United Sol Drone Carrier

The Nikola Tesla-Class drone carrier became a staple of core world fleets following its introduction in the mid 2300s.

This render represents a change in approach when it comes to ship design. I downloaded the extremely accurate space combat game Children of a Dead Earth (highly recommend, by the way), and tried to adapt its ship designs. Unfortunately, the game only has solid-core nuclear-thermal rocket engines, something I replaced in this render. 

The Nikola Tesla-Class is a development by United Sol, the main power player in the core worlds, composing both the Solar System as well as several nearby systems. While maintaining a policy of peace, United Sol has an astropolitical counterweight in the form of the Castor Moving Group, a relatively recent alliance of nearby polities intended to resist political domination by Sol. This led to a multi-century cold war between two arrays of sophont AIs, each with their own policy goals and broader objectives. The Nikola Tesla-Class was a further development on the part of United Sol, able to carry a diverse range of drones and long-range missiles. 

While lightly armed, the drone carrier's main advantage, other than its drone compliment, is its adaptability. Using nine closed-cycle gas core NTRs, it can be converted to use a variety of working fluids, and can even be launched from the surface of a celestial body using the rear-mounted docking ring, although this requires quite a large launch vehicle. In addition, its powerful sensor array can track contacts in a variety of light frequencies, and can be configured according to a given mission's requirements.

Although created almost three centuries before the present, variations on the original frame continue in service into the 2600s.