Don't Make Me Come Over There! class Frigate

Jade was quite wary of external threats. She escaped Sol in no small part because she feared the possibility of humanity wiping itself out in war, but she was aware that even if earth was sterilized there could still be some survivors that might pose a threat to her down the line, which ranged from rival groups of colonists setting up shop on Jadeworld to some Religious Group declaring her an abomination and launching a crusade to destroy her. Even so, even with early 22nd century fabrication technology it took a lot of effort to go from a basic group intelligence with seventeen bodies who's efforts were mostly focused on cultivating sufficient calories to one with over a million bodies which could spare the resources to begin space development.

Her first goals were modest, basic satellites for weather monitoring and expanding her network and simple defensive satellites with basic missile launchers built planet side and put into orbit. It was only after the development of space based industries that Jade could begin serious work. Ores were mined from the smaller moons of Jade-III and it's ring system, brought to a basic torus station in orbit of Jadeworld, broken down, smelted and used to make more ore processors, more Fabrication systems, more habitat modules for an increasing number of Jades tasked with overseeing the operations, more assembly births and more spacecraft. Setting up the basics foundations of this took over a decade of work, but once that was achieved the process would steadily speed up. Defensive stations got bigger and more formidable and gradually actual warships began to appear. The first of these were little more than mining ships with simple missile launchers strapped on them, but after Thirty Five years of work, she finally had her first true warship: the Don't Make Me Come Over There! class frigate.

The Don't Make Me Come Over There! Class Frigate is was a fairly small craft at 73 meters long weighing in at 750 tonnes and was inspired by the United States Space Navy's Fernandez-class Frigate and many of her contemporaries that would be embroiled in the First Solar War, though by the contemporary standards of the core systems of humanity it would be considered a gunboat. She followed the old fashioned rocket deck configuration, in which the top of the craft was it's nose and the bottom of the craft was it's main exhaust. Standard cruising speed was 1 G to provide thrust gravity for the crew, but in a pinch she was capable of 5 G burns with all spacers strapped into acceleration couches. The Don't Make Me Come Over There! class frigate was manned by a crew of sixteen Jades and could carry up to eight Powersuited Jades acting as marines. It's main armament was a pair of torpedo launchers (and a magazine with twelve torpedoes) and a gauss cannon which usually fired a 5 kilogram slug (or clusters of a ninety nine 50 gram slugs with a small explosive charge) at 10 km/s every thirty seconds, backed up by a pair of gating laser turrets to intercept incoming missiles, but could also be used as anti ship weapons as a last resort measure. She was encased in a layer of ceramic armor plate which Jade decided to give a light green tint to for aesthetic reasons. The Don't Make Me Come Over There! Class frigate was designed as an in system defensive craft and lacked a Hyperdrive.

One of the Complications that was of a particular concern for Jade around was a matter of communications. The further away that a ship got from Jadeworld the more latency became an issue using conventional radio and laser communications, which was a problem for regular naval operations let alone those pursued by a Group Mind. Even though Jade did have the designs for Hypercomm technology this was bulky. The smallest Hypercomm transceiver (able to send signals at 1024C) that she could build at this point these were large and bulky affairs that were 12 meters across and weighed 185 tonnes. For this purpose Don't Take Me Come Over There! class frigates operated in squadrons of four each which a Full Bars class Comm Frigate (a variant of the Don't Make Me Come Over There! class chassis which deleted all weapons beyond the PD Gatling Lasers) equipped with a Transceiver. This meant that latency was a manageable issue for system scale maneuvers, though it was an obvious weak point. Spacer crews were specifically programmed by Jade to form localized networks in case of separation from the whole known as Ship-Minds capable of executing their objectives and seek the means to reintegrate with the collective whole of Jade.

The first trial by fire came with the First Raid. Thirty four Don't Make Me Come Over There! Frigates as well as a network of combat satellites went up against seven pirate ships who's crews were eager to loot the mining operations. The Pirates had the advantage of superior technology (including torpedoes with laser pumped warheads, X-Ray lasers, turreted rail-guns and a few low end shield generators) and experience in space warfare, though their ships were Frankensteins cobbled together from salvaged ships held together by spit and bailing wire. Jade's fleet had the advantage of purpose built warships that were well maintained and supplied and numbers, but while they were well engineered they were poorly optimized. The Gauss Cannons could be devastating when they hit, but their effective range was poor even when firing grapeshot (which usually reduced the stopping power significantly), the torpedoes had halfway decent acceleration but poor maneuverability, their armor was well suited for KE weapons but was less useful against energy weapons and their endurance compared to those of the pirates and the two Point defense lasers were insufficient for their designated purposes while the ships themselves had a critical speed disadvantage. Four Don't Make Me Come Over There! Frigates were destroyed in the battle with five more were damaged, one to the point that it was soon scrapped. For all of that the pirates got off worse, with only one damaged ship managing to scamper away. Lessons were learned in this first battle and would be employed in future interstellar warships. Even so, work began on twelve more Don't Make Me Come Over There! class ships to make up for the losses and in response to the now revealed threats of the galaxy.