Earth Alliance Chimera Class Large Cruiser (EAS Capetown pictured) Chimera Class History The Chimera Class Large Cruiser was an EA attempt to build a ship out of spare parts. During the Earth-Minbari War, numerous Hyperion class cruisers and Nova class dreadnoughts would make it out of battle, but were so badly damaged that they were put aside to be repaired later, when wartime ship production let up. Unfortunately for the EA, the faster they produced ships, the faster the Minbari destroyed them. One EA engineer, on his way to his daily building duties at the Alpha Centauri Fleet Yards, noticed that quite a few of the mothballed Hyperions had only heavily damaged engineering sections. He also noticed that the aft ends of many Novas were more or less intact. He proposed that a new type of cruiser be built off of these discarded ships. Using the forward part of the Hyperion Class (forward the first engineering "block"), coupled with the aft third of a Nova, the Chimera Class Large Cruiser was born. The ship, on paper at least, was impressive. Six Mk-I interceptors, 4 SPBs, 2 MPCs, and 4 of the Nova's LPA's rounded out the Alpha model's weapons array. A flight of fighters provided the ship with adequate fighter protection. With a Nova reactor, it was thought that there would be ample power to keep the ship in combat. It proved less than satisfactory. Of the 47 built, only 15 survived the EM war. Tactics used during the War was blamed for this. The Beta model replaced the LPA's with Heavy LPA's. The reactor could barely handle the added power requirements, and only 8 were refit before the Earth Civil War. Chimeras fought on both sides, though the EA's Chimeras were mainly used as Colony Guard vessels at the smaller, outlying colonies. By the time of the civil war, 12 were in service, 4 for Clark, 3 defected to Sheridan, 2 were uninvolved, the rest served in colony defense. The entire class was decommissioned in late 2263, as more Omega class ships were built, allowing the Hyperion Monitor Cruiser to take over Colony Guard. The origional inpisration for this ship was Rick Lamoreaux's Hydra class Gunship. I saw this ship, which was made for the now defunct The Babylon Project: Earthforce Sourcebook's modified Full Thrust ship combat system. I had Rick's old SCS on my hard drive for a while, and decided to build a mini. The SCS image was corrupted at the bottom, so I lost the creator's name and contact info. Fortunately, late last year, he contacted me. I can now give full credit to him and point you to his site, which also has a Narn and Brakiri design, though not with a detailed picture as the Hydra was. The name change from Hydra to Chimera came from someone (who's e-mail I've since lost) who pointed out that the Hydra was an animal in Greek Mythos where if you cut off a head, two more would grow back, while the Chimera was an animal composed of various parts of other animals. The link to Rick TBP: EFSB page is as follows: Rick Lamoreaux's Babylon Project Support Pages Rick has since moved out of the B5 universe, concentrating on other realms that need a former EA officer's attention. Here's the B5W conversions that I came up with. I made a third variant, really only a one-of ship called the EAS Hydra, which is what the class was named origionally. Chimera Class (Alpha Model) SCS Chimera Class (Beta Model) SCS Chimera Class (Gamma Model) SCS