How to Build an Interstellar Warship,
Part One: The Basics
Author: Derran Tyler
Contact Info: 159821389(ICQ), Suzaku zx(AIM), cameron_blackblade(YIM)
Info: Member of the Nerimian Defense Initiative
I. Introduction
Greetings, I've written this little guide in order to give some of the RPers
out there a guide on how to actually develop their own customized interstellar warships. If you don't know who I am already, I'm Derran Tyler, one of the original creators of the RP military organization, the Nerimian Defense Initiative (NDI). I'm the one that's responsible for the
in-depth starship designs of the NDI which have been giving the various military organizations in Ayenee a great deal of trouble in the various space wars in which we've role-played on the Ayenee RP Message Board.
The purpose of this guide is to provide a basic outline for people to develop their own warships in order to even the playing field just a little bit. I feel this is needed because some people really do not seem to understand the fundamentals of creating an effective combat unit. While it would seem easy to just stick a bunch of large weapons on a ship that
can travel long distances using whatever technology you deem fit, that is rarely fun (at least in my humble opinion). The goal when creating an interstellar warship that fulfills a role needed by your military organization. This is why navies have different types of warships instead of a one-size-fits-all type warship.
II. Types of Warships
Let us begin with the most generic and most famous of warship designs, the almighty Battleship. The battleship is quite simply the largest, most powerful warship class in terms of sheer firepower. It should possess the strongest and most durable armor available as well as weapons systems that can crush any smaller warship classification. Battleships serve as
command vessels, not only because of their size, but because the enormous
amount of resources they take to build make them a symbol of pride and power for
whomever possesses them.
The weaknesses of the battleship are rather obvious. It is big and slow, thus it is not going to catch very many targets. Its size also makes it the obvious target of any major enemy attack, which means that a battleship is going to need escorting vessels to truly remain effective. However, the most dangerous weapon to any battleship is a starfighter. A starfighter can strike repeatedly against a mammoth battleship without fear of getting hit back. In large numbers, starfighters can cripple a battleship.
The next classification would be the Cruiser, by far the most generic type of vessel in any interstellar navy. Cruisers are extremely versatile in their application as they can be suited for many different tasks. Heavy Cruisers are the most common cruiser design, with enough firepower that they can trade shots with a battleship and deal significant damage. Light
Cruisers combine firepower with impressive speed and are usually second-line units. However, there are many other variations of cruisers that are far too numerous to list here. Be inventive in the application of your cruiser designs, as they are the jack-of-all-trades warship of a fleet.
Now we begin to move into the smaller classifications of warships, namely the Destroyer. The Destroyer is a fast, nimble vessel with enough firepower to deal a decent amount of damage to a cruiser. Destroyers are excellent escort vessels and they can be used to defend the capital ships of the fleet. I myself have developed several variations on the destroyer, so once again, try and make this class of ship work for you.
The Frigate is the smallest large warship design available, and oddly enough, this is probably the most predominate classification as they are small and very cheap to build. Armor is rather thin, but they make up for this in speed. Once again, these are escort vessels, so don't expect to put a frigate on the front lines and expect it to survive very long.
There are other classes of warships available, but these are the very basic types of warship, so I'm going to end it there.
III. Vital Warship Systems
Let's face it, a warship isn't just a floating gun platform, it's a self-contained military unit. Not only must a warship be able to fight, it must be able to support and protect its crew from the dark void of space with armor and deflector shields. It must also be able to communicate with bases and/or other warships surrounding it and detect its surroundings
with advanced sensors. Most importantly, a warship needs propulsion systems in order to even move and power its weapons systems. All of these systems must work in tandem in order for the warship to be an effective and worthwhile combat unit.
Since we are talking about interstellar warships here, let us start with the most obvious, propulsion systems.
Propulsion systems are perhaps the most vital element of any warship. Why? Propulsion systems not only move the ship, but they power the warship's other systems. So in essence, we could really call this Propulsion/Power. The bigger the ship, the more engines you are going to need to power the weapons, the life-support systems, the sensors, and everything else. An enemy knows out your power, and that ship is essentially dead in the water.
There are two types of drives: sub-light and faster-than-light (FTL). Sub-light drives propel a ship at sub-light speeds, and they are designed for fast travel when inside a star system. These are the drives that allow the ship to maneuver during combat. FTL drives are the ‘hyperspace' or ‘fold' drives of a warship that makes interstellar travel possible. Use whatever FTL drive theories that you wish.
Sensor systems are another essential element of a warship. If a crew can't see what's around it, then it is traveling blind, and that is incredibly dangerous. When one takes into account what a warship must do, sensors are vital to any fighting ship. You can use whatever type of sensors you want, it really doesn't matter.
However, there is a spin-off of sensor systems that is a sub-category of sensors, and that would be Electronic Warfare systems. Standard electronic countermeasures (ECM), stealth, or cloaking systems are included in all of this classification.
Force Field systems are another development that exists purely for defense not only against enemy weapons, but against space debris that exists in space as the warship moves. Think about it, little micro fragments of rock or whatever striking the armor of your ship as you're traveling at thousands of miles per hour through space. Propel anything fast enough and it'll
go through anything. Small particle-based shields are therefore necessary to maintain the integrity of a ship's armor while moving. The more known shields are designed to defeat enemy weapons such as lasers, particle beams, or whatever they can throw against you. These shields basically absorb damage from enemy attacks so the armor isn't struck. Such shields aren't infallible, but they greatly prolong the life expectancy of a craft during combat.
