VB6 Aurora > Bureau of Ship Design
Plasma Carronade System Defense Boat
Caiaphas:
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
--- Quote --- ...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."...
--- End quote ---
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:
------------------------------
--- Code: ---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
--- End code ---
--- 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! ;D
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