NationStates Jolt Archive

The Fury class battlecarrier.
Seeing the success of the trimaran hulled Poseidon class frigate, Ineffable scientists have been looking into applications of the design elsewhere. The Fury class is the result. With slight modification to the Hell class design, a trimaran carrier was designed. The result was the Wrath class supercarrier, essentially three adjoined Hells. But, this seemed a waste of the opportunity. The Ineffable navy was distinctly lacking any battleships, so the next step taken was to alter the design to produce a trimaran battleship, resulting in the Obliteration class battleship. But still, military top brass weren't satisfied. They felt there was something more they could do with it. The Fury class battlecarrier was the result. The central deck is the same as the deck on a Hell class, indeed it is exactly the same. The Fury class has the same aircraft capacity as a Hell, all of which launch from the central flight deck. The outer two, however, are taken from the Obliteration class, loaded with high calibur naval guns. The benefit of having two means that the Fury class can deliver two broadsides at once, if engaging multiple enemies, or it can deliver twice as much power to a shore bombardment. And with it's length being almost a kilometre, the punch it packs from a single side is consdierable enough already. The Fury class Battlecarrier is will be the single most powerful seafaring ship ever constructed by the Ineffable Empire.
Dimensions:
Length: 832m
Beam: 42m
Flight Deck Width: 124m
Total Width: 317m
Aircraft: 355
Mecha Complement: 20 J.E.D.I. and 10 Hellfire Class

OOC: Comments/suggestions please. Also, I know nothing about naval guns, so if someone such as Doujin could give me advice in that area I'd be very grateful.

Well, it fully depends on what you want. You could fit quite a few 16" cannons on those two outer trimaran hulls, and consider that an Iowa-class battleship uses 16" shells. For comparison, the Armor Piercing 16" shells mass about 2,700 pounds and can penetrate up to 30 feet of solid concrete. 16" AP rounds have a range of about 32 kilometers. The High-Capacity rounds on the other hand are shore bombardment rounds, and even they mass 1,900 pounds. HC rounds have a range of about 35 kilometers. And in naval guns, you have to remember that the propellant isnt stored inside the casing (in a traditional cannon atleast) so most of the volume in the round is devoted for payload.

So, consider if you had a 22" cannon. Such a thing would be an absolute monster in size and could deliver so much firepower in a single barrage that traditional artillery would have to crouch in shame. Another thing in designing your naval guns that you have to take into consideration is that do you want to use the traditional system of powder bags? What if you made the guns a smoothbore? Ofcourse, in a smoothbore you would need to use fin-stabilized rounds but if you had a 22" cannon, the efficiency of a smootbore type of weapon might be rather, interesting.

In any case, there are a lot of possibilities to choose from and a good comparison ground when developing your guns are the 16" guns on the Iowa-class battleships.

Interesting. I assume smoothbore is basically an unrifled barrel, yes?

push

Yes, smoothbore is exactly what the name implies. The strength of smoothbores is in their higher muzzle velocity. A rifled barrel gives more accuracy but in turn has lesser muzzle velocity. These differences arent ofcourse as hugely pronounced as one would think. Ofcourse, you have to consider than in a naval battle, the targets you will be using your main gun against are going to be pretty large so pinpoint accuracy is not the most necessary trait in the main guns.

Personally, i prefer smaller and lighter 8 or 6 incher battlecannons, as the age of the Battleship is pretty much gone.
Missiles can do twice as much damage from more than twice the range, and Missile Frigates are what will largely compose any fleet i manage to assemble, as well as Aircraft Carriers.
Frigates can still have a role, but i fear that the days of enormous ordinance on the seas are largely over, unless you wish to fight a purely pre-wwii war.

Personally, i prefer smaller and lighter 8 or 6 incher battlecannons, as the age of the Battleship is pretty much gone.
Missiles can do twice as much damage from more than twice the range, and Missile Frigates are what will largely compose any fleet i manage to assemble, as well as Aircraft Carriers.
Frigates can still have a role, but i fear that the days of enormous ordinance on the seas are largely over, unless you wish to fight a purely pre-wwii war.

You are largely mistaken. A round from a single 16" gun does as much damage as a Tomahawk missile, if not more, and costs only a fraction of the cost. With new advances in munitions, modified SCRAMJet rounds could have possibly the same accuracy, be fired from Battleships, and have same if not greater range than a missile. You can use your missiles and 6-8 inch naval guns on my Battleships, I gaurantee you that I will have sunk your ships by time you get my Battleships to sink.