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Weapons systems are probably the most notable of any warship, because the weapons make it possible for a warship to fight against its enemies. Missiles, lasers, particle beams, huge death rays, or whatever else you want to use are fair game. Just remember to take into account the size of the warship you're mounting this weapon on.
Life-support systems are no-brainers. They process and recycle air so that your crew can live inside of the ship. These systems keep temperatures at comfortable levels; generate artificial gravity so the crew's muscles don't atrophy. Basically, anything you can envision that is absolutely necessary to the survival of the crew is included in this class.
IV. Allocating Weapons Systems
Perhaps this is the most important section of this little guide. Through seeing people generate their own warship designs, all the designs have surprisingly enough been the same. They place a main gun, some secondary guns, maybe a few missile launchers, and they send their ship on its merry way thinking its fit to do combat.
Maybe against similarly equipped warships, but against a competently designed warship, one will find that such a ship has multiple types of weapons that are not only based upon their damage capacity, but how they deal damage, range, and even firing arcs.
So let's break down weapons into some basic types, shall we?
Primary Weapons are your big guns. They draw the most power, deal the most damage, and are usually the preferred weapon of any ship captain. Not gonna go into detail here, because most people seem to understand the concept of placing a large gun on their warship.
Secondary Weapons are the weapons that back up your main gun. Let's face it, if your primary weapon is truly that powerful, it has to recharge sometimes. Also, you may not want to overkill everything, so this is where you bring in your secondary weapons. They could be weaker versions of your primary weapon or something else entirely different. Again, it really doesn't matter here.
Point-Defense Weapons are weapons that are small, precise weapons designed to take on small, agile targets. They are short-range weapons that are designed to take on targets that get just a little too close for comfort. Think of small anti-aircraft batteries on Star Wars ships that shoot down X-Wings.
Ballistic Weapons could be rail guns, or more commonly, missiles or torpedoes. These weapons can often deal more damage on a localized area (Example: Missiles tipped with nuclear warheads), but they are limited by quantity and sheer speed.
These are the four main types of weapons, but lets see how we actually allocate these weapons on an actual warship.
As stated before, every warship should have its own primary weapon, which should deal the most damage of any single weapon the ship. Also, it should have secondary weapons backing up this weapon. Most people understand this fact, but what most people don't get is that you need more than just a standard firing array. When fighting enemy warships, they aren't just going to attack you at the front. They are going to attack you from the front, the sides, and from behind. Thus, you must have weapons that can fire on multiple firing arcs.
A firing arc is simply the angle at which a weapon can fire. A weapon can be fixed, that is, they can be mounted facing in one direction and cannot move. This means that the entire ship must move in order to fire this weapon. Most primary weapons are of the fixed variety. However, you also have limited-arc weapons that can move 30-degrees or so off centerline. They are still limited to firing in one basic direction, but they can vary the direction of their fire slightly. Turreted weapons, however, can rotate full 360-degrees off centerline, firing in any direction that they are needed. Point defense weapons are on turrets, as they need to be able to fire in any direction to accurately strike their intended targets.
In order to have an effective warship, one needs to have limited-arc and turreted weapons that can cover all possible firing arcs so the warship has 100% coverage against enemy attacks. Otherwise, you create a warship that is unable to defend itself against starfighters, flanking, or rear attacks.
V. Conclusion
So what have we learned today, kids? We've learned that there are four basic types of warships: Battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and frigates. We've also learned that a warship is more than a gun platform, but rather a complex development of engineering that incorporates many different systems into its basic operation. Finally, we've learned that warships have different types of weapons and that mixing the various types of weapons ultimately results in a warship that is highly effective in combat.
In the second part of this guide, we'll delve into much deeper issues. We'll begin to learn about specialized systems and creating a balanced combat fleet that maximizes the strengths of each class of warship while downplaying the inherent weaknesses. Until that time, I bid thee
farewell.
- Derran Tyler
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A Guide to Space Combat
Author: Derran Tyler
Contact: disgruntlednegro@hotmail.com
Part One:Introduction
That's right ladies and gentlemen; the man is back with the second installment on his warship series. The first article covered how to actually build an interstellar warship by laying out the various types, classes, and systems of a fighting ship. This article assumes that you already have a working warship design. Now, it's time to understand how all the systems of a warship come together and work in an actual combat environment.
Given that warships are considered naval vessels, a lot of the nomenclature between a sea water navy and a space faring navy are the same. The commander of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier is called a Captain just the same as the commander of an Imperial-class star destroyer of Star Wars fame. However, the similarities end right there. In space, planets are big and ships are small.
In space, ships are unlikely to be able to physically block their opponents from approaching a planet. What this means is that the traditional naval blockade isn't nearly as effective as it is in a terrestrial environment. In space, you're dealing with a fully three-dimensional plane. Not only can you go forward, backwards, and side to side, but you can go up, down, and in diagonals. In space, distances are huge, speeds are near relativistic velocities, and weapons have extremely long ranges.
So while ships may not be able to physically block each other, they will be able to force opponents to enter their engagement envelope on the way to their target. This holds true only if all ships are forced to concentrate near a specific point like a planet. You want to conquer a world, kid? You got to go there. If you're defending a world, the enemy has to come to. Space may be vast, but that doesn't mean that ships won't concentrate sometimes. A fight in deep space is completely different because each fleet could fragment and scatter if necessary without degrading is ability to fight as one cohesive unit.
