Einhauser
10-06-2005, 20:08
Introduction: The Lord class carrier is Einhauser’s response to the ever-growing threat of small craft, mainly fighters, destroying seemingly impenetrable targets, such as the fabled Deathstars. It was designed so that enemy fighters could not only be countered with anti-aircraft guns (of which this ship has quite a few, to say the least), but also with overwhelming waves of our own fighters.
For ease of navigation, this document has been laid out almost identically to that of the Firebat’s.
Chapter one: The hull
--The shields
Chapter two: The weapons systems
--The lance cannons
--The point defense guns (PDG)
Chapter three: The interior
--The bridge
--The mess halls
--The hangers
--The prison system
Chapter four: The engines
--The FTL engine
--Engineering
Chapter five: General statistics
CHAPTER ONE: The hull
The Lord class carrier is very fragile, when compared to most military carriers. It is long, and thin. Because it was designed to stay on the peripheral of combat zones and destroy enemy fighters and bombers, its armor is rather thin. Add to that fact the unusual shape of the ship (it is roughly cigar-shaped, with three large cubes placed evenly along the hull), and you get a generally high-risk assignment for captains.
The hull of a Lord is made up of three different layers, each with their own function. They are, in order of closeness to the outside space: Adamantium/ Crystex composite, which provides excellent protection from both matter and laser weaponry, with neither being overly emphasized; Durrosteel, which acts like a ground wire as well as armor, keeping any energy to hit the layer immediately in front of it from short-circuiting the rest of the ship; and finally Carbon Dioxenzemes, which keeps the rest of the ship insulated and airtight. In case of a rupture, this layer can heal itself in minutes using the nanites woven into its molecular structure.
While these layers are remarkably good at their purposes, they have been used sparingly on this ship. While the actual armor is slightly less dense than that used on Einhauserian battlecruisers, the Lord class is nearly three times their size, yet does not increase the amount of armor given to it. Because the ship is not meant to enter actual combat, this is not a serious problem to the skillful commander.
The main defensive shielding present on the ship is the voidshield. A voidshield is what you would find on most ships, albeit under the name particle shields. It runs constantly in one large, all encompassing bubble around the ship, keeping micro meteors and enemy matter-based weaponry, to name a few space-borne hazards, from reaching the hull. The voidshield is usually transparent, although it turns a mottled bluish-green/gray when matter impacts it. The color change only affects the immediate area around the point of impact, and only lasts for a few seconds. The Lord class is fitted with a device that pulls the voidshield flush against the hull, for use in the TDM (see chapter four). Alas, as magnificent as this technology is, it can still be overcome. Particularly large or particularly fast objects can pierce the shield with relative impunity. To launch or receive fighters, the voidshield must first be lowered.
The energy shields are almost totally different. Instead of blocking matter, they absorb energy from enemy laser weaponry. The energy absorbed is transmitted to the shield generator, which in turn stores it until a certain amount has built up, at which point the energy is either directed back into space, or into the engines. This later action results in a massive boost in speed for a few seconds, but also rapidly degrades the engine integrity. If the generator waits too long to empty the energy it stored, it will shut itself down or explode, depending on how well it is maintained. A different way they can be knocked out is by absorbing too much energy too quickly. This will result in similar actions as if it waited too long to send out the stored energy.
The Lord class has been fitted with a very complicated energy shielding system that allows starfighters to be launched without dropping the defensive systems surrounding the hanger doors. This is accomplished by having individual shield generators for every hanger, and even larger, more powerful ones to shield the rest of the ship. The shield positions are as follows: fore, 1st square, 1st hanger, 2nd square, 2nd hanger, 3rd square, 3rd hanger, engines, 4th hanger, top, and bottom. All of these generators draw power from a single reactor, but we won’t go into that until chapter four.
