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 The Seas the Day BB is designed to seize control of any situation and retain it no matter how much damage it takes. It meets all design goals, coming just 3 tons under the shipyard mass limit. Equipped with redundant versions of every single system (except the bridge) the Seas the Day is virtually unsinkable. A reputation further bolstered by a large engineering section capable of repairing any conceivable battle damage. Already heavy defenses are bolstered by 5 not yet developed shields providing 75 "shield points" that must be destroyed before any attacker can even begin to chip away at its armor. Weapons consist of 12 top of the line lasers and 12 missile launchers. The missile launchers are fed by deep magazines carrying 18 full volleys. More than enough to persuade any opponent that they need to close in to the laser batteries optimal range or run away. It comes with all the bridge-type modules we've unlocked and a 12b km range. This was fun to design. I hit my minimum objectives really early and just kept adding more and more stuff.
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Aug 8, 2020 01:51
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LLSix posted:Equipped with redundant versions of every single system (except the bridge) Why not go one step further and just make two ships?
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Aug 8, 2020 02:03
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The Lone Badger posted:Why not go one step further and just make two ships? Big ships tend to lose a lot of ship parts long before they die. Especially because component damage can bleed through to components even before there's a hole in the armor. Usually that's not a big deal, but if the fire control gets destroyed none of the weapons associated with it can shoot any more, so if you have a lot of weapons its usually worth adding a spare fire control. Fleet Doctrine calls for Battleships to close and brawl, so they need to be built tough enough to continue fighting even after taking a lot of damage.
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Aug 8, 2020 02:27
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LLSix posted:Big ships tend to lose a lot of ship parts long before they die. Especially because component damage can bleed through to components even before there's a hole in the armor. Usually that's not a big deal, but if the fire control gets destroyed none of the weapons associated with it can shoot any more, so if you have a lot of weapons its usually worth adding a spare fire control. Bingo, and this holds double because we can almost guarantee any battle we need these we will be heavily outnumbered. A second fire control feels wasteful until the first one gets blown away or microwaved. Also I would not want to get close to the beamship with 4 cannonades. That is a very solid chuck of firepower for our tech level. Virtual Russian fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Aug 8, 2020 |
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Aug 8, 2020 02:57
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I'm down to be re-dorfed. Put GrabbinPeels Jr. in there.
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Aug 8, 2020 03:10
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Should we be worried that the Seas the Day class has a shorter maintenance life than it's construction time?
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Aug 8, 2020 03:11
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Okay, it's time to really assess our assorted enemies, to get a feel for what we're dealing with. #1: The Kookens Pleasure Pit™ Protectorate: A corporation that bought their entire civilization, with their original place of business being some manner of brothel, drug den, or casino. They clearly have no morals to speak of, and seek only greater profit. It's likely they control their soldiers through strategic distribution of assorted vices, ensuring both physical and psychological dependence. Given their late capitalist nature, they have no concern for sentient life, the environment, or anything else. Reasoning with them is impossible and they must be destroyed. #2: The Theocracy of Dharampur: As a theocracy, they're clearly acting to maintain a moral high ground, in accordance with whatever religion the planet has become enslaved by. In reality, they're just biding their time until we demonstrate something they consider an affront to their faith, at which point they will unleash the full might of their military against us, calling it a holy war. While I've no doubt the leadership only cynically pays lip service to their religion to maintain order, the vast majority of the race can be assumed to be fueled by raw fanaticism that will make negotiation impossible once they've declared us infidels. Reasoning with them is impossible and they must be destroyed. #3: Unknown: Given that they're bug people, it's obvious they have some sort of hive mind. We'll never be able to establish proper communication, and should definitely stop trying since they immediately opened fire on us. Reasoning with them is impossible and they must be destroyed.
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Aug 8, 2020 03:13
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Servetus posted:Should we be worried that the Seas the Day class has a shorter maintenance life than it's construction time? Short answer yes. Maintenance overhauls suck, especially during wartime. However, a vessel like this won't spend much time on patrols.