Part Two: Information and Logistics
In war, information is the most important commodity. The most powerful army is useless if it can't be where it needs to be at the right time. In order to be where it needs to be, it needs information. To destroy the enemy, you have to know where the enemy is. The problem with space is that it is huge and effectively without limits. As far as we know, space stretches on and on infinitely. Because these distances are so huge, radar and radio communications have very limited usage.
You see, radio waves travel at the speed of light, which we all know to be extremely fast. However, it takes the light from the Sun eight minutes to reach Earth from a ‘miniscule' distance of 93 million miles away (1 astronomical unit [AU]). Quite simply, in terms of space, the speed of light still means that it could take literally hours for two friendly ships to update each other on their status. This makes giving orders a hard task because by the time an order is received it might no longer be relevant to its recipients.
In the end, what this comes down to is that space combat becomes fundamentally de-centralized unlike warfare as we have come to know it in the early 21st century. A general simply won't have enough information to make informed decisions, while an individual ship commander lacks overview, but knows what is going on in his immediate area. This means that warfare in space shifts from organized fleet maneuvers and network-centric warfare to a state of chaotic, ship-to-ship battles that focus on individual ship tactics.
Playing off this fact, one must realize that space is the ultimate stealth battlefield. The size and dimensions of space makes it possible to hide effectively using distance. If the enemy doesn't know your direction and you do not emit any telltale radiation, the search volumes can grow so large that contact is virtually impossible. Even with powerful sensors that can detect ships at a range of a million kilometers and the ship is within a 1 cube AU volume, the chance of finding it is little more than one in a million. In space, distances are so incredibly large that it is practically impossible to find anything hiding, something which is easily exploitable.
The size of interstellar space makes it possible to send entire fleets through enemy lines with little chance of being discovered before reaching their target. Borders have no meaning, blockades are nearly impossible unless tightly surrounding a planet or habitat.
To make matters even harder, space is truly four-dimensional. Everything is moving, and it is not just distances that matter but also their relative speeds and timing.
Part Three: Ship-to-Ship Combat
In space, maneuvers mean precisely shit. You see, naval warfare is based on attrition. Whoever attacks first and effectively will win. Naval forces are never broken by encirclement or superior maneuvers; they are broken by destruction.
Space combat is actually in phase space, the six dimensional spaces of position and velocity. The leader that can exploit the peculiarities of the local phase space will have a great advantage. Gravity acts by bending trajectories, different velocity vectors enable different kinds of attack and the asymmetries induced by stars and planets in visibility provide great creative material.
While space is the easiest environment to simply disappear in, if you can be seen, you can be hit. In space, there is nowhere to really hide because most of it is empty. However, in order to be seen, you have to be giving off some form of telltale radiation. This could come from many places, including but not limited to: engines, communications masts, and weapons.
The engines are often a primary culprit because they are the lifeblood of the vessel. They provide the power to run the ship's devices as well as move the ship around. Communications masts can also give you away because they emit RF or microwaves that can be picked up by other vessels. Communicating with another vessel is like lighting up a signal flare – you've just told everyone your location. Weapons and their reactors can give off tremendous amounts of energy when being powered up, which can tip off your enemy that you are in fact there.
Thus ship-to-ship combat is a constant game of cat-and-mouse. More than 2/3rds of the battle will be spent trying to just find the enemy while the rest is watching your weapons streak towards their targets, hoping you can score a hit. Also, combat rarely lasts past the first or second salvo, simply because a lot of times, you have caught an enemy off-guard.
A. The Weapons
Weapons include beam weapons, which often will strike a target instantly since they travel at light speed. The most common weapons of this type are lasers and particle beam weaponry. Pound for pound, these weapons are your primary armament because their payload is effectively unlimited (as opposed to missiles).
Beam weapons have moderate ranges in excess of 250,000 miles, but that number could be deceiving. Why? Because beams dissipate as they travel further and further. That means the farther off the target, the less damage the beam will do. This is why you have a maximum range and an effective range for beam weapon. The maximum range is the absolute farthest amount a beam will travel before breaking up completely. Thus, the effective range is the absolute farthest a beam will travel and deal damage to a target.
Beam weapons require a substantial amount of power to operate in combat, and if you power up your beam weapons then it is too like a signal flare to everyone around that you are a threat. This also plays into the stealth factor of combat.
Ballistic weapons come in two varieties: mass drivers and missiles. Mass drivers use powerful electromagnetic fields to hurl slugs at targets at tremendous speeds. While compared to a beam weapon, a large bullet doesn't seem like it would do a lot of damage, a 100 kg object traveling at speeds in excess of Mach 20+ has a tremendous force behind it. And more often than not, mass drivers operating in space can hurl objects at far greater speeds. So a matter of damage isn't the detractor of a mass driver, but rather the simple effective range. The maximum range of a mass driver is indefinite simply because of the law of inertia. You shoot a 100 kg slug and it'll keep on going forever unless it gets acted on by a greater force. Unfortunately, because mass drivers do not travel at relativistic speeds (but pretty close), they are inaccurate to the extreme. This means that such weapons are limited to point-blank ranges in terms of space combat.
