Ships of the 13th Tribe (Ship/Design/Modelling Discussion)

[DKeith2011]

Dreadnaught Model (Final?) Update

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The trench weapons are unprintable at this scale so they will have to be left to the imagination.

The last thing I see that might need a change is to move the engines more to the centerline of the ship so the trench can be open at the rear too.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Very nice! I'd agree that the engines should be closer to the centreline, but other than that it looks pretty damn close to what I envisaged.

[DKeith2011]

Ok, I'll pass on the last little tweak and we can call this one done.

[fnord]

This probably seems like a better place to ask about ship capabilities than the main story thread, so here goes:

How far off-axis can Kobolian vessels, especially the heavies, vector their main engine thrust? Any differences between vectoring in pitch and vectoring in yaw?

[Eternal_Freedom]

That's...absurdly specific. Um. I'd say no more than ten degrees or so, that's why they've got a whole load of maneuvering engines scattered over the ship.

[DKeith2011]

Dreadnaught Final

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Last tweaks done.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Excellent.

[DKeith2011]

I believe you have the billing info in PMs, let me know if not.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I got them, I'll get that paid ASAP...once PayPal decides to stop fuckign about and let me log in that is.

[DKeith2011]

Good old PayPal, ever so reliable.

[DKeith2011]

Firepower question for the alliance fleet; what is the most powerful of the big guns used by the modern ships, superlaser, spinal plasma beam or ancient beam weapon?

[Eternal_Freedom]

Superlaser, hands down. Even the "light" versions mounted on Jupiter and Phoenix considerably out-gun the heavy plasma or ancient beam weapons.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Decided to pick up this thread again, since I have waaaay too much free time right now, and in the hope it will spur me to continue the main story.

Lionheart-class Battlestar:

Characteristics:

-Length: 1650 metres
-Width: 650 metres
-Height: 250 metres
-Designer: Lemuria Academy Naval Architects
-Builder: TCN station "Olympus Base"
-Entered service: 2003 ATS (After Terran Settlement, standard calendar that matches closely with Earth AD/CE calendar system).
-Role: Battleship, fighter carrier, command ship.
-Crew complement: 2,500 crew, plus 2 companies of Marines and 160 pilots.
-Max FTL Jump Range: 25,000 light-years
-Maximum sustained FTL cycle time: One max-range jump every three hours
-Emergency FTL cycle time: One jump every twenty minutes (cannot be sustained for more than three jumps)
-Endurance: food and consumables for 6 months

Armament:

-4x megalasers (spinal mounts)
-64x twin turbolaser turrets
-512x twin laser cannon point-defence guns

Air Wing:

-160 Cobra Mark-III space superiority fighters (8 squadrons)
-10 heavy passenger/cargo shuttles

Key systems:

-Power source: 2x Terran naquada reactors (original), 2x Neutrino-Ion Generators (Flight-III refit)
-Shielding: Terran energy shields (original), Terran/Asgard/Ancient derived shields (Flight-III refit)
-Terran superconductive hull armour, linked capacitor banks (Flight II/III refit)
-Sublight engines: Two primary, multiple outmaneuvering engines
-Asgard beaming system for emergency evacuation (Flight II/III refit)

Ships in Class:

Flight I: Lionheart, Excalibur, Barham
Flight II: Victorious, Republic, Galactica
Flight III: Vanguard, Illustrious, Indomitable, Intrepid, Temeraire

Note: Barham lost during First Battle of Terra, Excalibur lost during Battle of Atlantis, all surviving units refitted to Flight-III standard. Galactica transferred to Colonial Fleet after First Battle of Terra.

History:

With the unexpected encounter with the lost Colonial Battlestar Warspite in early 2003 ATS, the Terran Commonwealth realised they would need Battlestars of their own if they were to provide meaningful help to their cousins in the Cyrannus Cluster. An exhaustive analysis of the Warspite during her refit gave the Naval Architects a number of ideas that were then streamlined into a design that would utilise advanced Terran technology from the ground up rather than as a refit.

The design that eventually became the Lionhearts was chosen and work began on the first two examples, with the third beginning slightly later due to lacking a suitable construction berth at Olympus Base. The design, while heavily inspired by the Colonial ship, still reflected Terran technology and naval doctrine. It placed more emphasis on the main armament and less on fighter numbers for example, and the multi-layered defences (point-defence batteries, shield arrays, and superconductive hull armour) was a clear concession that the ships would be engaged in close combat against enemy ships, rather than adopting a typical carrier stand-off role.

