Aoyagi

Unit type: battleship
Manufacturer: Old Earth Federation; Atlantic Federation
Dimensions: length 250 meters
Armament: 3 x 2-barrel beam cannon, 2 fore, 1 aft; beam cannon, 1 fore; 2 x 3-barrel heavy rocket launcher, all fore; 8 x 2-barrel 100mm antiaircraft machine gun, 4 dorsal/midships, 4 ventral/midships; 8-cell vertical launch system
Powerplant: graphite-moderated nucler reactor, output rated at 77900 kW
Propulsion: 6 x rocket engine
Hangar capacity: 6 mobile suits
Catapults: 2

After remilitarizing the Artemis asteroid fortress in UC 209, the Atlantic Federation came into possession of another "gift" from the Old Earth Federation's former military assets: a surprising number of surviving space warships as well as documentation and equipment to ressuscitate those excavated at the underground dock facilities in Brazil. While less than "cutting edge" technology, the discovery of these vessels and the ability to quickly construct more enabled the relatively feeble Federation to establish a respectable space force in short order.

The Aoyagi is a capable and well-armed battleship armed with a battery of beam weaponry as well as the ability to field a small number of mobile suits. The ship's design layout is fairly typical of pre-Interregnum Earth Federation vessels, with most of the armor protection concentrated in the midships area and command tower. Compared to the much lighter Ganarow, the Aoyagi features improved armor belts, as well as large armored panels that protect the sides and bottom of the bow and stern, reducing its vulnerable areas. One particularly ahead-of-its-time feature is a rotating gravity block sandwiched between the bow and command tower, allowing for the ship to make relatively long cruises while maintaing a high crew morale thanks to the artificial gravity in the living quarters. A hangar for mobile suits occupies the lower decks below the command tower and up to the gravity block, with an access door on either side of the hull. The Atlantic Federation retrofitted a pair of magnetic linear catapults to the exterior of the ship, allowing the embarked mobile suits to be quickly "fired" away from the hangar doors and into combat.

The Aoyagi's primary artillery are four turreted beam cannons, one with a single barrel and the rest in double configurations. Because of their layout, the battleship has an exceptionally powerful broadside and no blind spots along its main axis whatsoever, but by the same token has very limited firepower above and below. Four antiaircraft machine guns are installed on each side of the command tower for close in defense, while a major punch is offered by the same set of heavy rocket launchers used on the Ganarow escort ship, this time sandwiched between the bow and the forward armor panels. A vertical launch missile system is positioned just ahead of the forward-most beam cannon turret, of which a large portion of the bow is given over to magazines for storage of additional missiles.

The loss of the Artemis base effectively doomed the Atlantic Federation's space forces, or what remained of them at that point at any rate. While quite a few ships escaped capture when the asteroid fortress fell, and more than a handful were docked at various Federation spaceports on Earth, the space forces' chain of command effectively disintegrated without its headquarters. Perhaps in a foreshadowing of events soon to befall the planetside forces, the Federation's leaderless space fleet quickly fragmented, with the surviving vessels typically breaking down into small groups conducting raiding operations against civilian shipping and the surviving space powers.