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Description
Following the mixed success of the Hellstorm ground-attack conventional fighter of 3060, TME Industries' management wished to further capitalize on the under-served conventional fighter market. Market analyses going into the Hellstorm suggested that strike missions were the only combat aspect of airpower left that archaic conventional turbine-driven aircraft could reasonably serve in; air dominance was the realm of the aerospace fighter and, lacking opposing air forces and air defenses on the same planet, suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) was also best left to aerospace fighters (or, in the Jihad, tactical orbital bombardment). In the modern battlespace, conventional fighters were essentially a defensive weapon with little use in contested airspace.

TEAM MELTA, as a general rule, took an almost perverse enjoyment out of setting conventional wisdom on its head. Usually, however, this required extensive applications of lostech and overtechnology. A certain subset of them--an almost heretical group known as The Cavemen--instead looked to the past, perhaps as part of the first inklings of the retrotech movement that got its memetic start with ComStar's inclusion of the MSK-5S Mackie in its Technical Readout: 3058 publication. The Cavemen, through an extensive reading of military history, rediscovered a concept that had died in the early spaceflight era and decided that it was an aggressively defensive mission that conventional turbine-powered fighters could perform: interception.

In the pre-spaceflight era, before nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles became the primary weapons by which strategic arsenals were measured, the strategic weapon was the intercontinental bomber. While the European portions of the Western and Communist alliances were adjacent, the strategic centers of each alliance--the United States and the Soviet Union, respectively--were on different continents and as such strikes between the two were dominated by the tyranny of range. Large, multi-engine bombers, developed to cross the extreme distances forced by the Pacific Ocean in World War II, were the only weapons of the period capable of meeting this tyranny. In modern terms, they would be considered militarized large fixed-wing support aircraft. Their range and endurance well exceeded those of primarily single-engine fighter aircraft, and so they would be forced to enter enemy airspace unescorted. This lead to predictable countermeasures: radar for detection and surface-to-air missiles for point defense around strategic targets. Generally, however, it was desired to intercept incoming bombers as far away from the homeland as possible, which informed the purpose of the interceptor.

While the term is still used today for certain types of aerospace fighters, such as the Mark 39-004 Voidseeker Interceptor unmanned aerospace fighter, and the roles they fulfill, this is mostly historical inertia similar to how the petrochemical-powered jet interceptors of the early spaceflight era were called "jet fighters." While some interceptors roughly resemble modern air superiority aircraft, their role and capabilities were quite different. Interceptors could basically be defined as 'missiles with men in them' as their mission was to, upon alert, get to bomber cruising altitude as quickly as possible and then engage the much slower bombers. Interceptors quickly became missile boats since primitive targeting systems could track the slow bombers and the bombers could always carry more guns than the interceptors could. Maneuverability was never a major concern for interceptors; they were not intended to establish air superiority. It was only later, when interceptors were pressed into traditional fighter roles and found wanting, that modern concepts of air superiority and air dominance fighters that blended speed and maneuverability reemerged in the jet age.

With this past as prologue, The Cavemen intended to use the lostech fabricators of Tinker's World to develop a 'fighter' that would not have looked out of place in the late pre-spaceflight era. Emphasizing local maintenance and repair capabilities, they eschewed modern standards in terms of large monolithic skins and structure in favor of small local skins riveted onto what were effectively sheet metal parts. Most of what would give the interceptor that would become the Blixt away as the result of modern engineering existed underneath its appearance, with regards to efficient placement of internal components, fully coordinated systems-of-systems, and a philosophy weighted towards designing for maintainability.

Overall, the Blixt's archaic looks came from its archaic mission. It was built around tandem turbine engines with a combined 160-rating mounted one above the other for fuselage aerodynamics: rather than wanting the fuselage flat to act as an extended wing for better maneuverability, the fuselage simply had to be area-ruled to minimize drag and let the Blixt go as fast as it could. These engines were fed from a single nose intake with a coaxial spike for managing the shock wave throughout the Blixt's various flight regimes. The basic swept wings were thin with supersonic airfoils and terminated in pods designed to prevent wingtip flutter, while pitch and roll control was maintained with a large T-tail. The use of supersonic airfoils meant that the Blixt had a high stall speed, meaning that it had a high landing speed and therefore required four large airbrakes stationed at the very aft of its fuselage. The thin wings were also mostly structure, making them very stiff by modern standards and carrying not much more than the rear landing gear. All of this added up to the Blixt being capable of Mach 2 at sea level under full emergency power, comparable to many light and medium aerospace fighters and much faster than equivalent conventional fighters. Indeed, The Cavemen selected the Blixt's mass of twenty tons as an optimum of the speed-payload curve.

