Spotlight: Dart class

When it comes to fighter craft, there are three schools of thought. One way to go about the business of designing fighter craft is to have them as heavily shielded and armoured as possible, adding as many guns as you can and sacrificing speed and maneuverability. The second way is to sacrifice shields and armour, entirely in some cases, and having only lower powered weapons but gaining the advantage in acceleration, maneuverability and speed. The third idea is to balance the two.

Spur dart in standard flight orientation.

The dart class is the epitome of the second school of thought. It is fast, maneuverable and lacks nearly all shielding with next to no armour and little more than hand held rifles strapped to the sides. The dart class was first envisioned by Alliance Armoury with their proton fighters, however the proton had a few major flaws that prevented it from ever leaving the testing phase. Alliance Armoury released the plans for the proton fighter in the hopes that another company would pick up the idea and create a market for dart class.
Much to Alliance Armoury's dismay the dart class was far more successful than they ever imagined. Inter-Orbital Inc. picked up the idea but started from scratch on their own design. They released the Spur dart later that year in TPY 2367.

Spur Dart. Notice the engines
and weapons have gimbled.

The Spur dart quickly found its place on the battlefield and was adopted by many governments across the Federation as their dart class fighter. Her tiny spaceframe and four separately rotating engines allowed skilled pilots to pull off very complex maneuvers such as disabling flight assist and rotating a full 360 degrees, firing on and destroying a pursuer before re enabling flight assist and continuing in her initial direction. 
The Spur was armed with 6 small gimbaled hard points allowing pilots to swap out the standard issue laser weapons for plasma launchers or projectile weaponry, however needing to store ammunition added to the craft's weight so most pilots stuck with lasers. The spur also packed a pair of "boost" engines that could be activated in short bursts to give the ship an acceleration that would put many missiles to shame, she used these to easily get out of range of her enemies to come around for a more favorable attack vector. 

Spur Dart from the front.

The spur class's immense advantage on the battlefield allowed a squadron to quickly clear any enemy fleet fleet of light fighters although she was vulnerable to capitol ship's AA weaponry. This advantage kept the Spur class in service for far longer than most ships, she was refitted with new technology as it became available but the overall design barely changed over the years.
The dart class was one of the most vulnerable ships on the battlefield, leading to the nickname "flying coffin" however no fleet could do without them and ace dart pilots were widely respected.

Basic timeline of the Terraverse, Part 2

The Ventum as seen from the aft.

The time skip took place in around 1,897,632 ARD. They arrived in a new galaxy, only seconds later for them, but from an outside observer, the universe collapsed in on itself, then exploded outwards into a new universe, and after about 13.8 billion years the alliance showed up again. The alliance set out in this new universe looking for a home. They had with them their massive ship, Carrier Of Worlds created from the remains of AS-1, along with hundreds of smaller starships that they had docked to it. These smaller ships were dispatched looking for a viable new home world. During this time, known as the "wandering fleet" Seven took a small cargo hauler the Ventum and left the fleet behind. She set out in search of planets with life seeking adventure. She was not heard from for well over 500 years, during which the alliance fleet colonized a new home world, that later came to be known as Prima (this happened in FY 432 (FY is Fleet Year)) .

The centuries began to pass and a generation and a half down the line there were very few people alive that had ever met Seven and she was more legend than anything else. There were more important matters at hand to the people of the alliance, such as a rebellion. Daughter of Nine, Itzl Atavuli formed a tenth faction not long after the settling of Prima. This faction was at first not recognized but quickly gained traction. Within a year of it's creation the tenth faction had gained enough support to be officially recognized, this marked the first (and only) faction to ever have a non-Illian leader as Itzl took the reigns herself. The tenth faction gained the total support of a few colony worlds and eventually declared themselves independent of the alliance. The alliance government refused to recognize their independence.
Itzl's adoptive sister and master shipwright Tess Veretro designed the first superbattleship class starship which served as the flagship of rebellion. This ship was constructed by a shipyard under Itzl's influence and named the Spirit of Rebellion. It lead the Itzillian fleet into the only military confrontation between the Rebels and the Alliance. The two fleets were at a stand off, neither willing to fire on the other but neither willing to back down. Both the Carrier of Worlds and the Spirit of Rebellion were at the heads of their respective fleets with Itzl and Tess aboard the Spirit of Rebellion and Nine aboard the Carrier of Worlds. The Spirit of Rebellion had the clear upper hand in firepower however Carrier of Worlds had far more fighter craft that could evade Spirit of Rebellions main guns but would struggle with her shields.

Schematics of the Ventum.

