Demon Colossi

Heralds of the Era of Devastation

"The Demon Colossi were very, very big spaceships that the bad man Talitan used to take his army to our planet a very long time ago. They were very dangerous and hurt many people, but now we don't have to worry about them anymore since Talitan's army left to go back home."

— Excerpt from A Children's History of Passe-Rath

Around 1000 years ago, the Era of Devastation rocked Passe-Rath as humanity reaped the consequences of the Aulyssian Expansion. The warlike human subspecies known as Nurrathans arrived to the planet under the leadrship of a man named Talitan the Conqueror, who rallied the warlike denizens of what once was a human colony that settled on a faraway planet. They came to Passe-Rath for one pure and simple reason: to spill the blood of their long-lost brethren who they claimed betrayed them by leaving them to die once upon a time. At first, the humans did not take Talitan's threat seriously; but when the gargantuan stone spaceships known as Demon Colossi arrived in the sky above them, the war truly began.

Appearance

Demon Colossi, at first glance, seem to simply be mountain-shaped dark blotches in the sky -- there are no visible external propulsion systems, no windows, no open hangars; only jagged and spiky masses with protruding cylinders hanging in the sky. However, as they near closer to the ground, two traits become noticable: the fact that these starships are apparently made entirely of dark, rough stone, and the low, almost rumbling humming sound they constantly emit which becomes literally deafening as they get closer. The huge cylinders that protrude from the Colossi's hulls eventually reveal themselves to be massive implements of laser artillery, and the stony armor of the ships were filled with dozens of hidden hangar doors, missile silos, and EMP emitters all designed for all-out war. It's no question why these ships were some of the most feared tools of destructions in all of humanity's history -- they were built with lives and blood, forged on a hell planet in fire and nuclear radiation, and designed without any notion of mercy in any system, weapon, or tool anywhere in all of their 2.5 miles of death.

Power Generation

Deep in the hearts of the Demon Colossi, there are massive stone chambers that house the pieces of technology that power the giant battleships: a power unit that modern historians and engineers dubbed Gaseous Engines, but which the Talitanic Legion originally called Chained Stars. These engines were essentially small yet incredibly dense and powerful chambers of superheated gas -- somehow, the Nurrathans had invented a way to create tiny artificial stars as a way to power the Demon Colossi. Each Demon Colossus had one or two Chained Stars. The smaller ones could function off of one, but the larger ones required one for propulsion and another for weapons systems. If one failed, the ship would be crippled in terms of high-power laser artillery and interstellar travel, but still functional enough to navigate atmospheric conditions and operate smaller weaponry.
Interestingly, the technology required to make Chained Stars did not originate on Passe-Rath; it was invented solely by the Nurrathans under Talitan the Conqueror. When the Talitanic War concluded, scientists and engineers of Passe-Rath leapt at the chance to study both the Colossi and the Chained Stars. This led to a significant advance in the manufacturing of starship engines, as ships built using a modified form of gaseous engine technology could shave months or even years off of their travel time.

Propulsion

Demon Colossi use a unique method of propulsion that has been seen in very few ships prior to the Talitanic War: magnetic propulsion. During the construction of the Colossi, Nurrathan engineers quickly realized that it would take absolutely absurd amounts of standard fuel to get a ship that was basically a weaponized mountain off the ground, so they were forced to use a different method of thrust. By using the vast amounts of magnetic ore present on Nurrath, they crafted a system that uses magnetic force to move the Demon Colossi -- and by using power from the Chained Star engines, they can control that magnetism. This is also the source of one of the most famous characteristics of the Colossi -- their deafening humming is a product of the magnetic drive.

Weapons & Armament

From its bow to its stern, a single Demon Colossus is packed with enough armaments to wipe out a small city. Their two most feared weapons are the Laser Artillery and the T-Class Air-to-Surface Ballistic Missiles.

Laser Artillery

The huge stone cylinders that jut downwards out of the Demon Colossi at strange angles are the cannons of the laser artillery; huge weapons that can unleash earth-melting rays of damage onto planets' surfaces from above. They are fixed in place onto to the hulls of Colossi, and the only way for them to move is for the entire ship to change position. As a result, they are very slow-moving but still incredibly deadly. The diameter of their blast zone can range from 100-500 feet depending on the size of the cylinder. Typically, there are 3-6 laser artillery cannons per Demon Colossus; these are used in rotation as the cooldown of a single cannon takes about 30 minutes.

T-Class Air-to-Surface Ballistic Missiles

The T-Class missiles invented and used by the Talitanic Legion are quicker, more flexible in use, and higher in quantity than the laser artillery, while they don't have the raw destructive power that the cannons have, they are perfect at shooting down small aircraft and bombarding small locations from the air on a shorter time frame; where as the laser artillery must be positioned, warmed up, and then fired, which takes a significant amount of time, T-Class missiles can be deployed in the blink of an eye on would-be attackers, although not many would dare to directly attack a Demon Colossus.
These missiles are kept in silos located all over the hulls of Colossi; these silos are hard to spot from the outside due to the grainy, rough stone material of the hull. Typically, each silo houses 10-20 missiles, and there can be anywhere from 20-60 silos per Colossus.