CHAPTER TWO: The weapons systems
The Lord, being designed for long-ranged combat, has been armed accordingly. Instead of the massive arrays of lasers, torpedoes, and guns common on most combat vessels, the Lord is only equipped with 14 Lance Cannons (one on the prow, one on each outward facing side of all three cubes, and one on the stern. Each Lance Cannon packs a gigantic anti-capitol ship laser, which can melt through most known substances. The Lance Cannons are mounted in large turrets, which allow them to swing in any direction.
The Lance Cannons present on the Lord class have been specially modified with newly declassified focus lenses that boost the range of the weapons to nearly 10 times that of a standard Lance Cannon. This allows the Lords to keep enemies at a distance until either a ship better suited to slugging it out with other ships comes along or its fighters destroy the threat.
These weapons would be useless against fighters or bombers, so Point Defense Guns (PDG) have to be installed to protect the ship. There are 3,600 PDGs covering the hull of the Lord, with extra-dense clusters of them around the engines and weapons. Each PDG consists of three miniature Lance Cannons, with a sophisticated Targeting, Tracking, and Termination (T3) computer to help guide the rapidly firing laser bursts.
CHAPTER THREE: The interior
The Lord class carrier is a huge vessel, made up of mile upon mile of passageways, service ducts, and crawlspaces crisscrossing the ship. The corridors are narrow, only wide enough for one armored figure to pass along, or two unarmored side by side. Einhauserian engineers designed it like this in order to allow for the most passageways possible to fit. Because of the immense size of this class, moving men and materials around could take hours. To speed things up, there are six short-range teleporter stations present onboard, which are used to beam various things around the ship. They are not powerful enough to beam the stuff off-board, but they serve their purpose well enough.
The three cubes that keep being mentioned are actually the main parts of the ship. You see, crew cabins, mess halls, and most other important rooms are located in these areas, while most of the thin main body is filled up with the immense hangers, which have room for roughly 450 medium sized fighters and several dozen shuttles and bombers. Each cube is 153 decks high, as opposed to the 98 of the main body. We will go into more detail about the hangers later on in this chapter.
If the corridors were the nervous system, the bridge would be the brain. Nestled deep in the center of the first cube, it is the best-armored area of the ship and nearly impervious to damage. It spreads itself over three decks, which are filled with all manner of gunners, pilots, navigators, and a colorful assortment of other servicemen. The entire room is decked out in luxurious oak paneling, and the room is crowned with the shining gold command throne, which replaces the aging captain’s chair found in most ships. The command throne allows the captain to neurally interface with his ship, essentially becoming one with his mighty craft. As you can imagine, this gives the ship the advantage over ships of comparable size. Several backup generators have been installed that will keep the bridge operational even if the reactors were to be somehow damaged.
What would a ship be without its soldiers? Nothing, that’s what, and it would be rather difficult to retain those soldiers for long without a proper place for them to eat. To solve this dilemma, six mess halls, each spanning nearly 2 acres, have been included. This allows for the constant nutritional needs of the 44,900 crewmembers onboard.
Another area of interest is the 3D training rooms. These massive cubic areas were designed to allow the nearly 500 pilots stationed onboard to train without expending valuable fuel on simulated space combat. Three 3D training rooms have been added. Each is one square acre in size. The walls are lined with panels of non-reflective materials, and fiber-optic cables are embedded in them. Using the cables, images of space can be imprinted on the walls, giving the sense that you are piloting a ship. Each trainee is given a “flight suit,” which is basically a restricting jumpsuit. Special light-sensitive diodes are laced in the fabric, that when concentrated light is centered on one for a few seconds, the fabric constricts and keeps the targeted person from moving the area that’s lit up. This constriction continues until the supervisor of the match “thaws” the suits with a special device known as a “wand.” Each trainee is also issued a “laser gun,” which fires beams of tightly-focused light, to disable the enemy trainees. (If you have ever read the book Ender’s Game, think of the battleschool’s game and you won’t be far off.)
