The DDS proudly unveiled their latest warship the Missile launcher / UCAV carrier R101 Missileer which has been commissioned. The ship will not enter full service until late in the year however as it will be used mainly for development of missile technology and data internetworking. However it's first mission will be to carry out some training with DDS special forces teams, the Missileer can carry several SROPS.
A surprise addition to the Missileer arsenal is the new Z5t cannon, basically a Z5m on a movable turret. The main armament is the awesome quad-bank missile launcher however, and the Missileer carries 4 of them! At the moment the launchers are at a development stage and are restricted to firing 1 missile at a time, full software will be provided prior to combat service the DDS said.
A typical load of the Missileer is expected to be around 400 TPMs, which is a mighty load, but at full operational status a Missileer will be able to fire 16 missiles a second meaning that it could expend it's load in 25 seconds! In normal practice firing rate is expected to be less however. The full data handling system has yet to be installed though at the moment a pre-release version can accept data from up to 4 simultaneous sources plus the ship's own sensors (which are taken from a revision 1 Isometric), the full version will be able to take data from 16 sources and it's own sensors (though these would probably be used as a back-up or for self-defence usually). Therefore the 16 missiles the Missileer can fire per second can be using data from 16 different warships at once and thus easily targeting 16 different enemy ships with each salvo.
Dr Forbidden from DDS Research said this level of data integration was a major headache, "We have had to develop whole new methods of data analysis and buffering for the Missileer, and written a new data link protocol from scratch to get the transmission speed and security required. A lot of work though the fruits of this work will be also cascaded to other ships to improve their systems too over the next 12 to 18 months."
Construction of the next 2 Missileers will not begin until next year because of a shortage of building rig space at the moment.
