Plasma Carronade System Defense Boat

[Caiaphas (OP)]

I'm having some trouble getting this design to work right, and I'd appreciate some advice and criticism.  I'm trying to make a system defense boat, whose main role in a fleet engagement would be like old WWII PT boats; armed with powerful one-shot weapons but otherwise too fragile to do more than dart in and dark back out.

Kennedy class Monitor    5 250 tons     102 Crew     2319. 3 BP      TCS 105  TH 1600  EM 0
15238 km/s     Armour 1-26     Shields 0-0     Sensors 108/108/0/0     Damage Control Rating 1     PPV 4
Maint Life 1. 08 Years     MSP 276    AFR 220%    IFR 3. 1%    1YR 237    5YR 3550    Max Repair 750 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months    Spare Berths 0   

400 EP Beam Core AM Drive (4)    Power 400    Fuel Use 154. 95%    Signature 400    Exp 25%
Fuel Capacity 2 000 000 Litres    Range 44. 3 billion km   (33 days at full power)

CIWS-500 (2x6)    Range 1000 km     TS: 50000 km/s     ROF 5       Base 50% To Hit
15cm C8 Plasma Carronade (1)    Range 60 000km     TS: 15238 km/s     Power 6-8     RM 1    ROF 5        6 3 2 1 1 1 0 0 0 0
Fire Control S02 400-12500 (1)    Max Range: 800 000 km   TS: 12500 km/s     99 98 96 95 94 92 91 90 89 88
Beam Core Anti-matter Power Plant Technology PB-1 (1)     Total Power Output 32    Armour 0    Exp 5%

Thermal Sensor TH6-108 (1)     Sensitivity 108     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  108m km
EM Detection Sensor EM6-108 (1)     Sensitivity 108     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  108m km

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes

[Iranon]

Plasma carronades are rather poor weapons. They are mechanically similar to infrared lasers of the same calibre, but mostly inferior (twice as expensive, worse damage profile. Main upside besides calibre limit without spinal tech is a slightly lower crew requirements).

The vessel is extremely inefficient in some ways, the offensive capability would fit into a 1000t FAC several tech levels lower, at a fraction of the cost. You have tiny drives and a huge fuel tank, far beyond the performance optimum even if you don't care for fuel efficiency in itself. 45HS in 150% power engines and 15HS in fuel would  give you a third more speed and longer range on the same tonnage.
You have huge overhead for the passive sensors, I'd offload those to a scouting variant. If anything, I'd give each ship a small active sensor so they can fight unassisted.
You can't do field repairs if an engine breaks down, never mind if one gets disabled through combat damage.
CIWS are inefficient on anything deployed in groups, and a single ship of this capability won't be able to deal with many things. Railguns or regular Giauss cannons as point defence would also allow exploiting holes in the armour created by the big gun.
Fire control seems excessive for the very light armament.
Weapon has excessive capacitor tech, which does nothing but increase cost and reactor requirements. Even for this, the power plant is 4 times as large and expensive as it needs to be.

For a powerful one-shot weapon you may want to look into huge spinal lasers, possibly reduced-size and otherwise low-tech (if you're not planning to stick around, a fire rate measured in hours may be acceptable). An alternative would be a huge missile intended for point blank fire, below 5 seconds of travel time. This means non-CIWS point defences will not get to target the missile.

[Father Tim]

This ship can cross it's own engagement range in five seconds.  This means if it loses inititative (moves first), it will close to point blank, then the target ship will move away 75,000 km or so and the Kennedy will be unable to fire.  You want a much bigger plasma carronade at this speed.

It looks like you grabbed all tech that costs less than 111,111 RP or something, and then tried to design a ship using that.  There's nothing wrong with such an approach, but it tends to produce ships which would never arise organically since the next 200,000 RP are better spent on going faster or hitting harder, rather than two borderline useful EW or efficiency or fifth-or-sixth direct-fire weapon techs.

Which is why designs like this (or Xenoscepter's) attract the same criticisms every time.  (Such as: the sensors are too big, the electronic hardening is not needed, the engines should be boosted, this tech is a waste, that tech is too expensive, etc.)  Frequently, the post "Check out my gun cruiser for long-term independent missions" gets the reply "Replace the guns with missiles, offload the sensors to a scout, the fuel reserves to a tanker, add a collier to carry replacement missiles, and a dedicated jumpship to move the whole squadron."

