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TARTARUS Battleship
April 26, 2026 at 02:01 AM
Expanded TARTARUS Battleship article with scale, modular layers, firing modes, hangar bay, reverse-engineering loop, origin mystery, and unconfirmed details (2026-04-26)
The TARTARUS is the title dreadnought of DREADNOUGHT TARTARUS. It appears suddenly above Earth in FC 2057, a super-scale battleship of unidentified make whose arrival in orbit is the inciting event for the war that follows. The player commands it across active war zones for the rest of the campaign. For a wider summary, see the overview.
The TARTARUS rivals a moving city, and that scale is not cosmetic: its firepower is sufficient to obliterate metropolitan areas outright. Pointing the ship at a target is, in the fiction, threatening to erase a city. The vessel moves with what the developer has called a deliberate, almost arrogant slowness. It advances rather than darts, and enemies are expected to deal with it before it arrives or be ground down once it does.
The TARTARUS is fully modular. Customization spans the whole ship, which is why engagements feed back into loadout choices for the next theatre. The seven publicly confirmed layers are listed below.
Layer | Role |
|---|---|
Hull Structures | Top-level structural framework; sets layout and where other modules can attach. |
Functional Modules | Sub-systems handling non-weapon roles needed to keep the ship running in combat. |
Main Cannons | Primary heavy weapons. Long-range strikes against high-value targets. |
Missiles | Guided ordnance hardpoints for saturation fire and targets the cannons are not built for. |
Super Weapons | Reserved high-impact armaments for moments when standard weapons are not enough. |
Carrier-Based Fighters | Smaller aircraft launched from the ship to extend its effective range. |
Support Units | Auxiliary craft and systems reinforcing the dreadnought without forming the primary attack line. |
Every weapon hardpoint can be set to one of three firing modes. Mode selection sits alongside the loadout itself as a tactical lever before and during engagements.
Mode | Behaviour |
|---|---|
Manual | The player directs fire personally. Maximum control for precise shots or specific targets. |
Automatic | The weapon picks and engages targets on its own. Hands-off coverage while the player handles other systems. |
Focus Fire | Every weapon set to this mode redirects to fire in one direction simultaneously: the dreadnought's full broadside, concentrated. |
The TARTARUS carries a deployable combat mech in its hangar bay, dropped to the surface for ground-level engagements where firing the main batteries would be wasteful. The broader enemies roster is mixed enough that switching between dreadnought-scale and mech-scale responses is a recurring decision.
The TARTARUS grows steadily more powerful through reverse engineering. Intel pulled from defeated enemies feeds back into the loadout, unlocking new armaments and systems that can be installed before the next engagement. Different enemy types yield different intel, so a varied campaign produces a more varied ship. Because the game runs as a continuous campaign across a strategic map rather than a sequence of separate missions, those upgrades are persistent and carry forward.
The TARTARUS is described, at the start of the story, as unidentified. Humanity has no time to decipher its origins before the war breaks out around it. Who built the TARTARUS, where it came from, what allegiance (if any) it serves, and how the player came to be in command have not been disclosed in any official material.
The following points are not part of the publicly disclosed material:
Crew complement, names of officers, or whether the ship is crewed in the conventional sense.
Internal layout: number of decks, named decks, named bridges, named hangars, or other named rooms aboard.
Lineage: who designed the ship, what era or civilization built it, or whether it is unique in its class.
Allegiance: which side, faction, or government (if any) the TARTARUS serves in the FC 2057 conflict.
Identity of the player character and how they came to command the dreadnought.
Named weapons, named fighter wings, or named support units.
Exact statistics: tonnage, length, top speed, weapon yields, or any other numeric figure.
