Delhi WarShips

Overview

Prior to the early twenty-fifth centuryDelhi Ships was a small manufacturer of military transport vessels with a corporate headquarters on the world of Capella. That changed when Delhi Ships successfully won the competition to supply a new class of corvette WarShips to the Terran Hegemony, a relatively unusual event given that Delhi Ships was based outside the borders of the Hegemony.

Several factors came together in providing Delhi Ships with this particular business opportunity. Firstly, the Terran Hegemony had identified a need for a new corvette to replace the older Bonaventure and Vigilant classes, whose performance was becoming increasingly lacklustre in comparison to the demands placed upon them. Secondly, the Terran Hegemony had recently recaptured Terra Firma from the Capellan Confederation, and had received significant reparations from the Confederation paid in L-Bills, freeing up funding for a new class of WarShips - L-Bills Delhi Ships were willing to take payment in. Thirdly, Delhi Ships was prepared to build a new facility at Carver V, inside the borders of the Hegemony, to handle production of the new corvettes while preserving Hegemony technological secrets. Lastly, Delhi Ships had designed a WarShip that met all of the stipulated requirements.

The design that launched Delhi Ships into the world of WarShip manufacture was the Vincent-class corvette, a design that benefitted greatly from the "smart modularity" Delhi Ships built into the design, allowing for commonality of parts from various different manufacturing concerns as well as making new technologies and upgrades easy to embody. The Vincent would stay in service for more than three hundred years, with more than five hundred ships being manufactured; by the time Stefan Amaris launched his coup no less than thirty-nine different build standards of the Vincent had been introduced to service and Delhi Ships had become Delhi WarShips.

The Vincent would be Delhi WarShips greatest success. In the twenty-eighth century the company attempted to enter the big leagues with a new, revolutionary WarShip design at a much heavier weight; that new class of ship was the Soyal, a heavy cruiser designed and marketed as the replacement to the aging Avatar-class heavy cruiser. The Soyal was intended to capitalize on new, highly classified weapons technology - the Mass Driver class of weapons - but proved a commercial failure where the Star League Defense Force was concerned, a result of SLDF research already showing that Mass Drivers were unsuitable for use given current doctrines and the inherent limitations the massive weapons had to operate.

Despite the problems with the Soyal, including the sheer size of the design because of the demands placed upon it - a size comparable to a number of battlecruiser and battleship designs - the Capellan Confederation saw the Soyal as an opportunity to modernise its black water navy, and purchased a number of the design. That prompted both the Free Worlds League to purchase a small number of the ships, and public outcry demanding to know why the SLDF hadn't introduced Mass Drivers to service. Sadly, the Soyal proved a limited design, outlived by the earlier Vincent.

At some point during the Succession Wars the former Delhi WarShips facility on Capella became a part of the Rashpur-Owens company, although there was likely little remaining as both the Capella and Carver IV shipyards operated by Delhi WarShips were considered to have been destroyed during the First Succession War, and the Rashpur-Owens shipyard at Capella was damaged.

Manufacturing

Delhi WarShips had manufacturing centers in the following systems:

Capella

Components produced at Capella:
Component	Type
WarShips
Soyal	Heavy cruiser class WarShip

Carver IV

Components produced at Carver V:
Component	Type
WarShips
Vincent	Corvette class WarShip

Bibliography

• BattleSpace
• Field Report 2765: CCAF
• First Succession War (sourcebook)
• Technical Readout: 2750
• Technical Readout: 3057
• Technical Readout: 3057 Revised