All of the areas mentioned above are located in the three cubes, but the meat of the ship is in between them: the hangers. Each hanger is 30 stories high and just as wide, with massive blast doors capable of sheltering the fragile starfighters in the ship’s belly from even thermonuclear attack. Special racks have been bolted to the walls of these cavernous enclosures, made especially for holding fighters. The floors have been cleared completely of any rough surface, to allow maintenance and the storage of bombers and shuttles. Advanced fire-suppression devices litter the walls, ready to spew chemical fire-retardants onto the helpless craft.
The last great area of the ship’s interior is the prison sector, which is located at the bottom of the third cube, and has enough containment cells to hold 300 prisoners at a time without any overcrowding. Just down the hall from the prison is the death row. It has room for up to 100 crewmen, and is built around an Incinerator in the center. The death row is totally soundproof. Here is a description of an Incinerator from another document:
Judging from the name, the average person would say that the Incinerator is just a large oven. However, it is so much more. The Incinerator is a pentagonal room made of white tile. A steel grate forms the floor, and beneath the grate is a ten-foot pit. Lining the walls of the room are various nozzles of dubious looks, for indeed their purpose is most grim. You see, when the sprinkler system in the roof of the incinerator turns on, a special mixture of flammable materials (we will call it napalm for this tour, although it is much more of a liquid than real napalm) spray down onto the victims in the room. After a quick shower, the nozzles on the walls gush out jets of flame, so that the entire room catches fire. Do not fear, however, as the only flammable thing in the room will be the condemned people. After they burn up, a second liquid is pumped through the sprinkler system, this time a powerful acid that only affects organic matter. It will turn the deceased’s body (or bodies, as the case may be) into a soupy sludge, which will pour down through the grate and into the pit below. This pit can be emptied into space, so cleanup is not an issue. The screams of the condemned are recorded by the speaker-system in the ceiling, and broadcast into the death row, to demoralize and break the inmates held there. Up to 15 people can fit into the Incinerator at a time
Interrogation rooms are located in the prison sector, so captives can be examined.
CHAPTER FOUR: The engines
The Lord class is driven to incredible speeds by its two huge, plasma-driven engines. They are fitted into long exhaust grooves in the elongated tail of the vessel, and have several thrust-vectoring flaps built in to help steer the massive construct. Each engine is fed raw energy from two Pihc fusion reactors, which are located in one of the three engineering spaces present in the rear of the ship. Each engine’s reactors have their own room, and a fourth Pihc has been placed in the third, smaller room to provide power to shields, weapons, life support, and other important systems. All three rooms of the engineering complex are vented to the void, to facilitate cooling of the reactors. Any maintenance needed can be performed by one of the several hundred robotic arms lining the vast walls of these cavernous spaces, or, if a gentler touch is required, enginseers can put on utility suits and enter through the airlocks between the corridors and the engine rooms.
Of course, the Lord wouldn’t be going anywhere fast if it didn’t have some form of Faster Than Light (FTL) engine, so we have included a Time Manipulation Drive (TMD). This original drive system, which was developed by Einhauserian scientists very recently, is explained below using an excerpt from a previous design document:
My idea for an engine is called the Time Manipulation Drive. Let me explain how it works. When a ship begins to use its sub-light engines, it slowly begins to pick up speed. It can take quite a while to get going very fast, and even at full speed it is only going a fraction of the speed it could be going with it’s Faster Than Light (FTL) engines. That’s what the Time Manipulation Drive (TMD) changes.
The TMD uses a burst of energy from a Warp Coil (a big spiral of specially treated metal composites that conducts and stores massive amounts of energy) to force the ship’s shield generator to create multiple force fields. The two fields, one inside the other, trap layers of time. The first shield encompasses the ship and contours to it, trapping a layer of standard time, and the second, rounder shield surrounds the first field, which contains a second layer of time.
Special spikes are planted at strategic positions along the hull of the ship that protrude through the first shield and into the second. The tips of these spikes are filled with nanobots that can build new nanobots out of the bodies of the old. These bots will keep the tips of the spikes from being destroyed as time goes by. Now, beyond the second field is normal time, just like what’s inside the first shield.
