Re: Hypothetical Liberator Stats

After recently watching the Blakes 7 repeats on Sky, here's what I can
remember.

The Liberator is armed with neutron cannons, either 3 or 4 depending on
whether the fourth middle and smaller prong is also a weapon. These seem
to be very devastating weapons with one blast destroying a typical
federation ship. They are all fixed forward firing weapons. 

For defences, there is a force wall which is switched on just before an
attack hits and then turned off afterwards as it seems to place an undue
strain on the energy banks.

The auto-regenerative circuits seem to be able to restore the ship from
almost any level of damage as long as they still remain active. The
perfect example of this was the recovery of the ship after single
handedly holding up an alien invasion fleet for a few hours until the
federation battle fleet arrived. The damage incurred was enough to
render life support inoperable and all the crew had to abandon ship, but
were picked up when the damage was fixed. Of course the exception to all
this was the funny liquid which fixed itself to the hull and eat through
the entire ship. After destroying the computer systems, the ship
eventually disintegrated once it's engines were engaged.

The Liberator was also the only ship (until the Scorpio fortuitously
turned up) that had teleport facilities. Thus making ship boarding and
planetary expeditions a great deal easier.

Federation ships had a lot less detail revealed about them, but they
seem to have either 1, 2 or 3 (depending on ship size) main weapons.
These where plasma bolt launchers, relatively low velocity weapons,
which in some episodes were outrun and in others outmanoeuvered.

Weapons fire generally is very draining on a ship's energy banks.
Federation ships seemed able to fire off a half-dozen or so shots before
having to recharge. The Liberator was similar but usually managed more
shots, because it was advanced alien technology or some other PSB.

On a final note regarding FTL. In the Blake universe, ships that can
exceed the speed of light do it by a method called time distort. This is
never adequately explained, however they still remain in the same
physical universe and can engage in combat with ships moving below light
speed.

As I'm just starting to watch series 4 (ie after the destruction of the
Liberator), maybe I can get some info on the successor ship - the
Scorpio if anyone's interested.

David Bottomley