XH109 TCR02A Vutkor Tractor Runner

Description

Xyriat Hegemony

Fleet scale

Scale: Fleet (very nominally 1:10000th)

Twelve starships supplied.

Size (Bounding Box): 13.8mm x 6.0mm x 8.2mm

The Hegemonic Navys doctrine of tractor beam capture and light torpedoes to pick apart a grabbed enemy is effective, but not without its drawbacks. Tractor beams are short-ranged weapons and again highly agile enemy vessels or extremely fast-moving ones it can sometimes be difficult to manoeuvre to make a pass close enough.

The Vutkor Tractor Runner was designed to compensate for this weakness. In essence, the Vutkor is a fast-moving platform for two tractor beam arrays, with enough defences to allow it to run into an enemy formation, grab a vessel and escape with it before taking too much fire.

The Vutkor is a small vessel, technically a self-sufficient smallcraft. It has only a small crew, supplemented with cheap drones. Crewing a Vutkor takes a brave soul (or not infrequently, a punitive assignment), as their modus operandii can be considered almost suicidal.

As manoeuvrable as a fighter, the Vutkor mounts an unusual combination of capital ship and fighter shield generators, providing it a reasonable balance of protection, as it is likely to take considerable fire from both regular and anti-fighter weapons as it performs its duties.

Itself, the Vutkor only has a few point-defence particle beam turrets in addition to the tractor beams.

A single Vutkor is no great threat, but a pack is enough to be able to steal key elements out of an enemy formation, and survive long enough to bring their prize for the main fleet to be disabled.