since the others were low on ammunition, soon only 637 remained.
Through sheer luck, the Messiran heavy aerial cruiser Polar Star and a companion group of Aludran scout helicopters passed close enough to Astute's position for 637 to detect and signal to one of the helicopters. Polar Star quickly moved in to recover Astute using her cargo winches. By this time, six of Astute's crew were dead and eleven more severely wounded, the latter including Captain Sala: four of Polar Star's crew were killed attaching the winches while under fire.
Polar Star deposited Astute near the middle of Dhamka Water Park on the east side of the city of Murad****. Though she was initially thought to be a write-off, the preliminary damage survey found surprisingly little structural damage and her primary systems remained sufficiently intact that the grounded Astute delivered supporting fire during the Niharan attack on Murad a month after Operation Exhume. During the attack, her remaining crew operated her weapons and sensors. Notably, Captain Sala left her hospital bed to command her grounded vessel.
When the three S-Class aerial battleships arrived at Murad later that year, Spite's cargo included a replacement engine for Astute. In that time, Muradi engineers had almost restored Astute to working order, replacing her explosive reactive armour, all of her missile armament, several of her guns, her fire control systems and much of her internal circuitry. It was thus with a Muradi crew under an Army Colonel, an ibex named Nisha Bedi, that Astute participated in Operation Hornet, the final battle of the Garam Civil War, protecting a column of over a million Niharan refugees as they fled Clan shelling of the capital across the Sarnia Desert. She suffered minor damage due to patrolling close enough to Nihara to be caught at the edge of the 5-megaton nuclear blast which levelled what remained of the city three days after the evacuation began.
In the aftermath of the war, Astute initially remained in Murad with her crew, with Colonel Bedi receiving a promotion to become the first Captain of the Muradi Air Navy in over seventy years. However, the Council of Murad realised there was a problem with this arrangement, in that they had no idea how to service the Leviship's engines. Empress Jirina dio Alud soon struck a deal for the return of Astute to Aludra along with her crew, in exchange for replacing the seventy-five obsolete Zh-33DT fighters in Muradi service with thirty-five Al-900 Sabre IIs for no cost. Astute's crew and support staff would be granted Aludran citizenship, along with their families.
Astute ended up assigned to the Eastern border Militzia*****. She is perhaps best known for her role in rescue operations during the fire at the Athel Gas Refinery in 885 when, despite the risk of the plant exploding, she flew through a wall of flames to rescue trapped plant workers in the main building. For their bravery, Empress Jirina dio Alud presented Captain Bedi with the Vigilant Star, the most distinguished Aludran peacetime decoration, and personally commended her entire crew.
Two years after she left for Aludra, Rawal Tank Plant, with great fanfare, rolled out Murad's first domestically-produced military Leviship, based on all they had learned from the rebuild. Her name, of course, was Astute.
Propulsion
Like most modern Leviships that do not incorporate a nuclear reactor, the A-Class use a turbine-based multifuel engine for electrical power. The powerplant can burn diesel or gasoline, but usually runs on conventional jet fuel: with a top speed of around 210 knots, A-Class Leviships are capable of refuelling from fixed-wing tanker aircraft using a flying boom******. This makes them a lot more flexible than the elderly T-Class they replaced: while externally modern, the T-Class were built around obsolete surplus surface ship engines that ran on residual fuel oil.
Much as theoretical work on a nuclear-powered A-Class layout has existed since they were on the drawing boards, no functional powerplant has ever been tested. The most likely reason for this was to preserve the secrecy surrounding the Tarantula self-propelled gun's status as a hybrid Leviship: if the Chirans did not think the A-Class could mount a nuclear reactor, it would follow that they would conclude that the smaller Tarantula could not either. With the discovery of this deception in 874 during the Battle of Omar, there was no longer any such reason: however, rather than proceeding with powerplant upgrades to the A-Class, Empress Lana dio Alud issued Requirement 5533 for a clean-slate ground support Air Destroyer design. After repeated delays, this new design was eventually dubbed the River-Class by Empress Jirina in 882, with all Levships in the class named after rivers in Aludra. While the River-Class are planned to replace the A-Class in service, as of 892 no timetable for the retirement of the A-Class has been drawn up.
