Perses Class Battlecruiser - First Attempt

[krummja (OP)]

Hey all, first time posting.  I've been playing Aurora for a week or so now and I'd like to think I have the basics down.  That said, this is my first decently large, well-armed warship (I have a few frigates, cruisers, and a missile destroyer), and I want to make sure it's not terrible before committing to building it.  I've been doing a lot of research to make sure I have the ranges and stuff right.  I believe the speed is decent for the tech I have, and the armaments should be pretty strong.  My chief concern at the moment is my AMM defense.  I have 2x CIWS and 2x AMM launcher but I don't know if the rate of fire is enough to make them worth the weight.

Perses class Battlecruiser    15 650 tons     389 Crew     2975. 1 BP      TCS 313  TH 1800  EM 0
5750 km/s     Armour 3-55     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 6     PPV 70. 82
Maint Life 1. 03 Years     MSP 713    AFR 326%    IFR 4. 5%    1YR 667    5YR 10000    Max Repair 450 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months    Spare Berths 4   
Magazine 98   

Battlecruiser 900 EP Internal Fusion Drive (2)    Power 900    Fuel Use 49. 5%    Signature 900    Exp 10%
Fuel Capacity 2 500 000 Litres    Range 58. 1 billion km   (116 days at full power)

Battlecruiser Spinal Mount 25cm C4 Far Ultraviolet Laser (1)    Range 320 000km     TS: 5750 km/s     Power 16-4     RM 5    ROF 20        16 16 16 16 16 13 11 10 8 8
Twin 15cm C4 Far Ultraviolet Laser Turret (4x2)    Range 300 000km     TS: 4000 km/s     Power 12-8     RM 5    ROF 10        6 6 6 6 6 5 4 3 3 3
Twin Battlecruiser 20cm C4 Far Ultraviolet Laser Turret (2x2)    Range 320 000km     TS: 4000 km/s     Power 20-8     RM 5    ROF 15        10 10 10 10 10 8 7 6 5 5
Phalanx CIWS-80 (2x6)    Range 1000 km     TS: 8000 km/s     ROF 5       Base 50% To Hit
Laser Fire Control S04 160-4000 (2)    Max Range: 320 000 km   TS: 4000 km/s     97 94 91 88 84 81 78 75 72 69

Iron Curtain AMM Launcher (2)    Missile Size 1    Rate of Fire 15
Iron Curtain Missile Fire Control FC15-R1 (1)     Range 15. 1m km    Resolution 1
Iron Curtain AMM (98)  Speed: 35 200 km/s   End: 0. 6m    Range: 1. 4m km   WH: 0    Size: 1    TH: 258/154/77

AMM Active Search Sensor MR16-R1 (1)     GPS 210     Range 16. 8m km    MCR 1. 8m km    Resolution 1
Ship 5000T Active Search Sensor MR50-R100 (1)     GPS 6300     Range 50. 4m km    Resolution 100

Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes

[lennson]

I don't seem to see a power plant on that ship.  Without one the lasers wont recharge.  I am new here too so someone else should comment on the other design choices.

[krummja (OP)]

Doh! Regarding the power plant, I can't believe I missed that.   Thanks for pointing it out.   

[Prince of Space]

The single AMM fire control makes that component of the missile defense vulnerable to a lucky hit. Or a HPM. I think you're right to be concerned that you included too little. By beefing up your supply of AMM launchers and fire controls, as one FC goes down you can reassign the launchers to the other FCs.

It's a military ship, therefore you could use gauss turrets instead of CIWS. CIWS only defend the ship they are mounted on, not adjacent ships. Turrets can do either. If this thing ever needed to operate with additional ships then gauss turrets would be preferable. I'd save CIWS for important commercial ships.

Your turretted lasers have slower tracking speeds than your hull mounted spinal laser. Take off the turrets and just mount the lasers on the hull. And swap out the laser FC for a slightly faster one to match the 5750 km/s weapon tracking speed.

Also, why have three different kinds of lasers? What does the 20 cm do that the 15 cm or 25 cm don't?

What do you imagine this ship doing for you? It has no offensive missiles, only lasers, so it closes to knife-fight range to blast the enemy, apparently. But it's a little thin skinnned to my eye. It'll have to run the gauntlet through enemy missiles (and survive) before it can fire its lasers. That big active sensor is probably overkill for that tactic, too. The missile sensor will give you firing solutions at more than enough range for a beam ship. If that's how you spot ships in the first place, maybe go with a passive thermal or EM instead of the active ship sensor.

[krummja (OP)]

Interesting points.   I actually didn't know the AMM Active Search Sensor could act in the same capacity as the Active Sensor at the relevant ranges vs.  hull sizes.  Is that what you're saying?

As for the turrets, I'm mainly going by the Rule Of Cool there, to be totally honest.   In my mind mixed turret sizes for different engagement ranges references WWII battleships with their various turret sizes for main guns vs side-mounted guns. 

