i mean, the usual problem with beam-based fleets are a) they're made of gallicite b) have the shelf life of calamari and c) if your enemy out EWs you, you're in for a bad day at the office. if you've got someone handy to overrun, i can see rushing with designs like this. as a fleet to have just because, maybe a little budget-busting.
i kind of like the pegasus. indy ("was the dog's name") has imo too much armor and the hangars, extravagances brought on i feel by the allure of 30,000 tons to fill up, but with the immense cost of that engine suite, you need ruthless focus on murder. comet is a glass cannon, and the "cannon" part is nothing special.
might look to shave some tonnage off pegasus's's's sensor suite (a boat bay for small recon craft might be a cost effective alternative, and maintain the independent action capability). Through all three classes i personally prefer 15 cm lasers over 12 or 20. But broadly speaking, implementation seems sound.
Yeah, beam fleets have serious issues when compared to missile-based fleets but I've played around with both big missile cruisers and carriers/missile fighters and wanted a change. Gallicite shouldn't be too much of an issue right now - it's my biggest stockpile on Earth at about 120,000 tons compared to the >1000 tons of Mercassium I have - but obviously will be a problem later down the line if I carry on the game long enough.
Your right that the Indy has some extravagances that it probably doesn't need. I really wanted to give it fighters because I recently read Forever War and played a bit of Steller Monarch and both settings give their cruisers fighters for extra defense and strike power. I was weighing up the benefits of stripping the hangers and just going with more railguns, which would be the more efficient option, but decided it probably wouldn't be as cool/fun. I went with an armour rating of 9 because I like to think of that as a 9" belt which, in rough OTL terms, is on the lighter side for a ship designed for use in a battle line.
I'm not too keen on the Pegasus since it was built with as many off-the-shelf components as possible, creating something quite mediocre in my mind. A boat-bay recon craft is a good idea, kind of like the float planes cruisers used to carry, so I might incorporate that into a later variant.
I mostly like them. Personally, I hate spinal lasers and LOVE spinal mass drivers (as a concept), so I would only ever spinal-mount a rail gun, but that is 100% personal taste.
I have built many an Aurora fleet based on late 19th, early 20th, and WWII wet navies, and find it a great way to theme and constrict my ships.
- - - - -
Again, this is one hundred percent my personal style and opinion, but 'spinal mount weapons' don't seem very 'early 20th C' Battleship to me. Two to four turrets of two to three big guns does. When I'm doing a 'simulation' fleet I frequently use SM to give myself up to 30cm guns for free, in order to build proper battlewagons. It's not even unbalancing, since a C1 Infrared 30cm Laser with a 10,000 km range fires very slowly (and since NPRs spawn with a proportion of your empire's total research points).
What I really like doing is copying an actual ship that existed in the time period, and 'interpreting' it by Aurora's rules. For example, I would take the https://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Cressy-class_cruiser and in Aurora design it to have:
speed 2,100 km/s, or 2,400 km/s or 3,900 km/s depending on my engine tech
2 single-turret 20cm or 25 cm lasers
12 single-turret 15cm lasers
12 single-turret 33% gauss cannon
3 single-turret 12. 5% gauss cannon
2 reduced-0. 25 size 9 missile tubes
Armour 6 layers deep
At least, as a starting point. I might have to drop the armour to 5 layers to fit my jumpships, or fiddle the engines/fuel/maintenance/crew ratio to fine-tune the displacement.
And sure, someone will come along and say "You should replace all those piddly little gauss cannon with a single CIWS; it's more efficient" and I will laugh at them because efficiency is not the goal; re-creating a Cressy is.
- - - - -
My point is, with a fixed design goal in mind you can easily weigh suggestions against the fiction and decide what's appropriate. Replacing three medium guns with two big ones might give better combat performance, but it will make your Mogami-class cruisers not Mogamis any more. * Long range fighter strikes and massive missile salvoes might win you every battle, but they sure don't feel like Jutland.
*Okay, bad example, since historically this is exactly what happened in 1939.
You got me! Those spinal guns aren't like OTL ships at all, I just wanted a really big gun! I have a plan to do something with more realistic ships in a multi-faction game inspired by the C19 Concert of Europe and scramble for Africa when C# comes around. One thing I've thought of is, to represent early ironclad and pre-dreadnought battleship guns, is to use plasma cannonades since they get a bigger caliber earlier than lasers. The fact they're worse than lasers would help represent how crappy those early guns were.
