Hormiga

Age

Type

Corvette

Faction

Pirate

Owner

Edward O'Brien

Overview

While the Arana is the Rec Runner’s most intimidating looking ship, the Hormiga is the one that actually gets the job done. It’s a smaller ship, a corvette, but it was built with a single focus on its mission: make the enemy regret their life decisions.

To make this goal a reality, the Hormiga was built with very few creature comforts. It has bunk rooms, a kitchen, a basic medbay, and a small common room with all the gym equipment built into the walls. The ethos of old submarines were adopted in the design: every single inch of space counts. Make up for the poor living arrangements by making everything there count. All possible space goes to punishing the enemy.

What could be worth these compromises?

The Hormiga’s a stealth ship, loaded to the brim with torpedoes, PDCs, 2 rail guns, and an onboard contingent of marines with 2 MCLRs. They’re here to party.

Typical Uses/Mission

Primarily, the Hormiga is an escort and assault ship. During a high-risk salvage operating in contested space, or while high-value salvage is being transported, it’ll be positioned in the area running dark just to keep an eye on things. When an adversary appears, they’re typically taken out before they’ve gotten a shot off.

Of course there are those times when an unguarded ship or even a vital part of the organization gets kidnapped. In those situations, the Arana might be sent to make diplomatic overtures and the Hormiga will be employing violence - either directly to the target in a rescue mission or against the target’s assets to compel a surrender.

Features

Stealth System

The Hormiga has multiple active and passive capabilities. The hull plates are designed to absorb all emissions. Radar, lidar, and regular light are heavily absorbed. It’s meant to be undetectable. A complex system of radiators and cooling is connected to an internal thermal-mass, enabling the ship to run dark for days at a time (though at the end of this time it needs to radiate all that accumulated heat).

The cooling system isn’t effective under thrust and thruster activity can also weaken it intermittently. There’s no cooling a high drive plume, but the ship’s own presence can mask the plume when it’s running at an adversary.

System AI

An onboard AI runs the bulk of the ship. The idea is that under heavy combat, the majority of the crew can be engaged in ship to ship combat OR have the redundancy of a ship system watching over them. On a previous deployment, an enemy team attempted (and failed) to capture the Hormiga thanks to the onboard AI.

Minimal Accommodations

The Hormiga has top-tier food, the best available in system. It has top trained chefs. The view screens are the best. They have the best crash couches and blankets in the fleet, even the biggest showers. Everything that they have is the best because it is the only comfort they’re getting.

Armament

Torpedoes

Unlike the other ships in the fleet, the Hormiga has a standard torpedo magazine and launcher system. There are four forward launch tubes and a loadout of 80 torpedoes.

Point Defense Canons

One of the Hormiga’s weakpoints: PDCs. There’s only three of them. There’s exactly enough to cover all essential defensive angles without any overlap. The mounting systems are difficult to integrate with the stealth systems. They opted to make the ship better at hiding rather than rely on shooting down incoming missiles.

Dual Rail Guns

A pair of keel mounted rail guns run the length of the ship. These are a caliber bigger than the typical corvette and they’re the Hormiga’s signature weapon. During an escort mission where the Hormiga is just watching in stealth mode, the first shot comes from the rail guns. They’ll get a lock on the target and fire without warning. The barrels can be seen running the entire length of the ship. They’re massive and literally every piece of internal space had to be built around them.

History

At first, the Hormiga was a corporatist corvette for a private security contractor, commissioned as the Just Enforcrer 792. To a large extent it was a bot-ship. The main crew was just 10 humans, augmented by a force of 45 security units and/or combat units. The idea was humans would fly the ship, point at a target, and the bots would make it go away. In combat, they would launch boarding craft, attempt to even vent the other ship, and then take it for themselves.

That worked for a long time. Corporate bullying at its finest.

Then they met the Rec Runners.

At the time, the Rata was engaged in salvage operations. One of the Enforcer’s clients had lost a ship, they wanted it back. In principal it was an easy battle. Rush by, launch the security bots, vent the ship, then even claim the Rata as their own salvage. It was so stupidly easy that it blew up in their faces.

There were flaws in the plan:

Most of the Rata is already in vacuum
Most of the crew is already in Vac Suits
Most of the crew is very, very good at taking apart bots and machines OR hacking them

The security bots had to prowl over two ships while a small team from the Rata used their Runner Pods to board, disable, and capture the Enforcer. From there they used the computer system to shutdown the bots, negotiated the Enforcer’s surrender, and added it to their haul for the mission, plus ten prisoners to ransom out.

In the aftermath, the runners needed a ship frame. They stripped the “Just Enforcer” down to bare metal and reconstructed it. Railguns salvaged from another mercenary ship. Martian boarding craft. Standard torpedoes. The stealth systems were harder. Special hull panels had to be tested and designed. The cooling system was difficult to work out. There were compromises. The hull won’t take much of a beating, but hopefully it doesn’t need to.

It’s been deployed as the Rec Runner’s muscle after being reborn as the Hormiga. They never see it coming, and those who catch a glimpse? They don’t live long enough to talk about it.