Prototype ICV Imperium Class, Heavy Battleship

Introducing the Imperium Class Battleship, its sleek design and destructive firepower will put this ship at the top of the auction block! Designed by a government sponsored project to create a war vessel suitable for space combat by use of the Imperium.
Stat Block
Length: 5,000 Meters Long
Width: 1,000 Meters Across
Height: 2,000 Meters Tall Meters
Cargo Capacity: 45,000,000 Tonnes
Minimum Crew: 10,000
Maximum Crew: 50,000
Re-entry/Atmospheric Exit Protection: Mark XI Metallic Tri-Fold Plating,
Armament: Four Main batteries capable of firing a generic photonic canister that implodes on impact after mid-flight arming, Eight Gauss Particle Accelerator Anti Ship Turrets, 1 Rear Battery
Engine: Six Tri-Core Quad Nuclear Fusion Engines
Reactors: Twenty Nuclear Accelerators
Fuel: N2O4/UDMH Propellant
FTL Drive: Imperium Astronomican Warp Seeker
Radar: Sentinel Farsight IV
Armor: Ten Meters of Titanium-C Battle plate, Two Meters of Dual Plate Crisis Armor Defense System, One Meter of FPD Folded Metal
Price Per Unit: 500,000,000 USD, 10,000,000 Maintainability Costs

Will actually give this a thorough lookover tomorrow, but the first thing I see is...

A 5km anything isn't going to reenter your run-of-the-mill atmosphere and do anything but glass the whole place.

edit: And the external design is head-scratching to me. Why would you have the forward section blocking the first set of turrets?

Also - conning towers = bad. Unless it's a crew rec area / sensor array.

Edit2: Are those...air intakes? Even if this was atmospheric capable, jet engines would be a waste of mass on this thing.

This might work better for armament. :<

needs moar misilez

This. No ship is complete without missile spam, the token tactic of NS.

Okay so apart from the deep need for a wave motion gun or other such very large spinal bang stick and not dieing to the comet empires teleport gun the esf fleet design isnt wholy awfull, its roughly rocket shaped, can present a tiny profile, has an almost rational centere line of mass and has stanking huge outtakes. However...

While a minimum of crew is neccesarily going to be high ten thousand in a 5 km ship thats meant to go a warring where the nukes pop like rain and hard radiation is the tool of choice may result in some fairly nasty issues. Your 5 km long but like any proper rocket shape your narrow. I would recomend a war prow of heavy armour and moar detailed heat dump, support and sensor range and importantly effective engagement ranges and detailed parasite craft. With field wankery you could reenter this thing but your gona have to mount alot of thermal supercon and laser heat pump mummery. Moar close defence! Moar details on parasite craft and your main drones and there rough useability.

I join with the request please dump the photonics discriptor. Your stat block has alot of chromstencollapsium hyper x but not enough max g acceleration.

Writte on iphoooone

This. No ship is complete without missile spam, the token tactic of NS.

Compared to a high delta-v missile, even Gasers are short ranged due to speed-of-light-lag.

You don't need to use standard 'nooks' or KKV/R-bombs though, there are plenty of other unique and interesting options, and you can always take some and combine them or go I a different direction with something or even just come up with something on your own.

Here's a few interesting ideas to get you started:

Lens-drones, basically, a missile with a big focusing array on it that flies a pre-programmed course towards the enemy, since you know where it will be ahead of time, you can hit it with your beam weapons from beyond speed-of-light targetting range and the missile can refocus the beam on the target, greatly extending your range in the case of vacuum-frequency lasers such as UV, X-ray or Gamma-rays

Explosive-pumped lasers, One shot laser drones that use an explosion to generate a high-energy laser pulse, you can go crazy with these, have 'em nuclear or fusion pumped, or even anti-matter if that's the cut of your jib.

Casaba Howitzer, basically a nuclear shaped charge, like an atomic HEAT round or something, this was a real project developed as part of Project Orion, but is heavily classified, so not a lot more is known than that, still, plenty there to play around with.