The 1st thing I would like to say is. . . HOLY BALLS THOSE ARE QUICK!
With that out of the way, these are some pretty solid designs, but here are some ways to improve them:
- Your burn time [fuel], deployment time, and maintenance life are pretty out of wack; from a roleplay perspective why is your battlecruiser kitted out to sustain maintain itself for two years without repair, sustain it's crew for a year without resupply, but only have enough fuel to run the engines for less than a month?
- Armor vs Shields, these are okay as is however the mechanically speaking the armor for your battlecruiser is quite light while the shields are very adequate for boom and zoom tactics.
- Your classes are all over the place. What makes the Heavy Cruiser "Heavy"? Is there a "Regular" Cruiser and it's halfway between it and a proper Battlecruiser? What is the Destroyer intended to do? Not so much an improvement as something to think about.
- Only the Heavy Cruiser has a Navigational Radar. . . if you are role-playing your ships to need a navigational radar, things might go a bit pear shaped if your cruiser bites it.
- Have you considered really tiny active sensors for dedicated target acquisition? A little Resolution 1 sensor, maybe ten tons or so, is great for firing the weapons if your big sensors bite the dust. They are also much quieter than great big Anti-Missile Sensors.
- Armament is sane, and firepower is great across the board. Might suggest replacing the SBG-10 Fire Controls with a lighter one with either 40,000(50% at 20,000) or 20,000(50% at 10,000) max range. The SBG-09 and SBG-13 are fine for using the Railguns outside of the Point Defense role, however you do lose some redundancy if the main FCS goes down. . . which could suck.
All in all, they seem like excellent ships. It is very hard to grade beam warships w/o knowing what technology level you are at though. The 1st priority for a beam-only warship is either speed or defense, then firepower. All other capabilities take a backseat to these. Long range and good sensors are nice to have though.
I heard speed was important for beam engagements
Thank god we don't have to worry about G-force for transnewtonian ships or my crews would be a fine red paste by the end of each tour. . .
Endurance is a problem with these ships, but 25 billion km at this stage is more than enough to get to any colony in TA space right now. It was a sacrifice for their stupid speed. In game doctrine for their use is for them to either operate from a colonial base when on the defensive, picketing jump points or striking out, when passives detect a hostile fleet, or, in offensive actions, to be accompanied by a 'support squadron' consisting of tankers, maintenance supply ships, and hospital ships which moves around 2500 km/s and keeps the attack elements moving.
The maintenance life to deployment time mismatch is a preference on all my ships. I like to dedicate 4% of tonnage to engineering because it makes really reliable ships but, at the same time, find that my military ships often don't need to be deployed for more than 12 months at a time, especially ships this fast. It's useful in the sense that I get 3-4 missions out of my ships instead of 2-3 before they need to be overhauled but your right that it is a little odd.
Class wise: Pegasus is a heavy cruiser because it has 8" and larger guns instead of 6" and smaller, which I would consider a light cruiser. The Indy is a battlecruiser because it is intended to be used in a battleline (bigger guns, more armour) but still keeps the speed of a cruiser.
The destroyer is an odd one. Compared to real ships its sort of the size of a small cruiser, although some modern destroyer such as the US's Arleigh Burkes are bigger. The concept behind them is to provide escort during fleet actions, adding weight to final fire PD and engaging smaller craft that come too close to the battleline, and to provide a more economical patrol unit than the Pegasus. I'm not totally happy with how they've come out but they'll get better with subsequent models.
Good idea with the little active sensor. It may be the case that a later class ditches the large SPD in favour of a single tiny radar to create a more economical destroyer design, like how the Royal Navy's new frigates are cheaper generalists designed to free up the more expensive previous generation of frigates for specialist use.
Yeah, those engines are THIRSTY!
It looks like you intend to send your cruisers out to the dark and have them sit there waiting for tankers, then send them further away to secure another location and wait for tankers - then rinse & repeat? Otherwise, they look quite capable.
Yeah, pretty much. I like to think of it as the ships having a 10,000 km/s combat speed and a 2,500 km/s cruise speed when going somewhere with tankers.