Big Ship vs Little Ship fleet

[Coalition]

Talking about practicality is much easier. Realistically, among reasonable sizes, bigger spacecraft are superior in every way but two:

a) They probably cost more, and thus you will be unable to operate as many of them. Storywise, this is probably a good thing, since it gives an excuse for our heroes to be the only ships in the quadrent.

b) They are limited to less acceleration, which is usually pretty irrelevant (space is so huge you can take your time), but in certain specific settings it might matter.

For (a), this is going to be true, as the smaller ships can be built assembly line style, using mass production to drive down their costs per ton.

For (b), why would this be true? If both ships have devoted 10% of their mass to engines, then wouldn't both of them get the same thrust? I'll agree that the larger ship will have more of its mass fraction dedicated to structural mass, but the smaller ship will have to devote more of its mass to armor.

For the larger is slower, we do have the Honorverse where higher mass ships have lower accelerations, but we also have Star Trek where larger ships seem to go faster (possibly due to cross section vs volume?).

[Thanas]

Also, the whitestar was quite in some trouble when going up against dedicated warships with comparable firepower.

And they were used with specific doctrine and tactics to be effective, using their agility for concerted attacks. They didn't instantly invalidate the use of bigger ships.

To furhter elaborate on this, the first thing the ISA did after the war was to build bigger ships, even massive ones.

[Parallax]

Sufficiently advanced technology reverses these roles though, how big is a TARDIS?

Exterior or interior?
And even then, it seems to be extremely variable depending on what the pilot(s) want. The default exterior configuration is something resembling a cupboard/wardrobe sized affair but the Doctor has tried to manually reconfigure the exterior dimensions into the Great Pyramid before and fully expected the change to work.

In novels, Type 40 TARDISes were seen to be configured to resemble space war ships with fully functioning exterior weapon systems. Yeah, that's incredibly daft but ... *shrugs*

Interior dimensions ... well, really friggin' huge is about as accurate a size as you're going to probably ever get. They're not infinitely big, certainly, but it's at least the size of a city or so. Big enough, as demonstrated, that there are parts of the TARDIS that the Doctor hadn't been to for centuries.

[Batman]

Where does 'larger ships go faster' come from anyway? If he's talking FTL the rules of physics go out the window ANYWAY and under impulse smaller ships DO appear to be faster, or at the very least more agile, than battlewagons.

[Coalition]

This isn't actually feasible due to practicality problems. Engines need to shoot propellant out the back, and thus the number of them you can tack on is limited by surface area. The surface area doesn't grow as quickly as the volume, and thus mass, meaning you can't really keep the same proportions. (Unless, of course, you design your big ship to be basically a bunch of little ships linked together, but at that point, you might as well just stick with a bunch of little ships.)

If the acceleration is one engine dependent on power, you'll be able to scale it linearly for a while until you hit implementation problems in getting that much power to the propellant; you'll need more cooling in the small area, the high voltages might be more than the engine can handle, that kind of stuff. The kinds of engines that work like this tend to be low acceleration anyway.

True, I was thinking that the back end of the ship would steadily look more and more like a nozzle as the ship increased in mass.

So a smaller ship might have 1/4 of its rear area used by the nozzle, a larger one would be half its rear area, and the capital ships would be pretty much all engine if you looked at it from the back. They would all have the same acceleration though.

For linking lots of little ships together, that would run into the fun of ship structure, so the port group of ships isn't accelerating faster than the starboard group of ships. Plus if one of the engines is damaged, that acceleration will be suddenly cut off, meaning the structure will have to handle the sudden load.

Basically the speed differential between smaller and larger ships would not be as bad as between airplanes and surface ships.



For my larger ships going faster, you are right that it was for FTL. My guess was that warp power depends on the cross section of the ship. Larger ships will have a higher volume:cross section ratio, allowing them to be more efficient at same speeds, or able to go faster. This could be due to them simply being the newest ships also. I'll concede this point.

[SAMAS]

Personally, I prefer something Assault Carrier-like. Kinda medium-small. Think the Nadesico and just about every major ship in Gundam (White Base, Arghama, Archangel, etc...).

But since we're talking about spaceships, I made this page on TV Tropes a week or so ago. Anything that particularly needs to be added/corrected?

[Stofsk]

Cool site. Cool article.

The only thing is, when I hear 'Assault' as a prefix for a type of ship, I always think of 'Planetary Assault'. So an Assault Carrier would be a ship to facilitate an invasion by carrying marines and their dropships. But the prefix 'Attack' or 'Strike' tends to give the impression of a solo unit that can engage in missions independently sans support. Otherwise, I liked the article. Maybe the only other suggestion I could make is add a line to the Interceptor trope by adding that they often escort their own bombers and have to engage in dogfight duels with opposing interceptors.

[Batman]

For my larger ships going faster, you are right that it was for FTL. My guess was that warp power depends on the cross section of the ship. Larger ships will have a higher volume:cross section ratio, allowing them to be more efficient at same speeds, or able to go faster. This could be due to them simply being the newest ships also. I'll concede this point.

