u/Immediate-While1583

This was a class of ship that existed in the original series but was not included in the reboot. I personally quite liked the design and decided to do a take on it. When designing the ship, I aimed for it to be a cheaper alternative to the Dreadnought, a nice mid-level ship between the Patrol Cruisers and Dreadnoughts.

To do this I decided instead of the smaller triple barreled turrets usually mounted to the sides of these ships I would go for Dreadnought turrets, this would give the Heavy Cruiser a very similar firepower level to a dreadnought (if both ships are facing forward) add on the three large twin turrets and the Heavy Cruiser has around the same ish firepower as a Dreadnought, I tried to give a middle road advantage to the heavy cruiser without making the Dreadnought obsolete, gives the EDF a reason to build one ship over the other depending on the time. The Dreadnought, of course, boasts a stronger wave motion gun, better protection, and it can launch fighters, while the heavy cruiser doesn't have the same level of protection, its wave motion gun is weaker compared to the Dreadnought (but stronger than the Patrol cruisers) and she only has one hangar which can carry a very limited degree of aircraft, certainly not a full squadron of fighters. In the end, I had the ship be a neat fill-in for fleets, need the firepower of a dreadnought but cannot afford one? You build one of these, if you want more capabilities (aircraft squadron storage, stronger WMG, etc.); you don't build one of these.

For a name I landed upon "Meteor" I wanted a space themed neutral name for this ship, and Meteor seemed to fit, just as she is when I thought up of why the EDF would want one of these, she is cheaper than a Dreadnought in FTD (you can actually get Two Meteor class ships for the price of one Dreadnought in FTD) but of course, the ship is less protected than a Dreadnought and has a weaker WMG. Maneuverable, hard-hitting, fast & fairly cost-effective (by my standards anyway), Meteor is a neat alternative to the Dreadnought, while not being a replacement for it.

Wrapping up the Autonomous fleet, the Ajax class, while the Autonomous fleet in the show had around 49 vessels of this class to make up the Autonomous fleet, only 4-5 ships is needed for FTD. Gladiator makes up the armor and defense of the fleet while the Ajax class are the striking power of the fleet. With this ship done this is technically the last official earth ship from the reboot series that I needed to build, there is a ship past this that wasn't in the reboot (the heavy cruiser) that I will be building, but in terms of official ships that appeared in the reboot, Ajax was the last of them.

Took my From the Depths Yamato, did some very basic photo editing and made this, the background is drawn by me, Yamato had a few cosmetic alterations done for her to fit the scene, mostly related to lighting.

After several months of refits and rebuilds of older ships, I've at last caught up, and a new ship has been built. Introducing Gladiator. She is a surprisingly large ship (300 meters long, according to the 3199 program books, although she is larger in FTD like all the other ships I've made, Ajax being 180 meters long according to the same program book). Despite her size, she doesn't wield a lot of weapons, which, given her role as a command ship, commanding multiple Ajax class vessels, is perhaps not surprising.

A rather interesting gimmick she has is her Grenade Missile Launchers that pop up out of the hull. I was fully prepared for this system to not work, since the launchers would be firing missiles into each other because of the angle of the hull. However, instead, the missiles just passed through the other launcher, so everything worked out in the end.