Chapter 220: Ship Classes

Over two weeks passed in a flash. Under a relentless work schedule, several massive shipyards rose across Planet Kugrage, their sheer scale leaving the local population in complete awe.

At Skygnaw's command, the facilities—built in key resource hubs across various ruined cities—officially went operational.

Thick dark smoke billowed from towering smokestacks. Endless lines of heavy transport vehicles, each measuring over twelve meters long and three meters tall, rolled into the city centers laden with raw ore extracted from outlying mines, feeding directly into the central shipyards.

While the Mindborn had never developed advanced motorized warfare, that did not mean they lacked heavy utility vehicles.

The Round-Head Elephant Transport was the most iconic example of their terrestrial logistics.

Crude, oversized, and heavy—it embodied local engineering.

The vehicle drew its name from the largest land creature to ever roam Planet Kugrage, the round-head elephant.

Named for its bulbous skull, the species had grown scarce during the tribal era before facing complete extinction.

The reason was simple: the early tribes had hunted them to the last.

In those primitive times, clans fought daily over scarce territory. Starving populations had little reason to care about conservation or endangered status.

The early Mindborn held no high-minded ideals. In the end, every species on the planet was merely competing to survive under the harsh rules of nature.

As for modern concepts like environmental preservation or returning draft beasts to the western wilderness, those were luxuries born only after a society secured a steady food supply.

Throughout this period, Skygnaw remained thoroughly occupied.

After inspecting the shipyards, he began organizing technical schematics, categorizing various Cybertronian vessel designs from the archive.

According to his blueprint, setting aside super-heavy flagships like the Nemesis, the fleet's combat vessels were divided into five primary classes: cruisers, destroyers, frigates, troop transports, and light assault craft.

This structure was not invented on a whim, but adapted directly from tactical intelligence gathered during his interrogation of the Quintesson agent, Tridents.

The Quintessons represented an established spacefaring civilization. While their exact technological tier remained unclear, Skygnaw estimated they had not surpassed the third orbital classification.

Otherwise, they would never have been driven off Cybertron by Alpha Trion's early resistance movement.

Within two weeks, Skygnaw had laid out the schematics with absolute clarity.

Battleships served as fleet flagships, often functioning as floating command hubs.

While hull designs varied between spacefaring species, all battleships shared two core traits: immense scale and heavy planetary-strike armament.

Cruisers formed the backbone of any main fleet.

Capable of extended long-range deployments, cruisers featured balanced weapon arrays and heavy shields. In practice, they delivered the primary firepower behind the flagship.

Destroyers focused on point-defense and fleet mobility. Specialized in intercepting enemy fighters and reconnaissance craft, they possessed exceptional sub-light maneuverability.

Frigates served their literal function: screening the capital ships. When necessary, they were expected to intercept incoming torpedoes and absorb heavy fire to preserve the primary vessels.

They were the cheapest combat hulls to produce, though "cheap" remained a relative term compared to capital ships.

Equipped with localized jamming arrays and heavy defensive plating, frigates were deployed around the flagship during transit and battle to disrupt incoming strikes and block boarders.

Notably, a frigate carried only a single main cannon, leaving its offensive power minimal. It was, in essence, a pure defensive barrier.

Among these specialized roles, troop transports served the most singular purpose—heavy troop deployment.

The final category, Assault Craft, represented a hybrid between rapid-response ships and multi-role tactical units.

Primarily used in surprise strikes, they could carry strike teams while maintaining strong long-range bombardment capabilities. They were versatile, multi-role craft.

Their only drawback was a lack of specialized performance—trying to handle every role meant excelling at none.

Assault craft had several variations, including raiders, strike boats, boarding craft, and specialized reconnaissance vessels.

In size, the largest barely matched half the length of a frigate, while the smallest were smaller than a Decepticon armored troop carrier.

Frigates, being mass-produced consumables designed to take hits for capital ships, already had their material frames streamlined to the absolute limit.

