Anti-Missile Corvette Design

[Resident Evil (OP)]

Hi all.

I've wanted to post up some designs for a while, so I'm finally getting round to it. These are Internal Fusion based ships, so not totally low tech. They are intended to work in small groups consisting of four Titan anti-missile corvettes, supplemented with one Skathi corvette group leader, which carries the jump engine and main sensors for the group.

So without further ado....

First the Titan - ironic as it's such a small ship really

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Titan I-Y class Corvette (AMM)    4,000 tons     100 Crew     1154 BP      TCS 80  TH 96  EM 0
5000 km/s     Armour 2-22     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 4     PPV 8
Maint Life 6.05 Years     MSP 721    AFR 32%    IFR 0.4%    1YR 34    5YR 506    Max Repair 200 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 24 months    Spare Berths 0   
Magazine 408   

Crawford-Webb 200 EP IntCon Wasp Px1.0 (F0.5/T25/e0.45) (2)    Power 200    Fuel Use 45%    Signature 48    Exp 10%
Fuel Capacity 250,000 Litres    Range 25.0 billion km   (57 days at full power)

Daly-Page S1-R5 Launcher (5s/r6/100%) (8)    Missile Size 1    Rate of Fire 5
Hardy & Sims Missile FC FC35-R1 MCR3.8 (a28/e14/50%) (2)     Range 35.3m km    Resolution 1
AHI Amnixiel IIs S1W1 (32/60/132) (248)  Speed: 60,000 km/s   End: 8.9m    Range: 32m km   WH: 1    Size: 1    TH: 440/264/132
AHI Aciel IIs S1W1 (5.6/60/204) (160)  Speed: 60,000 km/s   End: 1.5m    Range: 5.6m km   WH: 1    Size: 1    TH: 680/408/204

Hardy & Sims Active SS MR42-R80 (a28/e14/50%) (1)     GPS 2688     Range 42.1m km    Resolution 80
Hardy & Sims ASS 0.9 MR3-R1 (a28/e14/50%) (1)     GPS 26     Range 3.5m km    MCR 383k 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
Because these were my first real combat ships they are a bit of mixed bag, intended as they are to combine an anti-missile capability with the short range missiles, along with some anti-ship capability out to 32m km with the longer range missiles. The intent is that eventually, when more ships come on line, they should be switched into a dedicated anti-missile role. The small Search sensors are there to provide a limited capability in case something nasty should happen to the group leader, in which case they would be able to stay in the fight, all-be-it with limited capability.

The R1 fire control can engage size 6 and smaller out to about 3.8 million km which, for incoming at 50,000km/s gives around 15 intervals to engage and destroy incoming salvo's.

The Skathi group leader is as follows...

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Skathi Ia-S class Corvette GL    4,000 tons     116 Crew     1481 BP      TCS 80  TH 96  EM 180
5000 km/s    JR 5-100     Armour 6-22     Shields 6-300     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 6     PPV 0
Maint Life 9.21 Years     MSP 1504    AFR 19%    IFR 0.3%    1YR 32    5YR 479    Max Repair 546 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 24 months    Spare Berths 0   

Reid Systems J4000(5-100) Military Jump Drive (e10)     Max Ship Size 4000 tons    Distance 100k km     Squadron Size 5
Crawford-Webb 200 EP IntCon Wasp Px1.0 (F0.5/T25/e0.45) (2)    Power 200    Fuel Use 45%    Signature 48    Exp 10%
Fuel Capacity 250,000 Litres    Range 25.0 billion km   (57 days at full power)
Beta R300/324 Shields (4)   Total Fuel Cost  54 Litres per hour  (1,296 per day)

Hardy & Sims Active SS MR50-R1 (a28/e14/50%) (1)     GPS 364     Range 51.0m km    MCR 5.5m km    Resolution 1
Wyatt Cyber Active SS MR140-R80 (a28/e14/50%) (1)     GPS 8960     Range 140.2m km    Resolution 80

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes

With this I've gone for much heavier armor to give it a bit more survivability as it's central to the group, along with some basic shielding (the best I had at the time). I am thinking the amount of shielding is not really significant, and will probably replace it with ECM as a better investment  in the future. However, at the time it was designed I hadn't researched the ecm tech.

So, any opinions or comments for things I may have missed, of ways I could improve them would be welcome.

Cheers

ZG

[Iranon]

Nothing seems to be wrong with them, but when it comes to corvettes I'm stingier.

