The Royal Sovereign Battlecruiser is an innovation even though it is considered to be experimental. It, like the Monarch class battleship, is equipped with assault rifles. The assault rifles are a weapon that can fire an energy discharge directly from a ship’s reactors and can have devastating results on a target, whether a ship or a planet.

The Energy Consortium is producing ships of the Royal Sovereign class to work alongside the Monarch class battleship to protect its mining assets out in areas of unsecured space. Like the Monarch class battleship, not much is known about the Royal Sovereign class battlecruiser other than the initial specs the Energy Consortium presented to the fleet for joint collaboration and development with the EC. The ships were not going to be large enough to share the phalanx 2 weapons systems with the Nebula class battleship and the Behemoth class. Instead, the Royal Sovereign would share the conventional phalanx weapons system proven in the rest of the fleet.

The class was also fitted with 4 experimental assault rifles that could channel power directly from the reactors to the weapons with devastating results. Admiral Owden declined fleet involvement in the project, commenting that until a new, more exotic power source became the norm, this ship class had power requirements that did not make its assault rifles viable.  The assault rifles would drain the ship’s reactors and only allow for a one-time discharge of each rifle before the reactors would have to be refueled.

Owden speculated in a memo to the EC that while the Royal Sovereign class of battlecruiser had a great potential and relative size and should integrate well into the fleet, like the Monarch Class of battleship, the Royal Sovereign class did not provide enough of a benefit over traditional classes under conventional power limitations. Owden further speculated that the main assault rifle design that the ship was built around would require the power that only a planet-based system could provide and would not be a viable option especially with the ship’s smaller size relative to that of the Monarch Class battleship.  The Royal Sovereign could not be viable until smaller, more compact antimatter or quantum energy sources were available. Owden therefore canceled fleet funding for the design. While the EC has produced ships of the class, they have not reported back to the fleet with enough success to warrant fleet support and funding.