The League of Kings and their clients are well-awared of the fact that if their raiding fleets are to stand a chance against the Frontier Navy and co-belligerent forces of off-world civilizations, they need a comparable variety of aerial supporting assets. Aerial tankers allow their carrier aircraft to stay in the air longer (important, as most of their carriers are afforded with none more inspiring than navalized MiG-21), and electronic intelligence and warfare aircraft are valuable both in guiding raider squadrons into ambush positions and in warning them of or even thwarting enemy search-and-destroy efforts. While the warlord alliance do possess land-based support platforms, the immense distances often involved in order to provide coverage to their raiding fleets have limited such platforms' responsiveness and flexibility.
Since traditional carrier-based support aircraft are beyond what the majority of their carriers, equipped with skijumps, are capable of launching, and they initially lacked a matured development for a helicopter-based solution, several League of Kings' original founding warbands combined efforts to modify an amphibious aircraft design into several variants, one equipped with a so-called "Balance Beam" active electronically-scanned array radar for airborne early warning role, one serving as an aerial tanker, and one fitted to carry out airborne jamming.
Next challenge comes in the form of ships capable of supporting them. Unlike Frontier Navy's co-belligerent off-world partners, a few of whom do operate seaplanes as well and proceed to build heavily-armed seaplane carriers and incorporate such ships into naval action groups, the League of Kings prefer the more-concealable auxiliary cruisers and submarines operating outside of already-deployed raider squadrons to support the seaplanes. The latter option comes in the form of I-590 Type Ho nuclear-powered submarine.
Each I-590 Type Ho is capable of refueling up to three flying boats simultaneously and can carry small spare parts as well as even replacement aircrew; alternatively it can carry up to eight 40-foot ISO containers. Armaments include six bow-mounted 533mm torpedo tubes with either 12 torpedoes or 24 mines; while the warlord alliance reportedly developed a submarine-launched version of Noor anti-ship missile that can be fired from 533mm torpedo tubes, such missiles are known to have never been issued to these submarines, ostensibly to discourage overzealous behaviours amongst their captains.
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