For Individual ships please see the Ship Registry.
The Cosmic Navy of the Terran Accord, often shortened to The Cosmic Navy or just the CN, was the primary naval power within Terran space during the centuries leading up to first contact with, and eventual surrender to the Affini Compact. As the final major fighting force that existed as part of the Terran empire prior to annexation the navy had inherited many differing traditions from across various nations that made up pre-cosmic earth, and it's uncontested power saw it essentially merge all other armed branches of the military into its fold. As such, the military budget for the Terran Accord was essentially the military budget for the cosmic navy, plus a few small fractions for dedicated special operations and intelligence groups. This document exists to give a baseline understanding of its structure and operations just prior to first contact with the affini, though some post-contact events will be mentioned.
As part of it's dominance, and the nature of void warfare that developed over the centuries, the cosmic navy found itself split into performing three basic duties:
As such, the navy's prime fleet structure was divided into three distinct forces to reflect the varying needs of each duty. While all arms of the navy came under naval command and to varying extents the Secretary of War, they each competed for political, funding, and technological edges over each other. The three primary arms were titled thus:
Battle Command - The more traditional capital warship based force. Closer to the ocean going Carrier Battlegroup doctrine of old Terra's sea going navies. Battle Command would have more warships heavy cruiser grade and higher than the other arms, with a more traditional force of picket ships and destroyers providing screening duties. Often equipped with what have been described countless times as over the top weaponry, Battle Command found itself the enforcers of system or planetary blockades, using their unmatched level of sheer tonnage, both in terms of ship weight and in the weapon throw weight that they could mobilise at any one time. Anyone thinking of organising a general strike or an independence movement would think twice whenever they heard a Battle Command task force had just entered the system.
Strike Command - Consisting of a large array of strike groups, strike command represented the speartip of any Cosmic Navy operations. With the motto 'first ones in, last ones out' Strike Command valued speed and long-range weaponry to accomplish their tasks. Whenever reports of a pirate who had not sufficiently greased Strike Command's coffers, or proved a threat to either Naval or Corporate interests would be identified, Strike Command would send a squadron of their craft to engage and crush the poor souls who'd had the back luck to be in their way. Following a more decentralised structure compared to Battle Command, Strike Command hit hard, running down their foes with terrifying accuracy, often leaving without looking for survivors unless there was a good financial, political, or prestige reason to do so.
Border Command - The smallest of the 'big three' forces, Border Command officially stood as the ever watchful guardians over terran space. Utilising long range patrol vessels, stellar cartography, and stellar exploration ships, Border Command officially looked outwards to act as a tripwire in the eventual case of contact with another intelligent alien species, hostile or not. However, Border Command also found itself most intertwined with the Office of Cosmic Naval Intelligence, with the two collaborating covertly with a frequency that often worried both Battle and Strike commands. In collaboration with the OCNI Border Command would operate a series of intelligence gathering ships, void stations, and ground assets that would monitor the Terran Accord's citizens for any dissent. In return the OCNI would be provided with unregistered planets and asteroids scouted by Border Command for the detention and interrogation of dissidents. It's been rumoured that the Border Command's Naval Infantry are the force the OCNI recruited their special forces operatives from.
Several minor arms also existed, while technically independent they were all subservient to the 'Big Three' with the exception of the OCNI. The largest of the minor arms include.
During the war with the Affini Compact, several of the minor arms would be either subsumed into the Big Three or merged with each other. For example, the three Offices of Naval Research would be absorbed by their respective arms, whereas the Stellar Marine Corps, Naval Infantry, Cosmic Militia, and the Terra and Executive Guard Corps would be merged into the Cosmic Defence Army.
More detailed breakdowns of the doctrine, ship classifications, and various arms will be broken down later in this index.
As the three primary arms of the Cosmic Navy, 'The Big Three' as they were colloquially known collectively represented around 80% of the naval budget and the vast majority of Accord expenditures. Due to the nature of each arm, and the lack of any outside military organisation for funding competition, each arm would lobby fiercely to both the government and corporate interests for funds, exclusive access to technologies, and positions of prestige. This scramble for resources and political power brought on more divergence between each arm as time passed, with different doctrines, weapons systems and formation rationales.
"I cannot do this, this lying, this spying" "Statecraft, [REDACTED], statecraft." - An OCNI civilian asset and his handler.
Throughout human history, the cloak and dagger have always been found to be most expertly used by tyrants. While officially the Office of Cosmic Naval Intelligence exists to provide military intelligence to the Cosmic Navy, its purview has been much wider, much more terrifying for what has been almost all of its existence, supplanting any 'civil' based intelligence service minus that of the various corporate and police intelligence gathering operations. Any talk of the Office of Cosmic Naval Intelligence must always be prefaced with the disclaimer 'While officially' as the overreach and backhanded dealings of the OCNI still boggles the minds of even their advocates.
