The first, and most notable of these, was the believe that combat small craft, such as assault shuttles and starfighters, would play a much larger role in future conflicts. (Needless to say, this quickly doomed the design when brought before most Admirals, who were former fleet hadns, not fighter pilots.) This is most evident in the design of the foremost sections of the hull. Nearly a full third of the ship's overall length is designed to serve as a huge series of hangers. These served to house the two full formations (six wings) of small craft carried by the Terminators. Chief among these are three full wings of TIEs, a wing of Skipray blastboats and a squadron of assault shuttles. Non-combat shuttles, landing barges, dropships and transports round out the total count of over 320 smaller vessels carried aboard the Terminator.
One of the more interesting features of these hangers is the fact that the TIE bays are at ninety degrees to the plane of the ship, facing directly "down". This feature allows the full compliment of 212 fighters to exit the hull in as little as two minutes. Unfortunately, even though there are safety barriers and realigned gravity generators in the catwalks to the fighters, many pilots freeze at very thought of looking out of the underside of thier ship from such a large area. Shuttle and transport bays are mounted along the rear wall in a much more conventinal manner.
The command bridge, instead of being located far to the rear of the ship, is instead mounted on the end of an arm, near the bow. While it is internally identical to the standard KDY bridge configuration, many observers find the location something of a surprise. The origional intent of the designers was that the placemnt of the bridge further front made for better visability, a claim that is open to much conjecture.
For ship-to-ship conflict, the Terminators carry (in addition to the fighters) 200 turbolaser positions, 110 heavy turbolasers, 80 ion cannons and a full 100 tractor beams. While this is less than half of the armemement of the Executor, it is still considerable, especially as the Terminator does most of it's fighting with starfighters and blastboats. For surface encounters, this design carries a garrison base, 30 AT-STs, 20 AT-ATs, and 12,000 ground troops, including at least two platoons of Spacetroopers. The engines provide comperable real and hyperspace performance to it's larger sibling, although the hull and shields are no where near as strong.
In the end, the Navy went with the 15 kilometer-long Executor-class, leaving the first two hulls sitting in the KDY/Gyndine yards. (Production had shifted to the Gyndine facility due to thier greater knowledge base concerning starfighters.) KDY made the desision to finish them, even after the commitment to the Executors. The Terminator would be finished about the same time as Executor and Aggressor, and faithfully followed the origional design. The second of these ships, the Liquidator, as finished a year later, and is recognizable by the bridge being mounted in the traditional Star Destoryer position on a KDY standard tower. Both of them have gone on to serve as sector command vessels, and have shown the "boil out" starfighter tactics to be of some value against the Rebellion's hit and fade attacks with starfighters.
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