When the Terran Captain Meera Yen and her entire command staff defected to the League in February of 2681, they also brought with them the TRS Cairo, a refit Valorous-class Cruiser and its entire secure database. This treasure trove, and Captain Yen's willingness to submit to any measures the League saw fit to impose on her and her command staff, went a long way to garnering the goodwill needed for the League to grant her the rank of Captain in the League Navy. This appointment was sponsored by the first captain of the LSS Shadrach and as the entire line of Nyx-class ships had just been handed over to McKenzie for security, she was granted the LSS Nyx itself.
Even on the drawing board, the Nyx-class was a ship in search of a role.
The request from the Bureau of Ships was simple: give us a new Heavy Cruiser to replace the aging Phobetor-class. That was it. What the design team presented to the Bureau was almost as much a departure from the League standard as the Archigos- or Revelation-classes. Unlike those two classes, the Nyx-class at least kept to the more standard League form factor.
The Nyx-class was pitched as a stealth heavy cruiser, a sequence of words that aren't often heard together. The hull was outfitted with an impressive array of heatsinks and specially shrouded engines that meant that the ship could slip by passive sensors and most known systems of active sensors.
The grav vanes of the Nyx-class were specially designed to be able to produce a tighter gravity field around the ship, allowing for a limited number of pinpoint in-system jumps. This ability, when coupled with the sensor avoidance tech and the way the designers distributed the primary missile and torpedo tubes allows the Nyx-class to perform a pinpoint jump from the edge of a system into the center of an enemy formation, pass mostly unnoticed, and execute a proper broadside into an unprepared enemy ship before jumping away again.
This is frighteningly effective so long as the enemy is unaware that a Nyx is present on the field. When it became clear that the Terrans had made it a priority to keep tabs on every single Nyx-class, the ships were pulled from standard Fleet distribution and they were handed over to McKenzie. This wasn't done to ensure that they were crewed more efficiently or tasked more reasonably. Rather, this choice was made because McKenzie had proven to be deeply efficient at preventing spies from keeping tabs on his assets. The League had learned this lesson when they found that their own intelligence agents were unable to perform routine hardening missions on any of McKenzie's assets or locations due to the security that was maintained around all of them.
Thankfully, McKenzie also saw the benefit of a class of Heavy Cruisers who could slip into an enemy formation and wreck havoc before they were even aware that they were under attack. He ordered a secret refit plan drawn up for the Nyx-class that replaced eight of their torpedo tubes with slightly smaller version of the spinal plasma lance he had installed on the Archigos. To date, this refit is not known to have been carried out.
The Nyx-class is perfectly serviceable as a Heavy Cruiser in nearly every way. The unique positioning of its missile and torpedo tubes means that a Nyx cannot just face down an enemy nose to nose as effectively as most other League ships, and as such it tended to be relegated to an artillery role by Admirals who didn't fully grasp how to use them well.
The ideal method of deploying a Nyx, as determined by Captain Meera Yen of the LSS Nyx and Admiral Molidor of the [name] Fleet, is as a first strike vessel. An effective battle plan that correctly uses a Nyx-class looks like this:
TBD. (Optional)