Default power is subtly discouraged by the mechanics. Going above, you pay the same for an engine of the same output (compactness bought with higher fuel use). Going below, you pay less and less for an engine of the same output, often a larger and less stressed ship is cheaper until you approach 50% propulsion tonnage.

Your mission life is quite long. Also, maintenance life is notably in excess of deployment time. Does this match your use - e.g. they are expected to often get R&R without overhauls?

Do you really get good use out of stealthy engines? This doubles their cost. Likewise, I'm not sure ECM is worth it.

Redundancy is nice, but you pay quite a bit for the sensors considering the limited offensive capability of the ship.

[SevenOfCarina]

Eh. They're pretty run-of-the-mill as far as the size is concerned, but having said that, I think that they're rather severely under-gunned.

There are only two(!) fire controls and eight(!) launchers for some four-hundred missiles, which is, generally, a very bad idea. As rule of thumb, AMM ships should be built to empty their entire magazines in the time it takes for an equal tech missile to cross the AMM envelope, for the simple reason that you do not want a ship to go down with a magazine full of very expensive missiles. A good balance to aim for at that tech level is maybe four fire controls and sixteen launchers for every 256 missiles, which should fit on your current design.

It's also very poorly protected. At that tech level, I'd expect at least four levels of armour and twenty points of shields, or alternatively, six or eight armour levels and no shields. The speed is a bit slow for Internal Confinement Fusion drives, but that is entirely dependant on your strategic outlook.

The deployment time and maintenance life are fine, in my opinion, though you could carry a tad less MSP (tone it down to ~4 years?) to make some room. I concur with Iranon about the stealth issue and the redundant Res80 sensors - it'd be easier to simply bring another sensor ship along.

[Resident Evil (OP)]

Thanks for the comments.

You're right about the engines. I've been playing around looking at lower power engines (like maybe 80-85%) and thinking I can probably get the fuel saving to balance out the engine size - but at the moment this is what I've got and I've been building a fleet around these engines to a 5k km/s standard, so any planned change is going to have to wait till my next generation of engines. Which I've been researching along with improving the fuel consumption tech.

Stealthy engines - I dunno - probably not. It' just what I did cause it seemed better to have stealthier engines At the moment, they may be more expensive, but I have a lot of minerals, and keep finding more -so I'm not to concerned about it.

When you say mission life - do you mean the 24 months bit? If so I've found it quite useful, I've had the fleets out for the full period escorting survey ships 15-20 billion km from home with tankers keeping the fleet topped up - so I've found it useful to have a long(ish) deployment time.

The high maintenance is partly to stop message spam in the event log, but also I think I added extra to pad the ship mass out to a nice round 4k tons so the speeds and such were nice round numbers.

The redundant sensors were a contingency, but they are only 0.9 and 1.2 HS so not particularly expensive. That said, later on they'll probably go if I upgrade the ships, contingent upon improved missile ranges and improved fire controls which may need more space. We will see.

[SevenOfCarina]

Then that's fine. I generally keep to a 24 month / 5 year standard, so I know the benefits. 

If your ships are mostly on escort duty, then it might be better to boost their range to ~40 billion km, though it's really up to you. It's interesting that you consider 4000 tons 'small' though, considering my corvettes are 500 tons and any ship massing 4000 tons or more would be a major fleet asset. Heh.

I'll admit that I, too, engage in meaningless mass addition in pursuit of the holy round number.

 

[Resident Evil (OP)]

reply to : SevenOfCarina

Heh - I just assumed they were 'small' cause I keep seeing some huge designs on the forums - like several hundreds of thousands of tons, and compared to that they seemed titchy.

It would probably be useful to have longer range I've found, but then it's what do I cut out to do it. Any refit and redesign is going to wait till my next engine tech comes out (whenever that is) and then I'll have to re-evaluate what I can and can't fit on the hull.

Regarding the launchers/magazine size - I honestly had no idea what was best but the last thing I wanted was to run out of missiles - so I erred on the side of caution by loading out 50 full salvos of missiles - maybe that was a bit excessive The last battle I had the four ships combined were able to take out the incoming salvo's with 2 launchers per fire control - so I had four launchers going spare. But they weren't huge salvos so didn't need the full whack. But it is a consideration to tinker around with the number of launchers/fire controls too. It will probably end up been dictated by what I run into and how well they fare in future battles.

[Michael Sandy]

Going to have to disagree a lot with SevenOfCarina.

