Been playing a lot of Star Sector lately, and been very inspired by their designs. This was a quick 30min build based a pair of their ships, the Hammerhead and Gemini.
The BARBEL class frigate is a rather unique entry from Ad'Astralia Fleetworks, being the only purpose built military platform from the otherwise all (intended) civilian megacorp, as well as the unique genesis for its design. In response to the slow but steady climb in piracy in the outer reaches of the Second Great Expansion, the AAF design bureau experimented with the ancient concept of a Q-ship--a wolf in sheep's clothing. The original intent was to design a pair of ships that mimicked one another's silhouette, which would serve the dual purposes of not only allowing for surprise defensive actions against pirates, but also (and arguably more importantly) inspire enough operational caution into would-be attackers to prevent the need for such actions in the fist place. The sticking point became that the design teams assigned to work in tandem on the sister ships clashed over compromises to achieve the desired twinning effect, struggling to fit the mission needs of their fellow team into their own plans. At first, it was assumed this would be a relatively easy obstacle to over come; after all, as so many warships in the Second Great Expansion were little more than repurposed and up-gunned civilian craft, surely it couldn't be that difficult to design a ship from the kneel up to perform both tasks?
Unfortunately this assumption ran into several real world concerns. The first, and perhaps most obvious, was that while countless civilian ships had indeed been converted for military tasks, this was a change born out of pure necessity, often desperation, rather than qualified assessment. Furthermore, previous conversations not withstanding, not a single warship had been converted the other way around, into a civilian craft. The design teams simply struggled to accommodate one another, to say nothing of the budget. AAF was a megcorp with a bottom-line to protect after all, and even in the interest of physically protecting the bottom-line, the design bureau would run into the more nebulous yet no less steelclad opponent of their own accounting department. Frankly, no civilian ship was ever going to be able to justify the costs of filling out the base superstructure to allow the necessary degree of uparmoring, powering, and redundancies a proper warship would require. And no warship would ever need the size a transport, which was always going to represent the juiciest pirate bait, to make the deception worthwhile. At least, these were the final statements made by the AAF fact finding committee tasked to decide whether to continue pursuing the program or cancelling it outright. Ultimately, they decided on a compromise in order to recoup some of the investment; the BARBEL would proceed as a standard frigate, notable for its numerous hardpoints, useful for customization, left over from the original efforts to create a dual purpose craft.
For what its worth, the redacted summary included the admission that the original goal of the program was probably achievable despite all the justifications the committee accumulated in order to alter the end goal, but it'd been a rough quarter for the company (ironically due to piracy) and they sensed a lack of will from upper management to potentially sandbag another quarter's profits by approving further funding.
Noticeably absent from the findings, redacted or otherwise, was the further admission that the R&D board was guaranteed end of the year bonuses for each design that matured to the production phase by the end of that fiscal year, and as the ancient saying went, a bonus in the hand was worth two in the bank.
