- "No matter where your perception leads you, our hounds will find you. And our hunters will have their sport."
- ―Taunt sent from the CAR-class frigate Clergy
The CAR-class frigate is an infrequently-seen light warship that originally saw service exclusively within the Covenant Navy. Distinguished by its wide sweeping wings and its small size, the CAR-class frigate is intended to bridge the gap between the CRS-class frigate and its predecessor the ADP-class escort. In this way, it can provide an impressive escort to high-speed armadas while being capable of acting independently to support group assaults or gather reconnaissance. Well-shielded and decently fast, the CAR is average in all other areas which has prevented widespread adoption in the Covenant.
Introduced during the aftermath of the Forth Age of Conversion, when a rise in piracy called into question the effectiveness of their existing police craft, the CAR-class frigate was not wholehearted adopted by the Covenant military at large. Instead, it was almost exclusively used by the Ministries of Preservation and Conversion, leading religious cleansing operations and mapping the Covenant's vast territories. Few of these ships would see combat during the Human-Covenant War, and those that were commandeered by independent warlords were usually decommissioned in a vain attempt to keep their larger, more valuable craft capital ships - an unfortunate waste of the frigate's capabilities.
Variants
Mortdakan-pattern logistics frigate
While all patterns of the CAR-class frigate make for decent combat platforms, some in the Covenant began to see its potential in other roles - this saw them commissioning the Mortdakan-pattern logistics frigate. Equipped with matter fabricators, hangars for surplus strikecraft, and additional reactors and fuel, these frigates aren't built to be as powerful as other models of warships, but fulfil a more important role as keeping the Covenant fleet resupplied on extended operations.