The A-Class served as a testbed for the electrical engine system used by the much larger S-Class. Precisely how this system works without burning conventional fuel in the engines is not clear: various methods involving magnetic acceleration have been theorised, with many analysts concluding that the engine is a byproduct of Aludra's extremely secretive research into commercial nuclear fusion.
Armament
In terms of armament, these vessels in their Garam Civil War configuration mostly made use of surplus weapons from last-generation armoured vehicles, including a pair of S-2 Swan tank turrets front and rear. The interior of each turret was extensively reworked with the gunner's station moved to the commander's station to allow for the mounting of an enlarged gun stabiliser and fire control computer. The first major block upgrade to the A-Class in 869 retrofitted Bastion-III frontal armour developed for the S-3 Black Swan to the tank turrets.
The Szalai R48 low-pressure gun / mortar system was a stopgap weapon designed in 859 due to technical problems with the original liquid propellant version of what would become the Szalai Advanced Gun System. Designed to be mounted on the hull of the old SN-2 Sorcerer******* 205mm self-propelled gun and conceptually based on Chiran mobile mortar carriers, the system consists of a pair of breechloading mortars fitted with autoloaders. The Sorcerer's drivetrain never appreciated this alteration, but the result was an effective fire support vehicle which incorporated modern computerised fire control systems. The A-Class first received the R48 in 869, following the adoption of the SN-5 Monarch self-propelled gun with the completed Mk55 AGS the year before. The R48 replaced the two 127mm twin-barrel Mk6 Mod 29 Dual-Purpose Gun turrets the baseline A-Class mounted.
The Va-37 Diapason, named for the eight-foot rockets used by the original prototype, is something of an oddity in that Vanek Aerospace is not generally associated with rocket development. It exists due to the historical closeness of the Vanek and Sias families: Sias Kinetics was working on SACLOS guided anti-tank missiles at the time, and so Vanek took up the contract to replace Aludra's vintage Reformation War-era Model 793 multiple rocket launchers, fundamentally little different to those used during the Battle of Eflin in 794. The Diapason's replacement, the SK-58 Hailstorm, entered service in 858, leaving hundreds of surplus launchers. While many of these were "lost" and later turned up in the hands of pro-Empire militia groups on Aludra's borders, a substantial number were retained as spare barrel sets for the A-Class.
The secondary turrets are the final two Block 25 configurations from the MC-1 Halberd infantry fighting vehicle. In anticipation of the adoption of the MC-2 Broadsword IFV, Empress Lana cancelled the last batch of MC-1s after their turrets were already completed, leaving enough spares to outfit all twelve A-Class Leviships. The anti-tank configuration featured a pair of 40mm cannons and two twin ATGM launchers, while the anti-air variant mounts a single 40mm cannon and a quad Standard Vehicle Mounted Launcher for SAMs. Since the Block 25 refit was at the time only six months old, these were the most advanced weapons mounted on the baseline A-Class. The 869 refit changed the missile armament of both turret types: the SACLOS Thunderbolt ATGM and IR / UV-seeking Silver Dart SAM respectively replaced the MCLOS Hammerhead ATGM and IR-seeking Razor SAM.
In anticipation of "eventualities," the A-Class also carry enough of Aludra's standard-issue Model 37 battle rifles to arm just over half of the crew, along with four of the long-barrel DMR variant of the Model 37 and four belt-fed general-purpose machine guns. External lockers also allow for storage of four Silver Dart SAM launchers in infantry configuration, primarily in case of ambush while powered down. When Astute was shot down, she was still carrying the older "C" IR / UV variant of the Silver Dart rather than the "E" imaging infrared version, as official orders at the time were to expend all C-variant missiles still in stock.
Refit
Astute's refit in Murad left her unique among her class, with significant alterations to her internal systems, sensors and weapons. The only refit on a similar scale is 0711 Auger, which received two Navy A8 Trainable Variable Missile Launchers in place of her Diapason launchers, and improved fire control radars to increase her ability to provide anti-aircraft support.
On her arrival in Murad, Astute was in appalling condition: both her front and rear tank turrets suffered severe damage during Operation Exhume, one Diapason launcher had been destroyed entirely, and two of her IFV turrets were irreparably jammed.
