Dusk Sword: Overview

The premier air superiority fighter of GDS, the Dusk Sword is often rightfully hailed as the pinnacle of an Aeronautical Legion pilot’s career. Utilizing the most advanced hardware, software, sensors and armaments available to the GDS air force, the rumored presence of a Dusk Sword is often enough to cause any opponent to ground their aircraft indefinitely.
Of note, the Dusk Sword is one of the few GDS aircraft that doesn’t possess VTOL capabilities.

Dusk Swords are my absolute pride, and the greatest representation of everything the Aeronautical Legion stands for. _{You were told to write up an overview. What you’ve submitted below is a damn novel. – Hansuke}

When I was first appointed as the first chief officer of the Aeronautical Legion, my immediate concern was addressing our air superiority issues. I could have an entire legion at my command, but it meant fuck all if everyone was stuck on the ground.
At the time of my promotion we were fielding a rather… improvised air force, if I’m being charitable. Our fighters were retired ASF-55 frames we’d gotten at a discount from the Unified Empire, and at least 60% of their service life with us was spent in a hangar being resuscitated back to life by overworked maintenance legionnaires. I’d spent my initial years in GDS piloting one of those airborne rust buckets, and I can fully attest to the fact that the only thing keeping them in the air was obstinance and numerous rolls of tape. I can distinctly remember whenever we’d get back from a mission we’d mark another stamp on the hull, since we found managing a safe landing a far greater achievement than scoring a kill.

That isn’t to say anything of our transports, “bombers”, and absolutely prehistoric combat choppers we were using as gunships. As a new legionnaire reading this, be thankful you’ve never had to endure sitting in a T-31 “Jacobs Glider” cargo hauler as your bones get shaken out of your body anytime the pilot went over 200 km/h. You’d swear you were in the middle of re-entry from orbit, but no, that’s just how the goddamn thing sounded anytime you wanted to go just barely fast enough to stay in the air. Eventually it became unofficial procedure to take chaps along for the ride anytime we had to use a T-31, because we figured God would be less likely to drop us out of the sky if one of His own was there.
Seeing as I had a lot of work ahead of me, I figured it’d be best to start at the most core function of our legion.

For the initial design meetings, we laid out the key features a GDS air superiority fighter should possess:

· Supersonic flight

· Super maneuverability

· Air to air capabilities

• Countermeasures

· Fighter to fighter links

· Fighter to intel links

· Extended operational range and operational ceiling

· Above average armor

· No glass canopy, but an armored, sealed one that used zero latency video to project the outside view into the cockpit’s interior

· Two pilots, one handling controls, one handling systems

That’s all high level stuff, smaller scope features like ejection seats that don’t snap the pilot’s neck and all that are handled further down the line.
Before we even began talking about engines, powerplants, armaments and other features, we had to begin by figuring out the materials we’d be using in the hull. At the time, most aircraft were using hulls created with aluminum alloys, reinforced polymers, and titanium. For general use that’s perfectly fine, but a supersonic, super maneuverable combat aircraft is going to run into immediate issues. Either the hull will heat up and warp (or even melt) at high speeds due to air friction, or it’ll snap like a celery stick the moment you start pulling too many G’s.
Figure out the main material, we can figure out the rest.

Our engineers went over to the Science Legion R&D department for materials and gave them an outline of what we were trying to accomplish. We’d only recently discovered how to pull Allog from Chaff, so of course they immediately jumped to that due to the low cost and durability. I wasn’t exactly convinced with entrusting my legion’s lives to the physical properties of a metal we barely had any data on, but they said that mixing it in with some other material would do the job. Allegedly.
A few weeks of waiting later and we get a report back on what the materials lab has come up with.
It read “Jesus, this is a tough one.” and nothing else.
I brought this up with Acris, who said “The report isn’t incorrect.” and I immediately knew that I was in for a rough time. Two months after beginning the Dusk Sword project I was asked for an update on our progress, and we hadn’t even nailed down the materials that’d be used in the hull, much less anything else.
So I sent back “Jesus, this is a tough one.” and wouldn’t you fucking know it, when I go with the flow I get a sudden summons to Iza’s office all the way over at Frostfall to explain to her and Hansuke in painstaking detail what I meant by that.

