The Nighthawk Fighter is a unique, custom built fighter belonging to Canthian Federation Military Pilot Ankea Tarsa. It is capable of air, space and underwater combat and can travel faster than light. Although being releatively light and agile, the Nighthawk has twin forward locked railguns, 6 rocket launchers, 4 separate turret mounted laser cannons and wing mounted energy blades.
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Development
The Nighthawk was developed by The Armoury's Airspace division, but was designed by CFM Grand Architect Argarathan.
Design
The Nighthawk is designed with a focus on dogfighting while retaining the versatility to engage capital ships, starbases and ground and underwater targets. One of Ankea's prime requirements was that it would be suitable to use on as many missions as possible. To accommodate this the Nighthawk is fitted with a vast variety of features.
Flight capabilities
A built in wormdrive allows the fighter to travel at faster than light speeds and four ion drives gives it a sublight acceleration of over 300 ms-2 and a top air speed of 6,000 km/h. Smaller manoeuvring jets dotted about the chassis give it great agility.
Armament
The Nighthawk is heavily armed for fighter it's size. It features two, twin-barrelled, rapid-fire 75mm railguns, and a pair of triple-tubed 180mm rocket launchers, with one of each on either side of the cockpit. Each of the four wings has a sphere-turret precision laser cannon mounted on it's rear to allow the pilot to engage targets above, below and behind the craft. The fighter also has energy blades on it's wings, which can be used to attack targets directly.
Defences
The majority of the fighter's body a single piece of monomol, giving it incredible strength and resilience. This is backed up by internal and external nanite repair facilities and an active energy shielding system, coupled with an attack analysis system that tweaks the shields to better protects the armour and hull.
Cockpit
The cocpkit is a fully self contained, life supported unit, capable of surviving hard vaccuum without the rest of the ship and of a limited range personal teleport.
Stealth
While the Nighthawk is not intended for stealthy operations, several features have been implemented to make surprise attacks easier and to make it hard to track.
Operational History
Only three fully built Nighthawks currently exist, and only one is the latest version 3 model, which features several major revisions on the version 1 and 2 design. All three are owned by Ankea Tarsa and only the version 3 is used. She also holds all rights to the fighter's designs and has refused all offers to buy the plans.
Version 1
The Nighthawk V1 was the first fully completed fighter, it's predecessors were all semi-finished prototypes. It was only used in service for two months before being replaced by the V2. It was engaged in combat three times, all with great success, but which also highlighted several problems with the design which were fixed for version 2.
Version 2
The second iteration of the Nighthawk featured a lot of minor improvements to the weapon systems, shields, manoeuvring engines and computer systems.
