I want my cruisers to stand apart from my destroyers, frigates and corvettes by being able to operate independently. That means giving them beam, sensor, missiles, AMM, and perhaps even limited hangar capacity. Oh, a standard troop bay for a company of marines.
Is this doable or even advisable assuming you're working with a ship of 50-90k tons?
Let's say you merge a 10ktons missile cruiser with a 10 kTons scout ship, a 10 kTons AMM ship, a 10kTons beam ship, a 10kTons carrier and a 10 kTons DCA ship.
You'll have a generalist ship as you want.
Let's compare both.
About engine/fuel : same tonnage
About weapon/sensors : same tonnage, perhaps a bit less for generalist if you have redundant sensors on your ships, yet you'll want to keep redundancies.
Bridge, auxiliary control ans so on : A lower tonnage as you'll need only one of each
Officers : less officers needed in generalist design, so perhaps you'll have better bonuses, or perhaps you'll have worst as you cannot choose the best officer for each post, depends on your officer pool.
Crew : same tonnage, or a bit less for generalist due to to less bridges
ECCM and ECM : a small gain in ECM for generalist, as you need only 1 or 2, not 6, and perhaps a small gain in ECCM too as you won't need ECCM for missile and beam weapon at the same moment most of the time.
Jump engine : same tonnage if every ship has its own jump engine, but the RP cost will be far higher as you'll need a 60 kTons jump engine, and not 6x10kTons jump engine. If you use a dedicated jump design, you'll need only a third of the HS for specialized ships (or a sixth if high tech enough).
Defense : Armor cost will be the same I think, shield will be better used if grouped, and you'll be less vulnerable to shock damage. Yet you are more vulnerable to meson, one shot to the magazine and you lost everything. Another point, when damaged, your generalist ship will loose speed, if one of your specialized ship is damaged, the rest can go full speed and has a better chance to flee.
On a tons per tons basis, a generalist design will be more costly in RP and less efficient due to jump engine HS.
If you stabilize every jup point, or play with stabilized jump point option, a generalist design cost a bit less HS and same RP.
On a strategic/economic point of view :
It will be far longer to build/refit. A 60 kTons ship is far longer to build than 6x10 kTons, at least if you have enough shipyard to avoid constant retooling and can build all ships at the same moment.
For maintenance, it will be the same cost in C# (far less in VB6).
One slipway at 60 kTons now need the same number of workers than 6x10 kTons one. No difference there.
But you'll lack flexibility. You have to fight against a heavy missile opponent? Add a 10 kTons AMM ship. You need to saturate ennemy defense without improving your defense? Add a 10 kTons missile ship. With one design, your weapon/defence mix cannot be changed.
But there is a huge difference : detection
You'll have 6x the electromagnetic and thermal strength, so you'll be seen before seing.
And who see first, fire first, and in a better position.
If you have a better tech, it won't change a lot of thing, but if you have worst tech, you'll be fired upon without being able to retaliate.
Conclusion: specialize your ships.
I prefer to put at least some defense on every ship, and minimal sensors, I even put CIWS on critical ships like jump and flag bridge to be sure to have a better protection there, but I go with specialized ships but for 2 cases :
- DCA ship who also have at least a spinal weapon to be able to be used as beam ships (or to start intercepting missile at a higher range)
- exploration ships which operates usually alone. They have CIWS for defense, and hangar for scout fighters, but also a small magazine to allow them to be used as small offensive carriers when needed. Sometimes I even put one big missile launcher in them, to be able to launch a long range missile probe. Yet I keep them small, with thermal reduction, and without shields (and slow as they do not move often, most of the time they wait for their scout fighter to perform their task).
And they are not designed to fight, they are designed to scout and flee to tell their big brother that there is a bully somewhere.