Missiles on the other hand are the real heavy hitters in space combat. Why? Missiles are considered ‘smart' weapons because they have their own sensors from which to guide them to their targets. Missiles can use the law of inertia to maximum effect by using their engines to accelerate to a desired velocity, disengaging them, and then coasting to their targets, periodically reengaging their engines to maintain the correct vector of attack. Also, missiles can carry heavy warheads from large multi-megaton thermonuclear devices to exotic warheads like anti-matter. The main disadvantage of missiles is that they can be defeated by point-defense systems in their terminal guidance phase.
Another weapons system is the long romanticized starfighter. I could write a whole guide on these units alone, but I'll just give a short overview. In space, starfighters have one glaring problem: speed. Starfighters are comparatively slow compared to their parent ships as they don't have the powerful engines driving them. Also, there is always an issue of fuel and range. Starfighters can't go far away from their parent ships or risk becoming stranded out in deep space. So what does this mean? This means that starfighters are just like your mass driver: You have to use them close. Like missiles, starfighters are prone to fall victim to point-defense guns which they can seldom avoid due to their speed.
Conclusion
Well, that's all I have for now. It's a long and informative read, but those are some things that you need to have in mind when trying to engage in space combat. I might hit you up again, I might not. I'm out.
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Under authorization of the Confederation Strategic Command, I am Admiral Christopher Octavian, commander of the Nerimian Defense Initiative's Eighth Fleet. Under request of the Kyoto Academy of Sciences, I am here to give you a lecture of the power of modern-day starship weaponry. As my time is limited, I will get directly to the point.
Advancements in both weapon and armor technologies have dramatically increased the scale and scope of ship weaponry, more specifically in their raw energy yields. Quite simply, it takes more energy to destroy a target than ever before with the introduction of powerful energy shields and armoring materials such as Zesuaium and Xintium.
The most common type of starship weapon is the directed-energy weapon, which takes the form of the Altaran Empire's gravimetric x-ray pumped laser cannon, the Nerimian Confederation's energy wave projector, or the Star Army's fifth-dimensional soliton beam. While all three weapons work on different principles, which is not the topic of our discussion. What we are discussing, however, is the raw power of these weapons.
On average, materials such as Zesuaium are many, many orders of magnitude stronger than the base material iron, thus it requires more than the 1,661 degrees Kelvin to push these materials to their melting, boiling, and vaporization points. As such, our weapons must deliver a tremendous load of energy into the smallest of targets. Units such as the NDI's XF-14 and your Mindy power armor pack kiloton-level firepower in their primary weapons. This means that they are equipped with power systems that generate terawatts (one trillion watts) of energy—enough to power several cities for an entire day. And that doesn't even take into account their other systems.
When one goes up the scale, the warships of our respective nations are capable of generating enough firepower to render a planet uninhabitable in just a few salvos. The amount of energy needed to accomplish something like this is simply astronomical. For example, 4,181 terawatts is equivalent to the amount of energy released by a one megaton nuclear weapon. While this is sufficient to destroy a city (or at least a significant part of it), it is nowhere near what is needed. Even if you increase that yield thousand-fold you don't even begin to approach the energy levels needed.
The baseline energy level for effectively destroying a dry planet with no oceans in about one hour is well over five hundred million terawatts. And that is a conservative estimate by all accounts. A realistic estimate pushes that figure to over 1E27 joules.
Therefore, the low-end output of modern-day directed-energy weapons approaches two hundred gigatons (836,279,069 terawatts) and scales up much higher when you factor in ‘super-weapons' such as the stellar converter, disintegration gun, and quantum detonator.
Because directed-energy weapons are so deathly effective, they constitute the primary armament of any starship, but the revitalization of linear magnetic acceleration weapons utilizing multi-ton anti-matter shells has forced me to mention these weapons as well. Ballistic weapons do their damage through sheer kinetic impact, pulverizing a target. Because of their nature, a ballistic weapon doesn't necessarily need to match the yield of a energy weapon in order to achieve the desired result. Why? Because energy weapon simply operates by depositing heat energy into its target. A physical impactor subjects the target to severe structural stresses, usually resulting in penetration. If it fails to penetrate, it pulverizes and/or vaporizes at the point of contact due to internal stresses and work-heating, thus producing a large cloud of high-temperature material at the target surface. This cloud heats the target surface through convection and radiation.
But anti-matter weapons bring an entire new dynamic to the game: the matter/antimatter annihilation. The resultant reaction is 9E16 J/kg, which produces gamma-ray energy that is hostile to soft targets. While an anti-matter slug is liable to produce more destructive energy from its physical impact than the reaction, its ability to penetrate any type of armor makes it an attractive system.
The final portion of this lecture is missiles and torpedoes, which are single-use weapons that pack a tremendous punch. The Confederation's Starhammer series missile carries a heavy six hundred gigaton directed-energy fusion warhead. The main difference between a directed-energy fusion weapon and a standard fusion warhead is that all of the warhead's energy is deposited into the target instead of radiating in all directions, wasting as much as seventy-five percent of the weapon's energy. The Star Army's compressed antimatter warheads aren't as effective as the directed-energy fusion warheads simply because they can't react with all of the target's matter, thus some of the energy is lost, but they are pretty effective at penetrating armor, which makes follow-up shots more effective.
Ultimately, what I hope you've taken away from this lecture is that modern-day starship weaponry is incredibly powerful. Even the smallest of our soldiers possess enough firepower to be on par with tactical nuclear weapons.