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Aug 8, 2020 03:25
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Our internal analysis has identified two potential solutions to the current threat.code:code:In either case, lighter support vessels are of critical importance. code:code:code:code:code:code:code:
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Aug 8, 2020 04:49
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I would also recommend planning into Orbital Space Habitats to allow us to more easily take advantage of hostile worlds without having to spend large amounts of resources on auto-mines, it'll not only help conserve resources for asteroids we cannot use orbital mines are but help our economy. however this will need to take a backburner to the war effort for now.
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Aug 8, 2020 05:13
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I'd like to join as a scientist please.
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Aug 8, 2020 05:50
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What happened to the Kooken ship buzzing Makho's Folly? Did they bug off once it was requested that they do so? And did we at least get an active ping for a sense of their power levels?
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Aug 8, 2020 05:55
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So when it comes to ground unit design, since logistics elements are consumed when the supply is used, do you put them in higher “HQ” formations or attach them to the combat units directly?
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Aug 8, 2020 06:34
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There's two lines of thought on what can be done with new technology: Go faster or hit harder. Everyone likes the Inspector Gadget class Corvette right? How about we take it from an annoyance and turn it into something truly deadly. Introducing the Breaker Gadget class Corvette.  Utilizing improvements in armor technology and by replacing a burdensome active sensor with a much more economical sensor package and a few tweaks the Breaker Gadget replaces the single particle beam with a pair of devastating Kaun & Brink 20 cm Plasma Carronades without losing any of the ships range or speed. The only research requirement is for the small Pebble Bed reactor that can be finished in days, or entirely omitted for a slight loss in performance. Simply put this class is ready to go almost immediately. You might even notice that it costs less to build than the ship it's based off of. As an added bonus existing Inspector Gadgets can be refitted to this new Breaker Gadget class in very little time. Some might be better kept around however, as their hefty sensor package does allow for better long range tracking as opposed to mere fire control. An attack Squadron of Breaker Gadgets will punch well above it's weight and are excellent both on their own and as a heavy hitting escort force for the new fleet battleships. What's that? 'We should be focusing on speed improvements, not raw firepower!' Pah, I say! But fine, why not have it both ways.  Under half the size and clocking in at a blistering 6,965 km/s is the Prometheus Fast Attack Craft. You've no doubt noticed the multiple inefficient, undersized engines and the dubiously designed Beam Fire Control. Why? Because these are existing parts! The Prometheus is once again designed with entirely off the shelf parts except for the quickly researched reactor. It does have major downsides to make up for it's speed- namely that it's range makes it useful only as a colony defense craft. However this isn't entirely the case! The Prometheus is small enough that our existing Light Carrier could carry, or ferry, four Prometheus at a time. This could allow these cheap, quickly built craft to sit in defense over all our colonies in great numbers. They might even be worth building a dedicated 1000 ton Naval Shipyard for, if we can spare the construction capacity. Given it's greater range, ability to stay on station in reasonable amounts of time, and it's reasonable armor defense I highly recommend the Breaker Gadget class Corvette. The Prometheus is good, but it'd be a lot better if we had a greater carrier capacity or deep space maintenance facilities so they could sit on jump points in swarms.
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Aug 8, 2020 07:00
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EclecticTastes posted:Okay, it's time to really assess our assorted enemies, to get a feel for what we're dealing with. I see the pattern. 
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Aug 8, 2020 08:29
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*A sketch is found on the back of a napkin.* If they have energy weapons they'll come to us. If they have missiles we'll shoot them down. Brilliant!  240 point defense barrages every 5 seconds. Spectacular! Fighters won't stand a chance. No, no, no! The Gauss cannons aren't the main armament you fool. Look at the torpedoes, man, the torpedoes!  What have they got that will withstand 50 of those? Nothing! And after they blow the first ship up they'll find new targets. Genius! Point defense? I've already thought of that. Are you even paying attention?  All we have to do is park this thing over their homeworld and they're done, I tell you, done!
