October 20, 3301
This weekend, Lavigny-Duval was officially crowned the new Emperor. I didn’t really watch the ceremony when it was broadcast, but I did catch snippets here and there. Can’t really avoid that when every public monitor is showing it. Normally, I wouldn’t care, as I said, I don’t follow galactic politics. But one thing did catch my attention. As a gift to her people, specifically pilots, ALD decided to make a quite generous limited-time offer. She removed the naval rank requirement from imperial ships that had them, and she also offered a discounted price for those ships. Again, normally, I wouldn’t care. However, I’ve been thinking about things, and if Izumi gave me one thing before she died, it was a strong sense of justice.
I decided that I wanted to do something about that, and that I needed a better ship than my Vulture to do it. Enter the Imperial Clipper. I won’t bore you with my research, but I will say this: From what I, like many others, have seen, the Clipper has decent strength, and superb speed and maneuverability. That speed was the deciding factor. Sure, I can’t have as many guns on it as a Fer-De-Lance, Python, or Anaconda, and those guns are placed weirdly, but I do have one thing they don’t: Speed. The FDL is the closest of the three to the Clipper, and even it’s out-matched. Basically, the big three pack the bigger punch, but I can still control the fight by deciding the engagement timing. They try to run, I can catch them. I find myself in a tough spot, I can retreat and regroup.
The Clipper may not be the tank that the Python is, but if the Python can’t hit me, I have a decent chance at victory. Even the faster FDL can out-gun and out-tank me, but again, I can run him down. It’s like an orca (the whale, not the ship) versus a great white shark. The shark is strong, but the whale can still take it down.