The first part of her refit occurred only a few days after she was recovered, with Polar Star donating two spare K6 155mm guns. Aludran engineers quickly built limited-traverse mounts for these weapons, installing them in place of the destroyed Diapason launcher and one of the IFV turrets, and it was in this configuration that Astute fired in defence of Murad. Shortly afterwards Aludran troops found a Muradi garage owner, Meera Patel, near the hulk of Astute with welding equipment in the middle of the night. While they initially suspected her of looting, it turned out she and her daughters were there to make repairs. The next day, the commander of the Aludran taskforce authorised the citizens of Murad to make whatever repairs they saw fit, placing Astute at the city's disposal for the remainder of the war. The sole condition was that the Muradi not attempt to dismantle or otherwise study Astute's engines. The prospect of their own Leviship very much appealed to the Elder Council of Murad, who approached local industry leaders to organise a refit.
Murad's local arms industry had expanded enormously after the city declared that it was not subject to the control of the central government in 876, following government attempts to draft Muradi citizens. As a result, the refit used locally-produced weapons. The supervisor was Kyra Bhakta, an experienced Muradi cargo Leviship designer, with the chief of production at the nearby Rawal Tank Plant, Sai Mistri, supervising armament.
The first stage of the refit replaced the S-2 Swan turrets with modified VA-3 Ishranth main battle tank turrets. These were a widened variant mounting two autoloading 140mm smoothbore cannons instead of the usual one. Rawal Tank Plant reworked the two K6 howitzer / guns from Polar Star for compatibility with Muradi ammunition and fitted them into Senapati self-propelled gun turrets to replace the R48 gun / mortars.
Two Toophaan Automated Launcher Loader Modules replaced the Diapason launchers. Toophaan is a sophisticated Garamese system that has more in common with the SK-58 Hailstorm, able to launch multiple payloads including guided missiles and calibres from 85mm up to 225mm. The standard configuration for firing 135mm unguided rockets has thirty launch tubes. Incorporating the reloading system for Toophaan required extensive work on Astute's midsection since unlike Diapason where each barrel is breech-loaded with separate rockets, Toophaan uses two half-sets of preloaded barrels.
The four IFV turrets were all write-offs for various reasons. Sai Mistri, well-known for her preference for heavy armament, managed to persuade the other planners on the project to use light tank turrets as replacements, settling on the 75mm low-profile "streamline" turret for the 8-wheel Krpaan light tank, fitted with an improved autoloader. Mistri, proving to be quite a diplomat, also persuaded the Aludrans to let her take away the old turrets for study: this led to a redesigned "all-aspect" Krpaan turret with a high-angle gun and modernised fire control systems that Rawal still manufactures today.
Central Garamese Leviship designers have long derided the use of infantry heavy machine guns on Air Destroyers, referring to them as "anti-bird guns." Mistri, unsurprisingly, was of a similar opinion and, as a result, the refit replaced Astute's .55 calibre heavy machine guns with 27mm Kobara autocannons.
Mistri's survey of the primary defence systems found the Sabran Protector revolver cannons to be "eminently serviceable" while the Cuirass-D laser system was severely damaged and in need of a major overhaul. The repairs to the Cuirass-D incorporated a modified cooling plant, a Chiran-made generator and capacitor bank gutted from a scrapped Jian ISV, and four overlapping 110-degree emitters to replace the original pair of 270-degree units. Opinions vary on whether this was due to doctrinal differences (as Garamese laser CIWS systems usually have a large number of limited-arc emitters), technical limitations, or a combination of the two. The Protector installations proved to be in good condition just as Mistri thought, though integrating their Aludran fire control radars with Astute's new Muradi battle management system proved to be extremely challenging.
Tarquesh had already provided large numbers of their state-of-the-art multi-mode Shakush anti-tank missile to Murad in 877, and these were the logical choice to replace Astute's Aludran-made Thunderbolt launchers. The project also evaluated the Chiran Laoying anti-tank missile: however, the integration of a Chiran nonary fire control system with Astute's decimal systems was far too complicated. Since by the time of the refit Murad was awash with the latest "E" variant of the Aludran Silver Dart SAM launcher, there was no real need to replace the SVMLs mounted on Astute, and so they were retained and repaired.