Versus 50k missiles, you would be able to fire 120 of your 160 high agility AMMs.  Yes, you wouldn't be able to flush all your AMMs against a single Box launcher volley, but for dealing with repeated volleys you will definitely have capacity to deal with them. Going with an 8 to 1 MSP to launcher ratio as they advocate, you may as well just have everything in box launchers. 

If the longer ranged, lower agility missiles are intended to be anti-ship missiles, I suggest sticking a larger warhead on them.  You are better off with a 60% chance to get a 2-warhead missile to hit than a 90% chance to get a 1-warhead missile to hit.  Also, consider if you need the anti-ship missiles to simply be able to strike the enemy before they reach beam range, in which case 5 mkm would be plenty.

On the subject of armor, that depends.  A fleet built on the concept of shooting down enemy missiles is only going to worry about missiles that can exhaust your own AMMs, such as enemy AMM spam.  Having beam point defense to deal with rapid fire missiles in smaller volleys is a good complement to AMMs which can blunt box launcher volleys.

I agree that the speed is a bit low, but as an escort limited to the speed of the Jump Tender, that isn't a bad concept.  One advantage of large magazine designs is you can use them as colliers for a long time after they fall behind the tech curve.  They have the endurance and efficiency to be useful for shuttling missiles to colonies.

One thing I disagree with is trying to directly escort survey ships.  That is WAY too consumptive of fuel.  Being in the same system and responding to threats, that is different.  You aren't so much escorting them directly as using them as bait to draw out an enemy, so that the other survey ships can complete their tasks.

As a starting fleet, it is not bad, but you will want some faster beam ships to complement them.  Something to kill the enemy efficiently once you have run them out of missiles.  You can use your anti-ship missiles to pick apart the most dangerous enemy beam ships, and hopefully not have huge logistics problems of replacing thousands of missiles every fight.

Going for a single fleet speed is something a lot of people suggest, but it is a mistake.  Have a strategic speed that everybody can match, that has your tender, your point defense, and any support ships.  But your beam fleet should be faster, perhaps twice as fast.  Because controlling the range is FAR more important for a beam ship than for a point defense ship.

[Garfunkel]

It is important to remember that there are 2 distinct missile threats to stop and they require different solutions.

1. Massive Alpha strike
2. Never ending spam

The first requires loads of fire controls and launchers that can shoot as many missiles as quickly as possible while magazine capacity doesn't really matter because there won't be a second big wave. The other relies on you having enough magazine space so that you can keep dealing with the spam. To deal with the first, having a box launcher equipped corvette is the optimal solution, but that would be almost useless for the second option. To deal with the second, you don't need that many launchers and controls but having few thousand spare AMMs in your magazines is useless if the alpha strike gets through and obliterates your ships.

So especially in early game, and to some extent to mid game, the optimal solution is to have two different AMM ship designs - one with deep magazines but with reduced amount of launchers, and another one with smaller magazines but with loads of launchers. You can then swap missiles between them if necessary and you're covered for both extremes.

[Jorgen_CAB]

In terms of missile launchers and magazine most of my capital ships tends to end up with having launchers for both AMM and ASM on the same ships becasue this way I can run any task-force for either offence and defense depending on the scenario they happen to find themselves in.

This might not work very well on a 4000t ship but from about 6000+ and up should work quite well.

This usually mean that you can easily deal with box launched salvos as every ship will have at least some capacity to defend and against staggered salvos since you are always going to have some ships with more AMM in their magazines.

So, in most cases you would run your ship in defensive mode until you find the enemy (stock up an AMM missiles), if you think you can take them on with what you have you will call up the colliers and load up the fleet for offensive action with a light AMM load and more ASM.

In terms of deployment time I almost never see that ships need more than 6-9 month deployment time. I can't really find any military missions that would make my ships need more than that. If they do I will just have to construct a temporary military outpost close to the action. Maintenance should generally be 2-3 times the ships deployment time. You don't want the ships store of supplies depleted from random component failure during a combat mission.

I also don't see much point in escorting survey ships. You would instead scout the system and make sure there are no threats there. Give your gravitation survey ships launchers and launch sensor buoys at any jump points you find to get advanced notice of any trouble so your survey ships can escape or at least hide away from any threats until reinforcement can arrive.