After the two fields are in place, the TMD sends a second, higher pulse of energy through the tips of the spikes and into the second layer of time. This speeds it up vastly. For example, is you were going 100 MPH and you engaged the TMD for 300 years, the ship would essentially travel at 100 MPH for three hundred years. When you drop out of accelerated time, you would find out that you had been traveling at 30,000 mph.
What’s that you say? Wouldn’t the ship get deteriorated and the crew die over all that time? No! Remember the first layer of time? It doesn’t speed up. Life goes on as normal inside the first shield, even as millennia are streaking past in the second. The thrust from the engines is the only part of the ship to reach into the second layer.
When the destination is reached, the inner field expands (with the help of the rest of the Warp Coil’s energy) and cancels out the second field. The result is that you can move millions of light years in only a few seconds. The faster the ship’s sublight engines, the more fuel for said engines the ship carries, the number of warp coils the ship carries, how many planets are in between you and the target, and what kind of shield generator the ship has all effect the range and speed the ship is capable of.
Recharging the Warp Coil is problematic. It stores so much energy that it can take days to fully recharge using only the power from the main engines. This process can be speeded up considerably with the installation and use of solar sails. These giant, circular sails are 50 miles in diameter, and composed of a mesh of fabrics only 1/40th of an inch in thickness. The main drawback to these sails is the steep cost (the material is roughly $1,089 a square foot) and the lack of space to put them on board a ship. Their other main problem is that the fabric is pure white, and is very visible from quite a ways away. While using the sails, the ship cannot move for fear of wrecking the sails.
Here are some Pros and Cons to the TMD:
Pros: Nearly instantaneous travel to anywhere; can’t be damaged while using TMD; can’t be tracked with sensors.
Cons: Massive energy requirements; long recharge time; possibility of ending up in the apocalypse; cant be tracked with sensors while using TMD; cant fire weapons while using TMD; cant steer while using TMD; cant view the outside while using TMD; cant stop until destination is reached.
The process of using the TMD is as follows:
The captain inputs the coordinates of the desired target into the TMD’s navigation computer. The computer finds the fastest path there while still avoiding planets and other such obstacles. When that is done, the captain sets the ship on the course laid out by the computer, then engages the sub-light engines, and then drops the ships shields. After this is done, he engages the TMD, and then waits for the computer to bring the ship out of accelerated time.
Of course, forcing such technology upon anyone buying this ship would be foolish, so the TMD is optional. If not installed, the space freed up in the engineering complex is large enough to turn into an extra shuttle bay, if you want to spend the time and money to retrofit such a huge place.
The spikes that are used to jump the Lord around with the TMD have been laid of hydraulic “levers” that lay flush against the hull until just before the ship enters accelerated time.
CHAPTER FIVE: General statistics
Ship Class: Lord
Role: Carrier
Minimum Crew: 42,900
Maximum Crew: 45,200
Marines: 2,000
Pilots: roughly 500
Length: 2,409 meters
Diameter of main body: 592 meters
Diameter of cubes: 920 meters
Mass: 22.04 million tons
Decks of Main Body: 98
Decks of Cubes: 153
Offensive Weapons: 14 Lance Cannons
Defensive Weapons: 3,600 PDGs
Hull: 3 layers
Shield System: Void, 12-point energy
Maximum acceleration: 26m/s^2
Maximum FTL Speed: 120 YPS (Years Per Second)
Maximum Jump Range: 98,000 years
FTL Recharge Rate: Fully charged in 6 hours
Sublight Engines: Two HK-071 Pihc fusion engines
FTL Engine: TMD
Power Generation: 5 plasma driven reactors
Fighter Compliment: 450
Miscellaneous Compliment: 100 Shuttles, 65 Bombers
Maximum Deployment Time: 7 months without resuply.