These differences were also a practical matter as well as doctrine. The TCN was aware of the Cylon preference for mass fighter attacks and a comparatively small number of Basestars. This was combined with the knowledge that the TCN had, at that point, a fairly small pool of trained pilots, none of whom had combat experience. Trying to match the Cylons fighter-for-fighter was a futile effort, whereas a shielded Battlestar built for close combat would be able to deal with large numbers of Raiders without sustaining damage.

The Flight-I ships were all completed in time for the First Battle of Terra where they excelled, inflicting massive damage and confusion on the massed Cylon fleet during the daring maneuver known to history as "Frankie's Wild Ride;" at the suggestion of Captain Franklin North of the Barham, the three Lionhearts made a charge right through the centre of the enemy fleet at maximum acceleration, destroying or damaging many ships before jumping away to safety - though the Barham herself was too damaged to jump, and would later fight "Barham's Last Stand" agaisnt seven Basestars, including one of the refitted First War-era Hades class vessels. All seven would be destroyed along with the Barham, which managed to evacuate all but five hundred of her crew before ramming the last enemy ship.

The remaining two ships fought gallantly during the general fleet action and survived with only mild to moderate damage. After the battle and the subsequent contact with the Tau'ri and the Asgard, construction of the Flight-II ships was delayed to allow additional technology from both the Tau'ri and the Asgard to be incorporated - this resulted in improvements to the armour system, more powerful generators and shield systems, and the inclusion of Asgard transporters to serve as an emergency evacuation method for nearby ships (a system that has proven it's worth countless times and is now standard on all TCN and Colonial Battlestars).

Four of the Lionhearts would participate with distinction in the Pegasus Campaign against the Wraith, gathering an impressive tally of destroyed Hive Ships before the final engagement, which saw the complete destruction of the Excalibur which was struck at near-lightspeed by a pair of Wraith cruisers after her shields were depleted. The emergency beaming systems managed to save more than two hundred of her crew, and her Air Wing fought on furiously before being recalled to a temporary home on the Nemesis.

The Flight-III ships were completed shortly after Task Force Nemesis returned to Terra and almost immediately began patrols of Terran space, the abandoned Cyrannus Cluster, and supporting the ongoing Alliance efforts to combat the kassa drug trade and the Atlantis Expedition. Three of them would participate in the operation in early 2008 ATS to destroy Ba'al's forces in Pegasus, causing substantial damage to Indomitable that needed months of dockyard time to repair. Four more would then form part of the Alliance Fleet sent into the Forerunner universe to defend the UNSC from the Covenant, where the Illustrious took heavy damage and returned to Terra for repairs. The remaining ships played an important role in the subsequent Battle of Reach, working together with their battlegroups and other Allied ships to destroy a number of Covenant Assault Carrier groups and sustaining only minor damage to Galactica and Temeraire.

While many commentators have concluded that the ships are obsolescent in the face of new, heavier, superlaser-armed vessels like the Phoenix class and have speculated that the Lionhearts should be retired and replaced with the new heavyweight design, the Terran Admiralty and the Colonial Fleet have rejected such calls - the Lionhearts remain powerful warships in their own right, with only a handful of ships in the home universe able to defeat them one-to-one. They make an excellent centrepiece for a battle group and are able to provide a wide array of support to other Allied forces, both in space and on the ground. It is likely that the Lionhearts will remain in service for a long while yet - though one of the more serious proposals circulated among TCN officers has suggested converting all surviving units into Assaultstars, with a much large Marine contingent and associated dropships at the expense of Cobra squadrons and some anti-ship weapons.

[DKeith2011]

[essential employee] Free time? What is this 'free time' you speak of?

This is the model that closely resembles the original series Galactica, correct?

[Eternal_Freedom]

Apparently I'm an "essential employee" as well, working for the Court Service and all, but our office is on a rota system. I'm averaging two or three days per week in the office at the moment, rather than five. I should be happy with still getting my full salary (what little there is of that) while having time to write, but urgh it is just too boring.

Anyways. Yes, this is the class that very closely resembles the oBSG Battlestars, like so (drawn by CanisD of Wolf's Shipyard, credit due to him):



The main differences with that ship and my Lionheart's is the "neck" section isn't tapered in my design, and the flight deck runs all the way through the pod, and the launch tubes are below the landing deck like the new series ships (so the pods are deeper).

