(This is probably a dead suggestion, but it's fun, so let's go!)

As noted in the Freedom Fighter ship description, the WYN sold copies of their gunboat to neutral worlds. I assume they would have done this relatively frequently. This proposal presumes that at some point the WYN eventually lost control of this process.

One unnamed world who purchased Freedom Fighters liked them well enough, but they chafed at the continued dependence on supplies from the WYN. Having a proper industrial base of their own, and having bootstrapped themselves to handle the technology, they decided to set up their own production facilities.

The world then, after the fact, decided to try to negotiate with the WYN to properly license their efforts. As part of these negotiations, the world wanted to show they already figured things out, and sent along detailed designs of what they had done. Unfortunately, during the negotiations, some of the middlemen decided that it would be fun to release those detailed designs. One thing lead to another, and those design plans became widely distributed.

Finally, some industrious groups took those plans and filled in any missing information. They also modified the design to simplify the gunboat even more:
- The disruptor was discarded and replaced with a phaser. This eliminated the most complex weapon system, simplifying construction and maintenance.
- All phasers were reduced to Ph-2s to eliminate the expensive components required for Ph-1s, and further reducing complexity and maintenance costs.
- They included full design details for drones, too. This allowed anyone getting the designs to have all of the information required for the gunboats.

This final incarnation of the designs became widely and wildly spread throughout the Alpha and Beta sectors. Basically, anyone who wanted the design could get it. Because of this, the designs became known as the "Free Fighter" (instead of Freedom Fighter) gunboat. Despite what anyone wanted, the name stuck.

This meant two things:
1) Any world with sufficient industrial infrastructure and a interstellar technology could now make these gunboats. If your world could make a freighter (or maybe even a shuttle), your world could now make this gunboat.
2) Anyone with sufficient manufacturing resources could their own workboat. This was something even a rich hobbyist could indulge in.

While this means that any world with interstellar contact could access these plans, their actual utility was, of course, limited by the need for a world to have enough infrastructure to support building them, limiting the pool of worlds that could take advantage of this. It also required the world to be willing to take the expense to create the facilities (instead of just buying built gunboats) and deal with the political ramifications of rebuffing the sales pitch from the dominant empire of their region, limiting the worlds using this gunboat even more.

That said, this gunboat design still became incredibly common and, from the late Y180s and after, would often be the first armed starship created by emergent worlds.

Technical details:
This is just a Freedom Fighter that has two changes:
- All Ph-1 are replaced with Ph-2.
- The disruptor is replaced with a Ph-2.
Presumably there would be a variant that has three drones instead of three Ph-2. The non-combat variants would be the same, but with Ph-2s instead of Ph-1s.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Wednesday, September 30, 2020 - 05:55 pm: Edit

Very few planets can build freighters, only major industrial worlds (major planets in F&E, possibly some of the minor ones) so that's not really helpful as those worlds have defense brigades with fleet-supplied real gunboats.