Cost: $450,369,828,946
If you have a coupon code, then you get $1 billion off. Please DO NOT post the code. TG it to me.
The following nations have a $10 billion discount on this ship:
Huntaer (its the least I could do for ordering so many Firebats)
For ease of navigation, this document has been laid out almost identically to that of the Firebat’s.
Chapter one: The hull
--The shields
Chapter two: The weapons systems
--The lance cannons
--The point defense guns (PDG)
Chapter three: The interior
--The bridge
--The mess halls
--The hangers
--The prison system
Chapter four: The engines
--The FTL engine
--Engineering
Chapter five: General statistics
CHAPTER ONE: The hull
The Lord class carrier is very fragile, when compared to most military carriers. It is long, and thin. Because it was designed to stay on the peripheral of combat zones and destroy enemy fighters and bombers, its armor is rather thin. Add to that fact the unusual shape of the ship (it is roughly cigar-shaped, with three large cubes placed evenly along the hull), and you get a generally high-risk assignment for captains.
The hull of a Lord is made up of three different layers, each with their own function. They are, in order of closeness to the outside space: Adamantium/ Crystex composite, which provides excellent protection from both matter and laser weaponry, with neither being overly emphasized; Durrosteel, which acts like a ground wire as well as armor, keeping any energy to hit the layer immediately in front of it from short-circuiting the rest of the ship; and finally Carbon Dioxenzemes, which keeps the rest of the ship insulated and airtight. In case of a rupture, this layer can heal itself in minutes using the nanites woven into its molecular structure.
While these layers are remarkably good at their purposes, they have been used sparingly on this ship. While the actual armor is slightly less dense than that used on Einhauserian battlecruisers, the Lord class is nearly three times their size, yet does not increase the amount of armor given to it. Because the ship is not meant to enter actual combat, this is not a serious problem to the skillful commander.
The main defensive shielding present on the ship is the voidshield. A voidshield is what you would find on most ships, albeit under the name particle shields. It runs constantly in one large, all encompassing bubble around the ship, keeping micro meteors and enemy matter-based weaponry, to name a few space-borne hazards, from reaching the hull. The voidshield is usually transparent, although it turns a mottled bluish-green/gray when matter impacts it. The color change only affects the immediate area around the point of impact, and only lasts for a few seconds. The Lord class is fitted with a device that pulls the voidshield flush against the hull, for use in the TDM (see chapter four). Alas, as magnificent as this technology is, it can still be overcome. Particularly large or particularly fast objects can pierce the shield with relative impunity. To launch or receive fighters, the voidshield must first be lowered.
The energy shields are almost totally different. Instead of blocking matter, they absorb energy from enemy laser weaponry. The energy absorbed is transmitted to the shield generator, which in turn stores it until a certain amount has built up, at which point the energy is either directed back into space, or into the engines. This later action results in a massive boost in speed for a few seconds, but also rapidly degrades the engine integrity. If the generator waits too long to empty the energy it stored, it will shut itself down or explode, depending on how well it is maintained. A different way they can be knocked out is by absorbing too much energy too quickly. This will result in similar actions as if it waited too long to send out the stored energy.
The Lord class has been fitted with a very complicated energy shielding system that allows starfighters to be launched without dropping the defensive systems surrounding the hanger doors. This is accomplished by having individual shield generators for every hanger, and even larger, more powerful ones to shield the rest of the ship. The shield positions are as follows: fore, 1st square, 1st hanger, 2nd square, 2nd hanger, 3rd square, 3rd hanger, engines, 4th hanger, top, and bottom. All of these generators draw power from a single reactor, but we won’t go into that until chapter four.
CHAPTER TWO: The weapons systems
The Lord, being designed for long-ranged combat, has been armed accordingly. Instead of the massive arrays of lasers, torpedoes, and guns common on most combat vessels, the Lord is only equipped with 14 Lance Cannons (one on the prow, one on each outward facing side of all three cubes, and one on the stern. Each Lance Cannon packs a gigantic anti-capitol ship laser, which can melt through most known substances. The Lance Cannons are mounted in large turrets, which allow them to swing in any direction.
