Jack of Harts

The United States Space Force commissioned the Marauder and Avenger projects to give them hyperspace combat capabilities, and they flew both designs during The War. But it was the Marines who first tested each design in actual combat. The Marauder was a huge craft, approaching the scale of actual frigates due to the massive hyperdrive, and it bristled with built-in weapons and hard points for additional equipment. The Marines loved it. They first tested it nearly a decade before The War began, and quickly adopted it into permanent deployment. Its primary weakness was maneuverability, due once again to the size of the hyperdrive, and the reactors required to power it and the various weapons. Which is where the Avenger came in. Both the Space Force and the Marines wanted a smaller hypercapable fighter, and it took nearly another decade of miniaturization to make that possible. The Avenger was still massive for a fighter, but was much smaller and sleeker than the Marauders. The Marines took them for testing as well, and it was Jack’s squadron who fought the Shang with them after The War started. All because the Marines also always looked for new weapons to throw at their enemies. Sometimes literally.

The United States Marine Corps of Jack’s childhood was actually America’s primary planetary combat arm. They used both Army and Space Force designs to fight on the ground and to secure the planetary orbitals, and they built their own Marine designs when they needed something to fill a niche those didn’t. They worked out of Army or Space Force bases, and deployed with every Naval ship in the cosmos, which allowed them to continue the old tradition that “every Marine is a rifleman.” Or a mech pilot. Or a tank driver. Maybe a fighter pilot. In the end, if you were a kid who wanted to play with guns and go to the stars, you wanted to be a Space Marine. When things were going wrong and the Americans needed to send someone to personally sort the bad guys out, it was usually the Marines who rode in to stack the bodies. Or they caught the smugglers trying to avoid local laws. Maybe they just boarded your broken down spacecraft and brought you back to the Navy starship that had come all this way to rescue you. Or they delivered disaster relief supplies. The Marines did a little bit of everything, and so they could be seen everywhere that America went.

The United States Space Force had the mission of defending America’s homeland and colonies from spacebased attacks when Jack was young. They operated powerful orbital and ground forts designed to support the smaller craft that are their primary offensive and defensive arm. They flew many fighters and bombers over the years, but the F-7 Hellcat was their baby from day one. It had aerodynamic maneuverability and space flight capabilities, and the paired lasers and missile pods quickly became a symbol of American ingenuity over all the worlds. The Hellcat was so overwhelmingly successful that every other branch of the military began using them in time. Which was when many began to see the Space Force as a secondary arm, only there to help the Navy defend our worlds. The Space Force couldn’t let that stand, so they created the Avenger and Marauder programs to build the first hypercapable American fighters and bombers. The B-14 Marauder deployed a decade before The War started, and showed once more that the Space Force didn’t need no stinking Navy to reach out and crush America’s enemies.