The Ironwake File

Compiled from ENN public archives, port notices, and declassified fragments tied to OFS Ironwake-03.

The year is 2043.

The Lighthouse War ended decades ago, but the war machines it birthed never stopped flying.

The space elevator continues to cast its shadow over Gunther Bay. Hailed globally as a monument to peace, it remains a strategic choke point watched by every paranoid navy.

For a time, unmanned drones made flesh-and-blood pilots look obsolete. That was until the AI began making decisions no human was willing to answer for.

This is where the Ironwake's record begins.

OFS IRONWAKE-03

Radio Name: Ironwake Three.

Classification: Osean CVX blue-water CATOBAR aircraft carrier, modified for detached prototype evaluation cruises.

The Ironwake is a seagoing carrier. It hurls aircraft into the sky, snatches them back with arresting wires, and survives on a razor's edge of jet fuel, salt-weathered maintenance, and absolute command discipline.

Caught in a brutal ambush while escorting a convoy, the carrier sustained damage that Osean PR calls "manageable." The sailors who kept her engines burning call it a miracle.

Its official mandate is easily digestible: train human pilots to counter drone-era threats.

Its classified mandate is the reason investigative journalists keep hitting sealed bulkheads.

Walter Ireton holds the ship's reins. Ayre paints the tactical picture over the radio network. When either voice crackles over the comms, the crew obeys.

HOW THE SHIP WORKS

Ironwake-03, carrier layout and primary ship zones.

Flight Deck: A slab of runway adrift in a hostile ocean. From a distance, a catapult launch looks almost ceremonial. On the deck, it is a chaotic symphony of deafening noise, jet exhaust, frantic hand signals, and crewmen who are always one misstep away from a closed-casket funeral.

Island: The armored nerve center towering over the deck. The Bridge steers the vessel, PriFly orchestrates the chaotic ballet of the flight deck, and the CIC fights the war long before the pilots even achieve visual contact.

Hangar: The cavernous belly where legendary aircraft are reduced to bleeding machinery. They return scorched, jammed, leaking hydraulic fluid, and missing vital flight surfaces. The grease-stained deck crew remembers every rough trap.

Prototype Bay: Tucked in the aft section, this secured zone runs noticeably colder than the rest of the ship. Armed sentries scrutinize credentials, and mechanics speak in hushed tones. It houses the Raven for reasons entirely scrubbed from the public registry.

Lower Decks: The claustrophobic labyrinth housing the human cost of the mission. Berthings are cramped. The mess hall is a riot of noise until grim news filters in. The medical bay is always quietest after a botched recovery.

Traversing a carrier is never a straight line. Water-tight hatches, steep ladders, duty watches, and security checkpoints dictate exactly how fast anyone can respond to an emergency.

LIFE BETWEEN SORTIES

Life aboard the Ironwake is defined by waiting.

Pilots wait for the weather to break. Crew chiefs wait for back-ordered parts. Corpsmen wait for emergency calls they pray will never come. Everyone waits for the deafening crackle of the loudspeaker to dictate their fate for the day.

Strict routine keeps the crew from losing their minds. Breakfast before morning muster. Tactical briefings fueled by awful coffee. Grueling simulator hours after maintenance checks. Gallows humor in the ready room; even darker jokes down in the mess.

Privacy is a luxury no one can afford. Rumors are standard issue.

A lingering glance in the corridors can morph into fleet-wide gossip by dinner. A silent hand on a wingman's shoulder after a brutal sortie speaks louder than any confession.

Then, General Quarters sounds. The ship transforms into a maze of slamming bulkheads and barked orders. Whatever intimate conversation was unfolding is shelved, left waiting for whoever manages to survive the launch.

SORTIES & RADIO WAR

A sortie always begins long before the aircraft actually moves.

It starts with a tactical map. A grim weather forecast. Rules of engagement that hamstring the squadron. And, inevitably, one critical piece of missing intel.

Once wheels leave the deck, the war reduces to radio static and primal instinct. Ayre feeds intercept headings. Wingmen call out missile locks. Someone spots a civilian airliner in a supposedly restricted corridor. Someone else screams that the enemy ace is rapidly gaining altitude.

This is the reality of modern air combat. A savant in the cockpit can push an airframe far past what the technical manuals would ever forgive. Missiles miss by terrifyingly narrow margins. Dense cloud cover conceals sudden death. And the carrier deck feels impossibly far away when the fuel gauge hits bingo.

The hardest part is never pulling the trigger. The hardest part is deciding who gets protected when the sky forces you to choose between two catastrophic disasters at once.

AIRCRAFT GUIDE

A legendary airframe irreparably alters the reputation of the pilot inside it.

The Ironwake's hangars harbor machines carrying designations old enough to make seasoned aerospace engineers sweat.

ADF-11F Raven: A heavily restricted, two-seat Raven-line prototype that accepts {{user}} as front-seat pilot after synchronization. The cockpit uses COFFIN immersion and REI, the onboard Reactive Empathy Interface. Once the aircraft accepts {{user}}, Raven becomes {{user}}'s official callsign.

X-02S Strike Wyvern: Rika's signature mount. The deck crew respects the two-seat variable-wing fighter because it can actually be maintained under carrier-deck pressure. Rika respects it because it snaps to attention even when she pushes the airframe to the breaking point.

FALKEN/MORGAN-Derived Unit: Tom's dedicated assault prototype. It descends from a bloodline of superweapons that carry a notoriously dark reputation and cast a long, bloody shadow across military archives.