I went ahead and stripped the CIWS and loaded up 8 total AMM launchers and a total of 4 AMM FCs.   This ship is meant to be in a larger fleet that will have a mix of AMM and eventually Gauss so I'm not too concerned about that, plus the laser turrets can act as (admittedly poorer) anti-missile to my understanding. 

Do these seem like decent improvements?

[Prince of Space]

Yeah, the AMM sensor will detect anything of 1 HS or larger at its maximum range, including ships. The ship sensor will detect anything of 100 HS or larger at its maximum range. For the purposes of beam combat, either is plenty and both is overkill. But not the fun explodey kind of overkill.

Rule of Cool or roleplay trumps efficient design in my book, just as long as you're making the decision deliberately, and not through an oversight.

Those laser turrets will be awful at anti-missile defense. They can roll the dice and try to hit, but don't rely on them. The low tracking speed on the turrets and FCs (4,000 km/s) means that any missile comically slow enough for them to reliably hit might actually be slow enough for this ship to outrun, with its 5,750 km/s speed. Incidentally, that's part of the problem with them in their anti-ship capacity. If this ship was firing on a copy of itself, the target would be faster than the tracking speed, imposing a penalty. The spinal laser would be better at hitting missiles, if it weren't for the slow speed of its FC bottlenecking it.

If the ship is operating as part of a fleet, you may be able to free up some space by droppping some fuel. My rule of thumb is to base my desired range off of the distance from the Sun to Pluto, which is roughly 6 billion km. That's 12 billion to get across the diameter of Pluto's orbit, or 24 billion km to make that a round trip. You have more than twice that. Putting more of that fuel on a commercial tanker that stays behind with the fleet's logistical supply train will free up tonnage for more dakka on your battlecruiser. Top off the tanks before going into battle, and then return to the tanker afterwards with 10% to 20% left.

[krummja (OP)]

Great points.  I'll definitely effect modifications with them in mind.

[ExChairman]

The Iron curtain has a warhead of zero?

[Iranon]

A few more things:

I'd aim to match ship speed and fire control speed, in your case probably 6000km/s.

Capacitor-3 is enough for your 15cm lasers to fire every 10s.

Your propulsion plant is unnecessarily thirsty.  Increase engine size to 50 (and reduce fuel accordingly) and you hit the most weight-efficient setup possible: max-size engines, 40% of engine tonnage in fuel. I'd consider 3 less stressed engines though, for a little increase in bulk, you can considerably lower fuel requirements.

I favour maintenance life slightly in excess of deployment time (by a factor of 1.2 to 1.5): having a safety margin is nice because component failure is less predictable, and it will be useful for combat repairs.

The sensor suite depends on design preferences. Yours is fine, if a concscious design goal is for ships this size to be totally self-sufficient.
For me, it would be enough if they can fight unassisted... and your R1 sensor has enough range for all your weapons. I'd leave long-range ship detectio to dedicated sensor boats, this also allows some form of emissions control.
R100 sensors are 100 times easier to detect by passives than R1 sensors of the same size. You may want to keep your R1 sensors on at all times, but switch R100 sensors on and off as needed; you can't currently do this if they are on the same ship.

[Thanatos]

It is strange to me that you would have a ship that is so fast, but have it's actual engagement and sensing range be so low. Your AMM missiles will also take 10 seconds to reach their target max range, and then they must recharge for 15 seconds, leaving a 450k km hole in your defense, for a missile or fighter to gain ground. And you only have two of those launchers, which means you can only knock out 2 missiles. Then, on top of that, your armor is too low. And your CIWS is too slow.

For missiles, the only reason to go into AMM territory is to engage and defeat missiles at long range. Thus you want to engage them at least at a million kilometer. At that point, you do not need many launchers, you just need a lot of missiles. I am sure the actual navy has a term for that, but I call it 'depth' missile defense. You defend by engaging the missiles in waves, far and safe from your own vessel. Furthermore, if your ship has 15k tons, and you can still go so fast, skip the middle man, and make full size Gauss Turrets without the 50% acc penalty. If you put 2 quad turrets, and you have 2 ships, that means you basically have 4 quad turrets defending your fleet. 4 * 6 = 24 and that is quite good to defeat a single salvo. Another ship, and you become extremely solid in AM ability.

So yeah, try and increase the range of your missiles to 2 million, and add more missile launchers, and you should be fine. You possibly won't even need the CIWS.

[krummja (OP)]

The Iron curtain has a warhead of zero?

That's odd, and I suspect a bug, since in the missile design it definitely has WH1. 

To everyone else - thanks for the excellent advice.   I'll take it all into consideration when tweaking the ship. 

Edit: I went ahead and did some tweaking.  I intend not to have PD on this ship as I will have other ships with dedicated PD/AMM.  Because of this I swapped the AMM sensor for an EM sensor so I can keep my active sensor switched off until engagement.  I made redundancies in the power plan system and tweaked the guns per recommendation.  I kept the two 20cm guns (again just RP/RoC).

