Final Contingency-class cruiser.

Length : 1.6 km.

Tonnage : 40 960 000 m3.

Also called 'Contingency-class' for short, Final Contingency-class cruisers were created as part of the European Federation Navy's Final Defence Protocols, and are in fact the last contingency measure on the list. They are simply the last option of the EFSN, when all else is lost. Their goal isn't to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat however, their sole objective is to make sure that if the Federation loses, then no one else will win, and reduce everything to cinders.

The Final Contingency cruiser are the most heavily stealthed ships in Earth human space by a huge margin, able to silently move through Sol with impunity as long as they avoid getting too close to Earth and Mars' massive orbital sensor arrays. Each is equipped with 3 missile launchers, and a carries a total of 6 missiles. A positively puny armament compared to virtually every warship, even lowly corvettes.

There is a simple catch however. Each of those missiles is a EFHA-OCSO-6 (European Federation High Admiralty - Omega-Class Strategic Ordnance) 'Armageddon' planetbuster missile, each made to wipe out all human life on an entire planet, and render it completely uninhabitable, even when using atmospheric domes, with sufficient stealth and defence network penetration aids to survive entry into Earth or Mars' Orbital Defence Grids.

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One of the reasons why there are so few missiles onboard is that once fully fueled the warheads require extremely maintenance and energy intensive systems to be online at all times to prevent it from simply exploding under the enormous pressure or the fuel undergoing nuclear fusion prematurely, which would pretty much preclude long term passive stealth. Hence, most of the ship's tonnage is more or less dedicated to fuel tanks and refueling systems for its deadly payload.

The Final Contingency-class was originally constructed in response to the Martian Republican Navy's strategic bombardment missiles, created and advertised as a last resort measure in case of an Earth-lead invasion, whose sole goal was to eradicate all life on Earth, to act as deterrence against a potential invasion. Such missiles, especially if sufficiently stealthed, might have been able to destroy the original launch sites before the missiles could fire. Hence the creation of a long term deployment, stealth launch platform.

All of the ships were built in the EFSN's secret shipyards in the outer solar system, and every single one can be fully automated if needed, although they are usually given a skeleton crew of a few dozen, backed up by a veritably army of maintenance drones. The crews are handpicked from the EFSN's stealth recon ships, who are in all respect remarkably similar to the Final Contingency-class, as they very much served as their baseline, plus a vast arsenal of recon drones and satellites, and minus the world destroying ordnance and oversized fuel tanks.

While the ships were several times given the order to be on high alert, usually during major conflicts with the UIS and its allies, only once were they transmitted launch codes and told to stay on stand by for launch orders, during the height of the Europa Crisis. The rest, as they say, is history.