I was mostly idly curious really because I can't recall any mention of Warp speed depending on ship size. Sure, the biggest ships appear to be the fastest, but they're also invariably what passes for warships in Trek so naturally they'd be at the technological edge. About the ONLY highest available tech Trek ship being slower than the battlewagons I can think of is Defiant, and if memory serves that was due to her having no external Warp nacelles.

[Nyrath]

We want to be careful with speed vs acceleration - the large ship might get more speed than the small ship, but it will take longer to achieve that speed.

Does that follow? The acceleration basically depends upon the thrust-to-mass ratio of the ship. There isn't anything particularly preventing the design of a huge dreadnaught that can out-accelerate a fighter. Especially if the engines have a minimum mass.

[Connor MacLeod]

Also, the whitestar was quite in some trouble when going up against dedicated warships with comparable firepower.

And they were used with specific doctrine and tactics to be effective, using their agility for concerted attacks. They didn't instantly invalidate the use of bigger ships.

Actually the big poitn about White Stars is that they are highly advanced technology compared to alot of what other races had (even the Minbari - white Stars were more advanced technologically). Agility played some role, but they weren't much more agile than a fighter (and while more durable, they're also bigger targets) and thereh aving the reactionless drive helped alot.

But they were still small ships, and had limitations of their own (their limited firing arcs, for example) and as noted they weren't massively tougher against heavy weapons (speed could perhaps help them stay out of heavy firing arcs, ,but if the enemy got a bead on them they were screwed.)

I'd still bet many races larger ships were tougher than a White Star, though - Certainly the Minbari ships, and the Excalibur. (which was the other thing about White Stars - you needed lots of them to do things.)

The Defiant was a bit different. IT was a specialied/dedicated design, whereas Federation ships as a rule tend to be multipurpose (exploration, fighting, family cruise ships, etc.). The Defiant could get way with being smaller because it packed all that into a much smaller package (though whether or not the PPCs had greater damage or not is still debatable.)

[Isil`Zha]

The villian must command his/her/its fleet from an absurdly large flagship. The hero does whatever he/she/it wants. That is all.

We just found out where laughably unimaginative childish rubbish came from. Evil King Mark in his mighty stronghold, but Gaffer Tim will stop him!

Hero ships just have to make sense. Defiant was inflated by fans to be some disproportionately capable ship, and the White Star situation is similar (but at least they had piles of White Stars). If your setting supports big tough ships, giving the hero a tiny WUNDERSHIP is just lame, wheras if the setting has different sizes operating in tradeoffs and the hero ship is within these rules, it's fine.

This was somewhat remedied by the Victory Destroyer, which was absolutely massive.

[Batman]

Err no it wasn't. The Excalibur was 25% again the length of an Omega or so and in regular mode didn't even have WhiteStar firepower.

[Starglider]

Err no it wasn't. The Excalibur was 25% again the length of an Omega or so and in regular mode didn't even have WhiteStar firepower.

What? Firing four of the six forward beams was explicitly stated to be '(a) little more powerful than an average WhiteStar'. That doesn't include the firepower from the numerous turreted guns, never mind the main guns.

[Batman]

Err no it wasn't. The Excalibur was 25% again the length of an Omega or so and in regular mode didn't even have WhiteStar firepower.

What? Firing four of the six forward beams was explicitly stated to be '(a) little more powerful than an average WhiteStar'. That doesn't include the firepower from the numerous turreted guns, never mind the main guns.

REGULAR mode. Which EXCLUDES the main guns which leave the ship essentially helpless for half a minute if memory serves. And yes, you are correct, the Excalibur WASN'T less powerful than a WhiteStar. It was merely not noticeably MORE powerful than a WhiteStar. Which given the size difference says something in and of itself.

[Connor MacLeod]

REGULAR mode. Which EXCLUDES the main guns which leave the ship essentially helpless for half a minute if memory serves. And yes, you are correct, the Excalibur WASN'T less powerful than a WhiteStar. It was merely not noticeably MORE powerful than a WhiteStar. Which given the size difference says something in and of itself.

You didn't read what he said.

The Excalibur has SIX forward beam weapons, only four of which were fired. You can see that quite obviously if you looked at the ship firing. It presumably has similar firepower aft.

There are also the two dorsal mounted turrets. It seems likely that the ship is at least 3-4 times more powerful than a White Star (Sheridan's exact words were "not much more powerful than an average white star" I believe) so we know it was somewhat more powerful, just not drastically so (less than 50% say).

You're also ignoring the fact the White Star is, for all intents and purposes, a highly optimized ship. Its basically just a jump-capable gun platform, and its defenses sucked against big ships (unless they had numbers or mobility.) And that firepower was all concentrated in the forward arc. So yeah, it can pack more firepower into a smaller package, but not without some (obviously considerable) drawbacks. An Excalibur has much better coverage (better fire arcs) as well as being vastly more durable.

And of course, you have to consider the tech disparity. The Excalibur was a testbed ship for EA and Minbari tech (with some Vorlon tech in it) but it was a reverse engineered ship, whereas the White Star was far more advanced by virtue of having Vorlon aid in building it (and the Minbari have a generally higher tech base to begin with, although they tend to optimize for the "heavy gun/low armor" rig too, so the Excalibur is probably more durable despite a Minbari cruiser outgunning it.)