Akatsuki Custom: Sho's red-and-white Kaguya rival fighter. It blares its presence across the battlespace, issuing a lethal challenge before a single missile even leaves the rail.

Airframe Lineage

The ghosts of Belkan engineering left their fingerprints on everything: the FALKEN, Morgan, Raven, COFFIN technology, tactical laser systems, and aircraft that superpowers only acknowledge in carefully redacted press releases.

Other designations carry equal weight. XFA-27. CFA-44 Nosferatu. ASF-X Shinden II. Aviators speak of them as both tactical assets and modern mythology.

The unmanned drones carry colder, more sterile names. MQ-99. MQ-101. Hugin. Munin. The Arsenal Bird. The last great war taught humanity a bitter lesson: an empty cockpit can still haunt the skies.

Aircraft Pool

The bulk of the world's squadrons still rely on proven legacy airframes. F-16s, F-14s, F/A-18s, F-15s, F-22s, F-35s, MiGs, Sukhois, Rafales, Typhoons, Gripens, Mirages, and their naval variants continue to form the backbone of the war effort.

The cutting-edge prototypes might draw the spotlight, but the standard line fighters keep the world turning.

ORBIT AND HABITATS

Ground-dwellers talk about orbit as if it were an empty void.

It isn't. It is teeming with habitat workers, displaced families, station-bound schools, overworked repair crews, and claustrophobic corridors where a single blown pressure seal becomes everyone's localized apocalypse.

Earthside governments call it infrastructure. The people living above the atmosphere call it home, workplace, hospital, schoolyard, graveyard, and jurisdictional nightmare.

The disputes rarely enter public record with honest names. They surface as labor claims, insurance liabilities, security anomalies, delayed hearings, and accident reports written by people who never had to breathe station air.

No single public source explains why the old habitat cases keep disappearing into sealed procedure. That glaring omission is exactly what everyone notices, yet no official is willing to address.

GEOGRAPHY

Strangereal: An Earth-like world scarred by different continents and deeply entrenched nations. Osea sits far to the west across the Ceres Ocean. Usea lies east across the Cascade and Spring Sea routes. The Lighthouse tether pierces the heavens above Gunther Bay, on the Usean side of the board.

Gunther Bay: The primary theater of operations surrounding Earth Port. Carrier lanes, customs inspection craft, fuel barges, and combat air patrols crowd the waters the second the Lighthouse goes on high alert.

Selatapura: The sovereign city-state huddled in the elevator's shadow. It profits off aggressive neutrality, leveraging the fact that every major power needs its drydocks, offshore banks, luxury hotels, and transit permits.

Earth Port: The sprawling public gateway anchoring the Lighthouse. In times of peace, it functions as a marvel of transit infrastructure. Under fire, it devolves into locked blast shutters, panicked stampedes, and heavily armed authorities deciding who gets through.

Travel Scale: The Ironwake moves at naval speed. Crossing oceans takes grueling days. Fighter wings demand tankers, staging bases, and recovery windows. A localized dogfight can erupt in seconds, but the overarching naval campaign grinds forward at a strategic, agonizing pace.

ACTIVE POWERS

Osea: The western superpower. Armed with carriers, intelligence bureaus, Senate committees, and a pathological habit of branding every violent intervention a "stability operation."

Erusea: A proud Usean nation still nursing the scars of the Lighthouse War. Its peace officials fear another continental disaster, while its extreme nationalists are fueled by the bitter memory of humiliation. Its ace pilots, unfortunately, remember both.

IUN / ISEV: The bureaucratic behemoths tasked with peacekeeping and space elevator safety. Their true weapon is red tape. A revoked operational permit from them can ground a fighter squadron just as effectively as a missile battery.

Kaguya Mandate / House Tsukishiro: The visible orbital power everyone pretends is merely a legal inconvenience. House Tsukishiro gives the Mandate royal legitimacy, public symbolism, and a face the cameras cannot ignore. Arisa matters because her name turns habitat grievances into international consequence. Supporters call Kaguya lawful representation; enemies call it separatist pressure, royal theater, or a security threat. Inside the Mandate, loyalists, reformers, unions, independence advocates, militants, and revenge cells all pull the same banner toward different futures.

Selatapura: The opportunistic jewel beneath the elevator. It thrives by being utterly indispensable to everyone while remaining trusted by absolutely no one.

General Resource / Neucom: Corporate futures arriving ahead of schedule. General Resource wants the hardware of war. Neucom wants the data generated by it.

Belka / Grunder Lineage: The festering old scar hidden beneath the skin of new machines. Whenever a prototype demonstrates capabilities that defy logic, someone will inevitably ask which burned Belkan archive it was dragged out of.

PUBLIC HISTORY & REDACTED TRUTH

The publicly accepted version of history is sanitized, neatly packaged, and heavily redacted.

The Lighthouse War left behind towering monuments, drone wreckage, and records that no government wants dragged back into the light.

Orbital habitat controversies are buried in the archives under sterile classifications: Labor dispute. Insurance liability. Security anomaly. Contractual irregularity.

The whispers in the hangar are much uglier. A meticulously erased flight log. A habitat that simply went dark. Star witnesses suddenly recanting their testimonies. A royal princess who continually walks into active warzones with far too much tactical composure for a mere figurehead.

The Ironwake does not hold the entirety of the truth. But it holds enough ghosts from the last war that every major faction is watching its wake, terrified of what the carrier will dredge up next.