Assault craft, at less than half that size, were structurally incapable of mounting heavy shield generators or spatial jump drives. They relied entirely on the main fleet for long-range transit.

Carried within capital ship launch bays and deployed only during active engagements, they functioned much like carrier-borne fighters.

This clear hierarchy of ship classes gave Skygnaw a structured blueprint to work with.

Drawing on concepts from his previous life, he viewed a Cybertronian fleet as an interstellar carrier strike group. One operated in deep space, the other on ocean waters, but the tactical principles remained identical.

"It was fortunate the Sharkborn fleet brought mostly fragile troop transports alongside their flagship, Abyssal Lord," Skygnaw mused. "Had they deployed a balanced fleet, taking them down without heavy losses would have been far more complicated..."

Tridents had clearly assumed the native population lacked spacefaring weaponry, deploying a heavy flagship surrounded by high-capacity, light-armored troop carriers.

Building a deep-space fleet was a resource-intensive endeavor, especially when manufacturing on a fleet-wide scale.

Skygnaw distributed the finished schematics to the shipyards, stationing engineering specialists from the Decepticon Aerial Corps to oversee production.

At times, he stepped onto the assembly line himself. As a Cybertronian warrior, scientist, and engineer combined into a single frame, his presence accelerated work significantly.

Thick smoke continued to billow from the shipyard smokestacks, turning the sky over Planet Kugrage into a permanent grey haze.

Even advanced technology relied on raw material processing at its core.

A month later, after endless adjustments, the first frigate cleared assembly.

As the hull lifted off the tarmac, the native workers—who had never seen a starship built from scratch—erupted into cheers.

"Look! We built it!" crewmen shouted to one another, as if injected with military combat stims.

Though the vessel's ownership and operational control had nothing to do with them, their enthusiasm remained unbothered.

In a sense, they had gained something valuable in return: access to future technical knowledge.

Days earlier, Skygnaw had promised Wala that before departing Planet Kugrage, he would grant the empire a limited set of ship-building blueprints.

Since the natives were now his vassal race, leaving them completely defenseless would reflect poorly on his standing.

More importantly, Planet Kugrage needed basic defensive capabilities to deter future Quintesson incursions. Skygnaw had not forgotten that beyond the Sharkborn, the Quintessons commanded Crocodileborn and Lizardborn fleets.

Given their endless greed, the Quintessons would inevitably send another expedition to reclaim lost territory once news of the failed invasion reached them.

It was only a matter of time.

Resource-rich worlds in deep space were finite; leaving a valuable world undefended invited immediate conquest.

When Wala received Skygnaw's verbal commitment days ago, the young Emperor had been ecstatic. Under his reign, the empire was finally reaching beyond its home sky toward the stars.

As the news spread, gratitude toward Skygnaw surged throughout the native population.

Though the blueprints Skygnaw selected were limited to basic second-tier technology, for the native civilization, they represented a massive leap forward.

Whether Cybertron had ever passed through a traditional technological progression remained a mystery to Skygnaw.

The Thirteen Primes had been unnaturally powerful entities.

While Primes like Alpha Trion and Solus Prime had systematically developed foundational technologies, the natural capabilities of Cybertronian frames often bypassed conventional technological hurdles entirely.

Skygnaw attributed this anomaly to the divine power of Primus. Cybertronians grew stronger by understanding their own mechanics, rendering standard evolutionary timelines irrelevant.

Another month passed, and the first destroyer cleared the docks to another wave of cheers.

By the fourth month, the Zelan Shipyard launched its first cruiser.

From that point on, production speed surged exponential growth.

Six months passed...

A year...

Two years...

During this period, Blackarachnia remained virtually absent from the shipyards. Neither Skygnaw nor the other Decepticons saw much of her.

She was focused entirely on her own project.

With Skygnaw's tacit approval, she had allowed her mechanical insects to feed freely across designated zones, aiming to cultivate a swarm of over ten thousand fully evolved units.

However, before her goal was fully realized, Skygnaw called a halt to the operation.

The reason was simple: the fleet was complete.

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