Designed to be the first capital ship in service to the Interstellar Alliance, and the second
vessel to hybridise Minbari and Vorlon technologies, the Victory Class Destroyer is one of the
most powerful warships ever to see active service, and easily the most complex and expensive
project undertaken in the first decade of the Alliance’s existence.
Almost three thousand meters in length with a mass of 310 million metric tons, the Victory
Class is substantially larger than the mainstay destroyers employed by the Earth Alliance
and many of the other major powers, the ship’s frame is designed around its large primary
weapon, and its drive systems are placed to take full advantage of the advanced gravimetric
propulsion systems the vessel employs.
The Victory carries a large crew as standard in comfortable artificial gravity, a state
achieved using the same gravimetric technology found in the vessel’s engines, and the ship’s
bridge and auxiliary control centres are efficiently optimised to allow for complete functionality,
even when forced to operate with a small or depleted crew.
The Victory’s supplementary weapons complement consists of several nose-mounted Fusion Beam
Cannons, as well as an extensive pulse-turret defence grid and several interceptor arrays.
But none of these weapons come close to matching the destructive power of the Victory Class
Destroyer’s main gun, a huge ship-wide weapons system designed to channel energy from the
vessel’s engine nacelles through the entire body of the craft to be fired from the primary
fusion beam array at the Victory’s nose.
This weapon essentially channels the entirety of the ship’s power supply into an offensive
energy beam, and thus the Victory Class will be left without the ability to maneuver for
a full minute, and will even suffer a noticeable drop in shipboard gravity while the power
supply recovers, leaving the craft extremely vulnerable for a short time.
The Victory Class carries several squadrons of both Aurora and Thunderbolt Class Starfuries,
which it deploys using an innovative system of retracting mechanical arms dotted across
the vessel’s ventral hull, the Starfury Thunderbolts in particular represent the cutting
edge of combat fighter development and greatly expand the destroyer’s potency in combat.
In addition to these fighters the class also plays host to multiple Kestrel class Atmospheric
Shuttlecraft, providing a means of deploying planetary landing parties and of transferring
cargo and personnel to other vessels.
The Victory Class was originally conceived by President John Sheridan as a larger destroyer,
intended to supplement the White Star Corvettes already in use by the ISA whilst employing
the same hybrid technology.
The first two vessels of the class, the Victory and Excalibur, were assembled at the Valen’s
Eye Shipyards in the ISA-Held system of Chi Draconis, and by December of 2266 both vessels
were close to completion.
Unfortunately, the final stage of the two vessels construction was interrupted, as the
unfinished Destroyers were scrambled to respond to a full-scale Drakh invasion of Earth.
During the Battle the Victory was tragically lost, as Captain Leonard Anderson was forced
to sacrifice himself and his vessel in a kamikaze attack against a hostile Shadow Death Cloud,
and in the chaos of the battle, a surgical raid on the undefended Chi Draconis system
resulted in the destruction of the Valen’s Eye Shipyards, leaving the ISA Excalibur as
the only vessel of her class.
Though left without her sister ship, and with the construction of further Victory Class
Destroyers seriously delayed, the Excalibur nevertheless played a pivotal role in the
continuing Drakh conflict, and the subsequent eradication of the deadly Drakh Plague.
Given the impressive performance of the two Victory Class prototypes, especially under
the uncertain conditions of their first cruise, the continuation of the Victory line was unconditionally
approved, fulfilling President Sheridan’s hopes for a formidable heavy destroyer, and
a powerful symbol of the Interstellar Alliance.