[Resident Evil (OP)]

lol - you ask 2 people how to design a ship and you get 5 different opinions 

Seriously - I do appreciate the feedback - it's something to think about, especially the speed. I thought I had a reasonable speed for the tech level - but maybe not. I could have squeezed bigger engines in there, but then I'd have had to compromise in other areas, and it's a bit late now as I've settled on a fleet speed of 5k km/s with these engines. I have been focusing on some of the engine techs so hopefully the next iteration will be a little bit better - but for the hostiles I've met so far my speed is on a par with theirs, so I haven't found it a problem yet.

It is important to remember that there are 2 distinct missile threats to stop and they require different solutions.

1. Massive Alpha strike
2. Never ending spam

- Garfunkel

The only threat I've faced so far is "never ending spam" except it wasn't never ending - it was probably 25-30 salvo's of size 5's and I had deeper magazines than they did. The way I looked at it was that in 10 ticks (for example) I could get 320 missiles in the air to deal with an alpha strike - which hopefully would be good enough. Also I'm tending to operate these squads in pairs, so that's 8 ships with 8 launchers apiece. I did look at a design with just box launchers, but it didn't seem to have same sustained firepower as this design.

If the longer ranged, lower agility missiles are intended to be anti-ship missiles, I suggest sticking a larger warhead on them.  You are better off with a 60% chance to get a 2-warhead missile to hit than a 90% chance to get a 1-warhead missile to hit.  Also, consider if you need the anti-ship missiles to simply be able to strike the enemy before they reach beam range, in which case 5 mkm would be plenty.

- Michael Sandy

Heh - Those missiles are a bit of a compromise. Frankly, long term it's intended to be a pure anti-missile ship. The longer range missiles were to give it some anti-ship capability in a pinch, but also, they could be used in an anti-missile role if I ran out of the shorter ranged missiles, which actually did happen. So really they're intended as anti-missile missiles which is why I stuck witht he size 1 warhead but high speed and agility for them. For anti-ship they'd only be used if somehow the enemy fleet managed to get the jump on me. I now have a second batch of corvette hulled ships which have size 3 missile and a bigger warhead with a range out to 90m km - and they're intended, until other ships come along, to give an anti-ship capability to the fleet. However, I've given them size 5 sensors and ultimately I see them as providing a fleet with anti-fighter coverage out to 100+ m km.

One thing I disagree with is trying to directly escort survey ships.  That is WAY too consumptive of fuel.  Being in the same system and responding to threats, that is different.  You aren't so much escorting them directly as using them as bait to draw out an enemy, so that the other survey ships can complete their tasks.

- Michael Sandy

Yeah - what I wrote isn't clear. I have the fleet in system - I don't follow the survey ships around. The fleets there to give the survey ships somewhere to run to in an emergency. I am scouting systems on the fringe of a hostile empire which I've been trying to find. I've spent 50 years building up my civilisation, and while developing planets is fine - I'm getting a bit bored and want to pick a fight with someone 

As a starting fleet, it is not bad, but you will want some faster beam ships to complement them.  Something to kill the enemy efficiently once you have run them out of missiles.  You can use your anti-ship missiles to pick apart the most dangerous enemy beam ships, and hopefully not have huge logistics problems of replacing thousands of missiles every fight.

At the moment all I've concentrated on is missiles - I haven't tried delving into beam fleets yet - I don't even know how to do it. I've been trying to read up on gauss guns to try and build some area PD ships - but frankly I need to focus some research into that first before it's going to be viable.

Ok - this is becoming a long post - I'm gonna stop it there

Cheers

ZG

edit - Spelling.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I would say that against the AI designs then AMM is generally a very expensive way to defend your ships. If you have a fleet with a good chunk of beam point defense, shields and armour all you generally will ever need AMM for is to thin out large volleys of missiles so your point defenses handles the rest and shield any few missiles that leak through.

Allot of people here (including me) play multi faction games where thing become a bit more complicated and there will be constant threats to deal with for all the factions, so that is a different situation than what you face.

Speed of ships is only important depending on what speeds any potential enemy is using. There are no point in locking yourself into any particular speed bracket. The only thing you need to consider is that ships that can't defend themselves need to generally use speed to avoid the enemy and that ships whose main offensive weaponry are beams generally need more speed than say a missile or carrier ship. There are no point in all ships in a fleet having the same speed either, it all depends on their role.

Make sure that ships have a purpose which make sense. This goes for weapons, sensors, defenses, deployment times, maintenance and range. This should then be correlated with your overall threat picture, doctrines and industrial capacities.

