Cray
02/14/03 08:53 AM
147.160.125.185
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PEREGRINE (ICE) ASF
100 tons
8.5t 200-rated fission engine, 900 Isp
....Thrust: 4
....Overthrust: 6
....SI: 10
3t cockpit
50t fuel (22pts+change)
4t 4x Optimized DHS
8.5t armor
....Nose: 41
....Wings: 41/41
....Rear: 13
22t 2x Thunderbolt-15 (nose)
2t Thunderbolt-15 ammo (8 shots)
BACKGROUND
The Peregrine is the product of an independent Periphery planet near enough to the Inner Sphere to be noted by the pirates lurking around the fringes of the Inner Sphere, but far enough way to be overlooked by Periphery traders and mercs. The planet, Del Gado, was part of the great web of the Star League's Periphery economy. In the Star League, Del Gado produced ball bearings and computer chips for its neighbors. Its neighbors delivered food and most other needed industrial goods. Which was a real shame, because Del Gado was a pretty inhabitable planet and would've made a better agriculture center than some of the planets feeding it, but they had better lobbies with local Star League administrators than Del Gado.
When the Star League left and the Periphery economy shut down, Del Gado imploded.
It took "only" about a century for Del Gado to shake itself out and re-establish something like civilization, a 19th Century level of farming communities and steam power. Its population was 2 billion, well fed, and had a reasonable knowledge base. Between 2900 and 3000, Del Gado repeated Earth's 20th Century technologically and, regrettably, militarily. The separate continents had developed independent nations with independent politics. They fought. Fighting inspired technological recovery.
After the brawling Third Global War of 2967-2972, the victors claimed the ballistic missile research facilities of their occupied foes. The natives of Del Gado knew the future lay in space. They would recontact the rest of mankind, perhaps even journey to distant Terra when they figured out the long-gone "Kearny-Fuchida Drive."
The rest of mankind, or a despicable portion thereof, contacted Del Gado first.
In 2977, a group of pirates landed on Del Gado. Their company of mixed, mostly light and medium battlemechs walked into an town, pillaged it for food, women, and booze, and left after razing it. Survivors reported the attackers were annoyed at the lack of high tech goods and took their frustrations out by leveling every structure in sight (and got more angry when their giant robots walked through wooden farmhouses with wooden floors over the cellars and storm cellars). The raiders wanted high tech goods, not crap made with discrete electronic components. Other nations were (to put it politely) a little dubious of claims of giant robots attacking an isolated rural town like a bunch of space pirates. The media was still using movie cameras and radio reporting more than live TV, so the attack sounded like a bad sci-fi movie to most inhabitants. Some historians mentioned the battlemech, but they didn't get as much press time as the experts ridiculing the raided nation.
But the pirates visited again, and again, and again. Different continents, different nations, different towns. The monetary damage was no worse than a tornado, but it was galling. People with starships, super-advanced battle machines, and fusion power turning into pirates? That was stupid. But, hey, defense contractors, the military, and many politicians liked the excuse to raise taxes for increased defense spending. The post-war shrinkage of the defense industry hurt a lot of people.
Ground forces and air support mostly annoyed the pirates rather than doing anything constructive. In one shining moment, a navy's large warships did manage to obliterate a lance of the parked "battlemechs" while the pirates had dismounted for some old school rape and pillaging. The battleships were later strafed by space fighters, resulting in a lot of damage to the superstructures and main turrets, but leaving the vessels afloat. The fighters apparently had short fuel supplies and could only linger for minutes over a battlefield. However, even the navy had to admit its battleships weren't much of a threat to more inland raids, and the stationary targets they enjoyed in that raid weren't likely to be repeated. The conclusion: the pirates would have to be defeated in space.
The 12-year program to develop the large rockets and "space fighters" for this task were an outgrowth of existing ICBM programs. Several nations pursued independent courses, sometimes sharing useful solutions to technical problems (engines and sensors, mostly) with their closer allies. The Peregrine was the first ready fighter, tested for 3 years before it was ready to engage pirates.
THE PEREGRINE
The Peregrine utilized the most advanced rocket technology available at the time, a laminar flow nuclear thermal rocket. The compact reactor heated its ceramic (uranium) fuel to ludicrous temperatures, then blew hydrogen over it. The thermal power output was in term of gigawatts, the thrust measured in hundreds of tons, and the specific impulse of 1000 was over twice as good as any viable chemical rocket. With an external fuel tank, the Peregrine could've carried itself to orbit.