The Lance Cannons present on the Lord class have been specially modified with newly declassified focus lenses that boost the range of the weapons to nearly 10 times that of a standard Lance Cannon. This allows the Lords to keep enemies at a distance until either a ship better suited to slugging it out with other ships comes along or its fighters destroy the threat.
These weapons would be useless against fighters or bombers, so Point Defense Guns (PDG) have to be installed to protect the ship. There are 3,600 PDGs covering the hull of the Lord, with extra-dense clusters of them around the engines and weapons. Each PDG consists of three miniature Lance Cannons, with a sophisticated Targeting, Tracking, and Termination (T3) computer to help guide the rapidly firing laser bursts.
CHAPTER THREE: The interior
The Lord class carrier is a huge vessel, made up of mile upon mile of passageways, service ducts, and crawlspaces crisscrossing the ship. The corridors are narrow, only wide enough for one armored figure to pass along, or two unarmored side by side. Einhauserian engineers designed it like this in order to allow for the most passageways possible to fit. Because of the immense size of this class, moving men and materials around could take hours. To speed things up, there are six short-range teleporter stations present onboard, which are used to beam various things around the ship. They are not powerful enough to beam the stuff off-board, but they serve their purpose well enough.
The three cubes that keep being mentioned are actually the main parts of the ship. You see, crew cabins, mess halls, and most other important rooms are located in these areas, while most of the thin main body is filled up with the immense hangers, which have room for roughly 450 medium sized fighters and several dozen shuttles and bombers. Each cube is 153 decks high, as opposed to the 98 of the main body. We will go into more detail about the hangers later on in this chapter.
If the corridors were the nervous system, the bridge would be the brain. Nestled deep in the center of the first cube, it is the best-armored area of the ship and nearly impervious to damage. It spreads itself over three decks, which are filled with all manner of gunners, pilots, navigators, and a colorful assortment of other servicemen. The entire room is decked out in luxurious oak paneling, and the room is crowned with the shining gold command throne, which replaces the aging captain’s chair found in most ships. The command throne allows the captain to neurally interface with his ship, essentially becoming one with his mighty craft. As you can imagine, this gives the ship the advantage over ships of comparable size. Several backup generators have been installed that will keep the bridge operational even if the reactors were to be somehow damaged.
What would a ship be without its soldiers? Nothing, that’s what, and it would be rather difficult to retain those soldiers for long without a proper place for them to eat. To solve this dilemma, six mess halls, each spanning nearly 2 acres, have been included. This allows for the constant nutritional needs of the 44,900 crewmembers onboard.
Another area of interest is the 3D training rooms. These massive cubic areas were designed to allow the nearly 500 pilots stationed onboard to train without expending valuable fuel on simulated space combat. Three 3D training rooms have been added. Each is one square acre in size. The walls are lined with panels of non-reflective materials, and fiber-optic cables are embedded in them. Using the cables, images of space can be imprinted on the walls, giving the sense that you are piloting a ship. Each trainee is given a “flight suit,” which is basically a restricting jumpsuit. Special light-sensitive diodes are laced in the fabric, that when concentrated light is centered on one for a few seconds, the fabric constricts and keeps the targeted person from moving the area that’s lit up. This constriction continues until the supervisor of the match “thaws” the suits with a special device known as a “wand.” Each trainee is also issued a “laser gun,” which fires beams of tightly-focused light, to disable the enemy trainees. (If you have ever read the book Ender’s Game, think of the battleschool’s game and you won’t be far off.)
All of the areas mentioned above are located in the three cubes, but the meat of the ship is in between them: the hangers. Each hanger is 30 stories high and just as wide, with massive blast doors capable of sheltering the fragile starfighters in the ship’s belly from even thermonuclear attack. Special racks have been bolted to the walls of these cavernous enclosures, made especially for holding fighters. The floors have been cleared completely of any rough surface, to allow maintenance and the storage of bombers and shuttles. Advanced fire-suppression devices litter the walls, ready to spew chemical fire-retardants onto the helpless craft.