- - - - -

So, most people trying to simulate a PT boat would use a FAC hull (i.e. 1000 tons, no bridge) and a big, overcharged engine (PT boats were faster than cruisers, after all) and minimal sensors & fire control (just barely enough to cover the range of the gun (or torpedoes)) along with two or four box launchers (the torpedos) or one big gun (which the Commonwealth would call an MGB rather than MTB, but Americans can't name things logically).

Since PT boats weren't designed for (and almost never* launched) beyond-visual-range attacks, I wouldn't give the Kennedys actual sensors.  I would make them rely on some other platform to spot & track targets.  I'd use torpedoes with active sensors before I'd put sensors on the boats.

I like the CIWS.  To me, it's the deck machine gun(s) that are basically useless against enemy naval units, but could be used on mines or kamikazes.  If you want to use them to shoot up commercial shipping or ground units, reduced sized (1/20th, 1/10th, 1/6th, etc.) gauss cannon are a better choice, but need a beam fire control system.

- - -

*Okay, the boats laid a lot of mines, which technically counts.

[Michael Sandy]

Part of the concept of a patrol fleet is that they can only engage effectively on those occasions where they are dealing with a small probe.  That makes having a speed/sensor advantage is really important.  That suggests either small ships or cloaked ships or both.

Having a lot of speed in a long endurance patrol ship is particularly difficult.  In order to get long endurance but the ability to select an engagement, you pretty much have to go with some kind of parasite craft in a long endurance carrier.

I love beam ships, but they really only work in a fleet encounter when you have enough beam ships to be immune to the missiles they might encounter.  The main role for beam ships in a patrol role is shooting down unarmed scouts, survey ships and gate construction ships.  And for that, a pop gun does the job.  Or go with a gunboat if you want a long enough ranged beam weapon so they don't have to worry about ramming.

So IF you want to share a ship that isn't optimized along those lines, it would be good to share the RP assumptions and restrictions you are adding to your ship.

You also might want to share if what your conception of patrol ship is, because some people use them to mean long endurance jump point guard.  And for that, you can have ships with very short fuel range, but long crew and maintenance endurance.

Another use of 'patrol ship' is to refer to ships that are no longer frontline ships, that patrol backwaters, either to provide PPV or as the RP equivalent.  Now I really like the use of barebones carriers for this.  They often have very long maintenance life anyways, and if there is a colony with a pop, crew endurance is easily dealt with.  You can put obsolete fighters on board, sensor fighters, out of date railgun fighters, and they will still be able to maintain your claim on space against unarmed intruders and small probes.

My survey support carriers are often out of date in terms of their engines, but they only need to keep up with the survey fleet, not an attack fleet, so it isn't a problem.  They can easily be repurposed to a patrol role, who are mainly in system to provide as detailed information as possible about an attack.  Although, with fast noisy sensor craft in the mix, they can often kite an enemy if there is no other detectable target in the system for them to go after.  This can buy a lot of precious time for a response fleet.

[xenoscepter]

@Father Tim

...Frequently, the post "Check out my gun cruiser for long-term independent missions" gets the reply "Replace the guns with missiles, offload the sensors to a scout, the fuel reserves to a tanker, add a collier to carry replacement missiles, and a dedicated jumpship to move the whole squadron."...

grumble mumble...

Warning: Angry Rant Contained Within!

Off-Topic: show

 - This. I can't stand this. Help me build a better long-range gun cruiser, tell me long-range gun cruisers suck... just, don't say what is effectively, "Cool ship bro, but instead of that, just throw it out and do this instead." If I wanted to know whether long-range gun cruisers or missile ships were better I'd ask that. I get not everyone would, but these replies kinda just boil my blood because they're not helpful. If you suspect someone's a n00b, just ask, "Hey, did you know long-range gun cruisers are actually worse than missile ships with a logistics train?" It's not that hard really...

 --- You didn't give us the technology used in this ship, but I tried to remake it as close as possible to the original. Try this one on for size:

Kennedy II class Monitor:
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Kennedy II class Monitor    5,250 tons     182 Crew     3295 BP      TCS 105  TH 1600  EM 0
15238 km/s     Armour 6-26     Shields 0-0     Sensors 108/108/0/0     Damage Control Rating 12     PPV 16
Maint Life 19.02 Years     MSP 4707    AFR 18%    IFR 0.3%    1YR 25    5YR 371    Max Repair 750 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months    Spare Berths 26   

800 EP Beam Core AM Drive (2)    Power 800    Fuel Use 25.71%    Signature 800    Exp 12%
Fuel Capacity 900,000 Litres    Range 120.0 billion km   (91 days at full power)

