The flagship of the mythical Devil's Fang Pirates, the Coelacanth is a Terran battleship extensively modified with bigger engines and a bristling compliment of turrets and cannons. Rumored to carry a crew of 999 pirates, the first surprise most bounty hunters encounter upon seeking out the Devil's Fang is the sheer magnitude of the Coelacanth, many expecting at most a large-sized cargo hauler or a repurposed gunship, not a full-on Terran warship. Terra had not been forthcoming with this information, as the Coelacanth had been liberated from the Grand Admiral himself some twenty years ago and has been a black eye for the Star Navy ever since. True to its name, the Coelacanth is ancient and elusive, and a formidable sight for those who find themselves on the business end of its many guns. While many believed the Devil's Fang to be dead or disbanded, or a fabrication of the Terran military to explain the failure of its inner world terraforming project, no wreckage has ever been found of the Coelacanth, and spotty rumors of its sighting and of chance encounters with it has peppered the tongues of starfarers for two Terran decades.
While its been heavily modified, the layout of the Coelacanth remains fairly simple. At the fore of the ship is her hangar, accessed by a plate-armored ramp which lowers below the top deck, allowing small- and mid-sized ships to dock safely. Beneath the hangar is the magazine, where much of her ammunition is stored. The mid deck is her gunnery deck, where topside turrets and broadside cannons can be easily accessed, repaired and fired. At the aft of the ship, far from the magazine, is the command and residential section- the Coelacanth has become something of a floating outlaw town in its years, like the Nassau of old Terra, where members and trusted affiliates of the Devil's Fang can gather, plan, maintain their gear and make merry after a successful run. Moving up and down the decks and in between building clusters can be disorienting at first but once you know your way around the Coelacanth it is like a small slice of a city, with room enough to meet the crew's every need. Being a Terran military ship she is equipped to be self-sustaining, allowing for the pirates to remain in hiding until their recent return to the theater of the Sol system.
Any force looking to take on the Coelacanth would be wise to take note of her armaments. She has twelve broadside laser turrets with three plasma variants on her top deck, poised to engage with harassment from buzzing small craft. A pair of mid-sized pulse cannons sit on her mid deck, ready to fire heavy photon bursts into larger adversaries. Forward of the pulse cannons are the disruptor turrets, firing a blend of six electromagnetic waves designed to soften forcefield projections and fry starship electronics. Forward of the disruptors sit two missile arrays capable of deploying salvos of guided missiles, illuminating flares, radar-scrambling "dazzle" rockets and more, helpfully seated just above the ship's magazine. Sitting front and center on the top deck are The Hounds, a pair of extra-large proton cannons originally designed for large-scale mining operations, capable of channeling large beams of destructive energy into asteroids and equally capable of blowing holes into other battleships. The centerpiece of the Coelacanth's armament are its twin paired 6660mm Hell Cannons, firing enormous solid kinetic shells capable of punching through ships rivaling the Coelacanth's own size. The 6660mm shells are so large and cumbersome that when one is fired, its shell is simply ejected out a side port into space, making room for the next round to be loaded from the magazine. Recovered shells from the aftermath of an encounter with the Devil's Fang reveal they are built from the fuselages of other starships. Meeting the Coelacanth head-on is a grim fate for Terran and Neptunian commanders alike.
While her compliment of guns may be intimidating to behold, the true workhorse of the Coelacanth is her broadside cannons. These are fixed cannons designed to fire solid kinetic shells in rapid succession, each side bearing four short-range cannons and three long-range cannons, but all fourteen are capable of pounding the doors off a battleship at mid-range. It is a simple enough business to hammer a ship until it explodes, but being as they are pirates the Devil's Fang are not interested in blowing up a bunch of grunt workers, they want what a ship is carrying or they want the ship itself, so an encounter with the pirates will often end with the pirates boarding the target starship. Teleportation is a thing of fiction and fantasy, if you want to board a ship you need to physically leave your ship and land on theirs. It used to be one would need to fly a small craft, land on a larger ship and find a way to breach their hull to get your crew inside, but the ever-inventive Devil's Fang have developed an innovative way to streamline this process: they created the Boarding Round.
