The Venture class battleship is the mainstay of the Malleon Navy, functioning both as a ship-of-the-line in larger fleets as well as the nucleus of smaller combat groups. Until the Malleon began commissioning Eminence-class super battleships at the end of the War, the Venture class was the best-armed and -armored ship of any of the navies. The original MIS Venture, first of its class, saw the most combat of any Malleon capital ship and became both a folk legend and a propaganda tool.

The Venture-class has a similar silhouette to the Eminence-class, but it’s smaller (1320 yards to the Eminence-class’s 2025). The bubble on the flight deck is much smaller (about 1/3 of the length of the flight deck to the Eminence-class’s 2/3) because the adaptive armor to protect the junction between the two hulls was less advanced. For similar reasons, each hull tapers less dramatically than on the Eminence-class. Also like the Eminence-class, Venture-class ships feature a railgun running the length of the flight deck. The adaptive armor creates an anti-shimmer aura around the ship, but, like the Eminence-class ships, Venture-class ships are too big to take advantage of this for stealth.

The primary role of the Venture class during the war was serving in fleets as ships-of-the-line. These battleships have deck after deck of turrets along each of their hulls, capable of devastating broadsides. In groups, they can use these broadsides in tandem for area control, as the salvos from different angles box in enemy ships or drive them apart depending on the battle plan. Malleon naval officers study the different formations and the firing solutions they can produce as a martial art, suichodori, the underwater dance: For example, the tactic of using wide broadsides from multiple angles to force an enemy fleet to converge into a killbox is called the Whale Art, zaitokujira-jutsu, based on the hunting tactics of humpback whales that use bubble screens to box fish in. The purpose of suichodori is to take maximum advantage of Malleon weapon systems by forcing opponents into a “dance” of moves and countermoves that’s “led” by the Venture battleship formation, forcing the enemy into the “final step,” positions where they can’t escape a lethal broadside or railgun shot.

The Venture class’s secondary role was serving as the main capital ship of smaller combat groups. These often were led by field-promoted admirals coming up from privateers or the merchant marine, often sneered at as “fool’s brass” by officers who studied suichodori at the Naval Academy. But even outside of full-strength Venture formations, the Venture class was still more individually powerful than any ship in the Feron or Isan navies. While effective in the early stages of the War, the Feron learned how to use multiple Wasps to ambush and destroy or capture the Venture-class ships leading these combat groups. This led both to the Eminence Project that led to the Eminence-class, but in the meantime, the maverick admirals in command of these combat groups recruited Isan allies for combined-arms tactics, with the less-powerful but more-versatile Isan cruisers better capable of protecting Venture-led combat groups caught off-guard until the Malleon ships could find their footing and position themselves to use the Venture­-class’s superior firepower. By the end of the war, the “fool’s brass” working with the Isan were credited with pioneering a new kind of suichodori but with an off-beat, jazz-like tempo, but this has yet to be formalized into official doctrine.

As with the Eminence-class, the Venture-class’s main weapons are the railgun and the batteries of turrets along each hull. The railgun primarily fired precision rounds, as implosion rounds were in prototype for most of the war and not standard issue until the war’s midpoint. Because precision round-firing railguns were new technology could disable an enemy ship with a single well-placed shot, but fired very slowly and required precise aim, younger officers coming up from the academy adapted suichodori to line up enemy ships for these “elegant” decapitation strikes, putting them in conflict with officers who trained on older craft and favored the “messier” broadside kills. As with the Eminence-class, Venture-class ships kept their heavy turrets near the flight deck in the middle of the ship with light turrets on the narrower decks at the top and bottom ends.

For defense, the Venture class is clad in adaptive armor and covered with point-defense cannons. This armor was highly effective against Feron cannons, being vulnerable only to captured Malleon heavy turrets, Feron breaching teams, and ramming/impaling Feron capital ships. As the war unfolded and the Venture-class’s vulnerabilities became clearer, the Malleon Navy retrofitted older Venture-class ships with technological advances spun off from the Eminence Project, most importantly improved adaptive armor and more-precise point-defense cannons.

The Venture class also has a foundry and hangar for building and repairing gunships and other small support craft. Unlike the Eminence-class, these facilities aren’t large enough to make major repairs to itself or capital ships in its combat group, but they can patch up minor damage to keep ships in their combat group battle-ready.

The Eminence Project spawned many variants of the Venture-class before arriving at the final Eminence-class design, most of which exist only in small runs of prototypes. While some of these designs involved relatively minor changes, such as the longer flight-deck bubble and more-tapered hulls that eventually were incorporated into the Eminence-class, others involved more radical changes such as adding a second railgun or switching to a three- or four-hulled design. Most of these prototypes weren’t intended for deployment but were pressed into service anyway at the most desperate stages of the War. While few survived combat, their black-box data helped Eminence Project engineers field-test their technology and finally arrive at a finished design.