NationStates Jolt Archive

this is totally occ just want comments on concept and or design.

The concept came to me: a snipership! using a rail gun that could fire a 7500 ton projectile at 2/3 the speed of light! After thinking about it more i came up with these stats:

TBA class sniper ship
Class sniper ship
Length 9500 meters
Crew 75,000
Hyper drive class 1
subspace engines
8 ball mrk IV medium engines
Armament
1 7500 ton class railgun/coil gun
40 heavy turbolasers
120 heavy lasers
1000 quad lasers
10 heavy proton torpedoe launchers with ammo storage from 25 rounds each.
hanagrs 0
cloaking equipment

the barrel for the rail/coil gun will be in the center of the craft surrounded by 5 hexagonal shaped platforms that will have the magnectic equipment for the rail gun. on each will be 8 heavy turbolasers, 24 heavy lasers, 200 quad lasers and 2 heavy proton torpedoe launchers. On top of the first platform will be the bridge.
there will be a 6th plaform with the engines and loading area for the railgun.

The projectile will be made out of soild depleted uranium.

Pardon my n00bness, but shouldn't a ship with such a weapon be dedicated to said weapon and not have all these additional weapons? I mean you can always send escorts with it. :)

So essentially it's a revival of the Darksaber project from Star Wars(with a rail-gun replacing the superlaser)?

Also 9.5 km? That's much more suited to a command/super-ship than a sniper ship. Sniper ships should be small, have a very long range and exceptionally precise gun that can pick off engines, weapons, defence satallites, shield generators, ect.

Plus, with one projectile, interception will be a piece of cake.

Lose the extra weapons, put maybe 4 point defense turrets and nothing else, cut the length size in half at least. And use some space-wank material like duranium (http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Duranium) or naquada for the projectile

Or throw in some extra expense, and fit the projectiles with FTL weaponry.

well then you wouldn't have to make the ship long at all and you wouldn't nee a rail gun, you could just make it a FTL cruise missile... but that would be nothnig new...

The inability of a rail gun round to change course, means it's not particularly effective at long ranges against targets with any real mobility.

I could see something like this usefull against the 5km+ "Wank-class" ISD's we see now and again, although there are easier ways to deal with those monster-ships, namely large explosive missiles capable of bursts of FTL speed

I could see something like this usefull against the 5km+ "Wank-class" ISD's we see now and again, although there are easier ways to deal with it, namely large explosive missiles capable of bursts of FTL speed

It depends on their speed.

This site has some good stuff on rail guns and missles and pretty much everything sci fi.
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3x.html

It has the guns to defend it self. i know that a 9.5 km ship is not very stealthy but with cloaking equipment it makes it stealthy. and escort ships would be very noticeable. this is meant to sit on the edged of of a battle and pick out ships that pose large threats like SSDs, carriers, ect. It is so large because to get that large of projectile up to 2/3rds light speed you need a lot of big ass magnets. get 4 of these jumping around the edge of a battle while cloaked; it would be very confusing.

They don't build 40 foot long sniper rifles for a reason.

i have to agree with the others... Aren't snipers suppose to be smaller than say a squad of soldiers. They are bad ass units but specialized. This bigmofo of yours could "technically" if you stretch it be called sniper ships. Wouldn't it make more sense if you had smaller ones that were more easily deployed and not really even requiring a large "escort" train? They would probably need a backup/spotter/sniper hybrid or two but they would inturn be much more effective at hiding & hit and run tactics.

The FTL missile-ships are a viable alternative to your baby.

<shrug>

Luck