A horrifying invention and the fabric of legends woven by men who survive an encounter with the Devil's Fang, the Boarding Round is a subway car sized shell the pirates will load into before being fired out of the broadside cannons into large ships they want to board. In order to ensure the survival of the crew inside, a Boarding Round consists of several key components illustrated above. They are:
A) A hull-breaching spearhead tip designed to pre-drill bulkhead and minimize entry hole expansion.
B) Spiraling force-wave emitters meant to soften and disrupt projected forcefields.
C) Four-side interior paneling, allowing the crew inside to exit the boarding round regardless of what angle it lands in.
D) Subway-style hand loops, for the comfort of the crew while in transit.
E) A thick outer shell protecting the crew cabin.
F) A layer of electro-reactive shaped charge plates, designed to blow outward through E) to allow crew to exit the round via C).
G) Known by the crew as "The Brakes", this section releases a rapid-expansion quick- hardening epoxy to seal up the entry hole behind a boarding round, preventing the vacuum of space from ruining such a grand entrance.
H) A stabilization ring meant to ensure the Boarding Round goes where it's pointed.
Once on board a ship the Devil's Fang will dig in, fight from deck to deck and work their way towards the bridge. Stories told by old starfarers say the Devil's Fang won't draw the blood of regular crew if they do not raise a weapon against their own. Their interest is captains, commanders and officers of rank, who are never spared. As their bounties and their reputation grew, men would tell tales of meeting the Coelacanth, of being boarded and being ordered to fight. The stories had gone around- if you don't raise a weapon they won't bring you harm, but their bounties are substantial and the reward and promotion for bagging the Devil's Fang are even more substantial- are the rumors even true? Is it worth not fighting back? Needless to say, the Devil's Fang meet resistance every time, but when they fight to the bridge, dispatch command and take over a ship, they always issue the men who fought them a choice: Join us of your own free will, return home to the scorn of your planet's courts or reload your guns and come retake your ship. The fates fill the sails of men with many winds, but enough have gone home, their safety guaranteed, that the rumors of the Devil's Fang have spread from one starport to the next.
The last and most crucial detail about the Coelacanth is the feature which has allowed it to return from hiding and bite the reaching hand of Quasar Galactic. Back on Titan Garden, a little thief plies her trade, a rumored associate of a mythical band of pirates. Mitsuko is the eyes and ears of the Coelacanth on Titan, and she'd stumbled into a friendship with the Red Raven Towing & Salvage Company. Amongst their ranks is a talented warp drive engineer, the serpentine Terran called Lydia. Lydia has a distributed network of brains that allows her to carry many abstract thoughts at once, and she used this aspect to develop the Pocket Drive, a piece of technology allowing a starship to access a theoretical subspace in between dimensional planes. Her notes are encrypted and her designs obtuse, she does not believe commercial distribution of Pocket Drive technology is good for the universe, meaning the only instance of a working Pocket Drive has, until recently, been on the Jackrabbit II. Mitsuko is a friend of Red Raven, but she is a thief and a pirate, and her crew needs a way to elude the whole Star Patrol if they're to fully return from their long hibernation.
Unbeknownst to the Red Raven crew, somewhere in the Outer Belt the enormous Coelacanth emerges from the inky void of space, seemingly from nowhere, taking a Neptunian Skyguard starship carrier by surprise. They'd been escorting a large Quasar Galactic research vessel, setting out to study the redirection of warp currents with the hope of creating a faster direct route from Neptune to Terra. This research would have a catastrophic impact on the worlds in between the two planets. The Coelacanth's cannons set the dark alight; this research is not fated to find its way back home to the Patriarch.