Another bit of waiting later, with numerous personal visits to the materials lab with boxes of doughnuts and coffee, we finally had something worth looking into.
The material was lightweight, moderately challenging to work with, insulated against heat extremely well, could handle temperatures far below zero, and still possessed some measure of flexibility. It wasn’t on par with Zephatun in terms of protection, but it was certainly close to it. They ended up calling it Maelite, which I’m almost damn certain was named after one of the engineer’s tabletop game characters, but it did everything we needed. With the decision to go forward with Maelite, titanium, and then sparse Zephatun in key areas, we could get started with the rest.

To ensure we could get this completed in an efficient manner, and ensure I wouldn’t get thrown through Iza’s office window due to another delay, the work was divided up among different special operations units across the Science, Mechanical and Aeronautical legions.

The Forge Priests were redirected from Glacier’s construction to Gracepoint Mountain to work on construction of the Dusk Sword’s hull, structure and mechanical systems. It took them about a week and cost me every single favor I had.

Cormorant Works were still in their early days, so the Dusk Sword’s engines and powerplants were engineered and fabricated by them as one of their first major projects. This is the beginning of their breakthroughs when it came to reaching absurdly high Mach speeds without endangering the aircraft or the crew.

While it’s outside their normal wheelhouse, I requested the help of the Shockwave Evangelicals to work on the Dusk Sword’s armaments. They had to be temporarily redirected from Glacier’s construction as well, and I had to ensure my door was barricaded every night so that Acris wouldn’t strangle me in my sleep.

The operational electronics, software, HUD, and other related systems were handled by the Aug Skulls and Conduit squadrons from the Science Legion. Implementation was done by the Mechanical Legion squadron Harrock’s greasers.

Countermeasures, both hardware and software, was handled by the Intelligence Legion, and I’ve been explicitly forbidden from mentioning the ones they sent to take care of all that. I once asked them how the countermeasures work, and they replied with “Why do you need to know that?” in a tone that suggested I stop digging my own grave.

All the test flights, input on capabilities, and other small nuances were handled by the War Eagles test pilots from our legion. Before anyone says “so you guys took the easy part” let me make it very clear that the job of a test pilot is to buckle into a ballistic missile with a steering wheel, make that missile go as fast as possible, and then land the missile. When asked how to land the missile, the designers usually reply with “That’s what you’re here to figure out”.

During a very early stage, we had a barebones prototype that had a hull, engines, rudimentary electronics and a powerplant. We had a test pilot take it up to 20km, do a few laps around the perimeter, and then see how it handled 6 Gs. That was the day we learned that:

1. The engines had an incredibly rare issue where, once inverted, they cut off at 6 Gs.

2. You can land a Dusk Sword by gliding it in.

3. The landing gear does not take kindly to cutting a path through a series of trees.

Our pilot had to be cut out of the seat after he had landed, but that’s exactly why we do test flights. Cormorant Works had the issue fixed within a few days and we got back on track. Before long we were loading it down with simulated missiles to test the handling with a full armament, checking on its detection profile at different elevations, and pushing it as far as we could manage. We wanted to try training dogfights with the Dusk Sword versus the ASF-55s we had at the time, but we felt that was a good way to end up with dead pilots when the ASF-55s disintegrated halfway through. They’re like that worthless cousin everyone has, where anytime you need them to put in some form of effort they just immediately crumble like a toothpick bridge.

As a company we had never engineered or manufactured any kind of aircraft before the Dusk Sword, so to summarize other events of note:

· The ejection seats worked too well, and during a test it shot a pair of mannequins up 15km.

· We all had a collective lapse in judgement and tested out the vulcan cannons at Mach 10.

