UEX Maitreya

The following information has not been confirmed by Volition and is therefore not canon for the FreeSpace universe.

Saab shipyards

Description:

Blue Planet: War in Heaven Tech Description

Ok so you want an update? Brace yourself, it's a clusterfuck out there.

No, BULWARK never put me up to this. They've been silent since day one. Did I tell you I had to use my own leave time for this trip? I haven't seen my family in weeks.

The problem you know is the budget black hole - resources go in, nothing gets out. Where is it all going? We're funding paper crews, ships that don't exist. Entire frig- and crurons disappearing from FLEETNET. I asked for tracking help but MIDWINTER hasn't got back to me. I don't even know where she's based nowadays.

So I told you I followed the paper trail of Calder's white elephant all the way to Saab. Everything was legit. Saab shipyard received the Murugan hull and towed her away to Elis for scrap. After that it all gets fuzzy. Anyone who gets to Elis graveyard looking for answers gets turned away at the door. I don't think the admiral even knows what happened to his pet project.

So I went digging. I can't find anything on BULWARK, so does that rule out Fleet involvement? There must be someone here who knows what the fuck is going on. Cross referenced with FEDAYEEN but nothing came up. DARK CLOUD seems superficially involved but there's nothing specific anywhere. Maybe an offshoot Shivan project? Doesn't sound right though, they've never been interested in military resources.

And the headache is, this black hole needed a half-built battleship for some reason. It's got to be destroyer-scale. Any smaller and they'd just dig up one of the Purusha hulls in storage. No one's going to miss an old frigate.

Feel like I'm close to something. I'll be back at Europa in a couple days. Meet at Simak? We'll compare notes.

Blue Planet: Chanticleer Tech Description

The Maitreya is a highly classified project of the Federation's First Fleet, built on the mothballed spaceframe of the Murugan heavy frigate prototype. While heavily armored, its conventional armament is light, and it must rely on its escorts for protection. Preliminary data indicates that the vessel carries equipment enabling its main reactor to warp the fabric of subspace, similar to the Knossos portal discovered in Gamma Draconis. Its full capabilities are unknown. All other information concerning the Maitreya is classified level Psi.

Name Origin

The name Maitreya is derived from the Sanskrit word maitrī "loving-kindness", which is in turn derived from the noun mitra "friend". In the Buddhist Kalachakra teachings, Shambhala is ruled over by Maitreya, the future buddha.

Performance:

Statistics

Name	UEX Maitreya
Type	Experimental
Manufacturer	Classified
Yaw, Pitch, Roll	150.0, 150.0, 150.0 s
Max Velocity	25 ms-1
Hitpoints	120 000 pts
Length	2093 m

Veteran Comments

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The fact that the tech description reads "Meet at Simak" indicates that the message was written before the Fall of Jupiter, since Simak Station was destroyed in The Blade Itself standalone mission, which itself takes place just before the Fall of Jupiter. Also, given that the heavy foreshadowing indicates that this model is directly tied to Project Shambhala, and that it required a destroyer-sized hull, the implication is that Shambhala is intended to be mobile and jump-capable. Given that Shambhala is the Council of Elders' plan to win the war without sheer force of arms, it can be further implied that Shambhala is a mobile, jump-capable ship that utilizes Nagari to communicate, on some level, with a great many people at once.

The Maitreya makes its first appearance in Blue Planet: Chanticleer. As expected, it uses the Murugan hull, and is reasonably well armed with a number of anti-fighter weapons. Its core function is, apparently, to alter the structure of subspace nodes, essentially as a counterpoint to Centaur Station. Even with a Knossos-type device stabilizing the node, the Maitreya can disrupt the node's subspace vortex and make it impossible for ships to enter or exit Sol - thus trapping Steele's forces and cutting them off from other sources of resupply, putting the war on a more even footing. Unfortunately, this will likely not be enough to give the Federation a win over the GTVA invasion force.