Torpedo Sphere

The Empress Teta Torpedo Sphere in orbit above Aurora Prime

The Torpedo Sphere (TS), as excerpted from the Imperial Sourcebook; Greg Gorden; West End Games; June, 1994; pp. 58-59).

The Torpedo Sphere, a dedicated siege platform, is designed to accomplish one mission - to knock out a planet's shields.  Planetary shields, whether full or partial, protect a world from orbital bombardment.  It takes a lot of troops to assault a planet.  It is easier and far less expensive to simply pound a planet into submission with the weapons of a Star Destroyer. But planetary shields prevent this.

The Torpedo Sphere is a miniature Death Star, covered with thousands of dedicated energy receptors (DERs) designed to analyze shield emissions.  Planetary shields are never uniformly even.   They experience power anomalies and energy fluctuations just like other mechanical devices.  The Torpedo Sphere parks in orbit around a planet and trains its DERs upon the world to search for weak points in the shielding.  These weak points rarely exceed more than a 20 percent power drop, but that is enough for the Torpedo Sphere to bring down the shields.

The Sphere contains 500 proton torpedo tubes arranged in an inverted conical formation.  Surrounding these tubes are 10 heavy turbolaser batteries.  The actual destruction of a planet's shields is simple. The Torpedo Sphere arrives and analyzes the shields.  It finds both the weak points and the location of the planet-bound shield generators.  The Sphere then fires a salvo of torpedoes that knock a hole in the shield (at a weak point), followed by blasts from the turbolasers to destroy the generators.  Then the bombardment of the planet can begin.

That is the quick version. In reality, it takes almost a hundred heavy weapons technicians to coordinate the tube launches.  The target area rarely exceeds a six meter square.  The hole this produces is actually a power surge that only lasts a few milliseconds.  If the turbolasers have not made their shots in this time, the process must start all over again.

The most difficult part of the entire process is determining exactly where the shield generators lie.  Sensors can not penetrate full planetary shields, so the crew of the Sphere must study the power waves within the shield to determine where the initial power is coming from.

There are only six Torpedo Spheres currently in service. They perform only one function, but it is an important one in these times of open rebellion.

Craft: Loronor's Torpedo Sphere
Type: Dedicated siege platform
Length: 1,900 meters
Crew: 61,245, gunners: 2,030, skeleton: 20,415
Passengers: 8,540 (troops)
Cargo Capacity: 3.8 million tons
Consumables: 4 years
Weapons:

• 10 Turbolaser Batteries
• 500 Proton Torpedo Tubes

Emperor's Hammer Members desiring more specific information on the capabilities of each of the Emperor's Hammer capital ships should review the Fleet Manual.