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Aug 8, 2020 08:41
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Curses, too slow to nab the Penny name!  Gadget Refresh - Brain Corvette  This is applying the following modifications to an Inspector Gadget - Main change is upgrade to new armor technology and doubling armor thickness. * Average strength-4 railgun/missile hits to penetrate: 6 -> 13 * Average strength-4 laser hits to penetrate: 4 -> 9 - Drop a fuel tank. It still has 12bkm range, adds 100m/s of speed from weight savings - Replace the big active with a small one. With the previous Gadgets around, we have plenty of strategic scouts. The little one is enough to paint targets in beam range. The emissions are also small enough that it can reasonably be left always on (1/1000th emissions of the big one) - Add a stores bay to cover weapon failures while kiting a target. Firing at a 4000km/s target at max range (6% hit rate), it will land ~60 hits before the gun breaks. (Pity Virtual Russian's sanity if we kite something, it's hundreds of shots) - Replace the pair of previous gen reactors with a modern one to add 31m/s. Costs 60 RP It ends up a little smaller, faster, and cheaper. 39 day retool (retool time is based on refit cost and it's pretty close). Upgrading a Gadget takes 5 months. You can also swap the gun for a laser/cannonade and build those out of the same yard. Particle Beam seems best to me for a first guess since we want to be destroying ships from outside their range. If we guess wrong and need to Leeroy Jenkins in, swapping the gun to a carronade takes about 17 days. It's still kind of pants vs any missiles or anything with longer range beams. Bomb Truck Corvette  This is a cheap little corvette designed to munch beamships. It wants to hold at 900,000 km away and lob missiles for a couple hours. It will not survive any returning missile fire, but each one has the ammunition to destroy about 4 Gadgets or one Brains (accounting for missed shots) with no risk to itself. It's the available engine strapped to the available magazine (magazines are really expensive to research) and filled up with launchers while staying above the fastest observed alien ship. The launcher and fire control are new since we don't have a reloadable size-4 and all our fire controls are overspec for this. A variant with 2 magazines and 4 launchers can build out of the same yard and be a significant improvement for ferrying ordnance forward from Earth to Makhlo's Folly (though it's still bad compared to a dedicated transport). Those can also fight, they just have a small enough salvo to be point defense-able and take half a day to shoot off all their missiles. Most of the optimization is in the missile:  It trades range to add 50% more warhead. Hit chance vs a 4000km target is 41.1% for average 2.47 damage per shot (compare to 1.61 for Macrotis or 1.50 for Vulpis). Earth can build about a missile per day and we already have 900 Macrotis stockpiled, so production shouldn't be an issue, just the research cost. It's also a decent missile for a torpedo bomber if we want to do that this engine generation. I also spent a little time trying to put together a point defense corvette, but they all sucked. It can only fit 2 of the existing turrets while maintaining speed, and each turret can only reasonably be expected to hit about one incoming missile each. So not useful unless they massively outnumber an enemy. edit: Tweaked the fire control resolution so it can fire Macrontis at 10mkm range vs big targets if something else spots for it. It loses the ability to target fighter-sized things at long range and margin for dealing with ECM. Foxfire_ fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Aug 8, 2020 |
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Aug 8, 2020 09:11
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Has no one submitted a design for a diplomatic ship? That was specifically requested.
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Aug 8, 2020 12:13
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Dunno much about this game but it seems like any diplo ship for this LP needs thick armor and/or the ability to dodge and flee like a housefly.
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Aug 8, 2020 12:20
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Create a special universal language made up of intricate patterns of beam and missile fire.
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Aug 8, 2020 12:22
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GunnerJ posted:Dunno much about this game but it seems like any diplo ship for this LP needs thick armor and/or the ability to dodge and flee like a housefly. Or be very very cheap?
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Aug 8, 2020 12:25
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Gnoman posted:Our internal analysis has identified two potential solutions to the current threat. Why such a short ranged fire control? The weapons can shoot out much further, and using such a limited fire control means that even at close range they are very inaccurate. That fire control isn't great, but was meant to fit on a compact fighter.
