Design Escort challenge #2
The Navy has requested you to design a 7000 ton Escort to protect our controlled solar systems so the main requirements to achieve it will be the following:
Range : Stellar Range (WILL BE ONLY USED FOR STELLAR OPERATIONS)
Weapons : 2x Sentinel beam (PD) and 1 Heavy Railgun (L) L stands for large (main weapon) and PD stands for Point Defense
Sensor: 1x General Sensor and for the Beam
Engines: 3x Engines
Technology disposal for design : Ion Drive
So again, we need specifics. How large are your solar systems? A Binary or tertiary system could be anywhere between 50 to 800 billion km, so in the latter, good luck trying to cover that much on sub-light because you wont.
We also do not know what that ship would be escorting but i will assume it is commercial ships, so somewhere between 900 and 1.5km/s. That means you would be better off with some endurance engines, meaning, between 80 and 90% total potency and maximum size, which for you would be 40 or 50 for a ship this size.
Now the bad news: a 7k ship wont be able to have all that and you only need ONE engine for this ship. This engine will be around 1/3 of your ship size because having ONE big engine is better than 3 smaller engines (Means you will get less crews, which in turn means less crew quarters and you will have more endurance because you will end up using less fuel, as the bigger a engine is, the better its efficiency with regards to fuel and you *will* need fuel endurance if you want it to escort anything anywhere in a solar system.)
As per size, you will maybe get away with 2 10cm energy cannons (in a turret) or 2 twin 10cm turrets. A Rail gun will be useless since your ship wont have the speed for it. Also, there is no Large Rail Gun, only standard to small size and they would suck for a ship like this.
Also, you could go CIWS for PD, but its better to have 2 Beam FC for those ships and use the weapons for both offensive and defensive fire. (In reality you will be using these for defensive. With that tonnage you wont survive offensive encounter and will need numbers to raise efficiency in convoy protection.) And because you dont have room for anything else, i would suggest to make some box launchers for 1.0 AMM missiles and maybe 12 size 6 or 8 ASM. I would go with 36 AMM and 12 ASM and if there is not enough space, reduce AMM to 24. Anything less than that you should get rid of the 12 ASM. And use pack tactics here, at least 4 of those ships instead of just one.
And thats the best that i can do given the circumstances and lack of information.