The last great area of the ship’s interior is the prison sector, which is located at the bottom of the third cube, and has enough containment cells to hold 300 prisoners at a time without any overcrowding. Just down the hall from the prison is the death row. It has room for up to 100 crewmen, and is built around an Incinerator in the center. The death row is totally soundproof. Here is a description of an Incinerator from another document:
Judging from the name, the average person would say that the Incinerator is just a large oven. However, it is so much more. The Incinerator is a pentagonal room made of white tile. A steel grate forms the floor, and beneath the grate is a ten-foot pit. Lining the walls of the room are various nozzles of dubious looks, for indeed their purpose is most grim. You see, when the sprinkler system in the roof of the incinerator turns on, a special mixture of flammable materials (we will call it napalm for this tour, although it is much more of a liquid than real napalm) spray down onto the victims in the room. After a quick shower, the nozzles on the walls gush out jets of flame, so that the entire room catches fire. Do not fear, however, as the only flammable thing in the room will be the condemned people. After they burn up, a second liquid is pumped through the sprinkler system, this time a powerful acid that only affects organic matter. It will turn the deceased’s body (or bodies, as the case may be) into a soupy sludge, which will pour down through the grate and into the pit below. This pit can be emptied into space, so cleanup is not an issue. The screams of the condemned are recorded by the speaker-system in the ceiling, and broadcast into the death row, to demoralize and break the inmates held there. Up to 15 people can fit into the Incinerator at a time
Interrogation rooms are located in the prison sector, so captives can be examined.
CHAPTER FOUR: The engines
The Lord class is driven to incredible speeds by its two huge, plasma-driven engines. They are fitted into long exhaust grooves in the elongated tail of the vessel, and have several thrust-vectoring flaps built in to help steer the massive construct. Each engine is fed raw energy from two Pihc fusion reactors, which are located in one of the three engineering spaces present in the rear of the ship. Each engine’s reactors have their own room, and a fourth Pihc has been placed in the third, smaller room to provide power to shields, weapons, life support, and other important systems. All three rooms of the engineering complex are vented to the void, to facilitate cooling of the reactors. Any maintenance needed can be performed by one of the several hundred robotic arms lining the vast walls of these cavernous spaces, or, if a gentler touch is required, enginseers can put on utility suits and enter through the airlocks between the corridors and the engine rooms.
Of course, the Lord wouldn’t be going anywhere fast if it didn’t have some form of Faster Than Light (FTL) engine, so we have included a Time Manipulation Drive (TMD). This original drive system, which was developed by Einhauserian scientists very recently, is explained below using an excerpt from a previous design document:
My idea for an engine is called the Time Manipulation Drive. Let me explain how it works. When a ship begins to use its sub-light engines, it slowly begins to pick up speed. It can take quite a while to get going very fast, and even at full speed it is only going a fraction of the speed it could be going with it’s Faster Than Light (FTL) engines. That’s what the Time Manipulation Drive (TMD) changes.
The TMD uses a burst of energy from a Warp Coil (a big spiral of specially treated metal composites that conducts and stores massive amounts of energy) to force the ship’s shield generator to create multiple force fields. The two fields, one inside the other, trap layers of time. The first shield encompasses the ship and contours to it, trapping a layer of standard time, and the second, rounder shield surrounds the first field, which contains a second layer of time.
Special spikes are planted at strategic positions along the hull of the ship that protrude through the first shield and into the second. The tips of these spikes are filled with nanobots that can build new nanobots out of the bodies of the old. These bots will keep the tips of the spikes from being destroyed as time goes by. Now, beyond the second field is normal time, just like what’s inside the first shield.