However, the high-strung nuclear thermal rocket (NTR) that met military requirements was not perfect. Some uranium tended to diffuse into the exhaust stream. Some fuel elements were prone to cracking and blowing out the tail pipe. The engine didn't mind that - it was designed to handle some fuel element failures. However, Del Gado's powerful environmental movement (founded in response to radiological and lingering chemical weapons used in the Second and Third Global Wars) was not cool with that. So the Peregrine had to be launched into orbital on a less dangerous chemical rocket, with its NTR wrapped in an ejectable 10-ton armored cask.
After reaching orbit, the Peregrine ejected the cask covering the sides and rear of its NTR and maneuvered toward the target(s) using its drop tank first, then onboard fuel as necessary. The Peregrine was guided by powerful onboard radar, ground-based radar, and hosts of telescopes on the ground, onboard the Peregrine, and in orbit. While radar was often foiled (by basic ECM systems the pirate pilots hardly knew their fighters possessed - it was just another blackbox to the lostech-era pilots), infrared and UV cameras had a particularly easy time tracking the ionized hydrogen spewing out of the pirate spacecraft. The Peregrine's crew of four worked to assemble this data into a targeting solution for their powerful "Thunderbolt" missiles, fire the missiles, and maneuver evasively. (Maneuver in the sense of jinking slightly with reaction control thrusters - maintaining a constant ballistic course was recognized as Bad in space combat.)
When deployed in the expected numbers (12-40) against the expected numbers of pirates (2 fighters, 1 "Union" dropship) at the expected range (under 220km), the salvo of Thunderbolts was expected to satisfactorily destroy the pirates. In a prolonged dogfight, the Peregrines were in deep trouble. Each Thunderbolt launcher had all of 4 reloads and, of course, the Peregrine had negligible fuel capacity compared to the super-efficient fusion rockets of their foes.
(Fortunately, fusion rockets were just around the corner, nuclear scientists told the military. The military's opinion that since nuclear scientists had been telling them that for 30 years, it would probably be another 30 years before fusion-powered Peregrines flew. In fact, Del Gado built its first functional fusion reactor in 3033, and that was a 5000-ton stationary power plant that wouldn't be scaled down to fighter size for at least two more generations.)
After combat, a Peregrine would (theoretically) use its onboard reaction mass to maneuver back to Del Gadan orbit and aerobrake to a landing. If moving excessively fast, the Peregrine might have to make several shallow braking maneuvers first, and hope it didn't skip off the atmosphere into a long, elliptical orbit. Such extended braking would carry the crew through Del Gado's radiation belts several times, potentially accumulating as much as 10 or 20 rems on their lifetime radiation count.
Speaking of radiation doses, a Peregrine that ran its onboard tanks dry would dose its crew with about 2-3 rems from its NTR. The hydrogen in its onboard tanks made a good neutron shield, but the Peregrine couldn't waste much additional mass on radiation shielding. Even placing as much equipment as possible between the crew compartment and the NTR only helped so much. And, of course, if the Peregrine suffered damage to its NTR, it wasn't coming home. Dribbling bits of radioactive fuel over its flight path was bad mojo with the public. Fortunately, the same technology that made the Peregrine possible also meant it was relatively easy to launch a rescue mission on a few hours' notice.
The Peregrine uses a "zodiac boat" external tank wrapped around its nose and sides:
www.astronautix.com/graphics/l/ls200lv3.gif " target="_blank"> www.astronautix.com/graphics/l/ls200lv3.gif
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The 100t hydrogen tank carries another 95 tons of fuel (plus 3 tons structure and 2 tons of armor), giving the fighter 21 more points of fuel. This is more than enough to reach escape velocity while retaining some maneuvering fuel, without tapping onboard fuel. With this external tank, performance is 3/5 until ejected.
ROMBUS, THE BFR
To loft the 100-ton Peregrine into orbit with a 100-ton external fuel tank and 10-ton engine cask took a large rocket. As with many large, government funded, politically hot topic programs, the solution was not as simple as the military would have preferred. (And the military would have preferred "just" a 10-meter diameter, monolithic solid rocket booster for each Peregrine. Fuel the Peregrine with liquid hydrogen, toss a match under the booster, and out it pops from an armored silo.)
But the Peregrine was part of not just a "kill the pirates" program, it represented the efforts of a space agency that also had to commercialize space, bring Del Gado back to the stars, access "cheap space resources" (whatever those were), and accomplish many other tasks. These were not particularly compatible with the military's requirement for long-term storage, ready-on-a-minute's notice boosters. However, they were quite compatible with the military's requirement for a BIG rocket. Civilian needs demanded a reusable, inexpensive booster. If the military wanted a fast launch, it would have to make do with high-speed fueling systems, bigger telescopes to spot the pirates further away from Del Gado, and huge, fast roll-out vehicles (or just launch-in-place hangars).