[Resident Evil (OP)]

Thinking about it - what I'm ultimately trying to do is essentially copy the US navy. My ultimate goal is to build carrier battle groups from the ground up - starting with the smaller ships which will ultimately become support vessels for the carriers.

I know amm's are only part of the answer - but I haven't really researched any beam tech yet - but it's on the list of things to do, first for building area PD ships but ultimately I want to build beam based warships to. Clearly there's a different doctrine for those sort of ship where they need higher speed to get up close and in the enemies face so to speak, while carriers want to keep enemies a nice comfortable distance away.

The enemies I've encountered so far are operating in the 5k km/s range, so my ships are been built to counter them atm. I'm sure there are other hostiles who are running faster ships, but I'm not having to deal with them yet

This is still only my first game, and the learning curve is a bit steep

ZG

[Jorgen_CAB]

That in my opinion sound like a good long term strategy.

I would point out though that you need to put one type of offensive strategy as your primary means of defeating large enemy forces and everything else as support to that.

It is not wise to use both carrier and offensive missile cruisers as the main offensive branch, too many compromises have to be made. But you can build both as long as one of them is a complement or support to the other. The same holds true for offensive beam ships.

There is also no problem of having these doctrines fluctuate over time and change as your technology grow and enemies shifts.

Using the speed of the enemy ships as a basis for how fast your ships is are important... that give you a very good constriction on ship design and if you need to put more or less industrial/research capacity on engines versus weapons, defenses and/or sensors.

[Michael Sandy]

I like carriers carrying railgun fighters complementing missile ships.   And I agree that you don't want to try to mix radically different offense types.  It is really hard to coordinate fighter launched missiles and capital ship missiles to time on target together.

I am not sure I agree with Jorgen on beam ships, but it might be a definition issue.  I have railgun fighters for point defense, but I also have no compromise Kiting beam ships.  I do not have and do not need a LOT of Kiting beam ships, not versus the AI.  Having a category of beam ships and fighters that can be efficient in point defense and a category that can peck to death an enemy fleet that is out of missiles does work.

If you are talking about a category of beam ships where you expect to enter enemy beam range, and simply choose the range bracket that gives you the best damage, I agree, that you do not want significant difference in your beam ships speed and chosen range.  I call that category 'Slugger', to distinguish it from 'Kiter'.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Eh. They're pretty run-of-the-mill as far as the size is concerned, but having said that, I think that they're rather severely under-gunned.

There are only two(!) fire controls and eight(!) launchers for some four-hundred missiles, which is, generally, a very bad idea. As rule of thumb, AMM ships should be built to empty their entire magazines in the time it takes for an equal tech missile to cross the AMM envelope, for the simple reason that you do not want a ship to go down with a magazine full of very expensive missiles. A good balance to aim for at that tech level is maybe four fire controls and sixteen launchers for every 256 missiles, which should fit on your current design.

It's also very poorly protected. At that tech level, I'd expect at least four levels of armour and twenty points of shields, or alternatively, six or eight armour levels and no shields. The speed is a bit slow for Internal Confinement Fusion drives, but that is entirely dependant on your strategic outlook.

The deployment time and maintenance life are fine, in my opinion, though you could carry a tad less MSP (tone it down to ~4 years?) to make some room. I concur with Iranon about the stealth issue and the redundant Res80 sensors - it'd be easier to simply bring another sensor ship along.

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I like carriers carrying railgun fighters complementing missile ships.   And I agree that you don't want to try to mix radically different offense types.  It is really hard to coordinate fighter launched missiles and capital ship missiles to time on target together.

I am not sure I agree with Jorgen on beam ships, but it might be a definition issue.  I have railgun fighters for point defense, but I also have no compromise Kiting beam ships.  I do not have and do not need a LOT of Kiting beam ships, not versus the AI.  Having a category of beam ships and fighters that can be efficient in point defense and a category that can peck to death an enemy fleet that is out of missiles does work.

If you are talking about a category of beam ships where you expect to enter enemy beam range, and simply choose the range bracket that gives you the best damage, I agree, that you do not want significant difference in your beam ships speed and chosen range.  I call that category 'Slugger', to distinguish it from 'Kiter'.

I think you just misunderstood my beam ship comment. I just meant you should pick one primary offensive doctrine but that you still could build other types of ships as support. Using beam ships is part of that. I tend to have some beam defence on all capital ships for self defence in addition to some dedicated beam ships with higher speeds.

Using beam fighters for point defence is just point-defence in my opinion... So it falls into that category for me. You can potentially use for other things as well so that is a bonus.