The Piranha, smallest of the main Feron capital ships, is designed to exploit weak points in enemy ship armor to launch fast and devastating boarding raids. The Piranha’s key innovation was the inertia-cancelling pod (ICP), an advance in Feron bubble technology that generates an antigravity force to counteract outside forces. This allows ICPs to be fired from turrets without the g-forces killing the boarding party inside as well as protecting the party from the force of impact when punching through enemy hulls. Piranhas primarily took down smaller support capital ships and proved particularly effective against modular Isan ships, where it could land boarding parties across multiple modules too quickly for their crews to seal them off and jettison them. But Piranhas could also successfully fire troops into cruisers and battleships with damaged armor, especially ones struck by other Feron ships’ weapon segments. The Piranha gets its name both from the way it would rapidly fire boarding parties to swarm and overwhelm enemy crews without warning and from the toothy, jaw-like weapon segment. Among the Feron legions, Piranha marines became known for their almost reckless bravery for being willing to shoot themselves out of a cannon through space toward an enemy ship, similar to early paratroopers in real life. 

While only 230 yards tall, the Piranha’s combination of high maneuverability and its turret-like ICP launchers allow it to dart through a battlefield and board vulnerable enemy ships with little warning. Like the other Feron capital ships, the Piranha uses a three-segment “totem pole” design. The Piranha’s command/engineering segment is proportionately smaller than the Wasp’s. Its most substantial difference from other Feron ships is its honeycomb segment: Because the arrowhead-shaped ICPs are fired out of turrets rather than launched under their own power, the individual hangar openings are much smaller, but there are more of them. Boarding parties pile into the ICPs, then a rail system loads the ICP into the turret to fire at the enemy. For the weapon segment, the Piranha uses a huge jaw-like set of clamps with tooth-like barbed blades to help the Piranha latch onto an enemy ship. Once latched on, the Piranha can fire ICPs from point-blank range with little chance of missing or failing to penetrate the enemy armor. Latching on also makes the Piranha difficult to hit both by the targeted ship’s weapons and by other enemy ships that would risk friendly fire. The Piranha’s engine has seven small exhaust ports in a 2-3-2 stack.

The Piranha’s main combat role is to board smaller capital ships and disable or capture them. While groups of Wasps could take down lone Venture-class battleships, support ships like the Bulldog and the Porcupine could engage a Wasp or its launched craft long enough to allow a single Venture-class to take them all down one at a time. By firing a large number of ICPs into various locations on an enemy ship, a Piranha could render an enemy ship useless almost immediately because the crew would be too busy fighting off boarders to focus on the battle. Experienced Piranha marines could even commandeer a boarded enemy ship by capturing key stations faster than the enemy crews could sabotage them. The Malleon quickly learned to rig up Bulldogs to self-destruct in case of Piranha attacks after hijacked Bulldogs proved particularly dangerous when turned against Malleon battleships and cruisers. In larger fleet battles, the Piranha takes advantage of fulgressus by firing its ICPs at targets of opportunity that are scrambling to defend against Wasp attacks, enhancing confusion in the enemy ranks by rapidly firing boarders into one or more ships.