The Dune Encyclopedia by Willis E McNelly

Author:Willis E McNelly [McNelly, Willis E]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0425068137
Published: 2015-11-09T05:00:00+00:00

FRIGATE

The generic term for the largest spaceships which could land and lift off in one piece from a planetary surface. Although common usage makes it appear that "frigate" means one sort of spaceship, there were at least several hundred, perhaps as many as a thousand, different designs which were all referred to by this single term, the factor common to all being mass. While most Houses, Major and Minor alike, owned a few troop carriers and the richest of the Major Houses had more specialized cargo and combat spaceships, it was the frigate which was the true workhorse of all the House fleets.

One of the more popular frigate designs was the "steamship," in which a fusion plant heated a reaction mass, usually water but sometimes ammonia or some other light compound. Various heat exchange techniques utilizing plasma fluxes and electromagnetic fields made the system reasonably efficient, and it was cheap to maintain. The same sort of energy fields around the launching pad absorbed much of the initial blast so that the major environmental problem was noise as the ship rose above the port.

A second widely used design was the "brat," which exploded small fission bombs under an ablative plate at its base. It was faster, more efficient, and lifted more pay-load than the steamship, but it was also much more expensive and left much short-term radioactivity in its wake.

Most efficient of all was the "torch," whose exhaust was plasma, but ruling Houses were often reluctant to allow what amounted to giant heat cannons to come and go overhead.

Because of the Guild monopoly, no frigate was capable of trans-light operation. In interstellar transit, frigates were mere cargo. In the confines of a planetary system, however, the frigate was dominant. No other class of ship was so flexible, with so favorable a combination of size, speed, and surface accessibility. Obviously no single frigate could be wholly representative, but one that is broadly illustrative was Antiock, the personal spaceship of the Padishah Emperor Corrin XVIII (r. 6874-6892). Surely one of the largest frigates ever built, Antiock massed well over nine hundred thousand tonnes and was four hundred and eleven meters in length. Its torch engine gave it a maximum launch acceleration of approximately seven standard g's.

Corrin, an aggressive scion of an aggressive family, intended Antiock for combat and planetary bombardment. It had storage for seven hundred missiles and torpedoes, fittings for a hundred lasguns, and emplacements for a large number of projectile weapons. Its shields were probably the strongest ever installed on a mobile base. But for reasons known only to the Bene Gesserit, Corrin's favorite courtesan, a member of the Sisterhood, persuaded him that Antiock should also serve court functions. Almost half of the armament was either removed or never installed; one of the missile bays became a ballroom, another an audience chamber; at least one of the lasgun turrets was converted to a starshine conservatory. Antiock was never used in combat. Neither did it serve long as a space-going palace: it was first launched in 6890; less than two years later Corrin was dead of chaumurky.

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