First Command - Torchship Captain Quest

[X] Balance of Judgement

a smart hunter build, clearly intended to punch above its weight class, and an Andromeda shout-out?

[X] Plan Space Purdey Over-and-Under

-[ ] Experimental pulsed particle cannon array (1 point)

Yes, but is it In the 40W range?

[X] Plan Space Purdey Over-and-Under

[X] Plan Torp

[X] Plan Just Bail At First Sign of Trouble

[X] Plan Defense + Probe Dakka
-[X] Flammable, but high thrust liquid oxygen reaction mass.
-[X] Flexible "sandblaster" mini-railguns.
-[X] 250MW main laser arrays. Short ranged but powerful, and useful for point defense.
-[X] ACER particle cannons, with multiple firing modes, for disabling enemy ships.
-[X] A heavy, two-tube torpedo and heavy drone bay (1 point)
-[X] None. The ship doesn't need the extra weight
-[X] Additional protective plates and whipple shields over vital areas (1 Point)
-[X] Upgraded shield capacitors (1 Point)
-[X] An accompanying Corvette with modular slots.
-[X] A rotary probe magazine for higher rates of fire of missiles and drones (1 Point)
-[X] Expanded internal stores (1 Point)

A defensive setup that uses its souped-up heavy rotary probe/torpedo/drone bay for both lots of firepower and expanded science flexibility.

We're going into a super-deadly region of space. That means we'll be facing both conventional firepower and space-wedgie threats. We've got to balance defenses, offensive firepower, and science flexibility. For defense, we've got both better armor and shields for any of the many things that might want tear our ship to pieces. I do a bit of skimping on the point-defence; no fancy pulsed-paricle cannons but instead a defensive combo of mini-rails and main lasers. For offense and science, we have 3 points for a super-torpedo bay: a heavy (not the standard light) torpedo and heavy drone bay, a rotary magazine for a faster rate of fire, and internal stores for plenty of ammo. In combat, that means we can launch a lot of big missiles and big drones, rapidly filling the combat zone with many big, scary, and dangerous things. For science, it means we have plenty of powerful probes and complex drones to send out there and poke things with.

It's also important to remember that we have a second ship just to supply us with. We don't really need to worry about running out of fuel or photon torpedoes probe bay supplies. (Yes, it's a probe bay. A very big and scary probe bay.) Instead of mission endurance, what we need is survivability and flexibility so we can poke the bear and escape afterwards. So that's what my plan is focused on doing.

E: Fixed a bunch of formatting errors.

[X] Plan Just Bail At First Sign of Trouble

Are the heavy torpedo bays large enough we could feasibly fabricate small manned rockets in them? I'm thinking extra escape pods, boarding craft, parasite fighters, etc etc.

[X] Plan Defense + Probe Dakka

We're heading into an area with unknown threats, and we need better awareness of what we are walking into, options to engage at a distance without getting up close for nasty surprises, and flexibility to survive against them.

We have an experimental sensor array for scans and targeting so we can see around us better with less chance of getting caught by surprises. We have a precision railgun and expanded remass so staying outside engagement range of baddies while hitting them is an option, and gives us time for planning even if they are catching up. We have particle cannons, heavy drones and heavy torpedos for when things get hot and heavy. We also have both a corvette and shuttles because we may need the heavier, modular corvette for doing dangerous things alongside us, and shuttles give us simple transport options.

I would have liked to get one of automated repair drones or the armored vault, as they would give us options for when we take damage or run into something we need to hold or hide from, and we could sacrifice the pulsed particle cannon for one of those.

[x] Plan Unknown Threat
-[x] Standard antimatter engines with water as reaction mass.
-[x] Experimental pulsed particle cannon array (1 point)
-[x] ACER particle cannons, with multiple firing modes, for disabling enemy ships.
-[x] A precision railgun turret, for very long range probing attacks.
-[x] A heavy, two-tube torpedo and heavy drone bay (1 point)
-[x] None. The ship doesn't need the extra weight.
-[x] The standard Star Patrol layered hull of dense metals and silica foam, protected by an artificial magneosphere and a screen.
-[x] Standard shield capacitors.
-[x] Both of the above. (1 Point)
-[x] Expanded remass tanks for longer range (1 Point)
-[x] Experimental sensor array and computers for long-range scans and targeting (1 point)

open_sketch said:

Go for it, and yeah it does!

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OK!

[ ] Experimental pulsed particle cannon array (1 point)
[ ] Experimental UREB (1 point)

Firstly, based on what I can see about the PPC, it sounds like it would be more accurately described as an UREB: an Ultra-Relativistic Electron Beam. See, electrons are very light, so you can accelerate them to very high relativistic speeds compared to proton beams. This means that you can rely on the fact that the electrons experience less time passing, and thus literally don't have enough subjective time to bloom due to electrostatic repulsion. For this reason they're VERY long ranged, much more so than lasers which are limited by beam quality. The real limit is jitter (vibrations from the ship moving about and throwing off your aim) and targeting (enemy ECM and jinking). And when they hit something solid, you get a massive flare of braking radiation. Good news! This will totally fry any computers on whatever you're firing at! Bad news! It's totally a warcrime to shoot this thing at living people! That' why it's in the point defence slot! Here's a more in-depth description.

