In early 2052 the
“Kaiserliche Konstruktionskommitee der Weltraummarine, Nu. 7” (Imperial Naval Design Committee No. 7) was tasked to lay out plans for the “New Fleet” of the empire. Several inventions had been made over within the last short years, while no warships had been built, so this was seen as an opportunity to create modern designs from the scratch, while previous design were often shots in the dark or constrained by how they were to interact with the existing fleet (ordonance, ranges, speeds).
Now was the time to design something entirely new on the basis of the latest components. Inventions had been made in several fields, promising a truly revolutionized ship generation: Magnetic confinement engines, Compressed Carbon Armour, level 6 reload rate missile launchers, Strengths 28 radar-emitters and strengths 18-receivers, and improved damage controls. This was supplemented by advances in the rate of fire of Gaussguns, now capable of 46 shots per minute (3/5s), beam fire controls with a standard range of 40k km, tracking speed of 5k km/s and turret gears of 6,250km/s.
The only identified active enemy consists of
robotic ships, travelling at a speed of ~7,500 km/s, with strong level 4 ECM (and ECCM), and ASMs with a theoretical range of 65m km, although in practice engagements had mainly fought at around 40m km, possibly indicating their firecontrolls were constrained to this range. The ships of this enemy fall into three broad weight categories: 1,000t FACs, 6-7,000t medium ships, and 12-14,000t large ships. This was the principal threat that the new fleet was to be designed against, but just recently a new race was encountered with unknown intentions, technologies and weaponry. Therefore ships should be generally good, not too narrowly designed against a particular threat.
The main constraints presented to the design teams was that existing ships should be economically upgradeable to the new designs in order to retain their highly trained crews and officers. This primarily meant that designs were to be submitted in the same weight categories of existing ships – mainly 3,000t gunboats and 18,000t battlecruisers & battleships, but to a minor degree also 7,000t destroyers and 10,000t cruisers. The Committee was free to submit entirely new designs outside of these categories in addition, provided they could be built and maintained by the current facilities – implying a 18kt limit.
After some month the design team came up with the following designs, which deviated radically from what was seen before in two points: Missile calibre and engine space.
The most profound change is the move from the Size-4 ASM calibre to a Size-1 ASM design, dubbed “all-small-calibre”, quick-firing design. The primary reason is that it has been recognized that large missiles offer few advantages over smaller designs, while being significantly easier to shoot down. It was concluded that it would simply be better to distribute the weight of the salvo over four times the projectiles. Overall a larger broadside would be delivered.
Moreover, the same tubes could be used for in a Point Defence role, and an offensive role. In standard configuration some tubes would be assigned to each, but if the situation required it, the captain could easily convert his vessel to a formidable PD station, or increase the broadside even more. This actually reduced the number of different ship classes in the navy. While previously designated AMM-vessels were assigned to task forces in danger, they were now completely redundant and would be converted to the normal design.
The missiles were not yet designed, indeed scientists were still working on the basic technologies, but it was hoped that within a year the two principal missiles could be produced:
- A simple, straightforward AMM design Size 1, Warhead 1, Range of 3.2m km, flying 75k km/s and able to hit the standard ASM of the enemy with 60% likelihood.
- And the new ASM design: Size 1, Warhead 4 (largest useful warhead for that size), Range of 68m km (so as to outrange the enemy missiles). It was decided to accept a somewhat suboptimal agility in order to have faster missile than the enemy (so that our first salvo would hit before theirs), thus resulting in a missile flying 41,300 km/s and hitting an enemy going at 7,500 with 2/3 likely hood.
It was also decided to increase the engine space from 25% of the previous standard (1 engine per 1,000t), to 33% (4 engines per 3,000t).
This way the new standard speed became larger than the 7,500km/s encountered in enemy large vessels (except the FACs). One consequence was that Railguns actually looked more attractive than Gaussguns for PD final fire, despite the research efforts invested. A drawback of this design choice was that the existing 7kt and 10kt ship weights did not fit the engine scheme, so they were to be slightly enlarged to 7.5kt and 10.5kt. Surprisingly their upgrade would still be much cheaper than upgrading the larger 18kt battlecruisers. Even though it actually would be more costly to convert these vessels than to build new ones, they were still to be converted in order to preserve the task force training levels.
Several scientists had announced they expected considerable advances in lasers designs over the next few years, so at this moment no redesign of the 5 large laserships in service was contemplated.
