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« Last post by El Pip on August 06, 2023, 06:43:44 AM »
Chapter 6 To Cruise or Not To Cruise Part II
The Challenger project emerged from the Daedalus design office in the Laconia system which had a complex relationship with the rest of the Empire. As an example of the issues in the system even the name of the office had been controversial. The Admiralty had vetoed a dozen suggestions as 'insufficiently British', 'ridiculously pretentious' or in one caustic case 'named after a pathetic failure their Lordships have absolutely no desire to be associated with'. With the name Daedalus having a long tradition in the Navy, particularly for 'stone frigates' (the baffling archaic way the Admiralty persisted in classifying anything that was a ship or space station), this was finally agreed as acceptable. Along with the usual selection of paper projects, none of which are interesting enough to detain us here, the Daedalus office had produced the Bellerophon battle-cruiser design (though that was more of a modification than an actual design) and more relevantly the Leander-class frigates. The Challenger fell somewhere between the two, being in part a redesign for local preferences but in part a radical fresh approach. It is also worth noting the name, the contest was held at the end of Laconia's Spartan phase and the Ancient Greek obsession of that system was subsiding, hence why the ship did not have a name from classic antiquity but was named after a survey cruiser that had been lost in Epsilon Indi, the home of the ancestral foe - the Automaton Menace. This was not just another affectation as we will see.
Challenger Mk.I Prototype Cruiser 30,000 tons 825 Crew 5,662.5 BP TCS 600 TH 3,600 EM 7,140
6000 km/s Armour 5-86 Shields 238-476 HTK 157 Sensors 0/0/0/0 DCR 21 PPV 217.85
Maint Life 1.10 Years MSP 2,297 AFR 655% IFR 9.1% 1YR 1,914 5YR 28,709 Max Repair 900 MSP
Magazine 375
Captain Control Rating 4 BRG AUX ENG CIC
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Morale Check Required
Rolls Royce Griffon Mk.III MPD-1800 (2) Power 3600 Fuel Use 50.31% Signature 1800 Explosion 15%
Fuel Capacity 2,087,000 Gallons Range 24.7 billion km (47 days at full power)
GKN Rampart Mk.II Epsilon Band/119 Farad Shield Generator (2) Recharge Time 476 seconds (0.5 per second)
Vickers 10" Mk.I Railgun V50/C4 (10x4) Range 250,000km TS: 6,000 km/s Power 15-4 RM 50,000 km ROF 20
Sterling Mk.II Twin Coil Turret (20k) (5x8) Range 30,000km TS: 20000 km/s Power 0-0 RM 30,000 km ROF 5
Marconi Type 903 TFC 160-20000 (1) Max Range: 160,000 km TS: 20,000 km/s 94 88 81 75 69 62 56 50 44 38
Racal Type 502 BFC 320-6000 (1) Max Range: 320,000 km TS: 6,000 km/s 97 94 91 88 84 81 78 75 72 69
Brown Curtis Gorgon Mk.I SFR-B (2) Total Power Output 50 kBTU/s Exp 10%
Hawker Mk.I 5' External Torpedo Tube (75) Missile Size: 5' Hangar Reload 111 minutes MF Reload 18 hours
Shorts Type 901 MFC 72m/R160 (3) Range 72.1m km Resolution 160
Brimstone Mk.I (75) Speed: 28,560 km/s End: 23.4m Range: 40m km WH: 7 Size: 5 TH: 209/125/62
Ferranti Type 600SR 46m/R20 (1) GPS 1680 Range 46.6m km Resolution 20
Racal Type 250EMWS 700k/R1 (1) GPS 21 Range 8.6m km MCR 771.7k km Resolution 1
GEC Type 1000LR 114m/R160 (1) GPS 20160 Range 114m km Resolution 160
Anderwave ILIC Mk.I ECCM (3)
TRE Asprin Mk.I 10kMx ECM Projector
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
The heritage of the Leander-class design is clear in the Challenger, the removal of half the main turrets to make space for the twenty five pentuple 5' Torpedo Tubes is hard to miss. The choice of where to place the tubes is interesting, despite in theory being able to launch from any aspect the tubes are all forward facing and concentrated on the front third of the hull, an aggressive choice to prioritise a very slight missile advantage (not having to course correct post-launch) over the effective coverage of the main guns. The standard County-class boasted an all round 3-2-2-3 turret arrangement (3 fore, 2 amidship on both flanks, 3 rear), the removal of the B, C, P, Q and W turrets left the Challenger with 1 fore, 2 amidship and 2 rear. As you might expect this was not a choice which endeared the design to the more traditional Admirals, particularly as despite the entry of the Leander-class into service at this point the Brimstone Mk.I was still unproven in actual combat. With the class solely deployed on patrol and internal security duties there had been an unfortunate lack of anything to shoot at. It would not be until the belated introduction of the jump and command capable Captain-class Frigate Leaders that the class and their torpedoes would see combat.