By this point, it was clear that Mistri was designing a vessel more like a very small aerial cruiser than a ground support craft. As a result, Bhakta's hull design team determined that the existing armour scheme was insufficient, and added substantial amounts of composite armour and additional explosive reactive armour plates. In particular, the refit added a very thick layer of armour plating on top of the main generator housing, altering the hull so that a new generator could be inserted from Astute's underside. The additional armour all but removed the secondary vehicle recovery and cargo hauling functions so beloved of Aludran designers.
The electronics were put together from a series of spare parts bought or donated from foreign Air Destroyers stationed in Murad, tied together with a custom-made battle management system nicknamed "Ajna." The software team modelled Ajna in equal parts on the Aludran Corona and Tarqueshi Fajar systems. Her new configuration boasted much more powerful fire control radars and other detection equipment, reflective of her focus as a single combatant rather than a support vessel for ground forces. Astonishingly, despite being a one-off system built from modules that were never designed to be compatible with one another, the Ajna fire control complex has an enviable reputation for reliability.
Finally, Astute's smallarms were replaced with Garamese equivalents: she ended up carrying sixty-five Nelsian-made MS-K 7.53mm battle rifles and ten PAKAM general-purpose machine guns. The reasoning behind the use of Western Garamese battle rifles rather than the assault rifles more commonly used in Central Garam was that battle rifles had given Astute's crew an edge during the fight to defend her. The design team reworked the internal storage racks, originally designed to hold two hundred and thirty-four magazines (six for each of the thirty-five battle rifles and four DMRs), to hold four hundred and fifty-five magazines, seven each for sixty-five rifles. The machine guns were a natural choice, as the PAKAM has a well-deserved reputation as one of the best general-purpose machine guns in the world: so good, in fact, that the Tarqueshi military purchased 55,000 of them during the war. Mistri also insisted on mounting additional storage lockers for Silver Dart SAM launchers, feeling that such protection would be vital if Astute were ever shot down again.
The resulting Leviship would have been regarded as a bad joke just a few years before, an Aludran hull rebuilt by Garamese designers and including Tarqueshi, Chiran, Nibeki and Messiran components. The refit left Astute almost four hundred and fifty tons heavier and significantly slower than her sisters.
* To conceal total production, Aludra almost never uses sequential hull numbers.
** "Emergency Order" was Empress Lana's preferred method of designating missions carried out in response to enemy action rather than those she had planned herself and assigned an operation name.
***Aludran railroad guns always had two names: one is the complete assembly, and the other just the gun. Typically a railroad gun was named after a noble Lady, and the gun's name was some form of veiled insult: Aludran nobles found this more amusing than anything. The one exception to this was the gigantic Little Zoya, named after the designer's daughter: the name of that gun is Hope.
**** Murad's alliance with Aludra was a result of their receiving seventy-five Zh-33DT multirole fighters for virtually nothing in 876 to bolster their defences against Niharan bombers. The construction of Nihara's defensive batteries in the Sarnia Desert began due to fears that these aircraft would be used by Murad to attack the capital: the existence of the enormous 24-inch Muradi supergun Broken Promise spurred these fears on still further.
The Water Park itself was part of the reason the citizens of Murad developed such an affinity for Astute. Like their "companion" animal species, the "horselike" species of Garam (zebras, gazelles and so on) regard bodies of water as places of community and safety. As with the Northern fortress-cities of Tarquesh, water sources are often sacred, and so even something as apparently-trivial as a water park holds a great deal of importance.
*****While Militzia can be literally translated as militia, this fails to capture the historical significance of the word. The Aludran Militzia dates back to the period after what foreign historians call the First Empire, a time when a divided Aludra could not afford a standing army and depended on locally raised civilian forces. In modern use, it refers to the volunteer force that exists between the police and the armed forces, with duties including SWAT-like paramilitary police operations, riot control, and holding ground on Aludra's borders.
******Aludra has never even attempted to use drogue and probe refuelling with Leviships, due to issues related to putting a long hose near an aircraft with a mast.
*******Almost always referred to by its nickname "Magician" (the Aludran form translates literally as "Illusionist") due to its propensity for making things disappear.
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