Well, I'm back from the dead. Or at least back to fooling around with Bryce again. I made a new model over the weekend while holed up in a room as a couple of carpet installers were running around and yammering in Russian. So here is a posting and some text. I hope to get back to doing more of this in the near future, or at least without a three and a half year gap. --- Prior to Venusian reunification, the most powerful person on the terraformed world was Joseph Bartos, First Duke of Maxwell. His ownership of Maxwell Holdings, a conglomerate that produced everything from biological constructs to spacecraft to holographic entertainment, granted him immense wealth and the need to protect it. The Duke procured a class of four anti-piracy ships to protect his merchant fleet, building them at High Maxwell Shipyards on Pearl, the eighty kilometer-wide captured Kuiper body left over from the massive terraformation bombardment of centuries past. By mass and mission, the Stalwart class was a corvette, though Maxwell designated them "Escort Interceptors". To support a variety of inner system missions, the ship carried a crew of eighteen and a security squad of a dozen troopers. Armament ranged from a single powerful ten meter laser to eight five meter mounts, twin missile tubes and three fifty millimeter gauss gatling guns. The Stalwarts relied solely on fusion rocket propulsion, with three main drive engines and four powerful evasion thruster units. Lack of supplementary radiator surfaces limited the capability of the fusion power plants, concentrating on high thrust rather than efficiency. However, the shorter distances and slower velocities of inner system travel emphasized acceleration over endurance and the Escort Interceptors were well suited to their mission. After Joseph's election as the first King of Venus in 2512, the Stalwarts were supposed to be integrated into the new Venus Defense Fleet, but somehow the transfer never took place and they remained vessels under the Duke of Maxwell's Own Protective Force. After Joseph's abdication as King and Duke in 2534, the ships transferred, not to Venus, but to Maxwell Holdings, of which Joseph remained chairman. --Jayne's Spacecrafts (Twenty-Third Edition) High Nairobi Press, 2550