Field Secured Container Vessel

A Field Secured Container Vessel (FSCV) was a type of bulk transport vessel used by the Imperial Navy.

Characteristics
With massive force field generators mounted on their bows, a pair of FSCVs could generate one or more huge force-field bubbles between them, in which vast quantities of cargo could be transported.

The typical FSCV was a Loronar Corporation design, with two ships capable of supporting a chain of up to twenty 800m field bubbles and five billion cubic meters of cargo. Other types of FSCVs were built to different designs: for instance, Black Ice, assigned to replenishment fleet DK-209 in the Mortex sector, was built by Rendili StarDrive, and could generate up to nine field bubbles, each capable of hauling at least 110 million tons of cargo.

Most of the length of an FSCV was taken up by field bubbles, and while the tugs were themselves around the size of small Star Destroyers, most of the hull space inside them was occupied by engines, fuel cells and shield generators: in the Rendili design, the crew—100 in each tug—spent most of their time in a small command module on top of the hull.

In normal operations, a pair of FSCVs would pass through a system under way, while smaller transports ferried their cargo to its destination. This was done because, while they could comfortably sustain their cruising speed in the vacuum of deep space, their ion drives provided only very slow acceleration and deceleration.

Since two ships the size of heavy cruisers might be required to haul a cargo broadly comparable in volume and tonnage to a large Super Star Destroyer, diverting most of their power output into sustaining the force-fields to do so, it is unsurprising that a typical Loronar FSCV took thirty-five hours and 600 million kilometers to move between a full stop and its normal sublight cruising speed.