Gaiaterra: Elysea's Conflict/Aerial Battleship Aenarion

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The Aerial Battleship Tyrion is the epic unit of Prince Tyrion, the legendary general of The Protectorate's Asur Command. This epic unit is planned to be voiced by Mark Noble.

History
"Sunfang cannon, fire!"

-Tyrion Captain in battle

To the late Emperor Yoshiro, there were many measures of a warrior's prowess. His loyalty, his determination, his skill with blades, sidearms, his dedication to following Bushido, and his mastery of the arts of war.

To his son Tatsu, the best measure of a warrior was the number and power of his guns.

Prince Tatsu saw to it that the captains of his Aerial Battleships were the best warriors of all, arming these remarkable (and remarkably expensive) vessels with an inordinate number of guns. Unlike the Shogun, the Aerial Battleship Tyrion was intended to, as the Aquilans say, "get all up" in the enemy's business, sporting a vast number of short-ranged weapons and capable of directing an extreme amount of firepower at the enemy.

The primary armament is the three main turrets, two on the front and one aft, each turret armed with three massive 460mm plasma-cutter cannons. With the vast internal storage and power generation capacity of the Tyrion, these can be used to carve large sections of hulls out of enemy ships, be they ships flying or ships sailing. Supplementing the main guns are banks of kinetic-burst turrets that fill the air with superheated slugs, useful against hostile aircraft or lightly-armored units that might attempt to overwhelm the Tyrion's main turrets by sheer numbers. Bow-mounted missile/torpedo tubes add some long-range punch for opening an engagement, though their position makes them difficult to reload. Finally, a squadron of "Aliathra" fighter-bombers provide air cover and scouting capabilities.

Tyrion battleships are intended to simply plow into enemy formations and defenses, as they are well-armed enough to take on whole fleets by themselves. With their vast arsenal, they can engage any enemy within reach, so the only way to destroy one of these machines is to overwhelm them with numbers and firepower; every conceivable weakness has been analyzed and addressed, turning the Tyrion into a brutal warship that cannot be destroyed by anything less than an equal deployment of brute force.

While an impressive achievement in and of itself, the Aerial Battleship Tyrion gets its name from the four wave-force engines located on sleek, pivoting nacelles jutting from the hull of the vessel. Expelling vast amounts of energy, the water jets are deactivated in favor of brightly burning Wave-Force engines, which greedily harness and expend the gigajoules of energy produced by the massive Wave-Force furnace at the core of the ship.

These engines lift the vessel airborne, turning it into the largest and heaviest flying machine in human history. Then, when the Wave-force furnace reaches its greatest potential, the nose of the battleship slides open to reveal the Sunfang, the largest Wave-Force cannon in existence, which is said to be wholly capable of leveling a mountain. A single hit from this mighty weapon will obliterate any airship, blasting a massive hole in it and sending it crashing down to earth in a flaming wreck. Tatsu firmly believed that space was the future of the Protectorate, and took every step to ensure that the solar system would fall firmly under the control of the Empire.

Of course, such a machine comes at a steep price. There are only two known Aerial Battleships in existence, the Tyrion and its sister ship, the Yamato, and each took almost a decade to build. Such a massive machine generates so much power that its mere presence is dangerous to those around it, with its massive engines capable of flattening cities, or backfiring and causing the ignition of the atmosphere if improperly used. Therefore, in order to deploy one of these machines within the atmosphere, a Mobile Fortress Tatsu must be standing by to help coordinate its movement, and the computers of a Nanotech Mainframe are required to assist with the millions of calculations needed to keep the floating behemoth operational.