· The missile targeting system successfully locked onto the jet itself.

· Our active countermeasures locked onto a commercial airliner that was on the edge of our airspace. Once we’d overridden it before anything could happen, everyone in the ops room dry heaved so hard we nearly puked up our boots.

· Thanks to one of my bonehead test pilots, we discovered the actual operational ceiling.

· The DFD system worked so spectacularly that we detected six Vanguards shamming by a lake in the woods of Gracepoint Mountain. We could even estimate their BAC due based on the number of beer cans surrounding them.

· The DFD system worked so well it nearly overloaded the power plant and had to be tuned down.

Week by week we integrated new systems, performed test flights, and tuned everything until we had our first fully assembled Dusk Sword. Or at least the first version of it as we retrofit new tech onto our aircraft as it comes out, such as Aeroprene Thread ports and other stuff that gets me a threatening message from the Intelligence Legion anytime I mention it.
Now that we’d verified it worked, we could start trials on it before beginning mass production. The issue we had was that this was meant to be an air superiority fighter, so what exactly could we test it against? I wasn’t exactly enthused about claiming it was ready for deployment until I was able to verify it would stand up in near-peer warfare.

One idea was to build a second Dusk Sword and have the pilots run dogfights on each other, but I was hesitant to sink that much funding into it until we could be absolutely sure there were no issues with the base design. As luck would have it, the perfect opportunity presented itself when GDS was approached to provide a screening force for an upcoming invasion.

A screening force contract using our rickety ass ASF-55s was only ever undertaken if the Intelligence Legion could confirm the enemy had extremely weak air capabilities. When I requested a report for this contract I was informed that the opposing country had four relatively modern fighter jets, all of which were guaranteed to intercept our potential client’s air support.
After checking with my best pilots, I confirmed with Iza that we could handle it with the prototype Dusk Sword. Admittedly that was one fucking hard sell to convince her that sending in a single, prototype fighter against four opponents wasn’t going to end with two dead pilots. When the client asked how large of a force we’d send, I believe the answer given was “Large enough”.

Day of the invasion I found myself sitting in an operations center at Gracepoint Mountain with the other primary officers as the Dusk Sword took off from the runway to head towards the operational theater. Our pilots kicked it up to Mach 20 and reached the client’s air force within a handful of minutes, and then after confirming their presence they pulled up and out of sight. The barrage of “Where the fuck is the rest of your screening force?!” messages from the client’s commanders was funny enough to keep me from getting an ulcer due to stress.
Ten minutes after crossing into enemy airspace, the Dusk Sword’s DFD picked up four enemy fighters taking off from an airbase and moving in to engage. And not a single one of them even knew the Dusk Sword was there.

The moment the enemy got into formation the Dusk Sword gunned it forward, dropped down behind them, and fired four Inferno-class “Sick Arrow” plasmatic missiles right up their asses. The ground forces below were likely picking ash out of their uniforms for the next week. We were afraid that due to firing missiles, any AA defenses would lock on immediately, but the countermeasures ensured that never happened. Every time enemy sensors would try to get a hold on it, the Dusk Sword’s automated defense would… ensure that didn’t happen in a highly classified and highly effective manner. Within seconds, the stealth capabilities once again ensured it was invisible in all ways but direct line of sight.

After remaining in a holding pattern for another hour to verify no other threats were on the way, our prototype Dusk Sword returned to base and we had ourselves a resoundingly successful first trial. I’d also like to point out that we brought home all the profits from the contract with the absolute bare minimum of operational costs deducted from the total. From there we made final adjustments, sent it off to Fabrication, and within a matter of years had an air force I couldn’t be prouder of.

If I had to summarize the Dusk Sword, it would be this:
The most advanced fighter jet fielded by another military force is the ASF-60 “Sun Strike” from the Unified Empire. To date, the ASF-60 currently has 942 confirmed air to air kills, the highest of any established nation.

We once fielded a Dusk Sword against them.
They backed down.

-FrW Azan Kinrados