{tabs Ref Cat 6-Z295 FRIGATE. The genenc term for the largest spaceships which coutd land and lift off m one piece from a planetary surface Although common usage makes it appear that "frigate" means one sort of spaceship, there were at least several hundred, perhaps as many as a thousand, different designs which were all referred to by this single term, the factor common to all bemg mass While most Houses, Major and Minor alike, owned a few troop earners and the nchest of the Major Houses had more specialized cargo and combat spaceships, it was the frigate which was the true workhorse of all the House fleets One of the more popular frigate designs was the steamship," in which a fusion plant heated a reaction mass usually water but sometimes ammonia or some other light compound Various heat exchange techniques utilizing plasma fluxes and electromagnetic fields made the system reasonably efficient, and it was cheap to maintain The same sort of energy fields around the launching pad absorbed much of the initial blast so that the major environmental problem was noise as the ship rose above the port A second widely used design was the "brat," which exploded small fission bombs under an ablative plate at its base It was faster, more efficient, and lifted more pay-load than the steamship, but it was also much more expensive and left much short-term radioactivity in its wake Moht efficient of all was the "torch," whose exhaust was plasma, but ruling Houses were often reluctant to allow what amounted to giant heat cannons to come and go overhead Because of the Guild monopoly, no frigate was capable of trans light operation In interstellar transit, frigates were mere cargo In the confines of a planetary system, however, the frigate was dominant No other class of ship was so flexible, with so favorable a combination of size speed, and surface accessibility Obviously no single frigate could be wholly representative, but one that is broadly illustrative was Annock the personal spaceship ol the Padishah bmperor Comn XVIII (r 6874-6892* Surely one of the largest frigates ever built Antiock massed well over nine hundred thousand tonnes and was four hundred and eleven meters in length Its torch engine gave it a maximum launch acceleration of approximately seven standard g's 258 Comn, an aggressive scion of an aggres sive family, intended Antwck for combat and planetary bombardment It had storage for seven hundred missiles and torpedoes, fittings for a hundred lasguns, and emplacements for a large number of projectile weap