Blog Tour: Day of Wrath by Anna Butler (Guest Post + Giveaway)
Designing the Gyrfalcon
One of the greatest joys of playing in a science fiction universe is that you can look at the limitations and constraints of this one, shrug, and toss them aside.
Well, to an extent. If you strive for plausibility in your writing—I don’t say realism, because it isn’t realistic to have ships going faster than the speed of light—then you toss aside those constraints only after due thought and consideration. You plan out how to get around them.
Some of the greatest fun I had came from thinking about the spacecraft in the series, everything from fast and mean personal fighter craft to the behemoth military dreadnought that is the Gyrfalcon. So, let’s take a look at her, because while she maybe doesn’t have a speaking part, she has far more than a walk-on, third-spear-carrier-from-the-left sort of r0le. She’s been in every book so far, so certainly counts as a major recurring character.
This is the ship that is home for Bennet and Flynn, my two MCs. This is where they live and work, and where they learned to love each other and where they had to give each other up. She’s their safe place, and their haven. And she’s also a place of torment, where they live in close proximity to each other but can’t be together.
Gyrfalcon is one of (originally) nine massive dreadnoughts, one for each of Albion’s provinces, and heads up the First Flotilla (one destroyer, six frigates, nine corvettes). A dreadnought is, as Bennet notes in Makepeace … a triumph of functional design. There were more graceful ships. There were more beautiful ships. But there weren't more brutally powerful ships anywhere in the Fleet. What you saw with a dreadnought was what you got: sheer strength and overwhelming might, and more clout to the cubic yard than seemed technologically feasible.
Here are some ‘facts’ about her:
- She has faster-than-light capability that utilises dropping out of normal space, and into ‘hyperspace’. This is grandly described in the dictionaries as “(in science fiction) a notional space–time continuum in which it is possible to travel faster than light.” In Shield, scanning and communications can be beamed through hyperspace with you (which is mightily convenient!) but it isn’t without its drawbacks. Ships can’t drop into hyperspace in an atmosphere or while they’re in the middle of a space battle (too much energy in flux)—that makes sure they just can’t jump away out of trouble. I mean, where would the drama be if they could all just scarper the minute the enemy shows up?
- Gyrfalcon’s a warship. She fights through a combination of directed energy beams(lasers), laser guided cannon that shoot missiles at her target and she’s really rather like an aircraft carrier, with 180 fighter craft—Hornets—she sends out in battle to harry the enemy. A Hornet is capable of faster-than-light, with the same restrictions on making the jump in atmospheres or where there’s lots of stray energy about. Bennet’s the boss of all the Hornets, with Flynn flying as his wingman.
