The Umbra, with its pilot, Silhouette
The Umbra is Silhouette's personal starfighter, built for her by Meridius Soldato at approximately the same time as Soldato constructed her base ship, the White Angel.
Designed as an infiltrator, the Umbra's low profile, high speed and maneuverability, and powerful shields overcome its limited weapons payload. Additionally, the Umbra's AEGIS System allows the craft to shape it's force fields into flat planes, which can be used as melee weapons (the force field planes are sheathed in highly-destructive plasma fields) in close-quarters dogfighting without a significant drop in short-term performance. Long-term use will deplete the Umbra's power supply rapidly, greatly dminishing its operation capacity.
Even without the shielding, the Umbra is formidably armoured with lighteweight alloys durable against most starfighter-level projectile weapons and sheathed with a cystalline overcoating which disspiates energy weapons fire.The Umbra posseses typical countermeasure suites for countering homing weapons and disrupting weapon locks.
The Umbra's main offensive weapons are two Crystal Pulse Laser cannons mounted in the forward mandibles on either side of the canopy. Unlike the repeating plasma cannons typically used on starfighters of comprable size, these two cannons are fire-linked and at full power, can easily punch through the shields of a starfighter and cause significant damage to a capital ship.
Unusually for a ship its size, the Umbra also posseses a larger phased plasma lance weapon, typically used against larger star-ships. Since its power demands are as extreme as the AEGIS System, the lance is only good for a maximum of two full-power shots before its power demands begin to diminish performance.
The Umbra's propulsion system is an advanced fusion drive with specialised thrusters, which allow for high-speed maneuvers in space or in planetary atmospheres. The ship's power plant is capable of supporting full deployment of all weapon systems at full-speed for a half-hour, though the fighter has never been tested at that operational level.
The Umbra is equipped with a top of the line Space Drive specially tuned to activate and intitate in less than one minute. The Umbra's navigation computer additionally allows it superior navigation and directional control under normal power or Space Drive.
As the profile of the ship is designed to present as small a target as possible, space is at a premium. The ship is only large enough for the pilot, and Silhouette has to pilot the ship in a prone position.
While Silhouette was unaware of it at the time, it was apparent that Soldato, for reasons of his own, has designed the Umbra as the defensive counterpart to his prototype Gryphon starfighter, intending them to work in tandem against opponents, however this occured only once when Soldato and Silhouette battled Count Heinrich Straeger when the latter attempted military action against Elysium.