Why The Royal Marines Don't Field Fighter Craft

In the original module there were no fighters in the Royal Marine order of battle. The reason that was had nothing to do with any sort of military decision but that the writers needed a small tough scout ship craft that was ideal for a small group or team and so we got the assault scout which is a much beloved ship, I believe.

I wanted to play the Warriors of White Light module but since we’ve all played or read it I felt that it might not be very interesting. Instead I proposed to attempt to capture the flavor of the original while being original moving the setting 100 years into the future and use the published modules as history. Without even considering the issue of fighter craft I just updated the Royal Marine order of battle. Using the ships that were on order in the original module I designated them as replacements for older hulls plus invented a few new names but basically left the order of battle identical to the original module. However a prospective player had an interesting character concept that involved having a family member that had been a fighter pilot and I started asking myself why the Royal Marines don’t have fighters.

The answer is they did; the Raptor Squadron. It was extremely popular but not as versatile as assault scouts. Initially the Royal Marines relegated Raptor Squadron to anti-piracy and outer system patrol due to their inability to board and inspect merchant ships. They were extremely effective in anti piracy but long patrols in the outer system lead to crew fatigue. It was judged that the fighters weren’t fully suitable to the mission of the Royal Marines and yet they persisted in the order of battle as they were new and still being paid for. Eventually there was a push to use them in support of Space Fleet missions (and thus get the UPF to pay for them) but deploying them out system was a logistics nightmare without a carrier. The Royal Marines improvise by attaching heavy shuttles and latter a confiscated freighter christened the Pelican. However the final demise of Clarion’s fighter program came in a moment reminiscent of desperate last stands from the annals of history from places like the Alamo and Talos IV.

The Raptor Squadron saw action first in White Light System against pirates and one major sathar incursion. They were credited with the destruction of a sathar destroyer.

Deployed with Space Fleet to the Dramune System they were instrumental to the police action at Outer Reach. The Royal Marine’s experience with this deployment led to a brief discussion of acquiring a carrier for the squadron but the compromise measure commissioning a confiscated freighter as a tender was the result.

In the Liberty System, also known as FS 30, (see module SFKH 4) they were stationed to both support the fledgling system defense militia of the Mhemne and to be a training cadre. Their efforts met with mixed results there as the Raptor Squadron was a bit sensitive to the issue of whether fighters were a suitable militia weapons platform and the Mhemne were unsuited, physiologically, to fighter operations (see the details of the module) as they pass out during high G maneuvers. The pilots of the Raptor Squadron were understandably proud of their craft, the squadron and their accomplishments but the Mhemne leadership pushed for their reassignment requesting larger ships for training their fledgling navy. Before the squadron could be reassigned they took on two sathar carriers in a desperate suicidal last stand. They stopped a worm incursion but the squadron was largely decimated.

It was decided to not replace its losses and funds were diverted toward the purchase of War Hawk and eventually Nightingale. A handful surviving of Raptor fighters were stripped of weapons and fuel and stored away in stasis against a future need. One is on display next to the Osprey Museum.