Iverson-Class

When expansion started in earnest, the Fleet found a hole in itself. Trade and resource hauling grew tenfold; the capital hulls available to escort it did not. Growth meant producing two things at once, because every escort the Fleet wanted cost it a berth in a shipyard and a production line of fighters to fill it. A young Commodore named Iverson proposed the cheap answer: drop the squadrons, buy instead of build, and arm it to the teeth.

So the Fleet buys the same standardized freighters and merchant traders every shipping concern in the system runs, and takes them into a yard. Iverson-class is not a shape. It is a pattern, applied to whatever hull arrives, which is why no two are alike and all of them are the same class. There is no production run, no first hull and no last.

What comes out is not improvised. Armor layered over plating that already earned its scars. Main turrets oversized for the hull. Missile clusters where the cranes used to sit. Crew served mounts on the open freight decks, because a converted hauler has no fire control worth the name and a gunner behind a shield is cheaper than building one. No hangar: a transfer dock, and whatever fighting it does, it does itself.

An Iverson carries no name on the hull. No designator, no stencil, nothing painted large enough to read from any distance that would do an observer good. Fleet standard markings only, and an observer will be close before resolving them.

Each vessel is named, as is tradition. The Fleet christens these hulls and then declines to write it down where anyone can see.

At range the donor hull is identifiable. What is not available at range is whether this particular one is carrying grain. By the time that answer arrives, an approaching vessel is inside the gunship's arcs and has been tracked since long before it decided to look.

Three vessels of one class. They share the armament pattern, the plating scheme and the fire control. They share nothing else, because nothing else was ever specified.