Mars-class

The Mars-class Heavy Cruisers are fictional warships in the Honor Harrington universe (the "Honorverse").

The Mars class Heavy Cruisers were a response to the disappointing performance of the Sword-class Heavy Cruisers. Overall a more powerful ship, she has suffered some serious design flaws that were corrected in later versions. Mars-class vessels were originally designed to be fitted with smaller, advanced intertial compensators. However, these compensators were not initially available, forcing standard PRH compensators to be fitted instead. There was one advantage to this; Mars-class possessed a great deal of reserve impeller capacity. Thus they could tow many more missile pods than other heavy cruisers.

Massing 477 kTons and with a crew complement of about 1200 personnel, she was the pinnacle of early-war Havenite design.

Initially installed with a new class of fusion reactor. the Goshawk-3 was substantially more efficient. While generating twice the power for only a 10% increase in size, shortcuts were made in containment safeguards. On occasion, the reactor will "hiccup", the safeguards completely failing all at once, which causes the destruction of the entire ship. This problem became apparent when the PNS Tanit was lost with all hands in parking orbit around Enki.

Mars Subclasses
Mars-A Originally just an expanded Sword, she featured larger magazines than her later iterations, which gave her extended engagement capacity.

Mars-B A much more popular design than the -A, she traded missile ammunition for uprated defenses and energy armament. As well, she was the first class to have sufficient fire control to handle the newly-redeveloped missile pods (previous ships could handle pods, but suffered degradation in their firing solutions due to insufficient computer capacity).

Mars-C A mid-war change in design, this replaced the original Goshawk-3 reactors with a more modern, safer design.