Confederation Navy: Condottiere Class Colonial Cruising Frigate
You may have been wondering where this has all been heading.
You should set up the ground rules, even if vaguely, under which you plan to operate in, and while I doubt I'll ever get around to trying to give more than a bare outline to the Confederation Navy's Order of Battle, mostly because there's very little material, and some of it I find unpalatable, I'm to have a go at a general purpose frigate, since several strands seemed to have come together recently.
From the first edition of High Guard, I was pretty sure I could design a better version of the Broadsword class mercenary cruiser, a legacy design. As I recall, it was either going to be at four hundred or a thousand tonnes, which I had identified as design sweet spots. Eventually, the second edition came out, and it's taking a while to figure out the ins and outs, not helped by the need to infer a lot of the details, which runs the risk of being non canonical if challenged.
First came hull configuration; I'm not fond of the spherical shape, and I kinda thought having a fixed undercarriage more in terms of streamlining, which I eventually considered unrelated to the issue. Then five pylons as being more stable, but also connected to manoeuvre drive housings and docking space, ie five cutters and/or smallcraft, and I discarded that as well. So I settled for a sphere with a tripod under carriage, as part of the overall minimalist approach.
I'll address the naming convention; It's not really aggrandisement, it just fit in with the mercenary aspect, the smaller variant I was originally going for had been the Contractor class (that was an Easter egg), and it's meant to be as far as I can stretch it, alliterative.
I thought about it, and came to the conclusion that outside the heavy and battle cruiser, the modern Confederation Navy isn't bothered with the definition of cruiser, as long as the vessel is jump capable and is armed; they feel it also helps confuse enemy intelligence and obfuscate operations, as well as the exact performance and capabilities of the vessel in question.
The technology level of the Broadsword is a default twelve, which is fine if I don't plan to armour it, or go beyond a three parsec range.
While the Broadsword is eight hundred tonnes in displacement, I'm going to go with a nineteen hundred ninety tonne tripodial sphere; it's twenty percent cheaper than standard, and partially streamlined, which a careful pilot can fairly easily land on most planets.
The default technological level depends on the expected role of the vessel in question, which could well be commercial.
A tonne short of two thousand suits quite well, as it places the vessel in a category harder to hit with most largish weapon systems; add two pop up turrets, and you need something larger than a pop gun to cause criticals.
You can build a technological level seven titanium steel hull if you don't need artificial gravity plates installed all over the place, judicious use of the manoeuvre drive would provide that down to earth feeling, since with the permanent tripod land gear, it really is a tail sitter.
You can bump it up to nine, though to be fair there doesn't seem to be any difference in the bill of materials, except you're paying double for artificially induced gravity throughout the ship.
At technological level ten, you can install a fair bit of armouring, though I'd guess that any ship that will be armoured from the start would be manufactured at technological level fourteen spaceyard.