After the two fields are in place, the TMD sends a second, higher pulse of energy through the tips of the spikes and into the second layer of time. This speeds it up vastly. For example, is you were going 100 MPH and you engaged the TMD for 300 years, the ship would essentially travel at 100 MPH for three hundred years. When you drop out of accelerated time, you would find out that you had been traveling at 30,000 mph.
What’s that you say? Wouldn’t the ship get deteriorated and the crew die over all that time? No! Remember the first layer of time? It doesn’t speed up. Life goes on as normal inside the first shield, even as millennia are streaking past in the second. The thrust from the engines is the only part of the ship to reach into the second layer.
When the destination is reached, the inner field expands (with the help of the rest of the Warp Coil’s energy) and cancels out the second field. The result is that you can move millions of light years in only a few seconds. The faster the ship’s sublight engines, the more fuel for said engines the ship carries, the number of warp coils the ship carries, how many planets are in between you and the target, and what kind of shield generator the ship has all effect the range and speed the ship is capable of.
Recharging the Warp Coil is problematic. It stores so much energy that it can take days to fully recharge using only the power from the main engines. This process can be speeded up considerably with the installation and use of solar sails. These giant, circular sails are 50 miles in diameter, and composed of a mesh of fabrics only 1/40th of an inch in thickness. The main drawback to these sails is the steep cost (the material is roughly $1,089 a square foot) and the lack of space to put them on board a ship. Their other main problem is that the fabric is pure white, and is very visible from quite a ways away. While using the sails, the ship cannot move for fear of wrecking the sails.
Here are some Pros and Cons to the TMD:
Pros: Nearly instantaneous travel to anywhere; can’t be damaged while using TMD; can’t be tracked with sensors.
Cons: Massive energy requirements; long recharge time; possibility of ending up in the apocalypse; cant be tracked with sensors while using TMD; cant fire weapons while using TMD; cant steer while using TMD; cant view the outside while using TMD; cant stop until destination is reached.
The process of using the TMD is as follows:
The captain inputs the coordinates of the desired target into the TMD’s navigation computer. The computer finds the fastest path there while still avoiding planets and other such obstacles. When that is done, the captain sets the ship on the course laid out by the computer, then engages the sub-light engines, and then drops the ships shields. After this is done, he engages the TMD, and then waits for the computer to bring the ship out of accelerated time.
Of course, forcing such technology upon anyone buying this ship would be foolish, so the TMD is optional. If not installed, the space freed up in the engineering complex is large enough to turn into an extra shuttle bay, if you want to spend the time and money to retrofit such a huge place.
The spikes that are used to jump the Lord around with the TMD have been laid of hydraulic “levers” that lay flush against the hull until just before the ship enters accelerated time.
CHAPTER FIVE: General statistics
Ship Class: Lord
Role: Carrier
Minimum Crew: 42,900
Maximum Crew: 45,200
Marines: 2,000
Pilots: roughly 500
Length: 2,409 meters
Diameter of main body: 592 meters
Diameter of cubes: 920 meters
Mass: 22.04 million tons
Decks of Main Body: 98
Decks of Cubes: 153
Offensive Weapons: 14 Lance Cannons
Defensive Weapons: 3,600 PDGs
Hull: 3 layers
Shield System: Void, 12-point energy
Maximum acceleration: 26m/s^2
Maximum FTL Speed: 120 YPS (Years Per Second)
Maximum Jump Range: 98,000 years
FTL Recharge Rate: Fully charged in 6 hours
Sublight Engines: Two HK-071 Pihc fusion engines
FTL Engine: TMD
Power Generation: 5 plasma driven reactors
Fighter Compliment: 450
Miscellaneous Compliment: 100 Shuttles, 65 Bombers
Maximum Deployment Time: 7 months without resuply.
Cost: $450,369,828,946
If you have a coupon code, then you get $1 billion off. Please DO NOT post the code. TG it to me.
The following nations have a $10 billion discount on this ship:
Huntaer (its the least I could do for ordering so many Firebats)