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Wyldfarers

The Wyldspan is filled with ships, travelling the trade routes and exploring deep into the farthest reaches of the Wyld. Such ships take up a great deal of resources, and must thus be constructed carefully, with great thought to their goals and functions. Each of the nations of the Wyldspan, thus, has a different philosophy of ship construction, and it is often possible to guess a ship's origin just from her design.

The Scarlet Imperium

The Imperium designs its ships to take advantage of its innate benefits: a surplus of hearthstones and artificers, and a dearth of artificers capable of forging truly high-level artifacts. The Imperium is awash with civilian ships travelling its trade routes, and puts few limits on what those ships can have in their construction. However, ships utilizing soulsteel are not allowed in the Imperium, and special licenses are required for any ship to carry more than a single one-point weapon.

Imperium military ships tend towards the middle of the cost line, mostly being 2-dot or 3-dot artifacts. Their weapon systems are almost exclusively on seperate circuits from the rest of the ship, in order to refrain from creating ships of such complexity that they cannot easily build or repair them. This reduces their overall power slightly, but the Imperium rarely minds.

Imperium ships, following Immaculate doctrine, are never named only after people, animals, or similar physical beings. Instead, ship classifications are based around concepts (such as a Harmony-class exploration vessel or the much-fearer Devastation-class battlecruisers), and individual ships in the Imperium Defense Force are named for both people (or places) and concepts, such as the IDF Light Of Arjuf, the IDF Mela's Grace, or the IDF Ejava's Pride. Civilian vessels generally stick with two-word combinations, usually including a vowel and an adjective (ex, the Flowering Storm), although this is not a requirement.

Examples of Imperium military construction
Examples of Imperium civilian construction

The New Realm

Ships of the New Realm follow a very different design concept. Emperor Markian prefers for Solar craftsmen to work on the basics of his ship fleet, and New Realm capitol ships are defined as large and larger, with small numbers of fighters escorting powerful capitol ships. Markian's ships are often Level 3 or 4, with the occasional Level 5 as the bulwarks of the fleet. Markian's ships rarely have extra circuits; he prefers to draw all their power from a central source.

The New Realm's military fighters are named for weapons (such as Scimitar interceptors or Firewand heavy fighters), while capitol ships are named after animals (Raiton-class cruisers, Yeddim-class troop carriers). Individual ships are usually given single word names that define a ship's purpose and temperment, usually as an adjective (The NRN Industrious, or the NRN Valiant.)

Examples of New Realm military construction
Examples of New Realm civilian construction

The Dead

The ships of the dead are frightening things. The Wyldfarers of these beings are rarely uniform, although certain similiarities exist (especially at the lower end). The weakest of their ships are small things, designed to swarm across the enemy, disgorged from a few powerful, elegant, cruisers of bone and ebony. In between are the scout ships of the Abyssal Exalted, each unique to its Deathknight.

The small ships of the Dead are categorized as though they were creatures of night - Maggot-class fighters, Viper-class scouts, and the like. Larger ships do not have classifications, as they are always unique. Individual ships have names as simple or flowery as the Deathknight responsible for them wish, from the Tyrant Of The Endless Night's Shadow to the Prince's own Desolation.

Examples of Abyssal construction

The Mountain Folk

The Mountain Folk do not have very many ships, so they make them count. Mountain Folk ships never carry fighters. Instead, they are durable and well-constructed capitol ships that are capable of overwhelming almost anything else one-on-one, without being incredibly large. Mountain Folk ships also always have the most powerful grids possible, in order to eschew the trade routes and explore their own paths.

Ships of the Mountain Folk only have a tiny number of classifications, based entirely around their purpose: "scout ships", "Cruisers", "Destroyers". They do not receive specific names, only designations (the GX-39), although individual crews often give their ships nicknames that have no particular naming scheme.

Examples of Mountain Folk construction