Hussar-class FFLD, Unmanned Light Frigate

Yeah (I guess), but your ships' engines' individual fluctuations will still remain, and can be identified that way.

Only if the enemy has a database of individual ships' engine fluctuations beforehand.

Not really, a quick and easy spectrum analysis of your exhaust would show what you're burning and how hot it is.

Good point. Decoy idea scrapped completely.

By "Operaship" I'm assuming you mean "wanked out ship that is not of my own wanked out design," yes?

Clomata, seriously. Did I run over your dog or something?

Or are you of the philosophy that if it isn't UBERHARDFT with NOTHING THAT DOESN'T EXIST ALREADY, it's flat out wank?

95% of the stuff I use is either in existence in a less efficient form or on the drawing board in real life. The rest I handwaved into existence in order to RP in my chosen setting, which is often Soft FT. And, may I add, I am continually striving to remove that last 5% of handwavium with as much realistic stuff as possible.

You also have to realize that this is 300-500 years in the future, if not more. Five hundred years ago, if you had told our ancestors that today we'd be riding about in horseless carriages that moved via tiny explosions in a big metal box, or that we'd going from continent to continent in hours on giant metal birds, you would be tossed in the looney bin at best.

And if you told them the world was round, you'd be labeled a witch and drowned.

I believe Men In Black paraphrased it best.

And as for my claim that a decently designed warship is going to beat the crap out of an "Operaship", I clearly meant things like a Star Destroyer, a Battlestar, or a "Saucerhead" Federation Starship.

We're talking things that have effective combat ranges of a few thousand kilometers, if that. "Warships" that, with few exceptions, rely on line-of-sight weaponry and brute force defenses to survive. Internal designs that emphasize overwhelming crew numbers and spacious living quarters at the expense of redundant and energy-efficient systems. Tactics that seem to exult in Horatio Hornblower-esque broadsides and charges, throwing finesse and tactical maneuvering to the wind in the interest of a visually pleasing spectacle.

Now please, explain to me how one of those is going to survive against a swarm of multi-gigaton antiproton or fusion warheads launched from behind a planet at a significant fraction of C, or a hail of kinetic weapons raining down on them from light-hours out? How multiple squadrons of TIEs or Vipers are NOT going to be torn apart by interceptor missiles, kinetic "flak" rounds, and invisible solid-state lasers. How tactics and warships designed to look cool are going to defeat tactics and warships designed to kill the enemy?

Because that is why we are here. To design virtual things that kill virtual people. To put them up for review amongst our peers who also have too much free time on their hands. To prove to the vast majority of NationStates that you CAN'T conquer the world (or universe) with a basic government plan, a platoon of tanks, and a handful of ICBMs.

Well... in his defence, there are opera ships that could deal with that no problem. Honourverse ships, for example.

Point taken. Things I consider Operaships are generally developed for visual media.

The problem is analyzing things like Star Destroyers from some perspective of hard science, when they were not designed that way, or for that purpose, and whether they ever win, lose, get blown up or anything at all is not based whatsoever on such analysis but things like Plot.

And in roleplaying the only thing that determines whether a ship, person or anything at all is affected in any way is whether its role played out like that. Even the aforementioned analyses can be easily manipulated since they are flawed attempts to put consistent physics onto inconsistent non-physical fictions. And any one frame of reference for any kind of comparitive analysis is only as useful as consensus in roleplaying.

So no, you didn't run over my dog. But, the claims of being particularly effective against or good compared to 'operaships' are just meaningless to me. How could a TIE fighter survive the multi-gigaton antiproton warhead? Easy - someone just declares that it did.