Part One: The Basics
Author: Derran Tyler
Contact Info: 159821389(ICQ), Suzaku zx(AIM), cameron_blackblade(YIM)
Info: Member of the Nerimian Defense Initiative
I. Introduction
Greetings, I've written this little guide in order to give some of the RPers
out there a guide on how to actually develop their own customized interstellar warships. If you don't know who I am already, I'm Derran Tyler, one of the original creators of the RP military organization, the Nerimian Defense Initiative (NDI). I'm the one that's responsible for the
in-depth starship designs of the NDI which have been giving the various military organizations in Ayenee a great deal of trouble in the various space wars in which we've role-played on the Ayenee RP Message Board.
The purpose of this guide is to provide a basic outline for people to develop their own warships in order to even the playing field just a little bit. I feel this is needed because some people really do not seem to understand the fundamentals of creating an effective combat unit. While it would seem easy to just stick a bunch of large weapons on a ship that
can travel long distances using whatever technology you deem fit, that is rarely fun (at least in my humble opinion). The goal when creating an interstellar warship that fulfills a role needed by your military organization. This is why navies have different types of warships instead of a one-size-fits-all type warship.
II. Types of Warships
Let us begin with the most generic and most famous of warship designs, the almighty Battleship. The battleship is quite simply the largest, most powerful warship class in terms of sheer firepower. It should possess the strongest and most durable armor available as well as weapons systems that can crush any smaller warship classification. Battleships serve as
command vessels, not only because of their size, but because the enormous
amount of resources they take to build make them a symbol of pride and power for
whomever possesses them.
The weaknesses of the battleship are rather obvious. It is big and slow, thus it is not going to catch very many targets. Its size also makes it the obvious target of any major enemy attack, which means that a battleship is going to need escorting vessels to truly remain effective. However, the most dangerous weapon to any battleship is a starfighter. A starfighter can strike repeatedly against a mammoth battleship without fear of getting hit back. In large numbers, starfighters can cripple a battleship.
The next classification would be the Cruiser, by far the most generic type of vessel in any interstellar navy. Cruisers are extremely versatile in their application as they can be suited for many different tasks. Heavy Cruisers are the most common cruiser design, with enough firepower that they can trade shots with a battleship and deal significant damage. Light
Cruisers combine firepower with impressive speed and are usually second-line units. However, there are many other variations of cruisers that are far too numerous to list here. Be inventive in the application of your cruiser designs, as they are the jack-of-all-trades warship of a fleet.
Now we begin to move into the smaller classifications of warships, namely the Destroyer. The Destroyer is a fast, nimble vessel with enough firepower to deal a decent amount of damage to a cruiser. Destroyers are excellent escort vessels and they can be used to defend the capital ships of the fleet. I myself have developed several variations on the destroyer, so once again, try and make this class of ship work for you.
The Frigate is the smallest large warship design available, and oddly enough, this is probably the most predominate classification as they are small and very cheap to build. Armor is rather thin, but they make up for this in speed. Once again, these are escort vessels, so don't expect to put a frigate on the front lines and expect it to survive very long.
There are other classes of warships available, but these are the very basic types of warship, so I'm going to end it there.
III. Vital Warship Systems
Let's face it, a warship isn't just a floating gun platform, it's a self-contained military unit. Not only must a warship be able to fight, it must be able to support and protect its crew from the dark void of space with armor and deflector shields. It must also be able to communicate with bases and/or other warships surrounding it and detect its surroundings
with advanced sensors. Most importantly, a warship needs propulsion systems in order to even move and power its weapons systems. All of these systems must work in tandem in order for the warship to be an effective and worthwhile combat unit.
Since we are talking about interstellar warships here, let us start with the most obvious, propulsion systems.
Propulsion systems are perhaps the most vital element of any warship. Why? Propulsion systems not only move the ship, but they power the warship's other systems. So in essence, we could really call this Propulsion/Power. The bigger the ship, the more engines you are going to need to power the weapons, the life-support systems, the sensors, and everything else. An enemy knows out your power, and that ship is essentially dead in the water.
There are two types of drives: sub-light and faster-than-light (FTL). Sub-light drives propel a ship at sub-light speeds, and they are designed for fast travel when inside a star system. These are the drives that allow the ship to maneuver during combat. FTL drives are the ‘hyperspace' or ‘fold' drives of a warship that makes interstellar travel possible. Use whatever FTL drive theories that you wish.
Sensor systems are another essential element of a warship. If a crew can't see what's around it, then it is traveling blind, and that is incredibly dangerous. When one takes into account what a warship must do, sensors are vital to any fighting ship. You can use whatever type of sensors you want, it really doesn't matter.
However, there is a spin-off of sensor systems that is a sub-category of sensors, and that would be Electronic Warfare systems. Standard electronic countermeasures (ECM), stealth, or cloaking systems are included in all of this classification.
Force Field systems are another development that exists purely for defense not only against enemy weapons, but against space debris that exists in space as the warship moves. Think about it, little micro fragments of rock or whatever striking the armor of your ship as you're traveling at thousands of miles per hour through space. Propel anything fast enough and it'll
go through anything. Small particle-based shields are therefore necessary to maintain the integrity of a ship's armor while moving. The more known shields are designed to defeat enemy weapons such as lasers, particle beams, or whatever they can throw against you. These shields basically absorb damage from enemy attacks so the armor isn't struck. Such shields aren't infallible, but they greatly prolong the life expectancy of a craft during combat.
