TSN Escort

The TSN Escort is most commonly encountered as a lightly armed patrol vessel that operates within the sectors of Terran space. It is the weaker, lighter little brother of the TSN Destroyer. New to Artemis Cosmos, the TSN Escort is now a playable ship. It lacks Warp Drive, so playing this class of ship can be extremely challenging. The TSN Escort is not a long-range vessel, as it intended to operate out of a local base station and provide defense within the sector. As its name suggests, it is primarily used by the United Space Faring Planets, or USFP, to escort civilian cargo and passenger ships, and protect them from pirates and other raiders. 

When encountered as an allied ship, it can be ordered to attack or defend a specific location in the sector, as well as a few other actions by the communications officer. It is smaller than a TSN LIght Cruiser, and not as resilient. It deals about the same beam damage as a Light Cruiser but lacks the area of effect firepower of Nukes and Mines. It can nonetheless be useful in combat, especially in groups with Destroyers. As expected of an escort ship, it is extremely fast, although it lacks Warp drive.

As a playable ship, the Escort has the usual helm systems, power allocation systems, science equipment, and communications. It is a fairly small frigate, with limited space on its Engineering Grid, although it has the usual three DamCon teams for system repairs. Note that it has no Warp Drive and no Warp button will appear on the Helm console. Engineering may want to divert power to Impulse to triple the speed of the ship for long range travel, although only 250% speed can be maintained for long without overheating the Engines. 

The TSN Escort does have a Flight Hangar, despite its small size, and carries the usual single TSN Shuttle and TSN Fighter. In an emergency, it can handle more, although the space will be cramped. A TSN Bomber can supply the Escort with a few Nukes and Mines, evening out the odds a bit in a combat scenario. 

Finally, the weapons systems allow for the weapons officer to lock onto enemy ships and fire the ship's beams. The TSN Escort is able to fire beams in Manual mode and set beams to the frequency provided by the Science officer to receive a boost to beam damage against enemy ships. However, without any supply of torpedoes or a torpedo tube, the Weapons officer will not have quite as much to do.  

Quick Stats

Like the Destroyer, the Escort had a completely different look in Artemis 2.0. These two allied ships were added to Artemis 1.4 to give Comms something more to do. It was always intended to be an NPC ship, not a player ship, and was essentially an unarmed civilian transport. It became a warship in Artemis 2.0 when the new transport ships were added. The "Sloop" was always longer and larger than the Destroyer and looked something like the TSN Scout. Check out the USFP Escort page for its original appearance.

The Escort is weaker than the Destroyer, but only by a small amount. It has weaker shields, and less hull points, but it originally had 40 shields, and it now has 80. The Destroyer has not been similarly beefed up and has only 10 more shield points, so it probably should be made tougher. It should be noted that the Destroyer has nearly the firepower of a Heavy Cruiser, as it fires much faster than the Escort, while the Escort does exactly the same beam damage as a Light Cruiser.  

As noted above, the Escort is now playable. It is clearly intended as a change of pace for experienced crews and will provide a real challenge. I provided some ideas to even the odds above, but the pace of the standard missions will be very slow, without either Warp or Jump drive to help the Escort cross the sector. The intention is probably for the Escort to be used as a secondary ship in a multi-ship mission, where a Scout or Light Cruiser can act as an interceptor, while the Escort hangs back and defends the bases or civilian ships.