ECM drones, even if you don't want to succumb to missile spam, some ECM drone with big fat flares and decoys and jammers and dazzlers and what not can provide enough confusion to let you get in close and deliver some blows with your lasers and rail-guns.

Thanks for the reviews, since its a prototype i'll be sure to add missile spam capabilities

how does this thing radiate its heat?

Alright. First things first. This is more a pet peeve of mine, but I usually prefer at least a few paragraphs of background and engineering information on a design. The stat block, in terms of actual data, is woefully inadequate. If this is designed to be purely export, then it'll sell reasonably well amongst the newer FT nations (more veteran players tend to develop their own navies, though having a navy of mish-mashed international designs does have a certain appeal).

In my opinion, this puppy is an exception to most of the designs in FT - it's ridiculously underarmed. Let's have a looksee.

Alright. Ignoring the hefty dose of handwavium (which you DON'T need. Realistic weapons work perfectly as well, if not better, than most of the stuff people pull out of their arse), it appears your 5km by 1km by 2km behemoth, a ship that is nearly five times the size of one of my Majiirian War Sailers, has less than one fourth the number of primary weapon systems. Additionally, if those turrets in the image are to scale, then they are ridiculously oversized for a weapon that is not kinetic in nature.

I would personally recommend a missile bus utilizing electromagnetic acceleration (rail/gauss/coil) as its first stage. You can look at my Falarica system for an idea of what I mean (keep in mind it was a first attempt on my part and is rather primitive). The warheads available are many and varied, though I'm a fan of laser heads (explosive-pumped, typically in the XRAY range).

Now. For your secondary systems (your anti-ship turrets that aren't missile launchers), you have listed...

First off - gauss weapons and particle weapons are apples and oranges, but it's a common mistake. Second off - particle cannons = bad. Charged particle cannons, the ones that are commonly called ion or plasma weapons? Have an effective range of maybe a kilometer (and that's a big maybe, I've seen estimates of a few feet). Uncharged beams, which do a lot less damage and are a lot harder to build engineering-wise, still have the range of a small laser weapon due to electrostatic bloom. Off the top of my head I recall the upper maximum range limit being abou 100,000 km, which is practically point-blank range in terms of space warfare. Not to mention they're rather easy to defend against. Don't use particle weaponry.

As an alternative, there are two camps - the kinetic camp and the laser camp. I'm personally a fan of lasers, though there are waste heat problems to deal with. I'd recommend sticking fusion reactors under you guns (which wouldn't look like naval guns in the least in real life, but hey this is NS) and using them to "pump" X-ray laser arrays for your unguided anti-ship weapons.

Redundant. Anyone coming at you from the rear is going to get a face full of fusion exhaust plasma which, while nowhere near its potency when it leaves the drive, is still going to be carrying a ridiculous power. Likewise any missiles or kinetics (and maybe lasers? Something tells me they might be disrupted by that much plasma but I'm not a physicist) are not going to survive their journey to your ship's rear.

Unless I'm mistaken, and no one has corrected me on it yet, if you're using fusion torch drives most of your power requirements are already met. And if you have fusion technology already, why not use it? Other than the engines and weapons, your power requirements on-board the ship are rather minimal.

I'm going to assume that the "Sentinel Farsight IV" is not a simple RADAR array, but a multi-spectric passive/active array featuring LIDAR and thermal imaging, supplemented by networked sensor buoys. If not, do this.

This mostly seems like handwavium to me, but I will say this - other than anti-beam armor (which will mostly be ablative, and only able to take one good hit in a particular spot), and of course whipple plating, armor is useless in space. If you're going to take a hit from an anti-ship kinetic weapon, you're effectively dead and no amount of armor is going to stop that. The amount of whipple plating needed to eliminate the threat from real kinetics (and not just stray PD shots or interplanetary debris) is bordering on the ridiculous. For missiles, the best defense is using laser and/or kinetic and/or missile point defense systems coupled with good radiation shielding for the odd nuke that gets through. Keep in mind that nuclear weapons pack far, FAR less punch in vacuum than they do in the atmosphere. So much so that they're almost not worth the effort except in missile spam scenarios.