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Weapons systems are probably the most notable of any warship, because the weapons make it possible for a warship to fight against its enemies. Missiles, lasers, particle beams, huge death rays, or whatever else you want to use are fair game. Just remember to take into account the size of the warship you're mounting this weapon on.
Life-support systems are no-brainers. They process and recycle air so that your crew can live inside of the ship. These systems keep temperatures at comfortable levels; generate artificial gravity so the crew's muscles don't atrophy. Basically, anything you can envision that is absolutely necessary to the survival of the crew is included in this class.
IV. Allocating Weapons Systems
Perhaps this is the most important section of this little guide. Through seeing people generate their own warship designs, all the designs have surprisingly enough been the same. They place a main gun, some secondary guns, maybe a few missile launchers, and they send their ship on its merry way thinking its fit to do combat.
Maybe against similarly equipped warships, but against a competently designed warship, one will find that such a ship has multiple types of weapons that are not only based upon their damage capacity, but how they deal damage, range, and even firing arcs.
So let's break down weapons into some basic types, shall we?
Primary Weapons are your big guns. They draw the most power, deal the most damage, and are usually the preferred weapon of any ship captain. Not gonna go into detail here, because most people seem to understand the concept of placing a large gun on their warship.
Secondary Weapons are the weapons that back up your main gun. Let's face it, if your primary weapon is truly that powerful, it has to recharge sometimes. Also, you may not want to overkill everything, so this is where you bring in your secondary weapons. They could be weaker versions of your primary weapon or something else entirely different. Again, it really doesn't matter here.
Point-Defense Weapons are weapons that are small, precise weapons designed to take on small, agile targets. They are short-range weapons that are designed to take on targets that get just a little too close for comfort. Think of small anti-aircraft batteries on Star Wars ships that shoot down X-Wings.
Ballistic Weapons could be rail guns, or more commonly, missiles or torpedoes. These weapons can often deal more damage on a localized area (Example: Missiles tipped with nuclear warheads), but they are limited by quantity and sheer speed.
These are the four main types of weapons, but lets see how we actually allocate these weapons on an actual warship.
As stated before, every warship should have its own primary weapon, which should deal the most damage of any single weapon the ship. Also, it should have secondary weapons backing up this weapon. Most people understand this fact, but what most people don't get is that you need more than just a standard firing array. When fighting enemy warships, they aren't just going to attack you at the front. They are going to attack you from the front, the sides, and from behind. Thus, you must have weapons that can fire on multiple firing arcs.
A firing arc is simply the angle at which a weapon can fire. A weapon can be fixed, that is, they can be mounted facing in one direction and cannot move. This means that the entire ship must move in order to fire this weapon. Most primary weapons are of the fixed variety. However, you also have limited-arc weapons that can move 30-degrees or so off centerline. They are still limited to firing in one basic direction, but they can vary the direction of their fire slightly. Turreted weapons, however, can rotate full 360-degrees off centerline, firing in any direction that they are needed. Point defense weapons are on turrets, as they need to be able to fire in any direction to accurately strike their intended targets.
In order to have an effective warship, one needs to have limited-arc and turreted weapons that can cover all possible firing arcs so the warship has 100% coverage against enemy attacks. Otherwise, you create a warship that is unable to defend itself against starfighters, flanking, or rear attacks.
V. Conclusion
So what have we learned today, kids? We've learned that there are four basic types of warships: Battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and frigates. We've also learned that a warship is more than a gun platform, but rather a complex development of engineering that incorporates many different systems into its basic operation. Finally, we've learned that warships have different types of weapons and that mixing the various types of weapons ultimately results in a warship that is highly effective in combat.
In the second part of this guide, we'll delve into much deeper issues. We'll begin to learn about specialized systems and creating a balanced combat fleet that maximizes the strengths of each class of warship while downplaying the inherent weaknesses. Until that time, I bid thee
farewell.
- Derran Tyler
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A Guide to Space Combat
Author: Derran Tyler
Contact: disgruntlednegro@hotmail.com
Part One:Introduction
That's right ladies and gentlemen; the man is back with the second installment on his warship series. The first article covered how to actually build an interstellar warship by laying out the various types, classes, and systems of a fighting ship. This article assumes that you already have a working warship design. Now, it's time to understand how all the systems of a warship come together and work in an actual combat environment.
Given that warships are considered naval vessels, a lot of the nomenclature between a sea water navy and a space faring navy are the same. The commander of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier is called a Captain just the same as the commander of an Imperial-class star destroyer of Star Wars fame. However, the similarities end right there. In space, planets are big and ships are small.
In space, ships are unlikely to be able to physically block their opponents from approaching a planet. What this means is that the traditional naval blockade isn't nearly as effective as it is in a terrestrial environment. In space, you're dealing with a fully three-dimensional plane. Not only can you go forward, backwards, and side to side, but you can go up, down, and in diagonals. In space, distances are huge, speeds are near relativistic velocities, and weapons have extremely long ranges.
So while ships may not be able to physically block each other, they will be able to force opponents to enter their engagement envelope on the way to their target. This holds true only if all ships are forced to concentrate near a specific point like a planet. You want to conquer a world, kid? You got to go there. If you're defending a world, the enemy has to come to. Space may be vast, but that doesn't mean that ships won't concentrate sometimes. A fight in deep space is completely different because each fleet could fragment and scatter if necessary without degrading is ability to fight as one cohesive unit.
