Loading...
Loading...
TARTARUS Battleship
April 26, 2026 at 01:59 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 and the central platform every player decision feeds back into. It appears suddenly above Earth in FC 2057, a super-scale battleship of unidentified make whose mere arrival in orbit is the inciting event for the war that follows. Players assume command of this vessel and direct it across active war zones for the rest of the campaign.
The TARTARUS is not a fixed unit. It is treated by the game as a constantly evolving war machine, with virtually every external system reconfigurable between engagements. Hardpoints can be swapped, hull layouts can be rearranged, and new armaments earned through combat slot into the framework as the campaign advances. For a wider summary of the game itself, see the overview.
The headline detail is size. The TARTARUS rivals a moving city, and that scale is not framed cosmetically: its firepower is sufficient to obliterate metropolitan areas outright. That makes positioning a real strategic question rather than a trivial one. Pointing the ship at a target is, in the fiction, threatening to erase a city.
The vessel moves with what the developer has described as a deliberate, almost arrogant slowness. It does not dart around the strategic map. It advances. Enemies are expected to either deal with the dreadnought before it arrives in their airspace or be ground down by it once it does. That tempo is one of the things that distinguishes the game from a fast action title and pushes it toward the wargame and roaming tower-defence end of the genre spectrum.
The TARTARUS is fully modular. Customization spans the full ship rather than a single weapon slot, which is the main reason engagements feed back into loadout choices for the next theatre. The seven publicly confirmed customization layers are listed below.
Layer | Role |
|---|---|
Hull Structures | Top-level structural framework of the ship; determines layout and what other modules can attach where. |
Functional Modules | Sub-systems bolted onto the hull that handle non-weapon roles required to keep the ship operating in combat. |
Main Cannons | Primary heavy weapons. The headline armament, capable of long-range strikes against high-value targets. |
Missiles | Guided ordnance hardpoints used for saturation fire and against targets the main cannons are not the right tool for. |
Super Weapons | Reserved high-impact armaments meant for moments where standard weapons are insufficient. |
Carrier-Based Fighters | Smaller aircraft launched from the TARTARUS to extend the dreadnought's effective range and engage threats at a smaller scale. |
Support Units | Auxiliary craft and systems that reinforce the dreadnought's combat posture without forming the primary line of attack. |
Every weapon hardpoint on the TARTARUS can be set to one of three firing modes. Mode selection sits alongside the loadout itself as a tactical lever the player pulls before and during engagements.
Mode | Behaviour |
|---|---|
Manual | The player directs the weapon's fire personally. Maximum control, used for precise shots or specific high-value targets. |
Automatic | The weapon picks and engages targets on its own according to its own arc and rules. Hands-off coverage while the player attends to 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. The mech is the game's secondary combat layer, dropped to the surface for ground-level engagements where firing the dreadnought's main batteries would be inappropriate or wasteful. It lets the player handle smaller-scale confrontations without escalating every situation to the level of city-erasing firepower, and it returns to the bay between deployments. The hangar itself is part of the modular framework, and the broader enemies roster is mixed enough that switching between dreadnought-scale and mech-scale responses is a real recurring decision.
The TARTARUS grows steadily more powerful across the campaign through reverse engineering. Intel pulled from defeated enemies feeds directly back into the dreadnought's loadout, unlocking new armaments and additional 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. Anything earned in one theatre carries forward into the next, and a player who picks fights with a wider range of opponents will end up with a more diverse arsenal than one who sticks to a single enemy type.
The TARTARUS is described, at the start of the story, as unidentified. The pre-release material is deliberate about leaving its origin open. The vessel arrives in Earth orbit in FC 2057, and humanity has no time to decipher its origins before the war breaks out around it.
What this means in practice is that several questions a setting article might normally answer are simply not answered yet. Who built the TARTARUS, where it came from, what allegiance (if any) it serves, and how the player came to be the one piloting it have all not been disclosed in any official material. The wiki treats those points as open until they are clarified by the developer.
The following points are not part of the publicly disclosed material at this time. They are listed here so that readers know what the wiki is and is not claiming, and so that any contributor adding text on these points can be checked against verified sources rather than fan speculation.
Crew complement, names of any specific officers, or whether the TARTARUS is crewed at all in the conventional sense.
Internal layout: the number of decks, the names of any specific decks, named bridges, named hangars, or other named rooms aboard the ship.
Lineage: who designed the TARTARUS, 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: who the player is in fiction, how they ended up in command of the dreadnought, and whether they are a single named individual or a collective.
Specific named weapons: the named or branded designation of any individual main cannon, missile system, or super weapon mounted on the ship.
Specific named fighter wings, named support units, or named carrier-launched aircraft.
Exact statistics: tonnage, length, top speed, weapon yields, energy output, or any other numeric specification.
