General Garendin, former commander of the HCS 140th Infantry Brigade and current adviser to the HCS Future Strategy CommitteeLast week i was fortunate enough to be part of a group of HCS advisers invited aboard CSS Korlaya, a Kelsan KS bomber. This is the newest type of warship to enter service with the HCS Space Navy and was designed and built in an amazingly short space of time as an answer to the DDS' space bombers.
The Kelsan is a fairly simple design in essence. Indeed the HCS designers used an abandoned cargo ship design as their starting point. The Kelsan was intended to be quick to design, build and deploy. It is basically a flying tube with weapons at one end and an engine at the other. Despite all of this the Kelsan is a remarkably good ship.
Although an army man i have spent some time on space on a mixture of ships ranging from the sturdy and reliable Cosmos to the downright scary Kalahati Tuul B. The Kelsan just feels right, its not designed for space combat of course which means that rapid accelerations and evasive manouvers did not have to be factored into the design. Thus the designers could concentrate on refining the simple basics and thus the Kelsan is a ship where the toilets work and ceilings do not randomly collapse on your head (KT crews will know what i mean!)
We are just the start of the Kelsan story of course, the weapon it was designed for the CSM-S has yet to be even tested but already the basic solidity of the platform has seen the Kelsan used on missions beyond those originally intended. I am sure that the Kelsan will go down in the annals of the HCS as one of the best weapons we have ever had.