Part Two: Information and Logistics
In war, information is the most important commodity. The most powerful army is useless if it can't be where it needs to be at the right time. In order to be where it needs to be, it needs information. To destroy the enemy, you have to know where the enemy is. The problem with space is that it is huge and effectively without limits. As far as we know, space stretches on and on infinitely. Because these distances are so huge, radar and radio communications have very limited usage.
You see, radio waves travel at the speed of light, which we all know to be extremely fast. However, it takes the light from the Sun eight minutes to reach Earth from a ‘miniscule' distance of 93 million miles away (1 astronomical unit [AU]). Quite simply, in terms of space, the speed of light still means that it could take literally hours for two friendly ships to update each other on their status. This makes giving orders a hard task because by the time an order is received it might no longer be relevant to its recipients.
In the end, what this comes down to is that space combat becomes fundamentally de-centralized unlike warfare as we have come to know it in the early 21st century. A general simply won't have enough information to make informed decisions, while an individual ship commander lacks overview, but knows what is going on in his immediate area. This means that warfare in space shifts from organized fleet maneuvers and network-centric warfare to a state of chaotic, ship-to-ship battles that focus on individual ship tactics.
Playing off this fact, one must realize that space is the ultimate stealth battlefield. The size and dimensions of space makes it possible to hide effectively using distance. If the enemy doesn't know your direction and you do not emit any telltale radiation, the search volumes can grow so large that contact is virtually impossible. Even with powerful sensors that can detect ships at a range of a million kilometers and the ship is within a 1 cube AU volume, the chance of finding it is little more than one in a million. In space, distances are so incredibly large that it is practically impossible to find anything hiding, something which is easily exploitable.
The size of interstellar space makes it possible to send entire fleets through enemy lines with little chance of being discovered before reaching their target. Borders have no meaning, blockades are nearly impossible unless tightly surrounding a planet or habitat.
To make matters even harder, space is truly four-dimensional. Everything is moving, and it is not just distances that matter but also their relative speeds and timing.
Part Three: Ship-to-Ship Combat
In space, maneuvers mean precisely shit. You see, naval warfare is based on attrition. Whoever attacks first and effectively will win. Naval forces are never broken by encirclement or superior maneuvers; they are broken by destruction.
Space combat is actually in phase space, the six dimensional spaces of position and velocity. The leader that can exploit the peculiarities of the local phase space will have a great advantage. Gravity acts by bending trajectories, different velocity vectors enable different kinds of attack and the asymmetries induced by stars and planets in visibility provide great creative material.
While space is the easiest environment to simply disappear in, if you can be seen, you can be hit. In space, there is nowhere to really hide because most of it is empty. However, in order to be seen, you have to be giving off some form of telltale radiation. This could come from many places, including but not limited to: engines, communications masts, and weapons.
The engines are often a primary culprit because they are the lifeblood of the vessel. They provide the power to run the ship's devices as well as move the ship around. Communications masts can also give you away because they emit RF or microwaves that can be picked up by other vessels. Communicating with another vessel is like lighting up a signal flare – you've just told everyone your location. Weapons and their reactors can give off tremendous amounts of energy when being powered up, which can tip off your enemy that you are in fact there.
Thus ship-to-ship combat is a constant game of cat-and-mouse. More than 2/3rds of the battle will be spent trying to just find the enemy while the rest is watching your weapons streak towards their targets, hoping you can score a hit. Also, combat rarely lasts past the first or second salvo, simply because a lot of times, you have caught an enemy off-guard.
A. The Weapons
Weapons include beam weapons, which often will strike a target instantly since they travel at light speed. The most common weapons of this type are lasers and particle beam weaponry. Pound for pound, these weapons are your primary armament because their payload is effectively unlimited (as opposed to missiles).
Beam weapons have moderate ranges in excess of 250,000 miles, but that number could be deceiving. Why? Because beams dissipate as they travel further and further. That means the farther off the target, the less damage the beam will do. This is why you have a maximum range and an effective range for beam weapon. The maximum range is the absolute farthest amount a beam will travel before breaking up completely. Thus, the effective range is the absolute farthest a beam will travel and deal damage to a target.
Beam weapons require a substantial amount of power to operate in combat, and if you power up your beam weapons then it is too like a signal flare to everyone around that you are a threat. This also plays into the stealth factor of combat.
Ballistic weapons come in two varieties: mass drivers and missiles. Mass drivers use powerful electromagnetic fields to hurl slugs at targets at tremendous speeds. While compared to a beam weapon, a large bullet doesn't seem like it would do a lot of damage, a 100 kg object traveling at speeds in excess of Mach 20+ has a tremendous force behind it. And more often than not, mass drivers operating in space can hurl objects at far greater speeds. So a matter of damage isn't the detractor of a mass driver, but rather the simple effective range. The maximum range of a mass driver is indefinite simply because of the law of inertia. You shoot a 100 kg slug and it'll keep on going forever unless it gets acted on by a greater force. Unfortunately, because mass drivers do not travel at relativistic speeds (but pretty close), they are inaccurate to the extreme. This means that such weapons are limited to point-blank ranges in terms of space combat.
