Sojourner-class dreadnought

"Let the deconstruction of our gifts begin! The majesty of our new fleet will be unparalleled!"

- Arbiter Ripa 'Moramee, upon activating these dreadnoughts

The Sojourner-class dreadnought is a class of prime dragoon used by the Forerunner fleet. Manufactured within Summus Assembler Vats, the Sojourner class was commissioned shortly before the Forerunner-Flood war and the warships were ready for combat soon after the Flood's reemergence.

Superstructure and hull
Two Sojourner dreadnoughts and the docking battle station form combat tridents, independent squadrons that could be deployed on any solar system. During the war against the Flood, the Forerunners made a new combat formation: ten Sojourner dreadnoughts arranging themselves into an octagonal formation and a battle station arranged into deadly decimation lattices, capable of splitting other vessels in half. The dreadnoughts can detach from the battle station and act as components of the ships themselves when hovering above the surface of a planet.

Sojourner dreadnoughts are equipped with long-range scanning auspex array systems, which can peer through slipspace to look for approaching ships, mapping local star systems by probing vast distance in realspace, or detecting subtle changes in planetary or ship atmosphere.

Crew and complement
Like most Forerunner warships, Sojourner-class dreadnoughts only required a handful of living beings to oversee ship operations. These dragoons were crewed by fifteen navarchs, which oversee naval or combat operations. The navarchs were led by the ship's princeps. The crew was protected by two hundred heavily armored Warrior-Servant scutarii, who excelled in shipboard combat and the tactical reconfiguration of the dreadnoughts' interior spaces.

The dreadnought also carried millions of autonomous Despair-class hunter-killers, which were directed by the ship's complement of five thousand venatores on long-range strikes. The venatores donned war sphinxes while carrying out their duties aboard these dreadnoughts.

Armaments
The Sojourner was a heavily armed class of dragoon with a single capital-scale torsion driver as its primary weapon. A gravitic emitter that could be used as a delicate grasping tool or as a crude scalpel, the torsion driver was capable of pushing and pulling portions of the enemy ships beyond their shielding and structural supports with discordant harmonies, tearing them apart and exposing the vulnerable systems of the enemy ship to the rest of the dreadnought's complement of armaments.

The Sojourner dreadnoughts were also armed with twenty-eight converging beam cannons. Controlled by Warrior-Servant crewmen, these beam cannons launched tendrils of energy capable of tracking enemy vessels, creating a path that allowed for antimatter streams to pursue hostiles. The dreadnoughts were also outfitted with three hundred light mass fusillade cannons.

Operational history
Manufactured within Summus Assembler Vats, the Sojourner-class dreadnoughts were the last in a line of first-order warships stretching to the Forerunner's earliest interstellar expansion and were the pinnacle of Forerunner naval technology: impossibly fast, heavily armed and highly efficient. The Sojourners was introduced shortly before containment efforts against the Flood began. Millions of Sojourners were raised up and thrown up against the Flood, proving to be astonishingly effective against the parasite. These vessels participated in all major engagements of the war and were praised as the apex of Forerunner naval accomplishment. Sojourners were sent on strikes deep into Flood-dominated Burns, deployed from trident spire and linked together in weapon configurations of world-ending firepower that ruthlessly cauterized the slightest hint of infection. Despite their efforts, only a few remained intact by the end of the war.

Some Sojourner dreadnoughts were docked at the Apex Site on the shield world known as Trove. During the Human-Covenant War in 2531, the High Prophet of Regret and Arbiter Ripa 'Moramee went to the Etran Harborage to gather a massive and powerful invasion fleet for the Covenant. However, a Reclaimer was required to release the locking mechanism holding the ships in place. Thus, they abducted Professor Ellen Anders to activate it for them. The ships were destroyed when the artificial star inside the shield world went supernova after the crew of the used their ship's slipspace drive as an improvised bomb.

Trivia

 * Parts of these ships were strewn about the outer surface of the Shield World. These derelicts are probably from a battle between the Forerunners and the Flood that resulted in the installation's infestation.
 * These ships bear a resemblance to a type of horizontal Forerunner structure found on Installation 00.

List of appearances

 * Halo Wars
 * Halo Legends
 * Origins
 * Halo: Escalation
 * Halo Mythos: A Guide to the Story of Halo
 * Halo: Smoke and Shadow