Keep the suggestions coming please!

Is this post modern or future tech? (and what about those Mecha's?)

And what is going on in those width measurements? why have you put the beam so small compared to the flightdeck?

If you're selling any. I'll buy two.

Personally, i prefer smaller and lighter 8 or 6 incher battlecannons, as the age of the Battleship is pretty much gone.
Missiles can do twice as much damage from more than twice the range, and Missile Frigates are what will largely compose any fleet i manage to assemble, as well as Aircraft Carriers.
Frigates can still have a role, but i fear that the days of enormous ordinance on the seas are largely over, unless you wish to fight a purely pre-wwii war.

You are largely mistaken. A round from a single 16" gun does as much damage as a Tomahawk missile, if not more, and costs only a fraction of the cost. With new advances in munitions, modified SCRAMJet rounds could have possibly the same accuracy, be fired from Battleships, and have same if not greater range than a missile. You can use your missiles and 6-8 inch naval guns on my Battleships, I gaurantee you that I will have sunk your ships by time you get my Battleships to sink.

Quite correct. The usefullness of naval guns is largely ignored these days, but when all available technology is applied naval guns can be on par in usefullness with missiles.

The main problem with naval guns in comparison to missiles is that shells are essentially unguided and cannot propell themselves. As such, hitting the target depends entirely on the ship firing the guns, but with a missile, it can adjust to possible position changes of the target and does not miss as easilly as a shell does. But in turn, a missile can be fooled with ECM and shot down, a gun shell cannot. And a missile usually has more range than a gun shell does.

I think that the best choice as naval guns would be in the 16" to 22" area, with the guns firing SCRAMJET rounds. SCRAMJET rounds would have insanely high terminal velocity and as such they would be quite accurate and have pretty good range. But dont take an either/or stand with the missiles and guns, use both and you'll get better fighting efficiency.

If you happen to be selling any of your warships, the Holy Empire of Whitsonia would like to purchase 50.

Should I make the beam bigger? Would ~80m be good?
It's future tech.
I may be selling these, but not until I've A: Actually finished the design, and B: produced enough to fill my naval requirements, and decided on a price

So I'll be using SCRAM jet rounds then for the ammuntion, with guns between 16" and 22". So how many of these can I realistically fit on this ship? 25 16" maybe, or 20 22" on each side then?

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http://aa.1asphost.com/AllyG/furyclassbattlecarrier.JPG
Eight 20" coilcannons each side, in four double turrets. That seem good?

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[OOC: Perhaps you should consider utilizing more missile systems. Cannons are all well and good, but they're outdated and outclassed by the naval assault missiles used by modern cruisers. If you make your warship sit as low in the water as possible, you can extend its carrying capacity, so it can carry far greater deliverable weapons payload in missiles than it can in shells. By coupling the missile systems with anti-missile flak cannons and missile intercept units on supporting ships, you have what is essentially two or three cruiser-class ships rolled into one.]

[OOC: Also, you may want to stabilize your design by removing those hefty forward guns and replacing them with smaller ones. I suspect that that design would suffer from real sluggish turning - even in comparison to a normal carrier - and would probably be pulled down too low in the water when stationary.]

OOC: For some reason, it looks like the huge guns on the outer hulls could possibly tip the ship. It just seems to me that there is way too many guns on the outer hulls.

OOC: I suggest take away the two forward guns and redistubute the firepower on a more even level, should work and help improve mobility

IC: The Holy Republic of Soldato Italiano would like to purchase two of these vessels when they become available. Thankyou.

Remove the forwardmost guns on both of the outer hulls, balance out the placing of the remaining guns on the two outer hulls with equal spacings and dont put cannons right to the tip of any of the hulls. Then, use the remaining space that you've got for large guns, on missile tubes to give the ship some stand-off attack power as well.

Also, how about using a linear accelerator to launch those fighters you've got on the ship? Instead of having the center hull be practically flat, make it a bit more bulkier but with a single linear accelerator built inside it. That way you could have your launch facilities under the cover of armor.

And dont forget CIWS weapons and defensive missiles.

[OOC: Alternately, build a taller superstructure and hollow the centre into a hangar bay leading out under the main deck but with a slanted exit at the same height from the water as usual. The ceiling would be the upper deck, which would be free to be armoured and protected with anti-aircraft weapons and anti-missile systems. To make it work, the upper deck would have to be slightly overlapped by the lower deck, to give clearance room for the aircraft below. This system allows you to retain rapidity of deployment (the one aircraft launch system suggested above would be slow in an engagement situation), and protect ship and aircraft conclusively. :)]

[OOC: ...or you could stow helicopter gunships on the upper deck. That'd be neat... fighters/bombers below, choppers above. Double your coastal fighting capacity, potentially.]