Missiles on the other hand are the real heavy hitters in space combat. Why? Missiles are considered ‘smart' weapons because they have their own sensors from which to guide them to their targets. Missiles can use the law of inertia to maximum effect by using their engines to accelerate to a desired velocity, disengaging them, and then coasting to their targets, periodically reengaging their engines to maintain the correct vector of attack. Also, missiles can carry heavy warheads from large multi-megaton thermonuclear devices to exotic warheads like anti-matter. The main disadvantage of missiles is that they can be defeated by point-defense systems in their terminal guidance phase.
Another weapons system is the long romanticized starfighter. I could write a whole guide on these units alone, but I'll just give a short overview. In space, starfighters have one glaring problem: speed. Starfighters are comparatively slow compared to their parent ships as they don't have the powerful engines driving them. Also, there is always an issue of fuel and range. Starfighters can't go far away from their parent ships or risk becoming stranded out in deep space. So what does this mean? This means that starfighters are just like your mass driver: You have to use them close. Like missiles, starfighters are prone to fall victim to point-defense guns which they can seldom avoid due to their speed.
Conclusion
Well, that's all I have for now. It's a long and informative read, but those are some things that you need to have in mind when trying to engage in space combat. I might hit you up again, I might not. I'm out.
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Under authorization of the Confederation Strategic Command, I am Admiral Christopher Octavian, commander of the Nerimian Defense Initiative's Eighth Fleet. Under request of the Kyoto Academy of Sciences, I am here to give you a lecture of the power of modern-day starship weaponry. As my time is limited, I will get directly to the point.
Advancements in both weapon and armor technologies have dramatically increased the scale and scope of ship weaponry, more specifically in their raw energy yields. Quite simply, it takes more energy to destroy a target than ever before with the introduction of powerful energy shields and armoring materials such as Zesuaium and Xintium.
The most common type of starship weapon is the directed-energy weapon, which takes the form of the Altaran Empire's gravimetric x-ray pumped laser cannon, the Nerimian Confederation's energy wave projector, or the Star Army's fifth-dimensional soliton beam. While all three weapons work on different principles, which is not the topic of our discussion. What we are discussing, however, is the raw power of these weapons.
On average, materials such as Zesuaium are many, many orders of magnitude stronger than the base material iron, thus it requires more than the 1,661 degrees Kelvin to push these materials to their melting, boiling, and vaporization points. As such, our weapons must deliver a tremendous load of energy into the smallest of targets. Units such as the NDI's XF-14 and your Mindy power armor pack kiloton-level firepower in their primary weapons. This means that they are equipped with power systems that generate terawatts (one trillion watts) of energy—enough to power several cities for an entire day. And that doesn't even take into account their other systems.
When one goes up the scale, the warships of our respective nations are capable of generating enough firepower to render a planet uninhabitable in just a few salvos. The amount of energy needed to accomplish something like this is simply astronomical. For example, 4,181 terawatts is equivalent to the amount of energy released by a one megaton nuclear weapon. While this is sufficient to destroy a city (or at least a significant part of it), it is nowhere near what is needed. Even if you increase that yield thousand-fold you don't even begin to approach the energy levels needed.
The baseline energy level for effectively destroying a dry planet with no oceans in about one hour is well over five hundred million terawatts. And that is a conservative estimate by all accounts. A realistic estimate pushes that figure to over 1E27 joules.
Therefore, the low-end output of modern-day directed-energy weapons approaches two hundred gigatons (836,279,069 terawatts) and scales up much higher when you factor in ‘super-weapons' such as the stellar converter, disintegration gun, and quantum detonator.
Because directed-energy weapons are so deathly effective, they constitute the primary armament of any starship, but the revitalization of linear magnetic acceleration weapons utilizing multi-ton anti-matter shells has forced me to mention these weapons as well. Ballistic weapons do their damage through sheer kinetic impact, pulverizing a target. Because of their nature, a ballistic weapon doesn't necessarily need to match the yield of a energy weapon in order to achieve the desired result. Why? Because energy weapon simply operates by depositing heat energy into its target. A physical impactor subjects the target to severe structural stresses, usually resulting in penetration. If it fails to penetrate, it pulverizes and/or vaporizes at the point of contact due to internal stresses and work-heating, thus producing a large cloud of high-temperature material at the target surface. This cloud heats the target surface through convection and radiation.
But anti-matter weapons bring an entire new dynamic to the game: the matter/antimatter annihilation. The resultant reaction is 9E16 J/kg, which produces gamma-ray energy that is hostile to soft targets. While an anti-matter slug is liable to produce more destructive energy from its physical impact than the reaction, its ability to penetrate any type of armor makes it an attractive system.
The final portion of this lecture is missiles and torpedoes, which are single-use weapons that pack a tremendous punch. The Confederation's Starhammer series missile carries a heavy six hundred gigaton directed-energy fusion warhead. The main difference between a directed-energy fusion weapon and a standard fusion warhead is that all of the warhead's energy is deposited into the target instead of radiating in all directions, wasting as much as seventy-five percent of the weapon's energy. The Star Army's compressed antimatter warheads aren't as effective as the directed-energy fusion warheads simply because they can't react with all of the target's matter, thus some of the energy is lost, but they are pretty effective at penetrating armor, which makes follow-up shots more effective.
Ultimately, what I hope you've taken away from this lecture is that modern-day starship weaponry is incredibly powerful. Even the smallest of our soldiers possess enough firepower to be on par with tactical nuclear weapons.