Class: Journey Class
Operators: American Union, Independent Operators, Jovian Colonies Group
Manufacturer:

Length: 50 Meters
Diameter:

Crew: 5

Propulsion: ULA Mark 19 Medium-Weight Fusion Drive
Maximum Acceleration: 1g

Range:

Sensors:

Armament: None, though various weapons have been mounted as after-market upgrades

Cargo Capacity:

Support Craft:

The development program for the Journey started in 2300, and was a near-disaster for Stellar’s shipbuilding division before being saved by a timely pivot in approach toward how the ship was sold.

The design ideas came directly from the Magnetic Assembly, with a certain executive pitching the idea of entering the starship market by combining existing off the shelf technology and using bulk-purchasing to reduce the unit cost of the product itself in an effort to replicate the increasing modular designs produced by the Assembly. The design would be completed in a relatively decent amount of time, but produced something that wasn’t noticeably better than other products on the market.

The middle-of-the-road performance of the ship was enough for the American Union to purchase a small number of the craft for evaluation. Small orders for the craft were also placed by a range of Jovian colonies. The low order-number would nearly sink the project, causing the per unit price to creep up well above the unprofitability threshold.

The project would be saved when Ein pitched selling large numbers of ships to the American Union for use as give-away technical assistance to various groups. This would create jobs programs that looked good for the Union, and allow the Union to arm groups that fit its interests without providing weapons or equipment that were worrying if they fell into the wrong hands.
The increasing sales numbers of the Journey Class Freighter would allow for continued development and additional monetization through software and hardware upgrades. Planned Obsolescence of the units would ensure that they would need to make use of those regular upgrades, though a majority of the operators of the ship tend to fix problems themselves as often as possible.

The Journey Class Freighter is a very conventional design. A Medium-Weight fusion reactor and gimbaled thruster assembly are on the bottom of the ship’s ‘stack’, with a set of fuel/reaction tanks sitting above the reactor, and a habitation area above that. The habitation areas are zero-g, though the whole ship can be spun around the axis of thrust to generate some spin gravity for the crew. There is one habitation area ‘above’ and one ‘below’ the axis of thrust. The upper one has communications equipment built in, while the lower one can be easily replaced with various weapon modules or other equipment.

The Journey is mostly unarmored, aside from a thin anti-flash layer made up of highly heat resistance tungsten carbide with an undercoating of industrial diamond that provides decent protection against intense flashes of heat. There is also a decent layer of carbon-infused aerogel designed to provide some level of whipple-shield like protection against micro-meteors.

Many operators of the ship will add their own armor packages to the exterior.

The interior of the ship is very similar to what one might see in a conventional airliner of the 20th century. The crew area is a single tube with a command area at the front of the tube, and various crew compartments along the length. The interior is reconfigurable and can support small pod-like living areas or work spaces as well as enough space for a few space-suits and an airlock. There is no direct access to the ship’s reactor or reaction-mass stores so much of the work that would need to be done requires EVA work.


Standard Configuration, unarmed.



Standard Configuration, unarmed.


S45454, modified to house a GRU KF-477 Point Defense System.
Destroyed in CE 2318 in combat against the Empire of Daqin.