On the subject of payload, it goes without saying that sixty percent of the Blixt was engine. A paltry ton of conventional armor covered it, a single ton of fuel ensured that its mission profile was straight up and straight down, and so only four tons remained for weapons and equipment. The factory versions of the Blixt put total emphasis on its straight-up-straight-down mission: the Blixt-0 carried a single fifteen-tube rocket launcher in each wingtip pod and a ten-tube rocket launcher in a chin blister. The Blixt-A carried three short-range missile racks of two tubes each in the same locations, all sharing a single ton of ammunition. The Blixt-B used the nose blister for a machine gun and half a ton of ammunition and put a single-shot five-tube long-range missile launcher in each wingtip. Endurance was not a selling point for any of these models. The Blixt-C was delivered empty and left for the customer to fill up as they wished with additional fuel tanks or better armor or whatever weapons they could get to fit. Unusually for TME Industries, the entire series could be licensed for manufacture offworld since they weren't considered to be worth the fabricator time required to fake riveting them together.

In the final reckoning, the Blixt was cost-effective only in terms of hardware. If one was willing, they could assemble an effectively expendable force of Blixts and fighter pilots and throw them en masse against an invading force. In terms of equivalent costs, ten Blixts could face off against even the lightest aerospace fighters, and entire wings against DropShips. Over time, however, personnel and maintenance costs for such large fleets became prohibitive so planets that did not immediately need their air forces left them to rust. This repeated in a short renaissance for the model during the Jihad, where a handful of worlds protected themselves with swarms of Blixts. This second wind lasted quite a bit longer than the first, since the Blixt finally came into its own when matched with an arsenal of four under-wing light Air-to-Air Arrow missiles.

Description
Following the mixed success of the Hellstorm ground-attack conventional fighter of 3060, TME Industries' management wished to further capitalize on the under-served conventional fighter market. Market analyses going into the Hellstorm suggested that strike missions were the only combat aspect of airpower left that archaic conventional turbine-driven aircraft could reasonably serve in; air dominance was the realm of the aerospace fighter and, lacking opposing air forces and air defenses on the same planet, suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) was also best left to aerospace fighters (or, in the Jihad, tactical orbital bombardment). In the modern battlespace, conventional fighters were essentially a defensive weapon with little use in contested airspace.

TEAM MELTA, as a general rule, took an almost perverse enjoyment out of setting conventional wisdom on its head. Usually, however, this required extensive applications of lostech and overtechnology. A certain subset of them--an almost heretical group known as The Cavemen--instead looked to the past, perhaps as part of the first inklings of the retrotech movement that got its memetic start with ComStar's inclusion of the MSK-5S Mackie in its Technical Readout: 3058 publication. The Cavemen, through an extensive reading of military history, rediscovered a concept that had died in the early spaceflight era and decided that it was an aggressively defensive mission that conventional turbine-powered fighters could perform: interception.

In the pre-spaceflight era, before nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles became the primary weapons by which strategic arsenals were measured, the strategic weapon was the intercontinental bomber. While the European portions of the Western and Communist alliances were adjacent, the strategic centers of each alliance--the United States and the Soviet Union, respectively--were on different continents and as such strikes between the two were dominated by the tyranny of range. Large, multi-engine bombers, developed to cross the extreme distances forced by the Pacific Ocean in World War II, were the only weapons of the period capable of meeting this tyranny. In modern terms, they would be considered militarized large fixed-wing support aircraft. Their range and endurance well exceeded those of primarily single-engine fighter aircraft, and so they would be forced to enter enemy airspace unescorted. This lead to predictable countermeasures: radar for detection and surface-to-air missiles for point defense around strategic targets. Generally, however, it was desired to intercept incoming bombers as far away from the homeland as possible, which informed the purpose of the interceptor.

