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This article, "Urshanabi", is related to a game.
It may or may not be an official, but should be considered non-canon until indcated otherwise.

UNN Urshanabi was a battleship of unknown classification in the United Nations Navy (UNN). In 2347 the ship was attacked and destroyed by pirates.[1]

Overview[]

Design details[]

Usrhanabi is a relatively conventional design, by UNN standards. Unlike vessels such as the Leonidas-class, Truman-class, and escort ships, the ship is not covered in add-on modules - instead displaying clean two-way symmetry all the way down its central axis. The hull is mostly octoganal, with two broad "shoulders" protruding from amidships to give the vessel a distinctive silhouette. The vessel has eight Epstein Drives for propulsion.

Armaments[]

Urshanabi is relatively well-armed, boasting at least 26 PDCs mounted across the vessel's centre and providing coverage of all angles of fire. These are supplemented by 4-8 railgun turrets, with two mounted on the dorsal surface towards the prow, and two mounted just above the Epstein Drives. The railguns are much smaller than any other battleship-grade railguns, and instead more comparable to the V-14 'Stilleto' light railguns found on the Scirocco-class assault cruiser. While the ship's ventral surface has never been seen in detail, these weapons are presumably mirrored on that side, too.[Notes 1]

In addition to the ship's kinetic weapons, Urshanabi's crew manifest is noted to have Torpedoes' Mates, indicating that the vessel is armed with an unknown number of torpedo silos.[2]

Service history[]

In 2347 the scavenger ship Artemis arrived at the wreckage and several crew boarded looking for salvage to steal.

Production notes[]

Urshanabi is misidentified in The Expanse: A Telltale Series as a Leonidas-class battleship in several codex logs found throughout Archer's Paradox. This is reinforced in an audio log left by Avasarala in which she refers to the vessel as a "battleship"; though countered by a throwaway statement by Drummer in which she refers to the ship as a "UNN frigate".

However, despite this misattribution, the vessel's size and listed crew counts do indicate that it is a capital warship among the likes of the aforementioned Leonidas-class. Using the PDC mountings and airlocks as a rough guide, a scale comparison can be made with a Corvette-class light frigate (46m in length), which would appear to put Urshanabi in a rough ballpark of around 300-320 metres in length - this is almost directly between the Leonidas (270m) and Truman-class battleships (376m). The vessel is also noted in-game to have been operating with a skeleton crew of only 67 - a crew count that still dwarfs those of other noncapital vessels.[2]

In-game, the ship's design was the product of short deadlines and production cycles; the original prototype for the game had the interior built according to the needs of gameplay, with the ship modelled around it. Deck 9 Games art director Anthony Jones did the initial round of kitbash concepts, inspired by the Truman-class from the show, before handing those off to environment lead Tommy Spampinato for cleanup and initial in-game placement. Environment artist James Campbell then took the ship to final completion.[3][4]

Gallery[]

Notes[]

  1. Due to the restrictions of real-time game art, the model for Urshanabi does not have any weapons placed on the ventral surface of the vessel, as this is a part of the ship never seen by the player in-game. This section presumes that the distribution of weapons seen on the ship is consistent, and mirrored, underneath the ship as with the other details found on it.

References

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