Editing BattleTech Spacecraft (section)

==  JumpShips ==
[[File:Invader with Argo.png|400px|right|thumb|topquote|An Invader JumpShip with the Argo latched onto one of it's hardpoints]]
A Ship with a Jump Drive is called a JumpShip. Typically the Ship is built around the Jump Drive, with up to 95% of the total volume of a typical JumpShip being dedicated to that specific mechanism and it's ancillary systems. They are also typically large. The smallest JumpShip was the Bug-Eye, a 129 meter long 6,100 tonne specialized surveillance craft and it's rare to find one under 100,000 tonnes. The highest limit a conventional JumpShip’s size is theorized to be 500,000 tonnes.

Civilian JumpShips as a rule can't do much more than Jump, having only minimal STL fusion drives they spend most of their days skipping from point to point ferrying STL ships which latch onto their Jump Points and using a big array of solar panels to recharge. Only occasionally coming into port at space docks for maintenance and so their crews don't die of boredom. These were either owned by government bodies for their logistical needs or are privately owned and operated, offering their service to whoever has the C-Bills. By 3055, there were something to the effect of 30,000 JumpShips in operation in the Inner Sphere at a minimum. In the early 31st century, production of new civilian JumpShips had been reduced to a trickle compared to what it had been under the [[Star League]]. Fortunately JumpShips are built to last.

Some of them might might have a few guns for defence and occasionally pirates might slap on some more for raids, but this is like slapping an M2 Browning and some Katyusha rocket launchers onto a river barge or a cruise ship. Yes, it works but it's far from optimal since you're under-armored and under-armed. You'd only really do it if you could not put together something proper, speaking of which...

=== WarShips ===
WarShips are JumpShips that have two defining features. First of all and most obvious is that they are heavily armed, armored, and are made for combat. Secondly they have Compact KF-Drives which do the same job as the regular civilian models while being half the size, but come at a price-tag five times higher than normal. This means they have space left over for fuel, weapons, armor, redundant systems, engines that can get around a system faster than a metaphorical space tortoise and similar. These range from comparatively  small frigates a couple hundred meters long to two-kilometer long Dreadnoughts. Mass-wise, their upper limit is theorized to be 2.5 million tonnes.

The thing about WarShips is that one of them in orbit of a planet can drop a lot of fuckload of nukes and cause a lot of devastation, as well as being able to provide less apocalyptic orbital support to forces on the ground. After the collapse of the old Terran Alliance, the powers that had the resources to build WarShips of their own were able to impose their social orders onto systems and planets which lacked them, giving rise to the [[Inner Sphere|Successor State]]s. When the peer powers met, this caused it's own problem. The best response to a WarShip is another WarShip, hopefully to intercept before it reaches a populated world or if that fails as a means of retaliation. The [[Ares Convention]] was put into place to prevent worlds from burning and [[Star League]] tried it's best to demilitarize the Inner Sphere to avoid that. Unfortunately, their worst nightmares came true after the First Succession War when the Successor States proceeded to spend their fleets bombing everyone back into the stone age. 

During the Succession Wars, Warships became LosTech to most of the Inner Sphere the Near Periphery. All examples were destroyed and the survivors had only a limited capacity to churn out a few new civilian JumpShips every year. ComStar had a few Warships squirreled away in distant asteroid bases as well as the technical data in hidden vaults. The only place were WarShips were actively being made was [[The Clans|Clanspace]], in which bigger and badder WarShips than ever before were coming out of Clan drydocks, on top of a lot of old SLDF WarShips that had been part of the Exodus.

===YardShips===
Straddling the line between a converted WarShip and a collapsible orbital space station equipped with a KF Drive (like the Hughes-derived Hephaestus class orbital factories), they’re basically the equivalent to naval heavy-lift ships used for transporting ship hulls in real life. More focused on repairs and accommodation of crews, they’re not as well armed as WarShips. While they became LosTech with the bulk of the Newgrange and Faslane class being destroyed in the Succession Wars, Clan Sea Fox in the Dark Age converted some of their WarShips into CargoShips and ArcShips from Potemkin class WarShips to transport their orbital factories, house their population, and store their merchandise on a massive scale to support their nomadic civilization.