While the term is still used today for certain types of aerospace fighters, such as the Mark 39-004 Voidseeker Interceptor unmanned aerospace fighter, and the roles they fulfill, this is mostly historical inertia similar to how the petrochemical-powered jet interceptors of the early spaceflight era were called "jet fighters." While some interceptors roughly resemble modern air superiority aircraft, their role and capabilities were quite different. Interceptors could basically be defined as 'missiles with men in them' as their mission was to, upon alert, get to bomber cruising altitude as quickly as possible and then engage the much slower bombers. Interceptors quickly became missile boats since primitive targeting systems could track the slow bombers and the bombers could always carry more guns than the interceptors could. Maneuverability was never a major concern for interceptors; they were not intended to establish air superiority. It was only later, when interceptors were pressed into traditional fighter roles and found wanting, that modern concepts of air superiority and air dominance fighters that blended speed and maneuverability reemerged in the jet age.

With this past as prologue, The Cavemen intended to use the lostech fabricators of Tinker's World to develop a 'fighter' that would not have looked out of place in the late pre-spaceflight era. Emphasizing local maintenance and repair capabilities, they eschewed modern standards in terms of large monolithic skins and structure in favor of small local skins riveted onto what were effectively sheet metal parts. Most of what would give the interceptor that would become the Blixt away as the result of modern engineering existed underneath its appearance, with regards to efficient placement of internal components, fully coordinated systems-of-systems, and a philosophy weighted towards designing for maintainability.

Overall, the Blixt's archaic looks came from its archaic mission. It was built around tandem turbine engines with a combined 160-rating mounted one above the other for fuselage aerodynamics: rather than wanting the fuselage flat to act as an extended wing for better maneuverability, the fuselage simply had to be area-ruled to minimize drag and let the Blixt go as fast as it could. These engines were fed from a single nose intake with a coaxial spike for managing the shock wave throughout the Blixt's various flight regimes. The basic swept wings were thin with supersonic airfoils and terminated in pods designed to prevent wingtip flutter, while pitch and roll control was maintained with a large T-tail. The use of supersonic airfoils meant that the Blixt had a high stall speed, meaning that it had a high landing speed and therefore required four large airbrakes stationed at the very aft of its fuselage. The thin wings were also mostly structure, making them very stiff by modern standards and carrying not much more than the rear landing gear. All of this added up to the Blixt being capable of Mach 2 at sea level under full emergency power, comparable to many light and medium aerospace fighters and much faster than equivalent conventional fighters. Indeed, The Cavemen selected the Blixt's mass of twenty tons as an optimum of the speed-payload curve.

On the subject of payload, it goes without saying that sixty percent of the Blixt was engine. A paltry ton of conventional armor covered it, a single ton of fuel ensured that its mission profile was straight up and straight down, and so only four tons remained for weapons and equipment. The factory versions of the Blixt put total emphasis on its straight-up-straight-down mission: the Blixt-0 carried a single fifteen-tube rocket launcher in each wingtip pod and a ten-tube rocket launcher in a chin blister. The Blixt-A carried three short-range missile racks of two tubes each in the same locations, all sharing a single ton of ammunition. The Blixt-B used the nose blister for a machine gun and half a ton of ammunition and put a single-shot five-tube long-range missile launcher in each wingtip. Endurance was not a selling point for any of these models. The Blixt-C was delivered empty and left for the customer to fill up as they wished with additional fuel tanks or better armor or whatever weapons they could get to fit. Unusually for TME Industries, the entire series could be licensed for manufacture offworld since they weren't considered to be worth the fabricator time required to fake riveting them together.

In the final reckoning, the Blixt was cost-effective only in terms of hardware. If one was willing, they could assemble an effectively expendable force of Blixts and fighter pilots and throw them en masse against an invading force. In terms of equivalent costs, ten Blixts could face off against even the lightest aerospace fighters, and entire wings against DropShips. Over time, however, personnel and maintenance costs for such large fleets became prohibitive so planets that did not immediately need their air forces left them to rust. This repeated in a short renaissance for the model during the Jihad, where a handful of worlds protected themselves with swarms of Blixts. This second wind lasted quite a bit longer than the first, since the Blixt finally came into its own when matched with an arsenal of four under-wing light Air-to-Air Arrow missiles.