My Shipyard

- Regina Apis Class Heavy Cruiser -

# Ship Version

The Nomad Empire had never got deep knowledge in naval warfare, even though the world was composed in its majority by water and the battles usually happened with warships, but the need for warships such as aircraft carriers, not only airship aircraft carriers, to help the strong airforce of the Nomad Empire would soon be noticed. Thanks to the Garden of Eden Alliance between the Nomad Empire and the Utopia Empire, the former finally made the first flying ship class of the world from the knowledge got from the latter. It was made, at first, to test flying aircraft-carrying warships before the flying dedicated aircraft carriers of the Nomad Empire became a thing, having a quite peculiar design with most of the weapons placed on the downside of the ship, opening space for two large rotors installed in the upper side, more than capable to keep the ship flying with all the weight aboard. The name of the class was Regina Apis of heavy cruisers, with Regina Apis, Regina Vespa and Regina Formica being the only ones built for the class.

In armaments, this class carried four triple mounts of 20.3 cm dual-purpose guns positioned on the downside of the flying ship, two in the front, two in the bow, equipable with shrapnel shells with proximity-fuses used against groups of aircraft, standard AP shells as the gravity already does the job to increase the penetration to a very good point and Utopian HE shells, the same used on the Posterus class, results of technology exchange of the two nations. Eight single 8 cm guns were also placed on the ship, four on the upper side, with one in the bow, two in the midsection and one in the aft, and the other four on the downside with two in the bow and two in the aft, all armed with shrapnel shells with proximity fuses to deal with aircraft mainly but can be used for other purposes. Four Stupeo CIWS were installed, based on the famous Aes CIWS of the Utopia Empire but with only one barrel to improve turning speed and they are used for aircraft and missile interception, positioned two in the midsection upperside, one on each side; and the other two in the downside of the turrets two and three. The most dangerous weapons of the class, however, were the bombs it carried, dropped from four compartments in the downside of the ship in the space between the turrets two and three, carrying enough weight to reload at least once each compartment, allowing eight bombardments attacks to be made before it needs to go back to base.

In the hull of the ship, you could notice a hole in the aft and the bow, connected by an intern flight deck, in which the 50 planes aboard are launched. They are 35 Shadow MK.VIB "Bark" with a maximum speed of Mach 1.8 and equipped with four 19 mm guns, two on each wing; 10 Shadow MK.VIBx "Rolland" with a maximum speed of Mach 2.1 and the same four 19 mm guns in the wings, besides an extra 19 mm gun on the nose; and lastly, five Shadow Mk. VIIB "Bert" with a maximum speed of Mach 2.5 and the armaments of 70 mm gun and four 12.1 mm. The ship also had two rather large helipads on the upper side of the ship, both with a lifter that connects to inside the ship where the aircraft is stored, usually picking up either one of the 10 Airway V transport helicopters or the 50 Battering IV strike helicopter. The first is equipped with sliding doors and a single-barreled 30 mm machine gun inside the craft, but can aim to both sides as long as the doors are open, using a pair of contra-rotating triple-bladed coaxial rotors and a single four-bladed rotor in the tail that gives the aircraft 290 km/h of speed even with the heavy armor to protect the people aboard. The second is an advanced strike helicopter with a maximum speed of 325 km/h thanks to the five-bladed rotor and the pair of triple-bladed propellers in the tail. The craft that relies on decent stealth armor to stay in the sky and the usual armament that's either a single 40 mm machine gun or a four-barreled 20 mm rotary gun under the nose, two retractable weapon pylons for either two sets of three heavy missiles or two sets of 12 light warheads, while the installed stub wings have special armaments, which are drones, usually three on each stub wing. They are small, fast and agile, with small and very light single machine guns which can be quite the trouble when they are in their swarm, easily dodging most weaponry and not trackable by heat-seeker missiles due to the absence of a human pilot and the presence of a cooling system, all of them controlled remotely from the ship the helicopters belong.