County Type: Transport In class: 10 In service: 2561 Mass: 800,000 Sail Integrity: 5 Thrust: 2/3 Fuel: 2000 tons Structural Integrity: 70 Armor: 1120 tons of standard armor (74+7 fwd and aft, 75+7 fore and aft sides) Docking Collars: 8 Fighters: 54 Small Craft: 100 Mechs: 108 Heavy Armor: 324 Infantry: 756 Crew: 300 Lifeboats: 250 Escape Pods: 250 Grav Decks: 8 150 meter Cargo: 100,000 Bay 1: Fighters (54), Infantry (756) 8 doors Bay 2: Mechs (108), Cargo (100,000) 20 doors Bay 3: Small Craft (100), Heavy Armor (324) 8 door Weapons: Fore Left/Fore Right 10 Naval Laser 35 5 White Shark Left Broadside/Right Broadside 20 Naval Laser 35 Aft Left/Aft Right 20 Naval Laser 45 Overview The County class transport was one of the last and most controversial ships launched by the Terran Hegemony before the founding of the Star League. The County is rightly described as a precursor to the Potemkin, and was intended to transport, deploy, and support a combined arms brigade in hostile territory. As a result the ship was designed to carry a full regiment each of mechs, aerospace fighters, and infantry, along with three regiments worth of tanks. To get these troops to the surface, eight docking collars for dropships were added, along with bays for a hundred small landing craft, each capable of transporting a tank, a company of infantry, or large amounts of bulk cargo. While unloading a County could be a time consuming process, this method makes for a vastly cheaper ship than the later Potemkin with its massive array of docking collars. The controversy that surrounded the class during its decades of service has to do with its armament, which for what is essentially a transport is very heavy. The County has a total battery of one hundred naval lasers, along with ten naval missile launchers. While this gives the ship an excelent ability to defend itself, the very selection of massed batteries of naval lasers and one of their intended uses would soon doom the class to infamy and stop production after only five years. Quite simply the naval lasers were intended to be used for orbital bombardment. The concept of massed batteries of naval lasers being used as an alternative to conventional artillery actually wasn't all that new at the time. The Terran Hegemony fleet in fact already had a class of ships fitted out to conduct such attacks, the Farragut class battleships, and limited, precision naval bombardment with naval lasers had already been used in a number of engagements quite sucessfully without the widespread destruction that saturation bombardment produces. In this way the County class transports were nothing particularly new or spectacular, in fact many in the army loved the concept of the County, as it gave them the firepower of a regiment of mobile guns to call upon without having to worry about loosing their support to counterbattery fire. Politics, as it often does, nevertheless struck down the County despite the facts. Lobbyists that wanted production of the County to stop to put money into other projects soon succeeded in earning the ships a label among the public as a relic of earlier, more barbaric days before the signing of the Ares Conventions, when unrestrained bombardment was a standard tactic. Eventually Director General Ian Cameron himself felt the sting when the other great houses began to complain that the Hegemony was constructing a "weapon design to kill civilians". With his plans to unite the inner sphere under the banner of the Star League, he eventually decided that the County was more trouble than it was worth, and on his order construction was ceased in 2566. The ten completed County class vessels were likewise assigned to primarily non combat roles for the majority of their service. What many at the time regarded as the last gasp for the "childkillers" (as they were commonly called) came in 2601 when Riga Interstellar Shipyards presented a slightly modified and updated version of the County to the SLDF as a new troop transport design. A few blame the unwarented reputation of the County for the rejection of the initial design (claiming nobody in the SLDF wanted to be known for deploying "childkillers"); and the ship that finally emerged from the ten years of designing and redesigning certainly wasn't anything like the County. Of course nobody will know how much of the Potemkin's final design was due to political pressure and how much was due to valid design concerns. Whatever the case, the County class ships kept at their duties as transport ships for non-combat areas for the next one hundred and fifty years. It is believed that General Kerensky had a special fondness for these ships despite their reputation. For whatever reason, in 2761 he ordered the County class Epsilon Eridani back to the Terran shipyards for modification. After a years worth of work, the E. Eridani re-emerged as a dedicated aerospace fighter carrier, with much of its troop bays removed and fighter bays added for four aditional regiments of fighters. Though she rarely carried more than three fighter regiments, she proved to be a powerful addition to the fleet, and it is believed that the other nine County class ships would have been similarly refitted had not the Periphery uprising and the Amaris Coup interupted those plans. All ten County class ships fought during the Coup, many of them proving the validity of their design during missions to bombard SDS batteries and Rim Worlds troops during the long campaign to liberate the Terran Hegemony. By wars end, three County class ships survived, including the Epsilon Eridani. All three went on the Exodus, and their fate is not entirely clear. Many of the records of the County class ships have been purged from clan databases, possibly the result of the anihilation of clan Wolverine, who is believed to have had possession of two of them. These two craft, including the fearsome E. Eridani, are presumed destroyed along with the rest of clan Wolverine, but of course nobody can be quite sure, and as always there are rumors... The third, on the other hand, is in the hands of the Jade Falcons. It has been in mothballs for centuries, with many of its systems nonfunctional, but there are indications that the Jade Falcons have been attempting to bring it back into service for the past fifteen years, relying heavily on Snow Raven aid to bring it into full operation. They have not yet been successful, and given the currently bad relations with the Snow Ravens, it is not likely that the ship will return to service any time soon.