Tartarus-Class Destroyer

Tartarus-class destroyer

The Jiralhanae have never been an imaginative species, especially technologically, but even they saw the need to create a ship class to replace their rapidly depleting stockpiles of Covenant-grade ships. This time, it was to humanity that the Blood Covenant turned, almost literally - the Tartarus-class shares many design features in common with UNSC ships, sometimes entire hull sections being used from the vast scrapyards formed during the Human-Covenant War. Raiding these for usable parts and sections, sometimes even usable ships, the Jiralhanae used what little scientific understanding they retained to cobble together the Tartarus-class destroyer. Intended as the next generation of Blood Covenant frontline warship, the Tartarus would be produced in large numbers, but its performance never matched their counterparts, and barely matched that of the ships they were created from.

The Tartarus-class were a mismatched set, using a chaotic ensemble of UNSC and Covenant technology. The Jiralhanae retained the functional 50mm CIWS turrets and Shaw-Fujikawa Translight Engines, and grafting on plasma turrets and pulse lasers where they could. Propulsion was provided by a combination of repulsors and chemical rocket thrusters, though the Jiralhanae's inexperience with the latter would see the human thrusters eventually abandoned. On some hulls, the Jiralhanae even retained the MAC weapons that had proven so troublesome against the Covenant, and tried to improve on them where they could, boosting their rate of fire and kinetic force imparted. The entire class sported a sculpture mounted on the prow, modelled on a massive skull with the MAC or plasma turret protruding, intended to strike fear into their enemies - the fact that space combat is fought at distances so vast that visual contact is rare is something that seems never to have occurred to the Jiralhanae designers.

The Tartarus-class would see continuous service during the War of Vengeance, as the Blood Covenant fought both on its own turf and invaded UNSC and Sangheili space. In combat,t hey proved to possess a combination of firepower, agility, and flexibility that larger ships lacked, though never in sufficient amounts of each to be particularly successful. When the Blood Covenant qas conquered by the New Covenant, the ships were largely discarded as worthless hunks of scrap by the new Naval commanders, though the Unggoy would salvage a large number of them as opportunity allowed. Eventually, in order to prevent illegally established Unggoy colonies, the New Covenant began actively destroying any functional ships still existing in scrapyards, denying them to the Unggoy.

Remarks

 * "You know the skulls on the front? Apparently they're taken from real creatures on Expansive Virtue - my god, what a hell hole that place must be."
 * "Even by Jiralhanae standards, they are utterly pathetic. A ship has a soul, and can be as courageous and tenacious as its crew and Shipmaster. Even the humans know this. This goes beyond simple Jiralhanae barbarity - there are even Jiralhanae that detest such dishonour."
 * "They use verything they can on the ships. Everything. On the one hand, the massive scrapyards mean that the Blood Covenant had a virtually limitless supply of these things - on the other hand, they're moving hunks of scrap. And since they use our own old technology, we know exactly how to counter them..."
 * "Tartarus would weep in shame at the ships they have named after him. Even we Jiralhanae have standards, and these monstrosities fall well beneath them. The Blood Covenant are barbarity defined."