NationStates Jolt Archive

I just want peoples opinion on this ship. Tell me if its terrible, if its good, about things that need work and other design issues. Please be brutally honest. Just refrain from profanity that is a waste of space.


Title: Heavens Grace
Class: Super Dreadnaught

Size: 12,000 meters bow to stern (12 kilometers/7.5 miles)

Crew: 500,000. Carries 100,000 troops.

Armor: 50 meters of high impact/heat-resistant Steel/Titanium/Zinc alloy 4 with neuromide woven into its structure (custom made for this craft) around non-essential locations, while 75 meters cover the essential parts such as the hyperdrive, shield generators and the life support systems.

Shields: 20 Defender class heavy capital ship shields, each with 2 backup power systems.

Weapons: 1000 Heavy Turbolasers, 400 anti-missile batteries, 500 Missile pods, 200 Heavy Ion guns, 50 tractor beams and 4 MAC cannons.

Other capabilities: 10 gravity well projectors

Fighter capabilities: The main hanger bay can hold up to 5 wings of fighters, each wing consisting of 50 fighters/bombers.

Propulsion: 12 Hornet class Atomizing reactors. Top speed of 5000 kph.

Hyperdrive: 3 Eagle Drive Mark IV's. Maximum speed of 1.7x sol (speed of light).

Landing Forces: Carries 100,000 troops, 5 pre-fab garrisons and mounting racks for up to 14,000 vehicles.

*bump*

ooc: I don't know, OMG uber-big star destroyers are kind of cliched.

Not only are they as he above mentioned, but SW starships suck. If you want to build a good ship, base it on WH40K

i need to familiarize myself with it...

Resource 1 (http://www.criticalhit.co.uk/w40krp/wd139_imperial_spaceships.shtml)

Resource 2 (http://www.specialist-games.com/battlefleetgothic/Default.asp)

Those should do you good. Ill look for more and post them in a minute

OOC: The main problem with huge ships (over 1 KM) is that they are exorbitantly expensive to build. My FT nation could build an entire fleet of 30 ships for what that ship will cost, none over 1 KM. Also, if you lose that ship, you're dead. Your nation has poured so much money into that ship that one saboage incident could destroy your navy. The only way to prevent this is to make redundant systems, making it more expensive, and creating a bad cycle.
Also, when protecting several systems, that huge ship will get unwieldy. I would use specialized ships, such as troop transports, battleships, and carriers to make a more effective force. A full fleet can be much more efficient when it comes to defending or attacking several systems than one huge supership.

Just food for thought.

thx for the info.

as this is my first FT thing ive ever designed, the whole star wars/Executer thing sorta influenced me lol. and i must agree, several smaller ships is indeed more practical. thx again for the info

I'd suggest adding more anti-ship/anti-fighter weapons and get rid of the fighters, they take up to much space, imo anyways.

Your crew is far too small. Even with an amazing amount of automation you'd need a crew of at least 1 million to run something that size.

Also, like many Super Dreadnaughts, it is very vulnerable to an attack by fighter and bomber craft witht he smallest weapons being your anti-missile batteries, which would be very spread out on a 12 km ship. I would add more small scale weapons if I were you. Even with 250 fighters and bombers, you'd be at risk to a large scale fighter attack.

The idea of cost, though, does have certain mitigating factors. Asteroid belts contain ridiculous amounts of minerals, and (if something is built in zero gravity) it decreases costs and hugely changes the scale one can build on. As long as you don't plan on landing the thing, it can be as big as you like.

I partly agree with the Death Star Syndrome (ie vulnerability to small craft) but the pure size of your shields and armour counts for a lot. A slightly smaller ship with a few more light guns would still be wise, I'd think.

All this comes from a neophyte, of course. Does it make any sense?

Contrary to most thoughts about "uber-big star destroyers" is cliched, the most logical way to fight a space combat is with a large ship. Space is such that a fighter is a manned missile, bait for the antifighter missiles and point-defense of a larger, star-destroyer type ship.

On earth, aircraft carriers beat battleships because they outrange them over the horizon easily. In space, there is no range limit (a missile, once fired, can fly nearly forever, even after it runs out of fuel), and there is no horizion to hide behind. A space-fighter is simply a manned missile-pod, which would be more efficient if it were simply automated.

In any case, Missiles, in my opinion, are extremely necessary arrangements on a large ship, as they are versatile. Lasers make excellent point-defense and knife-range fighting units, but a missile can outrange a laser if it is made large enough, and it can be equipped with ECM to avoid point-defense.

Energy-weapons are inherently shorter-ranged than missiles, because there is a certain limit to a laser's range, no matter the size. If one makes a missile the size of a Saturn Five, then it has quite enough fuel to go nearly anywhere outside the range of a laser.

And the fact that a battlewagon such as the Death Star has a "ventilation shaft," point-defense that can't point-defend, and no ship-so-ship missiles and Anti-Fighter Homing-All-the-Way-Killer (AFHAWK) missiles is inexcusable.