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Chile class Heavy Cruiser    12 500 tons     368 Crew     2618 BP      TCS 250  TH 2000  EM 0
8000 km/s     Armour 3-47     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/64/0/0     Damage Control Rating 38     PPV 32
Maint Life 1. 79 Years     MSP 1047    AFR 156%    IFR 2. 2%    1YR 405    5YR 6071    Max Repair 500 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months    Spare Berths 3   

1000 EP Internal Fusion Drive (2)    Power 1000    Fuel Use 45%    Signature 1000    Exp 10%
Fuel Capacity 1 000 000 Litres    Range 32. 0 billion km   (46 days at full power)

Battlecruiser Spinal Mount 25cm C4 Far Ultraviolet Laser (1)    Range 320 000km     TS: 8000 km/s     Power 16-4     RM 5    ROF 20        16 16 16 16 16 13 11 10 8 8
15cm C3 Far Ultraviolet Laser (6)    Range 300 000km     TS: 8000 km/s     Power 6-3     RM 5    ROF 10        6 6 6 6 6 5 4 3 3 3
Laser Fire Control S08 160-8000 (2)    Max Range: 320 000 km   TS: 8000 km/s     97 94 91 88 84 81 78 75 72 69
Magnetic Confinement Fusion Reactor Technology PB-1 (6)     Total Power Output 60    Armour 0    Exp 5%

Battlecruiser Active Search Sensor MR84-R100 (1)     GPS 10500     Range 84. 0m km    Resolution 100
EM Detection Sensor EM8-64 (1)     Sensitivity 64     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  64m km

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes

[Thanatos]

Now that's a sexy ship, about to put the fear of communism into central america.

I would still use the extra 500 tons you got to make it a nice round number, to put more armor on it. For ships that get close and personal, I heavily recommend 8 layers of armor. You might want to add 100 extra spare berths on the ship, in case you want to pick up survivors and interrogate integrate them into your benevolent communist cigar factory country. But with those guns, it is hard to tell if you would be recovering burnt ashes or actual people, but nevertheless, everyone will know that Chile has the best football team in the world.

Cheers.

[krummja (OP)]

Haha, I appreciate the visuals.   I've actually designed a couple other ships in the same general direction and I'd love to get some opinions on them - specifically if there's anything obvious I'm forgetting.   I might try to expand them all but I kind of like the congruities in weight, speed, range, and maintenance life.   They're admittedly lightly armored, I agree.   As for berths, I can always have frigates do the clean-up, or even the supply vessels. 

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Mauna Kea class Missile Cruiser    12 500 tons     340 Crew     2292.  2 BP      TCS 250  TH 2000  EM 0
8000 km/s     Armour 3-47     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 37     PPV 30
Maint Life 1.  36 Years     MSP 802    AFR 178%    IFR 2.  5%    1YR 464    5YR 6966    Max Repair 500 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months    Spare Berths 0   
Magazine 222   

1000 EP Internal Fusion Drive (2)    Power 1000    Fuel Use 45%    Signature 1000    Exp 10%
Fuel Capacity 1 000 000 Litres    Range 32.  0 billion km   (46 days at full power)

Iron Hammer ASM Launcher (5)    Missile Size 6    Rate of Fire 45
Iron Hammer ASM Fire Control (2)     Range 108.  0m km    Resolution 100

Missile Cruiser Active Search Sensor MR150 (1)     GPS 30000     Range 150.  0m km    Resolution 100

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes

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Yerevan class Missile Defense Cruiser    6 250 tons     146 Crew     1349.  6 BP      TCS 125  TH 1000  EM 0
8000 km/s     Armour 3-30     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 13     PPV 6
Maint Life 1.  31 Years     MSP 405    AFR 104%    IFR 1.  4%    1YR 250    5YR 3752    Max Repair 500 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months    Spare Berths 0   
Magazine 200   

1000 EP Internal Fusion Drive (1)    Power 1000    Fuel Use 45%    Signature 1000    Exp 10%
Fuel Capacity 500 000 Litres    Range 32.  0 billion km   (46 days at full power)

Iron Curtain AMM Launcher (8 )    Missile Size 1    Rate of Fire 15
Iron Curtain Missile Fire Control FC15-R1 (4)     Range 15.  1m km    Resolution 1
Iron Curtain AMM (200)  Speed: 35 200 km/s   End: 0.  6m    Range: 1.  4m km   WH: 0    Size: 1    TH: 258/154/77

AMM Active Search Sensor MR16-R1 (1)     GPS 210     Range 16.  8m km    MCR 1.  8m km    Resolution 1

Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes

[ExChairman]

You want more AMMs, 200 is not enough,  I would increase it to atleast 800. In your first real battle against a missile opponent 200 would probobly not help you much.

[krummja (OP)]

Could I not rely on a collier vessel to store the reserve supply of AMM?