CIWS-500 (2x6)    Range 1000 km     TS: 50000 km/s     ROF 5       Base 50% To Hit
25cm C8 Plasma Carronade (2)    Range 160,000km     TS: 25000 km/s     Power 16-8     RM 1    ROF 10        16 8 5 4 3 2 2 2 1 1
Fire Control S02 200-25000 (2)    Max Range: 400,000 km   TS: 25000 km/s     98 95 92 90 88 85 82 80 78 75
Beam Core Anti-matter Power Plant Technology PB-1 (1)     Total Power Output 16    Armour 0    Exp 5%

Active Search Sensor MR1-R1 (1)     GPS 25     Range 1.3m km    MCR 136k km    Resolution 1
Thermal Sensor TH6-108 (1)     Sensitivity 108     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  108m km
EM Detection Sensor EM6-108 (1)     Sensitivity 108     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  108m km

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
 --- I added a small active search sensor for target acquisition. It uses Active strength 10 with EM strength 5. EM / Thermal passives are the same from the original. I used the original Beam FCS tech, but doubled the number of them and changed the range / tracking speed parameters, then upped the Plasma Carronade calibre to 25cm and doubled them too. I kept the Capacitor 8 tech of the originals. The engines weigh the same total mass, but I used half of them, greatly increased their size, and reduced the boost from 2.5x to 1.25x. I used Fuel Consumption tech 0.16 to match it to your original drives. I was able to increase the armor by 600% with triple the crew endurance and almost triple the range for the same speed and engine tonnage.

 --- Each carronade can be assigned to it's own Beam FCS and fired independently, allowing you to fire one every five seconds or both every ten seconds. This version of the ship will cross it's own engagement range in 10 seconds, which is still pretty terrible, but means that if it doesn't move first, it can fire on the second increment and still hit something. The CIWS was retained, but uses Active Sensor 180 and no ECCM. I couldn't replicate the CIWS Tech from what was given here. I added a second Bridge for HTK padding, along with more engineering space for both more MSP and better Annual Fail Rates. Overall, it's mostly the same ship just improved. With a list of what techs you have available and such I could maybe... maybe improve it more. Anyways, hope you like my changes and as always... Cheers!

[Michael Sandy]

I like the Kennedy II a bit better.  I went with a bit of a different philosophy regarding number of fire controls, preferring to have several beam weapons per BFC.

Beam fire controls are expensive, especially long range beam fire controls.  They are often more expensive than the weapons by a long shot.  With a capital ship, you can more afford to have redundancy.  Small ships, almost any damage through the armor is likely to be a mission kill, whether it is an engine explosion, weapon or power plant destroyed or fire control lost.  Having two weapons, two engines, two fire controls, I suppose that makes it bigger than a 'small ship' by that definition.  It is an interesting size.  I definitely agree that an 800k range fire control is overkill on a 60k ranged weapon.

The maintenance endurance fits with a patrol ship, as it can park over a colony for years and years.  The range is longer than I need in my empire, but I suppose by late game you are spread out a lot more.  And there could be some monstrously huge systems that you have to cross.

[xenoscepter]

 --- This is a complete ground-up design which is a combination of Father Tim's PT Boat concept and your Kennedy-Class Monitor. All Tech is assumed to be Beam Core / Collapsium Armor equivalent in this design. It hits 9x harder than the Kennedy II at 160,000 km, and is faster with the same endurance and roughly the same range. It can lay mines, or use a powerful single shot torpedo with it's Size 30 Box Launcher, plus it carries 3[4 with one hot-loaded into the launcher] Size 6 missiles for additional long range punch. Up close it is lightly defended, but it's Alpha shields put out four shield points every four increments and it's CIWS is augmented by a twin turreted Gauss. The 'stealthed' active sensors make use of a strength ten active w/ strength 75 em for maximum range per GPS. The sensor is geared for res 1, so nothing escapes it's gaze. 1% Thermal Reduction means the Innovation-Class can use it's passives to see an enemy well before the enemy can detect it on their passives... ton for ton anyway. The particle Beam ensures the ship can do three time the damage of a Kennedy II at almost ten times the range, while the 20cm laser just gets deadlier as the Innovation-Class closes. That'll be all for me, cheers!