Now that idea I really like, Ma-Tek. Thanks. *starts modifying pic*
Actually, on that pic you can't see any of the anti-air defences, since they're normal size and that ship's just under a kilometre long. I've got missiles, flak cannons and gattling cannons for air defence. As for offensive missiles, it has them. They're the dark patches behind the forward guns.
Also, I'm going to be using diamond armour for this. It's lighter than most metals and stronger than all. Plus, it can be mass produced (yes, it can. Even in RL there are people doing it, so I figure that an NS nation could easily make enough for armouring massive ships.)

The problem with diamond related armor is that diamond fractures easilly. True, it has excellent refractive properties but its just too expensive to be mounted merely because of that. The simpler methods are usually the more effective ones as well. How about a few meters of Chobham style sandwiched composite armor with ceramic layers in it as well. On top of all that could be a separate refractive layer. Depleted Uranium has a bit too much mass to act as warship armor. In any case, diamond armor just isnt worth it. Going with more traditional concepts and developing them further gives you a far better result with less cost.

The point is it's not expensive, it's cheap due to the fact it's being mass produced rather than painstakingly mined.

Provisional Final Stats
Dimensions:
Length: 832m
Beam: 42m
Flight Deck Width: 124m
Total Width: 317m

Aircraft:
200 Wasp class fighters
100 Aurora class fighter/bombers
30 Shadow class stealth bombers
25 HB-2 class HyperSoar bombers
60 Samurai class attack helicopters

Mecha Complement:
20 J.E.D.I. class
10 Hellfire class

Armament (Offensive):
16 20" gauss cannons
8 10" gauss cannons
30 76mm cannons
60 Tomahawk-4 cruise missiles
180 Banshee class anti-ship missiles

Armament (defensive)
8 magazine loaded torpedo launchers (Spider class torpedoes
200 Shriek class SAM emplacements
100 Evil class CIWS
300 Euronda class missile interceptor launchers (short range hypersonic missiles, designed to destroy incoming anti-ship missiles)

Sound good?

Personally, i prefer smaller and lighter 8 or 6 incher battlecannons, as the age of the Battleship is pretty much gone.
Missiles can do twice as much damage from more than twice the range, and Missile Frigates are what will largely compose any fleet i manage to assemble, as well as Aircraft Carriers.
Frigates can still have a role, but i fear that the days of enormous ordinance on the seas are largely over, unless you wish to fight a purely pre-wwii war.

You are largely mistaken. A round from a single 16" gun does as much damage as a Tomahawk missile, if not more, and costs only a fraction of the cost. With new advances in munitions, modified SCRAMJet rounds could have possibly the same accuracy, be fired from Battleships, and have same if not greater range than a missile. You can use your missiles and 6-8 inch naval guns on my Battleships, I gaurantee you that I will have sunk your ships by time you get my Battleships to sink.


What you fail to understand is a missile such as a Soviet Sandbox has a range of approximately miles, a cannon will only fire some 17.5 nautical miles. Thats a difference of 275 nautical miles. Now if a ship is moving at 30 knotts it will take it nearly 9 hours to get in range to use its cannons. You can get a lot of missiles off in that time.

Tomohawks, which the discussion was about earlier, I believe have an even longer range. The reason guns have fallen out of fashion is because so long as your missiles are good you're never going to have to use them.

They are however cheaper to fire, which is why they are still of use in shore bombardment. However, in the case of TST's ship, the draft of that kind of vesel will mean that it won't be able to get close to the shore to use them.

[OOC: Perhaps you should consider utilizing more missile systems. Cannons are all well and good, but they're outdated and outclassed by the naval assault missiles used by modern cruisers. If you make your warship sit as low in the water as possible, you can extend its carrying capacity, so it can carry far greater deliverable weapons payload in missiles than it can in shells. By coupling the missile systems with anti-missile flak cannons and missile intercept units on supporting ships, you have what is essentially two or three cruiser-class ships rolled into one.]

[OOC: I disagree. Modern ships are very lightly armored in RL navies, often less than an inch. Missiles wreak havoc on those ships. However, those missiles would have trouble penetrating the armor of an Iowa-class battleship and the guns were VERY effective at bombardments.

That's one thing I completely agree with Doujin about: The relevance of the battleship in the modern navy.]