The changes to the defence side of the triad are less obvious but in their own way just as major. The design also used the EDEN ceramic composite armour from the Centurion project, but thinned it out even further down to only 5yd HDAE (Hi-density Duranium Armour Equivalent) versus 6yd on Centurion and 8yd on a County Mk.IVB. The space instead was used for two GKN Rampart shield generators, while this is sometimes described as a redundancy choice to have a way to generate shielding even if one generator was battle damaged, in truth it was a technical limitation - at this time the Empire was unable to build a larger shield generator without burning out the flux coils. The preference for shields reflects the way the Automaton loomed large in Laconian thinking, against spaced out waves of torpedoes a defence system that could regenerate was more valuable than a simple defence/ton analysis would indicate. This thinking can also be seen in the additional Sterling twin CG turret that has been squeezed onto the design, further improving the organic anti-torpedo capability of the design and therefore making it a better match against a torpedo heavy foe, such as the Automaton.
Ultimately the Challenger committed one too many heresies; it relied too heavily on an unproven main weapons system, heavily compromised the remaining tried and true Vickers 10" railgun turrets and optimised it's defences for one foe at the cost of poorer performance against everything else. While never officially assessed by the Admiralty Tactical Office the design was holo-simed and became a regular feature in Academy exercises both on Sparta and back at Britannia, though admittedly for somewhat different reasons. Many an officer cadet would come to curse the class, either as an unexpectedly dangerous simulated foe or as an unwieldy challenge to try and command. What emerges from those exercises is a class that in some respects met it's intentions, against a missile opponent it was indeed more durable and better able to weather the storm, but as an offensive platform was somewhat lacking. Taking the classic check of balance - two of the same class attacking each other - the 75 missile Brimstone salvo was indecisive. While there is always a degree of uncertainty around the precise performance of a PD system, on average enough of the salvo survived the gauss gauntlet to batter down the shields and punch one or two penetrating holes in the underlying armour. This left the target damaged, but not especially weakened, meaning the matter would come down to a gunnery duel of the type the design had compromised on. Other matchups had similar outcomes as the missile 'punch' was potent but rarely decisive, defenders of the design are often keen to point out that the County Mk.IVB fared quite badly against the Brimstone salvo but that is to somewhat miss the point. The whole point of the design contest had been to produce a replacement for that design, being 'better' than the Mk.IVB was the absolute bare minimum requirement not a noteworthy achievement. In fairness it should be noted there were certain scenarios were it shined, the multiple fire controls allowed salvos to be split across targets so gunboat/FAC swarms could be dealt with effectively at standoff range, but this was a fairly niche capability. A relevant comparison would be that the 8kt-aether Leanders had mounted 50 tubes, scaling that up Challenger should have had 200 or more. Overall the conclusion must be that the designers lacked the courage of the convictions, in trying to appease the gun lobby by leaving half the turrets on they merely ensured the resulting hybrid was compromised in both roles.
Some unbuilt designs can be seen as missed opportunities or at least visions of an alternate path the Navy could have taken. Challenger is neither of those things because of it's confused hybrid nature, even if the Admiralty had decided to embrace torpedo warfare it is hard to imagine the First Space Lord of the time, Admiral Haynes, doing so in such a half hearted manner. A lack of self belief and conviction is not a problem the designers of the final submission suffered from, as will be discussed in Part III.
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OOC Notes: Look a summertime update. It's even the same summer. And for the low, low price of stretching this out to a 3 part update.
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