Innovation class Patrol Ship:

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Innovation class Patrol Ship    5,250 tons     166 Crew     7315.55 BP      TCS 105  TH 18  EM 120
17142 km/s     Armour 2-26     Shields 4-20     Sensors 210/210/0/0     Damage Control Rating 5     PPV 28
Maint Life 6.46 Years     MSP 4790    AFR 40%    IFR 0.6%    1YR 198    5YR 2970    Max Repair 2250 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 2 months    Spare Berths 32   
Magazine 54   

900 EP Beam Core AM Drive [stealthed] (2)    Power 900    Fuel Use 4.14%    Signature 9    Exp 7%
Fuel Capacity 150,000 Litres    Range 124.2 billion km   (83 days at full power)
Alpha R20/24 Shields (4)   Total Fuel Cost  4 Litres per hour  (96 per day)

20cm C5 Far Gamma Ray Laser (1)    Range 1,200,000km     TS: 25000 km/s     Power 10-5     RM 12    ROF 10        7 3 2 1 1 1 1 0 0 0
Particle Beam-2 (1)    Range 1,200,000km     TS: 25000 km/s     Power 5-5    ROF 5        2 2 2 2 2 2 2 0 0 0
Twin Gauss Cannon R6-85 Turret (1x16)    Range 60,000km     TS: 25000 km/s     Accuracy Modifier 85%     RM 6    ROF 5        0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
CIWS-200 (2x8)    Range 1000 km     TS: 20000 km/s     ROF 5       Base 50% To Hit
Primary Fire Control (1)    Max Range: 1,200,000 km   TS: 25000 km/s     87 73 60 47 33 20 7 0 0 0
Point Defense Fire Control (1)    Max Range: 250,000 km   TS: 25000 km/s     36 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
15 Ton Boosted Beam Core Anti-matter Power Plant (1)     Total Power Output 10.08    Armour 0    Exp 7%

Size 30 Box Launcher (1)    Missile Size 30    Hangar Reload 225 minutes    MF Reload 37.5 hours
Size 6 Missile Launcher (75% Reduction) (1)    Missile Size 6    Rate of Fire 30
Missile Fire Control Unit (1)     Range 31.5m km    Resolution 1

200 Ton Res 1 Active Search Sensor [Stealthed] (1)     GPS 40     Range 30.0m km    MCR 3.3m km    Resolution 1
Thermal Sensor TH3.5-210 (1)     Sensitivity 210     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  210m km
EM Detection Sensor EM3.5-210 (1)     Sensitivity 210     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  210m km

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
To hit numbers and damage assumed to be against a target moving 25,000 km/s at 160,000 km distance.

[xenoscepter]

 --- Here are designs for some potential missiles to use on the Innovation-Class. I've never designed a mine before, so it may be borked.

Size 6 Anti-Ship Torpedo:

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Missile Size: 6 MSP  (0.3 HS)     Warhead: 36    Armour: 1     Manoeuvre Rating: 140
Speed: 40000 km/s    Engine Endurance: 13 minutes   Range: 30.8m km
ECM Level: 10
Cost Per Missile: 32.85
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 5600%   3k km/s 1820%   5k km/s 1120%   10k km/s 560%
Materials Required:    9.25x Tritanium   5x Uridium   18.6x Gallicite   Fuel x875

Development Cost for Project: 3285RP

Size 30 Anti-Ship Torpedo:

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Missile Size: 30 MSP  (1.5 HS)     Warhead: 216    Armour: 4     Manoeuvre Rating: 110
Speed: 160000 km/s    Engine Endurance: 4 minutes   Range: 40.8m km
ECM Level: 10
Cost Per Missile: 180
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 17600%   3k km/s 5830%   5k km/s 3520%   10k km/s 1760%
Materials Required:    55x Tritanium   5x Uridium   120x Gallicite   Fuel x750

Development Cost for Project: 18000RP

Size 30 Anti-Ship Mine:

Code: [Select]

Missile Size: 30 MSP  (1.5 HS)     Warhead: 0    Armour: 0     Manoeuvre Rating: 10
Speed: 100 km/s    Engine Endurance: 141,039.8 hours   Range: 50,774.3m km
Active Sensor Strength: 45   Sensitivity Modifier: 750%
Resolution: 10    Maximum Range vs 500 ton object (or larger): 106,720,000 km
Cost Per Missile: 170.575
Second Stage: Size 6 Anti-Ship Torpedo x3
Second Stage Separation Range: 106,720,000 km
Overall Endurance: 5877 days   Overall Range: 50805.1m km
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 1%   3k km/s 0%   5k km/s 0.2%   10k km/s 0.1%
Materials Required:    27.75x Tritanium   27x Boronide   60x Uridium   55.825x Gallicite   Fuel x5812.5

Development Cost for Project: 17058RP