SJ Sathanas

is the sequel to FreeSpace. FreeSpace is a flight sim in the classic Wing Commander Mold set in the 23rd Century. FreeSpace 1 starts fourteen years into a war between the Terrans and the Vasudans. The war has been dragging on for years, with little gain on either side. You start the game as a fighter pilot with the Galactic Terran Alliance (GTA) stationed on the GTD Galatea. Things are fairly basic at first, you don't have shields and your only armed with moderately dangerous laser cannons. The GTD Galatea is an Orion Class Destroyer, the capital ship class of the GTA. Its a trifile over 2km long, which certainly feels quite big when your a 20m long fighter. After fighting several battles with the Vasudans another race appears who are dubbed the Shivans. As the Shivans have fighters and bombers with shields and big painful weapons they quickly decimate several outlying systems and start working inwards towards the home systems of both sides. Realising they face destruction the Terrans and the Vasudans sign a peace treaty and an alliance against the Shivans. Eventually the alliance gets some comparable technology (by stealing it from the Shivans) and eventually fights off the Shivans with rather hideous losses. 14 years later the Shivans are detected in a recently discovered Nebula, and the Alliance actually does quite a good job of taking the system, actually making ground against the Shivans. This until one of these ships turns up. It is barely stopped before it is destroys an inhabited planet. The Alliance re-enters the nebula and soon discover that the Shivans didn't appreciate the destruction of their Juggernaught and that it wasen't one of a kind. They find another [i]hundred[/i] of these Juggernaughts bearing down on them. In context the size of the alliance fleet is probably under fifty Destroyers, which these things eat for lunch. The alliance evacuates the system with only fighters and light ships fighting them, these ships all cluster around the Star, which they turn into a nice SuperNova. Game Over. Coming to Armada these ships should still be quite scary. The beam lasers in FS2 ignore shields and melt through heavy armor that is designed to withstand multi gigaton explosions like butter. As we all know, star trek ships rely near totally on shields in combat so the effect of a beam like this on the bare hull is likely to have the same sort of effect the torp in ST6 had on the enterprise saucer. Oh, and the Sathanas has four of them. If balanced precisely as they are in FS2 then they will be slow and shieldless (capital ship weapon pierce shields, and 20m fighters don't do much damage to a 6km behemoth) with a huge amount of armor. They should be somewhat vulnerable to attacks on the stern, as the majority of heavy armament is at the front of the ship. Don't get in front of a Sathanas.
DIVE DIVE DIVE, HIT YOUR BURNER'S PILOT! Ahem, most of you won't get that. :( Best start to a level ever. For those who have not been fortunate enough to play FreeSpace2 then FreeSpace2