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Aug 8, 2020 13:01
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Here is a more coherent version of my proposal, I think: This has the disadvantage of requiring expensive research into a proper Gauss cannon --- one that's accurate (turrets for those are expensive!). On the plus side, better point defense (plus a bit more shields) make me more confident it actually can close in - 27 shots every tick instead of 16 every other is a lot more defensive power (and almost as much damage, though at worse penetration). Also more carronades were put in, and a bit more redundancy of lighter components. (Obviously, newer gen shields would be nicer, too).
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Aug 8, 2020 13:25
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Virtual Russian posted:Why such a short ranged fire control? The weapons can shoot out much further, and using such a limited fire control means that even at close range they are very inaccurate. That fire control isn't great, but was meant to fit on a compact fighter. I was trying for as much off-the-shelf as possible, and all our existing beam fire controls were either too slow or else even shorter ranged. I had intended to include a "flight II" with a upgraded system, but was trying to avoid making the post too long.
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Aug 8, 2020 13:46
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please do not intentionally gimp your space battleship yamato
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Aug 8, 2020 15:56
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Virtual Russian posted:Why such a short ranged fire control? The weapons can shoot out much further, and using such a limited fire control means that even at close range they are very inaccurate. That fire control isn't great, but was meant to fit on a compact fighter. One of the things the range bands doesn't show is that accuracy does go up to 100% if you're at 0 range, which is probably likely if you're at 12,000km range anyway. On the other hand adding a secondary long range fire control is worth the ~150 tons it'd cost in weight for multiple reasons, battle damage being one of them as already mentioned earlier in the thread.
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Aug 8, 2020 17:22
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 I present for consideration the Avalanche-class Battlecruiser. Designed to deliver a powerful knock-out punch with 8 Kaun & Brink 20cm Plasma Carronades as its primary armament, the Avalanche also has twenty Corneille Armamanents Gauss cannons; three quad turrets suitable for withering anti-missile point defense alongside 8 improved gauss cannons on standard mounts for drowning enemy vessels in a hail of heavy metal when the Avalanche closes to knife range. And that is something this ship is uniquely suited to do with five Kiselyov Turbine Nuclear Pulse engines pushing it to 6,000 kilometers per second—able to keep up with any conceivable escort and to outpace all known enemy combatants. The Avalanche design has built-in redundancy on all fronts except its primary Active Search Sensor (since it can piggyback off its escorts or sister ships if its own sensor takes battle damage). It has two anti-missile search sensors, two primary beam fire controls, and two point defense fire controls, twice as many power plants as it needs to keep its guns firing, and enough engineering spaces and maintenance storage to keep it on station past its designed 12-month patrol time and to repair any component that becomes damaged. It even has an auxiliary control center if the bridge is taken out. In fairness, the Avalanche does have a few weaknesses. First, it isn't as heavily-armored as some of the other proposals, with "only" 12 layers of armor and no use of the unproven "energy shield" technology. In exchange for its high top speed, the Avalanche is also a fuel hog with a 9 billion kilometer range, meeting the barebones 8b km requirement but not the preferred 10 or 12 billion kilometer marks. The designer would like to note for the record that speed is a defense all of its own, and that energy weapon brawlers need to be significantly faster than their prey. Those are the ideals the Avalanche is designed with. Finally, this proposal uses entirely off-the-shelf components; if accepted, our naval yards could begin retooling for it immediately. Thank you, gentlemen, for your time. (all RP aside, I keep thinking I'm missing something, so if someone spots a glaring error let me know and I'll fix it EDIT: Found it. The turret's tracking speed is more than the beam fire controls we have can possibly support. Adjusting...) Zurai fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Aug 8, 2020 |
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Aug 8, 2020 18:19
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Lando131 posted:One of the things the range bands doesn't show is that accuracy does go up to 100% if you're at 0 range, which is probably likely if you're at 12,000km range anyway. On the other hand adding a secondary long range fire control is worth the ~150 tons it'd cost in weight for multiple reasons, battle damage being one of them as already mentioned earlier in the thread. This is true, but closing to zero or 12k with a beamship doing 200 - 400km/s faster than our opponents means spending a lot of time inside their beam envelop without being able to shoot back. Adding a secondary long range fire control means the fighter fire control is not needed. We do have a 90k range, 4k tracking one, which is ok for a primary. It might just be worth researching an upgrade.