The result was the "Reusable Orbital Module-Booster & Utility Shuttle" (ROMBUS). It was a beast of a rocket, a hydrogen-oxygen titan that was almost single-stage-to-orbit, even with hundreds of tons of cargo. It did shed some hydrogen drop tanks along the way, but the bulk of the vehicle would splash down in special receiver lakes, or just the oceans.
www.astronautix.com/graphics/r/rombucut.gif " target="_blank"> www.astronautix.com/graphics/r/rombucut.gif
Full story:
www.astronautix.com/lvs/rombus.htm " target="_blank"> www.astronautix.com/lvs/rombus.htm
(The RL Rombus is not quite what was used by Del Gado. Bono's Rombus only had half the launch capacity of Del Gado's Rombus. But that sort of increase in capacity is achieved with "only" a 1.26x scale-up of the Rombus...)
The Rombus, or "Big Darn Rocket" (BFR) to most launch workers and Peregrine pilots, was able to put 1000 tons into a low orbit. The military was satisfied to launch 4 Peregrines on one Rombus; the excess cargo capacity represented an extra kick the Rombus could give the Peregrines before heading home. And head home the Rombus would: it would re-enter butt first, circulating leftover liquid hydrogen through its stern to stay cool (just as it did during launch to cool the stern from rocket exhaust), then venting the warm hydrogen through the engines to create a buffer layer between the rocket and the re-entry plasma. Near landing, a handful of its engines would fire to settle the huge, now-empty steel balloon into a receiving lake or the ocean. The Rombus was very bottom-heavy and seaworthy - it could be towed for thousands of kilometers.
Storing fuel (about 100000 tons) for a half dozen BFRs took some large scale but basically simple engineering. The pumps to fill the BFRs in under 10 minutes were epic in scale, but were just more brute force engineering. And since this all stayed on the ground there was no need to be lightweight or high tech about it. The computer checkout systems that went through the thousands of details and systems checks took a high degree of programming with the annoying requirement of "no bugs", but they were achieved. And with the economic muscle of several billion Del Gadans behind the Peregrine program, the entire cost was no worse than the millennia-past Apollo program to a much smaller nation.
DEPLOYMENT
Peregrines were only ground-launched until 2998. By 2998, the BFRs had been used to establish a large orbital fuel depot, a task they exceled at. The BFRs were ideal fuel tankers because they could simply detach their unused external tanks and transfer them to another BFR, or depot, in orbit:
www.abo.fi/~mlindroo/SpaceLVs/Slides/sld009.htm " target="_blank"> www.abo.fi/~mlindroo/SpaceLVs/Slides/sld009.htm
www.abo.fi/~mlindroo/SpaceLVs/Slides/sld010.htm " target="_blank"> www.abo.fi/~mlindroo/SpaceLVs/Slides/sld010.htm
Thus avoiding the problems of pumping liquids in freefall. And BFRs could be turned around for another launch in just a few days. A total of 100 Peregrines were built in 5 different models (few significant differences in game terms), with 11 being written off in combat and 4 in launch accidents. The Peregrines were taken out of combat service in 3017, and then out of service all together in 3019 when the military and Del Gadan space agencies admitted they weren't good for anything other than combat.
COMBAT HISTORY
The Peregrines saw combat three times, each time against pirates (one more of an opportunistic Periphery trader with a merc escort than a regular pirate). The Peregrines performed as expected, but go figure: their foes typically had (respectively) 2, 0, and 4 aerospace fighters guarding their (respectively) 1 Union, 1 Buccaneer, and 1 Union and 1 Leopard dropships.
The first defeated raid (2993) went basically as planned: 4 ready BFRs put 16 Peregrines into an intercept course for the pirates, who were nearly in orbit themselves. The battle was over in one pass. The elite crews of the Peregrines were veteran combat pilots of the Third Global War, test pilots, and trained endlessly on the Peregrine. The pirates were clueless of the threat and were in range of the Peregrines before they understood they were facing chemical rockets, not a half-dozen Union-sized dropships (the BFRs). The Peregrines concentrated their 32 Thunderbolts on the Union, with 19 striking the stern of the braking Union. They swept past the pirate Transgressors at nearly 17 kilometers per second (56 hexes/turn, relative).
