Special Edition Heavy Assault Cruisers

The Adrestia is a high-powered blaster platform specially commissioned for the 8th Alliance Tournament. While similar to its sister vessel the Deimos (on which its design was based), this ship nonetheless differs in some very important ways. Utilizing lightweight alloys and a prototype form of ion thruster, the Adrestia is capable of reaching truly mind-boggling speeds for a heavy assault vessel. While this makes it less sturdy than its predecessor, the lack of defensive plating is compensated for by state-of-the-art targeting systems, thoroughly optimized weapon hardpoints and upgraded warp scrambling capability. Don't let the lack of defense fool you; very few vessels out there can stand against the Adrestia toe to toe.

The Bestla was originally the product of a development program that involved the eccentric and often clashing talents of Tapio Histvaari, Core Complexion's Chief of Missile Systems Development, and Hildara Rostavik, Core's Lead Designer of Autonomous Weapons. The program was an effort to cram as much missile firepower as possible into the Bestla heavy assault cruiser, and its Geri assault frigate counterpart, while also supporting the sophisticated control routines and bandwidth to operate stasis webification drones with massively uprated systems. Despite serious personality clashes between the Caldari missiles expert Histvaari and Minmatar drone designer Rostavik, the Bestla was brilliantly redesigned from its basic Rupture-hull format into an incredibly advanced, and incredibly expensive, heavy assault cruiser. While the performance of the Bestla's missiles and stasis drones was far above anything achieved in combination in such a compact format, the Republic Fleet balked at the prospect of paying for whole squadrons made up of the Bestla and the similarly expensive Geri. Although a few Bestlas are maintained by elite special tasks units of the Republic, a significant number of the initial production run were donated as prizes to the Independent Gaming Commission's Alliance Tournament XVIII by the Minmatar when the Republic became the principal sponsor of the event in YC124.

Following reports that the Federation government had commissioned a limited run of a novel heavy assault cruiser based on the Adrestia from Duvolle Labs as prizes for the Independent Gaming Commission's Alliance Tournament XIX in YC125, the CreoDron board leveled a freedom of information claim which quickly returned a surprising volume of documents. While the majority have been fully redacted, what little can be gleaned dates the design of the Cybele to a YC120 contract authorized by the FIO for a series of joint operations with Crux Special Tasks Group and the Ostrakon Agency classified under "Project Trieste". The Cybele was developed by a provisional team under Duvolle's Advanced Manifold Theory Unit co-led by Rias Luisauir, prodigious R&D agent and engineer, and Progressive Plasma's Dr. Jinneth Duvolle, original co-founder of Duvolle Labs. Afforded a near-bottomless budget to design a platform suitable for locales where reinforcement would be impossible and return imperative, the two leads took full advantage of this unique opportunity to bring their most revolutionary and cost-prohibitive theories into reality as part of the designs. A reverse-ballast function devised by Luisauir, based on the micro jump drive's ultraweak force-compensated mass phase-tuning principle, negates armor plate mass gain by scaling microscale depleted vacuum volumes with the ship's mass in-flight, while a plasma cooling system designed by Dr. Jinneth boosts the operational threshold of hybrid turrets and armor repairers. Combined with an all-around upgrade to the Adrestia's core capabilities and electronics and the incorporation of heavy assault cruiser subsystems, the Cybele is a priceless force to be reckoned with.

A highly experimental prototype created by Minmatar scientists, intended to combine the qualities of their front line heavy assault cruisers. Heavily plated and sporting additional thrusters, this ship is not to be taken lightly. Rarely seen these days, the ship is typically given out only to select pilots as a reward for their excellence in combat.

The Vangel is a heavy assault cruiser design exclusively commissioned as a reward in the ninth Alliance Tournament. Like its smaller sibling the Malice, it possesses greatly enhanced energy destabilization systems. Though it was primarily conceived as a combat vessel for the solitary pilot, the Vangel‘s great stores of capacitor power and top-of-the-line armor plating make it no less effective in small fleets. A sleek, deadly triumph of both form and function.