I'm often at odds with others in the Draftroom about this, but I must say it. Automation, automation, automation. However, the amount of computer control (especially when dealing with sapient artificial intelligences) a given nation is willing to allow in their ships is often more of a cultural thing, so I'll let it alone. Just know that if your guns are manually fired, they're probably not going to hit jack shit.


As do the external design of the thing - I've always been a fan of ships that got wider and taller the closer to the engines you got. This allows you to use the ever-loveable centerline turret weapon placement without sacrificing forward firepower. I always put my non-guided weapons and missile bus launchers along the dorsal and ventral spines (my ships tend towards the wedge-shape), a primary "spinal" weapon system on the prow, and off-axis guided weapon launchers along the port and starboard hulls to use wet navy nomenclature. PD weapons will be dotted along the structure, but typically will be small enough that they don't risk being roasted by your own weapons. There is simply nothing like being able to bring the full tonnage of your weapons loadout to bear on a target on the intial approach, and if they survive that you can still rake them with 75% of your weapons as you pass or circle each other.

Again, conning tower = bad. I'd say the engines need to be bigger. And add droplet radiators somewhere on it if there's time. Most people just disregard thermodynamics.



Edit: Just noting that these are my opinions, and I typically yield to ZMI when it comes to design. He's, like, smart and stuff. My designs also incorporate energy shielding, as it's only partially handwavium and easier than coming up with armor composites that work.

Holy shit, my account still exists.

I'd add a ship-mass figure here (A billion tonnes or so if it's roughly the density of modern ships. May want to increase that a bit to account for higher density). To make it look more 'Real', you may want to make the numbers a little less around, but since round numbers are convenient, well, whatever works.

Bonus points for actually using a sensible figure for cargo capacity - that's pretty rare. all things considered.

Crew size is pretty cool. IRL, we're nowadays at rather more than a man for every hundred cubic metres worth of warship (Mere cargo haulers make due with rather less than a tenth of that, though) - you're at circa one for every 50000 m^3 (Very roughly, obviously. Difficult to gauge this thing's volume), that's a pretty decent level of automation. It could be less (Down to zero if one wants to), but for someone presumably going for an IoM feel, those crew sizes are adequate.

No energy-shielding that could take care of that...?

As Izistan implied, 'Photonic Canister' is horrible technobabble. 'Lasers' will be perfectly adequate. They're photonic, too. Or if you want munitions going boom, launch nukes/ antimatter warheads from these guns. They also produce photonic radiation. Other than that, I actually approve of your relatively small number of turrets - big, shield-penetrating bang is GOOD. I'd use only one type of gun. though - using two fundamentally different types just creates logistical issues you don't need.

But as others have said, you need moar missuls.

As ZMI said... Acceleration figures? Delta V is obviously unnecessary at this level, but acceleration figures should be included if one bothers to do a statblock at all.

Peak output?

No shielding? And it shouldn't really be more than five metres total thickness, tops, tbh.

I'm not sure you want a pricetag at all - as it is, the thing costs about as much as a modern day frigate. It's of course difficult - that is, impossible - to gauge pricetags OF THE FUTURE from the present, so one can't strictly say it's wrong, but it just looks... Weird.

what the fuck are you doing here rezo

I like. Very oldschool Starblazers.

Been thinking about what an actual interplanetary warship would be like. A VERY strange dynamic.

A real one? An orion ship with nuclear missile bays, with casaba howitzers, some sort of PD weaponry, and maybe even some cannon since you have the the thrust.

Thermodynamics? Where are the radiators? And what about radiation shielding?