New Pride Cruisers.. Round Two

After some grumblings from management about weapons and my own inner desire to complete these space monsters, I returned to the sketch and redid them with loving attention.

I also mangled the Pride-A into it's Pride-C version- which is the one you'll most likely see in-game under the AISN banner. Me? I like the USN one better- since it retains the three massive mass-driver cannon turrets I felt it should have.

I don't have the armament list I made on the Pride-A On-hand at the moment, but suffice to say it carries more ion cannon mounts, two extra plasma cannons (insets in the hull bulges), four more anti-ship torpedoes (these were removed for the drone bay, as well as a counter-missile rack), and the two bridge-mounted burst missiles are still ion arrays. This, IMO, is what the Pride heavy cruiser SHOULD have looked like, instead of the meager armed ship that shows up in the AISN.

Since the Pride is an older vessel, I felt a design change from the rest of the AFF fleets was in order. The pride comes from the mindset and the time of armor versus extravogent weaponry, and reflects this in the large space of just solid armor plating on the hull. The turrets mount older mass drivers that are too big to have any kind of elevation machinery, and thus limits their range of fire. This is made up for in the Ion cannons though, which cover the ship, despite the fact that they are weaker than their 'modern day' counterparts.

The AISN Pride shown here is an older model having it's old USN paint buffed off and re-painted in AISN stripes of the old empire (or old USN...). Lots of drastic changes here, from removing two of the main mass driver turrets (Arguing they did no good anyway), stripping out some of the torpedo launchers, and mounting communicatios antenna across the ship to guide the drones. Two ion arrays were also removed and replaced with burst missile racks to put the old warship as a form of escort warship. Suffice to say, it is a shadow of it's former self.

I do have in my mind the pride-B version, which might have emphasis on guns over drones, but that'll appear if I draw it. Oh, and on both versions here I included some vertical-launch missiles...even if they aren't reflected in the stats... take 'em or leave them if you will, modlers.

There, that should make management's heads spin for a while...