[fnord]

I like the writeup - good to see 13T isn't dead, just resting.

What's the comparative expense (both capital and operational) of a Phoenix-class battlewagon compared to a Lionheart? 2x? You had previously put Nemesis at 5x - presumably that's just the capital expense.

Didn't the Excalibat get almost all of her crew out, with fewer casualties than Barham? The way you've written it seems to have it the other way around.

[Eternal_Freedom]

A Phoenix probably runs about 1.5x the capital and operational costs of a Lionheart. The Nemesis was 4x a Lionheart in resource costs and crew, but she was also a prototype/proof of concept ship, so that may warp the exact numbers - you'd also have to factor in Styx Base, which exists entirely to support the two Warstars. The same also applies to Phoenix of course, as she's a single ship compared to the eleven-strong Lionheart class. While the resource and operational costs of the Flight-III's is just about the same as the Flight-I's, the costs involved in building them was less, because the dock crews had plenty of experience by then and you were starting to get economies of scale kicking in.

In other words, it's difficult to compare precisely as the situations are different. Plus, by the time the Flight-III's and the Phoenix (and the Jupiter for that matter) are built you're starting to see much more extensive use of the Asgard beaming systems in construction and manufacturing, plus the big plasma furnaces at Tartarus Base.

Fun Fact: about 50% of the total raw materials used in the Eridanus refit, the Phoenix and the expansion of Olympus Base came from the reprocessed remains of the Cylon Fleet after the First Battle of Terra. The Jupiter used a lot of reprocessed materials from the 30-odd Ha'tak fleet destroyed at Second Terra as well.

As for Excalibur, no, most of her crew died with her. She lost her shields and main battery and then got rammed by two near-lightspeed cruisers; one head-on and the other cut the Battlestar in half amidships. The beaming systems had five seconds to evac the crew, and managed (IIRC) 247 survivors - including the CIC and (most) of the Engineering crews, as it was programmed to grab the best trained/most experienced people first.

[fnord]

I was confusing the losses of Pegasus and the Excalibat.

Between the time dilation fields and Asgard(-designed) beaming kit, I suspect the critical path for a new Lionheart hull is at least 3 times shorter, to an outside observer, than back in the day.

You sure it's only economies of scale rather than also progress down a learning curve?

Looking at a curve where each doubling of volume reduces unit cost by 90% (cumulative):
Taking the original base cost of Lionheart as our base, and assuming a 40% first-of-kind premium (representing the non-recurring engineering required to get things figured out and kitted up for class production), per unit cost drops below 1 (including the FOK premium) with the fourth Lionheart built.

Assuming staying on that curve, the Excalibat was completed for 90% of Lionheart base cost, and Barham was completed for approx 85%.

Total class cost for all 11 hulls works out to just under 9.1x base cost (assuming that no major new facilities needed to be built, unlike Styx Base being needed for the warstars).

[Eternal_Freedom]

A learning curve also applies, yes. Though I think it's less the case that "the later ships were built faster" but that "the early ships were built slower." I know that sounds the same, but the later ships are closer to a typical build time than the early ones are - consider that the Lionheart was the first ship that size Olympus Base had ever built, so there is that factor to consider.

There was also mention of various supply bottlenecks being cleared by the new factories in New Delphi (which was in the chapter that introduced both Prof. Bazelgette and the Asgard ship George Hammond IIRC).

[fnord]

That sort of arglebargle would be covered under the first-of-kind premium (which could be higher than 40% - I grabbed it from nuclear reactor engineering), assuming the slips were already there, just that they hadn't built anything so damn BIG before.

There would have been some gubbins learned from refitting a ship that size, namely, Warspite.

[Eternal_Freedom]

True. Honestly I haven't put a huge amount of thought into it beyond "They built them, they got quicker at it." You might say they're built at the Speed of Plot.

[fnord]

I figured as much. I've worked on a couple of things where starship(yard) construction has been the limiting reagent and thus needing to be worked out in some detail.

[Eternal_Freedom]

In this case it's they're ready when they're ready - hence the Nemesis is finished in time for the Pegasus Campaign, the Flight-II's likewise, the Jupiter is ready just in time for Reach and so on.