Other Weapons

In addition to Laser Artillery and T-Class Missiles, Demon Colossi keep a number of cruise missiles onboard as well as long-range EMP burst capabilities to disable the electronic systems of cities, towns, an vehicles. There are no external guns, as the engineers of the Demon Colossi deemed them unnecessary; while missiles can target both planets' surfaces and enemy ships, what's the point of a weapon that can only target attacking enemy ships when the Demon Colossi are invincible?

Armor and defense

The dark stone that comprises the hulls of Demon Colossi serves as their armor. The stone comes from a mountain range on Nurrath known as the Sickening Spires and is more durable than normal rock, but not quite as hardy as standard starship steel. However, the true toughness of the armor comes not from its makeup but from the sheer quantity of it that surrounds the internal frame of Colossi. In the sturdiest places, it is almost 20 feet thick and completely solid.

Communication Tools & Systems

The Demon Colossi used standard radio technology found in the starships of that age to communicate with each other within atmospheric bounds; like any ship, they are unable to communicate while traveling through space at speeds faster than light. The radio technicians of the Colossi, while on Passe-Rath, did not often bother to encode their transmissions well while sending messages to each other unless discussing covert operations (of which there were not many). Post-war research indicates that while they had the capacity for high-grade message encoding, they did not use it often as leaving their channels open was used as an intimidation tactic against the residents of Passe-Rath; by letting their enemies listen to their transmissions about troop movements and missile targets, they were saying that there is nothing you can do to stop us, so we don't care if you know what we're about to do.

Sensors

The one area that the Demon Colossi were lacking in was sensor technology. The thick, tough stone exterior made it hard to monitor the hull for damage, and this is eventually how some of the Colossi were brought down. Ships would bombard certain spots of the hull with concentrated missile fire to break down the stone to within a few feet of the metal frame, then small squads of elite soldiers would land on the hull and destroy the rest of the armor to gain access to the inside of the ship. They would fight or sneak their way to the engine room or rooms, then detonate the Chained Stars to explode the ship. This strategy worked for Colossi that were in the air, but had some complications -- for example, if the Colossus was stationed above a city, the resulting debris from the explosion would be sure to cause massive casualties on the population below. In this case, the squads would try to barricade themselves in the ship's bridge and fly the ship over an uninhabited location, then crash it or detonate the engine. However, this strategy was much more risky; when the Nurrathans realized what was happening, it was incedibly difficult to keep them out of the bridge, and many squads were killed or captured this way.
For Colossi that were landed on Passe-Rath and served as a home base for battalions of the Talitanic Legion, the strategy of detonating the Chained Star would still be used, but stealth or trickery would be used to get onto the highly guarded ships.

Manufacturer

Talitanic Legion

Owning Organization

Talitanic Legion

Width

0.6 miles

Length

2.5 miles

Height

1 mile

Weight

20,000,000 tons

Complement / Crew

300

Cargo & Passenger Capacity

Up to 4000 soldiers

Kathisk and the Demon Colossi

The signature humming noise emitted by the massive starships is constant and deafening both inside and outside the Colossi. During the years-long journey taken by Nurrathan soliders on their way to Passe-Rath, this noise was all-consuming and had severe detrimental effects on the hearing of the passengers -- there were hardly any Nurrathans left at the end of the voyage whose hearing was 100% intact. This was the origin of the Nurrathan sign language known as Kathisk that is still used to this day; as so many soliders lost their hearing due to the noise produced by the Demon Colossi, they needed to invent a new type of communication to adapt to this unexpected issue.

"It started when this huge shadow blocked out the sun, and then the humming began. It didn't stop for months and months, it drove us insane with every passing day. Just this thing in the sky above us, destroying cities around us with lasers the size of skyscrapers, and the humming shaking the ground beneath our feet, always reminding us that doom was just an unlucky day away."

— Historical account of a Thanian soldier's writings, ~953 BDL

The Sickening Spires

All of the dark stone that makes up the hulls of Demon Colossi was mined in a mountain range on Nurrath called the Sickening Spires. This name comes from the vast swathes of radiation that permeate the land and soak into thte stone. At the time of the Talitanic War, the Nurrathans were not very far removed from humanity in terms of genetics and had not yet evolved their radiation to resistance; many Nurrathans died of radiation poisoning while mining stone for the construction of the Colossi.
Each metal Colossus frame required almost an entire mountain's worth of stone to cover in armor. As a result, there are sixteen locations in the Sickening Spires where mountains used to be but only empty scars now remain -- one for every Colossus built.

"It was a miracle we won that war at all. The Demon Colossi were not only weapons of war with the capacity for continent-wide devastation, but more than that, they were extremely potent symbols of fear. The bravery of our soliders in the face of the Colossi cannot be understated."

— A historian

The Lost Demon Colossus

Fifteen Demon Colossi arrived on Passe-Rath at the start of the Talitanic War, but sixteen Colossi were built on Nurrath. At some point in the journey that the Legion took through space from Nurrath to their destination, one Demon Colossus was lost in transit, along with nearly 3500 warriors. To date, this missing battleship has not been found; some historians believe that their navigation systems failed and they were stranded in deep space, some believe that they crash-landed on a faraway planet, and some believe that they defected and went missing on purpose.