But that, Clapp had pointed out, was also the primary tactical advantage of the LAC. It was just that because it weighed in at thirty or forty thousand tons, people didn’t really think of it that way. Even those who’d grasped the tactical reality intellectually hadn’t done the same thing on a deep, emotional level. And so they’d continued to think in terms of standoff engagement ranges, sophisticated shipboard systems, and all the other elements which made a LAC a miniaturized version of larger, vastly more capable hyper-capable ships.

Mitchell Clapp had begun his own design process by going back to a blank piece of paper. Rather than designing a starship in miniature, he’d seen it as an opportunity to design a pinnace on the macro scale. He’d ruthlessly stripped out everything that wasn’t absolutely essential to the combat role as he visualized it, and along the way he’d discovered it was possible to save a truly amazing amount of tonnage.

He’d started out by accepting a life support endurance of only ninety-six hours rather than the weeks and months which most LAC designers insisted upon. Next, he’d eliminated all energy armament, aside from an extremely austere outfit of point defense laser clusters. It was pretty clear to NavInt that the Manties had adopted radical innovations to provide the energy supply their new LACs required. Those EW systems had to be energy hogs, and the humongous graser they’d wrapped at least one of their LAC classes around was even worse. NavInt’s best current guess was that they’d gone to some sort of advanced fission plant with enormously improved and/or enlarged superconductor capacitor rings to manage their energy budget. They’d also done something distinctly unnatural with their beta nodes to produce impeller wedges of such power without completely unacceptable tonnage demands. Again, all of those were things Haven would be unable to match for years to come, but by ruthlessly suppressing the energy armament and accepting such a vast decrease in life support—and by eliminating over half of the triple-redundancy damage control and repair systems routinely designed into “real” warships—Clapp had managed to produce a LAC hull which came amazingly close to matching the performance of the Manties’ designs. Its less efficient inertial compensator meant its maximum acceleration rate was more sluggish, but it was actually a bit more nimble and maneuverable than the observational data suggested the Manty LACs were.

Of course, it had also been effectively unarmed compared to the Manticoran designs, but that was the point at which Clapp had recruited others to his project. In the absence of energy weapons, the Cimeterre carried a pure missile armament, and the R&D teams had made enormous advances in marrying reverse-engineered Solarian technology with their own indigenous design concepts. The missiles they’d come up with, like the LACs which would carry them, weren’t up to Manticoran standards, but they were much, much better than anything any previous Havenite LAC had ever boasted. Unless NavInt was entirely wrong about the performance parameters of the Manticoran weapons, the Cimeterre’s birds could approximately match their range and acceleration in a package which was only a very little larger. Once again, sacrifices had had to be made to cram that performance into something the Republic could produce, and in this instance that something had been the sophisticated seeking systems and penetration aids built into the Manticoran missiles. But when Clapp and his colleagues were done, they’d produced a ship which was faster on the helm, had almost as good an acceleration rate, and was armed with weapons which were almost as long-ranged as anything the Manticorans had yet demonstrated.