The OCNI's duties included: Human Intelligence (HUMINT), Signals Intelligence (SIGINT), Measurement and Signature Intelligence (MASINT), Cultural (CULTINT), Financial (FININT), Imagery (IMINT), Cyber (CYBINT), Industrial (INDINT), Social (SOCINT) and Counter-Intelligence (CONINT). While officially the OCNI would perform these in a 'silent' non-intrusive manner with actual action on the intelligence they collected being dealt with by the Navy, the OCNI would often run its own operations based on the data they had collected. Such operations conducted by OCNI field operatives would include: Terror bombings, Assassinations, Kidnappings, Ransoming of prisoners, extensive torture programs, Psychological warfare, Sabotage, non-standard espionage, illegal psychological and physiological experiments, political manipulation, corporate manipulation and the spread of mass disinformation.
The sheer size of the OCNI's actual purview had to be cleverly disguised in order to avoid raising suspicions of its actual power, as such the OCNI would conduct many deals and 'operations for hire' with Naval, Corporate, or Government agencies that would contribute to its massive slush funds that kept the coffers filled. It's suspected that just prior to contact with the Affini Compact, the OCNI's various 'donations' and off the book revenue streams gave it a budget at least five times greater than it's official government budget, and a slush fund that rivalled the currency reserves of the Terran Accord's central bank itself.
Included in the list of OCNI assets were several dozen black sites that allowed for extensive secret operations, from classified prisons to weapons testing facilities, secret research labs and manufacturing sites for Chemical, Biological, and Radiological weaponry. Many of these black sites often were discovered or constructed by Border Command, which held a close relationship to the OCNI, and subsequently handed over to the OCNI for operations.
One question that has always caused disquiet amongst those with enough privileges to know the real extent of the OCNI is where they draw recruits for their massive special forces corps. By the most recent internal estimates the OCNI may have had as many as 100,000 active special forces operatives before first contact with the Affini Compact. An important piece of the puzzle was uncovered months before the beginning of the Terran Pacification Program when important documents were leaked to the press and anti-government groups. The document, while somewhat redacted, when analysed showed that while officially many Naval Infantrymen under Border Command would retire after their tours of duty, large numbers of them would often emigrate to several specific planets at rates highly unusual for their actual size and economic opportunity. It is by sheer 'coincidence' that these planets are ones where there are extensive OCNI and Border Command shared facilities, including Naval Infantry training stations. With known pay rates for the OCNI's special forces operatives extending into double to triple that of the rest of the navy, it is a very real possibility that Border Command's Naval Infantry corps may well be a secret training program for the OCNI's own forces.
While the OCNI's recordkeeping is extensive, enough to keep Affini archivists busy for years in organisation and analysis, it is believed that the actual reach and breadth of their operations far extends even the records in their archives, with hundreds of contingency operations uncovered to force coups big and small from small corporations to the naval high command and even the executive branch of the accord. How many more existed may only be speculated, but it is likely that if there was even a mildly known individual somewhere in the Terran Accord, the OCNI likely had at least five assassination plans, including its own directors.
While the Big Three and the OCNI often soaked up the vast majority of the budget, the smaller arms of the navy never found themselves poor or strapped for cash, though their size was often limited through the imposition of restrictions by the Big Three. The following documents a brief outline for the minor arms.
Throughout human naval history, there has been an ongoing debate on how exactly to define the classification of ships. A simple task it may appear to be, but due to the constant scramble to improve and gain advantage over one's adversaries, the precise definitions change between nation and organisation. Terms arise, die, and then are resurrected with new meaning as a new unclassifiable ship comes to the fore. While the 2500's would prove a general commonality between ship classes of the time and those of pre-stellar humanity, the divergence of definitions between services would become only more pronounced. Using as simple terms as possible, the following is a rough breakdown of ship classifications and subclassifications
Carriers - The ultimate centerpiece of terrestrial navies, carriers of all shapes are typically armed with few offensive weapons, instead being littered with defensive weapons to provide cover against inbound missiles and fighters. The real power of the carrier lies in its air wing, which can provide deadly and flexible space superiority and strike missions on targets at all ranges.
Assault Carriers - Typically smaller than void carriers, Assault carriers generally blur the line between troop ships and aircraft carriers. Most ground invasions are launched from a squadron of these vessels, while capable of hosting a limited air wing of space superiority and strike fighters assault carriers tend to have their air groups filled with intra-atmosphere transport shuttles and landers.
Voidcraft Carriers - Whenever someone says a carrier, this is what they typically imagine. The Void Carrier, or just Carriers, are the closest to their ocean going forefathers. While sizes do vary from light escort carriers through to battleship dwarfing supercarriers, all voidcraft carriers carry a wide range of void craft to perform a wide variety of missions. Officially, only Battle Command has the right to own and operate main line Voidcraft Carriers.
