Drazi Redux: Reimagining the Drazi in A Call to Arms, Part 3

In Part 1 and Part 2 I looked at the Patrol and Skirmish level ships available to the Drazi. That is where the bulk of Drazi ships reside. In this part I will be looking at the much smaller number of larger ships that remain. Like their lower priority counterparts these ships too are very lacking representing some of the worst ships in the game tier for tier. I've given all 4 of the remaining ships a bit of an uplift in terms of firepower, and made a few more significant changes as well. Please let me know what you think

Firehawk-class Advanced Cruiser

The Solar Cannon is an extremely effective weapon that was, in its initial versions, so large that it could only be mounted on the Stormfalcon-class heavy cruiser. the initial attempts to fit it to a Sunhawk or Warbird hull being unsuccessful. With Stormfalcon being a very large ship, at least as far as the Drazi were concerned, they decided to design and build an intermediate sized hull that could fit the weapon. The result was the Firehawk. The ship retains very good agility and acceleration and is easily able to mount the solar cannon in addition to a respectable secondary armament.

*The Firehawk is a Mongoose design and I suspect it was only added in order to give the Drazi a Raid level ship. It is quite agile and has a competitive defensive profile. The major weakness of the official ship is its all Bore sighted armament combined with the fact the solar cannon is slow loading which creates a ship that can hit fairly hard, but only half the time. The change I made was simply to add an additional secondary weapon to bring it more in line, firepower wise, with other raid level ships. It still languishes as one of the most poorly armed Raid level ships in terms of raw firepower, however this is balanced by the fact that beams ignore one of the most common defensive abilities, that being interceptors, making the ship deceptively punchy despite its low 'on paper' firepower

Stormfalcon-class Heavy Cruiser

The Dilgar War was incredibly hard fought. While the Drazi were able to slow and then stop the Dilgar advance it was only a great cost in ships and personnel. The small Warbird and Sunhawks were often outclassed by the larger Dilgar ships and the Drazi recognised the need for a larger, more powerfully armed, ship to support their formations. 

The result was the Stormfalcon. Originally intended only to replace the aging Goshawk-class Jump Cruisers the Stormfalcon was considerably enlarged to accommodate an incredibly impressive offensive armament.

*The Official Stormfacon is an incredibly bad ship. its only redeeming quality is the fact that it is faster and more agile than most Battle level ships. In order to bring it in line with the rest of my Drazi lineup I dropped the hull to 5 and gave it a 5+ Dodge to reflect the Drazi philosophy of having agile ships. I also changed the ships armament quite considerably. The Drazi in B5W mount more weapons rather than more powerful ones so I dropped the double damage weapons and instead equipped the ship with more single damage shots. additional in keeping with the B5W version I added some twin arrays to cover some blind spots. I made sure to leave the rear of the ship with no weapons coverage though since the Drazi ships concentrate all their weapons forward

Nightfalcon-class Heavy Carrier

The Dilgar war taught the Drazi many lessons, one of which was that their ships and formations were very vulnerable to concentrated fighter attacks. Their pre-war doctrine had been to asign light carriers to their formations together with escort ships, this proved to be woefully inadequate in the face of the Dilgar onslaught. 

Drazi Hunters attack a pair of Resha-Kar ships in the area of Khilsiek, are they Batrados or Aviokis?

Once the war was concluded a new class of carrier was required and the Stormfalcon hull provided just the platform. The ship trades offensive firepower for an impressive (for the Drazi) fighter complement. While certainly an improvement on previous attempts at dedicated carriers such as the Swallow-class, it is still deficient in a lot of areas and has not been produced in great quantities.

*The Drazi don't really do carriers and the Nightfalcon is no exception. The ship has had a fairly similar treatment to the Stormfalcon with Hull 5 and a 5+ dodge. I also increased the speed to match the Stormfalcon since there is no real reason why it should be slower. Offensively, I swapped the double damage weapons for double the number of single damage weapons so its forward firepower is the same, and I also added Twin Arrays to the sides in keeping with the Stormfalcon.

Fireraptor-class Battleship.

To the outside observer the Fireraptor is proof that the Drazi have not learned any lessons from the wars they have fought over the past few decades. This is superficially true as the first Drazi Battleship follows the same design philosophy as all Drazi ships for the past 5 centuries. The reason for this is that the ship is based on the hull of the Raptor-class fleet support ship, the largest mobile unit the Drazi have ever produced and THAT ship follows the same design philosophy the Drazi have followed for 5 centuries since it first entered service a few years prior to the Dilgar war. It has never been mass produced and sightings by other races have been incredibly uncommon leasing to the conclusion that the Fireraptor is a new hull design.
The Fireraptor-class was built for one purpose only, to demonstrate that ISA technologies could be integrated by the Drazi into their ships, and in that regard, the ship is an incredible success. It is not clear what direction future Drazi ship designs will take

*The official Fireraptor is incredibly weakly armed for a War level ship, so my version aims to remedy that. I have again swapped the double damage weapons for a larger number of single damage shots and I have added some side firing twin arrays to reduce the number of blind spots. It has a much more respectable armament but is still inferior to almost every other War level ship in terms of raw firepower. I've also retained the Hull 6 as the ship is a War level ship and thus needs to be tough, but i have also added dodge 6+ so that it at least has a feature in common with the rest of the Drazi fleet. Finally I added a second Sky Serpent. This is for the simple fact that the ship has carrier 2 which means it can launch 2 of them at the same time. Otherwise the ship is still on the weak side for a War level ship so some additional tweaks may be necessary in the future. not that you often see War level ships...

Firehawks face down a Centauri attack during one of countless border skirmishes

That's it for Part 3 of the Drazi Redux. I will of course be play testing these more fully to tweak them a little better and I would welcome any feedback you could provide.

There are still plenty more Drazi ships to look at and in Part 4 I will be looking at some of the more unusual official ship from Babylon 5 wars, together with my favourite fan ships from B5W as well as the ACTA fanon.

If you do play any games with my new ship profiles, please let me know how the games go and what you think of the ships. are they too good, still to weak, just right?

Thanks to Ginge for helping with the balancing of the ships and play testing

STL's by Tyrel Lohr

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Thanks for reading, and I will see you next time.