The Peregrines followed their retrograde orbit around Del Gado, listening to ground control reports of the Transgressors' actions. The pirate fighters paralleled their gutted mothership for about half an orbit, when its uncorrected apogee took into the upper fringes of the atmosphere at near interplanetary speeds. The pirates intentionally skipped off the atmosphere into a wide elliptical orbit. The Peregrines used their barely-tapped external tanks to move into an crossing orbit, but the pirates apparently saw this and maneuvered out of the way. At this point, the Peregrines and pirates came to the same conclusion: they were low on fuel and needed to land. The pirates attempted to sneak onto Del Gado and land in a known rural area. The pirates (waving laser pistols at a farmhouse to get some local clothing) were gunned down by the farmer shortly before the military arrived. In the end, several Del Gadans were killed when the Union's still-intact engines and large components slammed into the ground at about 1km/s.
The second defeated raid (2998) involved a Periphery merchant who talked to Del Gado authorities by radio. The merchant's poorly disguised inquiries about Del Gado's easily accessed wealth ("I'm a...interstellar jewelry merchant...do you have any major jewelry centers? Ones without many military personnel, because I had trouble with thugs on the last planet I was on...not that I think your planet's militia is a bunch of thugs, of course...") prompted a Peregrine response, including those stationed at a new orbital fuel depot.
This proved to be overkill. 12 Peregrines from the depot, followed by 24 from ground launches hit the Buccaneer in two waves. The first ended up basically wrecking the Buccaneer, which didn't spot the coasting, non-emitting Peregrines until they were about 10000km (9 minutes) away. The merchant/pirate lit up its engines at first to avoid interception, but when the Pegrines lit up their NTRs, the merchant realized how primitive his foes were and went back to his original course. His onboard weapons would deal with such primitive fighters...in fact, the Buccaneer did hit one Peregrine with some laser fire. However, the heavy Thunderbolt missiles crippled the Buccaneer's systems (including the bridge) and left it easy prey for the second wave of Peregrines 42 minutes later.
The third raid (3007) involved something approaching a dogfight, because the pirates used a pirate point (the Del Gado-moon L4 point), having heard (rumors of) Del Gado's aerospace defenses. The result was a short slugging match in the same, rather than oncoming, orbits. These pirates also brought 4 fighters with their two dropships, and were quick to pounce on the launching Del Gado "dropships." This forced 8 Peregrines to abandon their BFRs before reaching orbit and 4 more to actually eject off an exploding BFR. Again, the Del Gadan fighters concentrated on the dropships, even to the exclusion of their safety. This resulted in 5 destroyed or badly damaged Peregrines before the Union and Leopard were destroyed. Two of the pirate fighters were destroyed; two more were simply ignored on the theory their fuel would run out like in the first battle. But it did not: the pirate Shilones were able to run back to their jumpship just a few hundred thousand kilometers away. So 12 orbital-stationed Peregrines were sent after them, as were 4 "LTVs" (lunar transfer vehicles) carrying several dozen marines.
The "Battle of Lagrange-5" was considerably easier than the orbital fight. There were only two damaged pirate fighters and an half-charged Merchant-class jumpship. The pirate fighters were dispatched in 2 salvos of "Bolts" and laser fire. The LTVs struggled to dock with the maneuvering jumpship (0.1G of continuous acceleration is a problem when you can only have fuel to match that for a few minutes). One LTV was badly damaged when the Merchant pivoted and slammed its massive bulk into the small vessel. Two LTVs managed to dock and deploy 30 heavily armed marines into the mysterious confines of futuristic starship. The battle was won more by the marines' crude method of cutting through locked hatches, including the airlocks, than by gunfire. They ended up evacuating air from most of the Merchant and killing most of the crew. Negotiations over an intercom (which the marines wired into) led the surviving pirate crew to maneuver the jumpship into Del Gadan orbit.
Despite upgrades to the Peregrine and budget cuts on the Peregrine's successor, the Peregrine was phased out of service in 3017.
VARIANTS
The only significant (in game terms) variant of the Peregrine was the last production model, the mark 5. The mark 5 mounted smaller missiles (Thunderbolt-10s), a pulse large laser, and a 1-ton power amplifier (a Brayton-cycle generator that heated hydrogen in coils wrapping the NTR's core). Though it had increased combat endurance, the intent was really to improve accuracy. The mark 5's laser also proved useful in shooting through outer airlocks at the Battle of Lagrange-5.
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
Disclaimer: Anything stated in this post is unofficial and non-canon unless directly quoted from a published book. Random internet musings of a BattleTech writer are not canon.
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