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Aug 8, 2020 18:43
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i would like to remind you all of one of the lessons of the Imperial Japanese Navy: the biggest and best gun in the world is only as good as its fire control, and if your fire control sucks then so do you.
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Aug 8, 2020 18:47
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Virtual Russian posted:This is true, but closing to zero or 12k with a beamship doing 200 - 400km/s faster than our opponents means spending a lot of time inside their beam envelop without being able to shoot back. Adding a secondary long range fire control means the fighter fire control is not needed. What would an upgrade look like? We haven't gotten new fire control techs as far as I can tell.
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Aug 8, 2020 18:51
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Those designing battleships probably would be best designing a new fire control for their ships. I withheld mostly because my serious designs were a Corvette and a FAC and only minimal research support should be given to those at this time. Edit: Forgot to add that if someone did research a better fire control for our modern weapons, 20cm plasma cannonades in particular, it'd probably be a good idea to include it on my designs even if a bit of tweaking is required.
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Aug 8, 2020 18:52
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Radio Free Kobold posted:i would like to remind you all of one of the lessons of the Imperial Japanese Navy: the biggest and best gun in the world is only as good as its fire control, and if your fire control sucks then so do you. Honestly, plasma carronades suck at max range anyway, and gauss cannons are super short range. Our existing BFC is probably fine for a plasma/gauss/railgun armament. Better fire controls are more necessary for particle beams and lasers. If we had spinal mount lasers, I would have used those instead of the carronades and designed an improved BFC for them. They don't do nearly the close-range damage that carronades do, but they perform way better at longer ranges. They also fire faster. An improved BFC would increase accuracy for all weapons, to be clear, because accuracy is a factor of the fire control's max range rather than the weapons'. It's just less relevant when our best weapons are short-ranged to begin with. EDIT: Here's what an improved BFC would look like:  We can increase the max range (and thus accuracy bonus) to 128k km. I also improved the tracking speed to 6k just to hedge bets; it could be taken all the way to 8k if desired at the cost of 33% larger size. Keep in mind that non-turreted weapons have a tracking speed equal to the ship's speed, so there's not much point in taking it higher for a slow ship. I'm totally fine with swapping out the designed primary BFC on the Avalanche to this version, it would cost a tiny amount of range and speed. Zurai fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Aug 8, 2020 |
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Aug 8, 2020 18:55
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Zurai posted:EDIT: Here's what an improved BFC would look like: I'm not sure if anyone else is having the same issues but your Discord image links aren't showing up for me.
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Aug 8, 2020 19:01
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Hmm, it all looks fine on my end (even when I log out). Let me know if anyone else has a problem with them and I'll find a different image host. If I had all the time in the world there's a number of research upgrades I'd do for the Avalanche. Researching a maximized engine of the current generation would let it cut down to 4 engines with increased speed, freeing up weight for heavier armor or more weapons. A better Beam Fire Control is always nice; for the record, at 20k (gauss cannon range), our current BFC would have a 79.17% accuracy rating, while the improved 128k range fire control would have a base 84.38% hit rate. That's about 25% less misses, which is definitely nice. I have some other responsibilities I need to cover today, but if I get a chance I'll modify the Avalanche proposal for a new BFC. Unfortunately, the maximized engines would cost 4,800 RP and would significantly delay the implementation of the ship, making it less attractive. Similarly, I would love a spinal mounted laser option, but unfortunately, that's 5k RP and would take years at our current EW research budget even if we dropped everything for it. I may actually try railguns instead of the non-turreted gauss cannons as well; they have better range and accuracy than our off-the-shelf gauss. Zurai fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Aug 8, 2020 |
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Aug 8, 2020 19:16
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Zurai posted:Honestly, plasma carronades suck at max range anyway, and gauss cannons are super short range. Our existing BFC is probably fine for a plasma/gauss/railgun armament. Better fire controls are more necessary for particle beams and lasers. If we had spinal mount lasers, I would have used those instead of the carronades and designed an improved BFC for them. They don't do nearly the close-range damage that carronades do, but they perform way better at longer ranges. They also fire faster. Why does a longer ranged BFC increase accuracy? Does it matter against missiles? You get a tracking bonus against missiles, but that's from having an active sensor, not a fire control.