Heavy Guided Missile & Directed Weapons Aviation Cruisers - Due to the legal restrictions on the ownership of voidcraft carriers that give Battle Command exclusivity to carriers, both Strike and Border commands have found themselves finding 'interesting' legal loopholes through which they are able to share in the prestige of owning these iconic ship types. As such, when a loophole in the law was found in the technical definition of a Carrier, both commands immediately pounced on the opportunity. While in actuality more of a hybrid of Battleship and Voidcraft carrier, these ships are carefully designed to just barely scrape by the definitions of both, leaving to the euphemistic definition of these ships being heavy cruisers with aviation facilities. The two most recent examples, laid down just before the war with the affini, were the CNS Pegasus and CNS Valkyrie for Strike and Border commands respectively.
Battleships - With the ascendancy of aircraft carriers as the prime naval power from the ashes of the 1936-1945 terran global conflict, Battleships had been declared an outdated relic of a forever lost past. The development of void combat and the jump drive changed that paradigm. Heavily armed with dozens of missile and artillery batteries, and even the ever fickle luxury of capital grade laser weapons and experimental plasma bolt throwers, the battleship is the ultimate expression of the idea that more is indeed sometimes more. The pride of Battle Command, who own the vast majority of this type of warship, the Battleship is as much a fierce psychological weapon as it is an effective battle implement, able to level cities with single salvos of their main arms compliment.
Dreadnaughts/Titans - An anachronistic term that's never received official recognition, Dreadnaughts and Titans describe the biggest, baddest warships of their eras. Often featuring their main weapons, typically railguns, super sized capital grade lasers or other more experimental weapons as the central spine through which the whole ship is built around, these monsters often outweigh their cousins by near orders of magnitudes in more recent examples. It's rare to see more than one in any one place, as the logistics trail to keep them running at all requires a herculean effort to keep running at anywhere near normal peacetime efficiency.
Fast Battleships - Less wasteful and more practical, Fast Battleships make up the majority of any battleship type warships in service. While a number are coincidentally ships formerly considered to be of Dreadnaught or Titan pedigree, most of these ships are designed to be more practical, with engines and armour layouts that allow for the battleship to keep at a decently similar speed as the rest of the task force, rather than having them run at a fraction of their maximum operational speeds. This should not be used however as an indication that these warships aren't still some of the largest and toughest warships out there, and a threat to subdue even the hardiest pirate or striker with a mere mention of their presence.
Pocket Battleships - Another legal and bureaucratic euphemism. These craft continue Strike and Border command's habitual skirting of Battle Command's remit. Often designed with a minimum of armour and an emphasis on speed and sheer firepower, these ships are built with severe underestimations of their total tonnage thanks to creative interpretations of naval law. While all but blatant violations of their owner's remit, they are tolerated by Battle Command as they are very rare, with only one being owned by Strike and Border commands respectively, acting as their flagships.
Pocket Battleships vs Battlecruisers - There is a debate as to if Pocket Battleships are better described as Battlecruisers due to the very similar role and design principles shared across both ship types. To compress a very extensive argument, there is enough ambiguity within law, and enough distinction in tonnage, let alone the very specific circumstances that pocket battleships came about.
Cruisers - Where carriers are the spear that strikes the throat, and battleships are the hammer that strikes the head, cruisers represent a wide range of warships that act as the meat of any fleet. Due to the diversity of cruisers, their roles in the various arms, and the wide range of armaments, there is never an exactly firm definition of cruisers. What Battle Command would classify as a heavy destroyer would be a light or even medium size cruiser for border command, whereas a strike command heavy cruiser would likely be classified as a light cruiser by Battle Command. The following list is not exhaustive, simply aiming to explain commonality where possible.
Destroyers and Frigates - Modern ships of the line, Destroyers and Frigates are the smallest classifications of ships that can be classified as being long-range and capable of acting in a multi-role capacity. Whether or not ships smaller than Destroyer of Frigate classification are capable of independent FTL jumps are entirely dependent on their parent organisation and their specific doctrine as to if they require them. For example all Border Command ships are FTL capable, whereas Battle Command eschews this on their corvettes and even some frigates, instead providing mounting systems for smaller ships to 'piggyback' for jumps on larger ones. The distinction between destroyers and frigates mainly exists in their respective tonnage, Destroyers typically being larger, and in their weapons capacity. The three most common variants of both types are Anti-Voidcraft defence, Guided Missile & Gun, and Sensor picket variants.
Corvettes, Patrol boats and Gunboats - The smallest vessels that can be considered warships, these represent the smallest, fastest and most manurable voidcraft that can't be classified as fighters. Typically manned with crews between 10 and 30 strong, these vessels are the most numerous, though their size often forces their designs to be specialised, rather than multi-role, due to limited space and reserves.
Special ships - These ships generally don't fall within normal classifications, but are typically important enough to mention as quasi classes in of themselves.