Baron-class Destroyer Introduced: 2694 Number in Class: 20 Mass: 635,000 tons Fuel: 1,500 tons (3,750) Tons/ Burn Day: 39.52 Safe Thrust: 4 Maximum Thrust: 6 Sail Integrity: 4 KF Drive Integrity: 13 Heat Sinks: 1,500 (3,000) Structural Integrity: 60 Armor: 368 tons of ferro-carbide armor (294, +6 each facing) Fore: 60 Fore-Sides: 55 Aft-Sides: 55 Aft: 50 Docking Collar: 1 Fighters: 6 Small Craft: 4 Life Boats: 10 Escape Pods: 10 Grav Decks: 2 (both 115 meters) Crew: 36 officers, 176 enlisted, 10 pilots, 10 techs, 21 marines Cargo: 93,811 tons Weapons: Fore (745 Heat) 5 Light NPPCs 1 NAC-30 2 Barracuda Missile Launchers FL/FR (426 Heat) 8 NL-35s 1 Barracuda Missile Launcher LBS/RBS (435 Heat) 3 Light NPPCs 1 NAC-30 2 Barracuda Missile Launchers AL/AR (170 Heat) 2 NL-55s Aft (190 Heat) 2 NL-55s 2 Barracuda Missile Launchers Ammunition: 90 rounds NAC-30 ammo, 100 Barracuda missiles. Notes: Has Lithium-Fusion battery system, HPG, and ferro-carbide armor. Design History: The Baron-class was originally designed to meet the need for fleet destroyers to escort battleships during fleet engagements. The ship's armament was based on NAC-30s and light NPPCs. However, what seemed to be decent, if uninspired, design quickly turned into a career-ending lemon for its design team. To be fair, it was not their fault. Having come up with a decent design to be built at the brand-new Worthington-Malenkov yards in the Lyran system of Loric, they were not responsible for the problems that followed. The executives at W-M substituted the design's specified FWL-made main computer for an inferior model made within the Lyran Commonwealth. The upshot of this mistake was that the ship could only make 2.5 Gs rather than its planned 3. Despite this, the design was well armored and had a docking collar, something most SLDF destroyers lacked. W-M turned out 20 prior to 2709. In that year the design demonstrated an unpleasant weakness. Four of these destroyers were attached to Task Force 26 as escorts to the Texas-class battleship Florida during war game COLD RAIN, held at Winter that February. During the course of the games two of the Barons were able to corner the Lyran destroyer Richard Beitzen. When the two ships fired their Fore and Fore-Side NPPCs at the Lyran ship, both ships experienced a power drain. Before their engineers could deduce the cause, they were struck by return NPPC fire from Beitzen that, though low powered, caused their main computers to crash. The sudden failure triggered the halt of the war games and an immediate convening of a Board of Inquiry. When the board reported its finding on September 23rd, it revealed that not only was the surge protection for the computers inadequate, but also that the power system for the NPPCs was wasteful and caused each PPC armed arc to draw 50% more power than needed. Because, unlike the Cameron-class, the failures hadn't killed anyone yet, coupled with the fact that Worthington-Malenkov had been lied to about the computer's surge protection, the SLDF chose only to punish the yard with a large fine and a five year ban on contract-bidding, rather than the nationalization than had been visited on Dassault-Shimmon. Instead, the Admiralty put the main blame for the failure on the computer manufacturer, Acer Interstellar. The company was dissolved and most of its board sent to prison for perjury and embezzlement. The existing ships were sent into mothballs. This likely would have been the end of the class's story had it not been for a trio of SLDF junior officers: Lewis Warrenton, Thomas Brantley, and Sandra Hosogaya. In 2763 these three came up with a design that would allow some use to be made out of the existing Barons. The proposal called for the replacement of the faulty computer with the original planned model. The trio also removed the ships 8 fore-side light NPPCs and replaced them with 16 NL-35s. When computer simulations showed the redesign to be free of power problems with its weapons, Gen. Kerensky gave the go-ahead to Krester Ship Construction to modify the Chelmsford as a test case. During her 2764 trials, the ship proved able to achieve her original planned 3G maximum acceleration. When the ship's firing trials showed no problem with the new armament, refits and overhauls for the other 19 ships were ordered. On the eve of the Amaris coup, 7 Barons were still in mothballs, 5 were in service with SLDF in the Periphery, 6 more were under refit at the SLDF yards at Sol and Oliver, and two others (Raymond of Tripoli, and William de Valence) were just beginning their retrials in company with the brand-new Milwaukee-class cruiser Philadelphia at Bryant. On December 21st they took on their new commanding officers: now-Commanders Brantley and Hosogaya took command of the Raymond and the William respectively, having been rewarded for their redesign work by promotion and assignment to skipper two of the ships they had redesigned. As it turned out their command tenure was quite brief, with both ships being lost with all hands during their sortie to wreck Krester's shipyards on the 27th. All six ships under refit at the time of the Amaris Coup were seized and put into the service of the Usurper, with none surviving the war. The war canceled the plans to refit the seven still in mothballs. By this time, the ships in active service had used their NL-35s to affect precision bombardments similar (if of smaller size) to those of the Farragut and County classes. Sadly, four of the five remaining in active service were lost during the savage fighting for Graham IV in 2771. Lewis Warrenton, commanding the Chelmsford, fought on, but Caspar drones destroyed both him and his ship during the assault on the Sol system on January 26th 2777. Moreover, the coup and the war that followed it destroyed the records of the locations of the seven mothballed Barons and six of them remain lost even unto this day. However, it is the fate of the remaining ship, the Simon de Montfort, which has rekindled interest in her class and in other lost ships. At the start of the Amaris Coup the Simon had just been refitted for duty in an unnamed system near the present day Rim Collection the advanced repair ship SLS Charon (all the missing Barons were mothballed in the Periphery). When the coup began the Charon, lacking a crew to put aboard her, re-mothballed her and left her there. The Charon was lost at Dieron in 2775 and Simon remained were she was until June 26th 3068, when she was discovered by a Rim Collection trading vessel. So far, the RC has refused offers to sell her and has stated its intention to press her into service. Though the costs of operating the ship will be very high for the poor nation, her people have managed to scrape up enough money to keep her going and to hire a handful of Inner Sphere instructors to help teach her new crew how to keep her running. The instructors have come from the Free Worlds League, the apparent reason for the FWL approving their hiring being Captain-General Marik's conviction that that a stronger RC will mean a reduction in piracy and thus be a good thing for humanity. Needless to say, the discovery of the Simon de Montfort has caused several major Inner Sphere powers and at least 3 Clans to send search parties to an area anti-spin ward of the Lyran Alliance where data gleaned from the de Montfort's computers suggests that other six Barons might be. Will these new searchers turn up anything or return empty-handed like so many before them? Only time will tell.