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Aug 8, 2020 19:26
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LLSix posted:Why does a longer ranged BFC increase accuracy? Does it matter against missiles? The formula for energy weapon accuracy is (beam fire control max range - target's current range)/beam fire control's max range. Basically, you get a better lock on the target the further inside your max range it is, so a higher max range extends that bonus. There are other factors in the accuracy formula (tracking speed, gauss weapon size vs accuracy, etc), but as far as the fire control goes, longer range is better. And yes, it does apply for missiles as well.
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Aug 8, 2020 19:30
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 The armament on this is much lighter than most of the other designs proposed. It uses the weight for armor and speed. The argument for doing this is that it's better to increase the chances of getting into range at all than to have more guns that may never get to shoot. Doctrine - Vs a missile ship, charge and hope they run out of ammunition before it runs out of armor - Vs a slower beam ship with shorter range weapons, hold at long range and plink with the particle beam - Vs a slower beam ship with equal or better range weapons, charge to 20000km where the lasers fire optimally - Vs a faster beam corvette, fire back with the particle beam if its in range - Vs a faster beam ship with longer range, hope their weapons break before it runs out of armor (lasers are our current best close-in weapon. They deal equal damage to our carronades after accounting for firing rate, plus they have better armor penetration. They have worse max range though) The fire controls are doubled for redundancy, the idea is it backs off if it accidentally moves into microwave range. Power plants are also doubled, though that is more for keeping research costs down. It has enough active sensor to spot its own targets. The EM sensor is so it can detect when it's targeted by missiles and can start charging. The armor defends against: - 173 strength-4 laser hits - 227 strength-4 missile hits - 142 strength-6 missile hits - 85 point-blank strength-10 carronade hits - 48 of Lando's enormous death torpedoes Pressing the guns into point defense, they intercept a 16000km/s missile at 35%. Point defense profile looks like this  I think it trades favorably with any of the other battleship designs. The carronades can't get into optimal range, and Phantom & Cudgel don't have enough ammunition to destroy it. Zurai posted:(all RP aside, I keep thinking I'm missing something, so if someone spots a glaring error let me know and I'll fix it I think everyone is vastly overestimating the effectiveness of the existing point defense fire control and quad gauss turrets. The fire control only gets 34% to hit vs a 16000km/s missile, and then the mini gauss penalizes it to 8.5%, so it doesn't hit much despite all the shots.  They're not very impressive uses of 400 tons. In a lot of cases, removing them and just going faster would help survivability more. Foxfire_ fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Aug 8, 2020 |
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Aug 8, 2020 20:51
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For future research, we should very much decide on a general doctrine for the future so we can focus on the weapons we desire for it. Spreading our research out only makes it likely to be beaten by an enemy that has focused in 2-3 weapon types that can cover both short and long range uses as well as point defense.
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Aug 8, 2020 21:17
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Who designed these under-sized gauss rifles anyway? Ought to have proper full sized quad gauss turrets, even if they weigh 1500 tons each. drat BuOrd!
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Aug 8, 2020 21:18
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If we had the time, fighters equipped with rail guns would be superior point defense due to not having a penalty to fire until we get proper quad gauss turrets, but we don't have that choice now.
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Aug 8, 2020 21:25
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