Missiles are also good because they can be modified. Say, three AFHAWKs can be fired from the same launcher that fires one long-range antimatter or chemical-energy explosive. Nuclear weapons are ineffective in space, as there is not shockwave, except their radiation value.

The problem with using antifighter missiles, is that space fighters move at such high speeds that getting a lock on them from a stationary missile tube, even one that can elevate, depress and swivel around, is very tricky at best. Against fighters, the most effective defense is other fighters. When you have a missile tube or energy weapon on a fighter, you decrease relative movement between the target and weapon by, well I don't know exactly, but it's safe to say a couple orders of magnitude.

The problem with using antifighter missiles, is that space fighters move at such high speeds that getting a lock on them from a stationary missile tube, even one that can elevate, depress and swivel around, is very tricky at best. Against fighters, the most effective defense is other fighters. When you have a missile tube or energy weapon on a fighter, you decrease relative movement between the target and weapon by, well I don't know exactly, but it's safe to say a couple orders of magnitude.

You do not need to get a bead on the fighter with the missiles. They are AFHAWKs, with emphasis on the HOMING. The missile is launched in the general direction of the fighter, then a seeker warhead activates and the missile vectors onto the fighter, and, barring chaff and other countermeasures, BOOM. And even with Chaff, the explosion would sleet hard radiaion through the fighter.

Dogfighting in space is extremely hard as well. There is not point-of refrence, and, in principle, the fighters are moving at quite a few G's before they start manuvering...

That is, if they have the acceleration to catch up with their Carrier, which is a starship and thus quite fast, posessing larger engines and inertia than the fighter, as well as more of whatever fuels it.

The way to swat fighters and other small craft is to set up your energy weapons in banks, 20-30 guns to a battery-- none of this turret stuff. That way you just incline your ship a bit and spray an entire area with beams.

... Why is it that people pull out ridiculous wristwrenching figures for size, armour, guns, shields etc., but assume a maximum velocity 1/6 of an ICBM, making the ship incapable of, ah... Leaving orbit?

Oh, right. Must be complete cluelessness.

Let me give you a small piece of advice: Description. People can't argue against "Heavy Armour for a destroyer", or "The ship travels relatively fast in comparison to smaller craft". Y'see, in everyone's mind, a fighter, cruiser, destroyer, these words mean something to them.

Destroyer might bring up an image of a medium-sized spaceship, with a few fighter bays and missile launchers, to one person. Irelevant of what the image is in each induvidual person's mind, everyone has a mostly equal comparison basis.
No matter what people might think of ships, the general ratio remains the same. For instance.

Joe thinks Carriers have a power of 5, and Cruisers have a power of 4.
Ben thinks Carriers have a power of 5000, and cruiser have a power of 4215. As you can see, the ratio here is almost equal.

However, when you go into stats, unless you're a scientist, you're bound to get them wrong. And guess what? If you can get them right, nobody will care anyway. Stats mean nothing to FT Rper 17 and MT RPer 12. They'll skip over your carefully contrived stats, and go looking for a picture and a description.

I'd advise doing pure descriptions, as, in space, no-one really knows what would happen anyway. So these stats mean even less than MT ones...

... Why is it that people pull out ridiculous wristwrenching figures for size, armour, guns, shields etc., but assume a maximum velocity 1/6 of an ICBM, making the ship incapable of, ah... Leaving orbit?

Oh, right. Must be complete cluelessness.

actually, most starships are built in a space shipyard. The ship would only have to resist a reletivaly small amount of the gravitational pull of the planet. I think.

You do not need to get a bead on the fighter with the missiles. They are AFHAWKs, with emphasis on the HOMING. The missile is launched in the general direction of the fighter, then a seeker warhead activates and the missile vectors onto the fighter, and, barring chaff and other countermeasures, BOOM. And even with Chaff, the explosion would sleet hard radiaion through the fighter.

Dogfighting in space is extremely hard as well. There is not point-of refrence, and, in principle, the fighters are moving at quite a few G's before they start manuvering...

That is, if they have the acceleration to catch up with their Carrier, which is a starship and thus quite fast, posessing larger engines and inertia than the fighter, as well as more of whatever fuels it.

The actual speed of the fighters or carriers or missiles doesn't matter in space because there is no frame of reference. The only thing that matters is the relative movement between them. If a fighter exits the hangar bay of its carrier, it won't immediately be left behind, struggling to catch up, because its movement relative to the carrier is nothing. It doesn't matter if the carrier is traveling half the speed of light or if it's perfectly at rest. That's the probalem with the missile. The fighter is moving so fast relative to the launcher, that by the time you launch and the missile gets far away enough from the ship that fired it to begin seeking targets, the fighter is gone. And dogfighting in space is easy. Your actual movement is not important at all. If two space fighters are facing each other, while traveling in the same direction at different speeds, it would appear, that relative to each other, they were closing rapidly with each other, moving in different directions, even though they are actually moving in the same diection.