The two fleets were moments away from all out war when Seven returned for the first time in over 500 years. Using a jump drive she appeared directly between the two capitol ships, much to the surprise of both fleets. Being directly between the two ships she immediately intercepted the heated conversation going on and interjected herself. She forcibly quantum teleported Itzl and Tess onto her ship and instructed Nine to beam over. Knowing full well that Seven would have no issues tearing herself through the hull of his ship to come and get him he complied. Seven sat the participants down and demanded to know why Nine was aiming guns at his daughters. Both sides gave their version of the story and Seven sided with Tess and Itzl telling Nine that it was not the Alliance's job to stop people leaving.
In the following week Seven met with the Alliance government who agreed to her demands to allow the rebellion to leave. The group set up their own government who unanimously elected Itzl as their president. At Seven's request the Itzillian government and the Alliance government signed an agreement to allow people free travel between the two. They worked closely on many projects forming an alliance between the Alliance and the Itzillians, as weird as that sounds.

The Alliance and the Itzillians made contact with many races over the years and formed the United Federation Of Worlds (U.F.O.W), commonly known as the Federation due to the long name. The Federation included: the Alliance, the Itzillians, the Phanten, the Alcinnians, the Voyrons, the Floranian and the Xenii.
The federation waged a few territorial wars with both the Freth and the Tharg during it's time.

The time in the Newverse was short lived though. Due to an anomaly in quantum physics the Higgs field collapsed. This ripped physics and chemistry apart on a fundamental level rendering the universe uninhabitable. This happened in one point, and then spread outwards at the speed of light, destroying all in it's path. Thanks to FTL technology the Federation was given some time, although not much, to make their move. They elected to make another time jump in TPY 59,753 (that means Terra Prima Year 59,753). There was an issue however. They were in a universe similar to ours. The original Terraverse had enough mass in it to pull the universe back in on itself to collapse itself, the second universe did not, it would expand forever, there was not going to be a next universe to skip to. So they did the only thing they could, they went backwards. The Federation made the "time leap" back millions of years before life in the original Terraverse arose.

I will leave the rest for part three, trust me, it will blow your mind.
By the way, the higgs field thing is real, check out this for more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijFm6DxNVyI

Spotlight: Currus Deos

The Currus Deos.

The Currus Deos was an Ark class super-capitol ship in operation during the Itzillian era.
She was a civilian ship designed for deep-space exploration and long term habitation. At 9,795 meters long she was one of the largest ships ever built at the time of her construction. Here's a brief breakdown of the ship.

Name:

Her name means "Chariot of gods" in Terran, however very few people actually spoke Terran as it was used primarily for naming starships (being a dead language for over 2.5 million years does that to a language.)
In the Terraverse Latin is used as "Terran" and English is used for "Eagiian", Eagiian is the language adopted by the Alliance not long after the settling of the rings.

The Currus Deos from the aft.

Specifications:

The Currus Deos was designed to be one of the largest ships ever created and she successfully held the record for a few years. She reached 9,795 meters long and her warp rings were 1,875 meters in diameter.

The ship used a five point rotating vacuum energy generator allowing it to draw energy from the quantum vacuum with four generators while the fifth cooled down, this allowed her to maintain a power output high enough to sustain cruising warp indefinitely. Her cruising warp was 5,000c allowing her to cross the entire galaxy in 200 earth years.

She was armed with only two MAC's (Magnetic Accelerator Cannons) that use electromagnets to fire rounds at speeds up to 0.5C (half the speed of light). The cannons had a barrel diameter of 60 meters capping their maximum projectile size. These cannons have two major drawbacks. Firstly, they cannot be aimed due to their size (and because they are built into the hull). This severely limited the effectiveness of the weapons on the battlefield as they required the entire ship to be facing a target before firing. Secondly, while they could fire a variety of different rounds at different top speeds (and were even once used to launch smaller starships) they suffered from a limited minimum round size. This may sound like a non-issue but bigger is not always better. Their accuracy decreased as the round size was reduced, however a solution was eventually put in place to allow them to fire entire clusters of missiles at once.

The Currus Deos compared to multiple other ships from Terraverse history. As you can see, she dwarfs them.

Breif History:

The Currus Deos was commissioned by Inter-orbital inc. in TPY 2471 and launched from Navalia in TPY 2473. She faced multiple delays before eventually setting off on her expedition in TPY 2474. The Currus Deos and her crew of 30,000 were to spend the next 10 years in deep space, they encountered the Floranian race during their expedition and made first contact. They returned to Navalia at the end of their expedition after which the ship needed many repairs that couldn't be made during her trip. She wouldn't set out again until 2486 for another 10 year mission. She underwent six 10 year expeditions during her service with two year breaks between them. She was finally decommissioned in 2544. At the end of each expedition a stripe was painted across her lower prow. Each stripe was a different colour. They were in order: red, blue, green, yellow, purple, black.

Currus Deos as seen from the Port side. The large hole through her centre is the hangar bay and the raised structure is her control deck. Controlling a ship of this size required a control deck larger than even some entire cargo ships.