[ ] Macron Accelerator

A macron is a very small but technically microscopic particle. The good news is that they can be accelerated to much higher velocities than railguns so ships trying to dodge macron beams much pass a harder check, but they don't lose damage over distance like lasers. Now, a hypervelocity soot-blaster is going to do quite a bit of damage on it's own, but if you cant you can switch to macrons filled with stuff, specifically fusion fuel. Because at the speeds they impact with, that fusion fuel will be compressed to criticality and let off a flash of radiation! Macron Accelerators can thus deal either straight kinetic damage, or kinetic + radiation damage. (In-Depth Write-Up)

[ ] The Killer Bus (Requires Shuttle Bay)

It's a very simple concept - you take a bunch of probes and put them on top of a big ol' first stage that's almost as big as a shuttle (it even gets manufactured and stored as one). This lets you create huge drone or missile barrages without needing an expanded probe bay or rotary launchers. The downside is that it's slow to fabricate, so it's fire rate is low by comparison. For max Cold War vibes, ships with expanded shuttle bays that can store multiple killer buses are called 'boomers'.

[ ] Nuclear Salt-Water Rockets

Ah. The Nuclear Salt-Water Rocket. One of the most insane propulsion systems ever devised. A highly enriched uranium alt is dissolved in water and stored in long and skinny beryllium tubes that prevent it from reaching criticality. This fuel is pumped into a rocket nozzle where it promptly goes critical and flashes into superheatd exhaust - if you manage the injection right, you can even make sure that the worst of the nweutron flux is directed away from your craft! This drastically increases missile dV, but fissiles are hard to come by! Your supply ship can only replenish your NSWR fuel very slowly so what you have is what you get most of the time!

[ ] Laser Thermal Parasites (Requires Laser Weapons)

For long ranged missiles, the possibility of an enemy ship outspending their dV stores is a very real possibility, and the NSWRs are super resource intensive! The good news is that if your ship has laser weapons, especially capital grade laser weapons, you can add a laser-thermal stage to your drones and missiles and take advantage of the prodigious power generation of your mother-ship to help them along! (Increases missile and drone dV, but requires you to spend X turns lasing your missiles, so your lasers can't be used for anything else in that time, banace by caping the number od parasites that can be lased per laser weapon?).

[ ] Wire Loop Radiators

Solid radiators are wonderfully rugged little things that requires very little maintenance, but they're fragile and prone to getting shot off and frankly not as optimized for rejecting large amounts of heat generated in combat. Droplet radiators on the other hand cannot be shot off, but they lose excessive amounts of droplets when performing combat manoeuvres, and adding forcefield guides is power intensive. Wire radiators however have a high surface area and good heat rejection, and wires being cut can simply be fixed by the ship slurping up the cut strands like spaghetti and just splicing in a fix as the wire travels over the winding drum with a high speed fabricator. (I ran the number for Tyrants, and wire radiators have the best heat rejection/(area-mass) ratio, so they would be the go to on high performance spacecraft.)

[ ] MHD Booster

Your starship's exhaust velocity can be increased with a magnetohydrodynamic booster and some cesium seeding of the propellant, this lets you turn Power into dV! (Write-up)


Oh, what does ACER stand for?

edit:

Also, I would like to toot my own horn a little, and say that with two sets oft extra engines, the BoJ is actually very good at running away from fights! Extra remass tanks increase dV but they also decrease thrust and FTL - something to keep in mind for people using them! Extra engines meanwhile just add thrust which is superior to having to spend dV!

[X] Balance of Judgement

I like this one!

Someone please tell me if my read on extra engines/remass tanks is right! I'm a little unsure about gameplay and lore separation, because my understanding is that dV mechanically represents an 'afterburner' that can be used to add thrust but consumes propellant at a prodigious rate, while adding engines gives more thrust while not spending more propellant.

Meanwhile my space nerd brain is expecting dV to be a total amount that we can spend, and Thrust being how much of that total we can spend per turn.

open_sketch said:

It's a little bit of both is my current plan. In close-in space combat, which is very brief, dV is afterburner only. But you also spend it to move between moons and planets STL, or to circularize when you FTL between planets and stars.

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Hmmmm, could you do an FTL manoeuvre for that sort of thing? Basically, jump near a planet or other celestial body, let it's gravity adjust your vector, FTL out before you crash into it?

open_sketch said:

Go for it, and yeah it does!

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Anyway, CyberEnby did the realistic (or at least, harder sci fi) idea, so here are some that stay within the fiction

[X] Spatial Sheer Cannon : This does the same trick as the stealth systems, where it uses the FTL system to manipulate space. However, instead of bending space around a craft, this thing instead stretches the space between the target and the vessel. When the time comes to fire the sheer cannon, all weapons on the vessel will fire through this area of space, just as the FTL field is deliberatly collapsed. The result of the collapsing field means a strong spatial compression, meaning that any energy beams inside the field experience an extreme blueshift while also being compressed in time and distance. In essence, the enemy is hit by an incredibly potent dose of extremely high energy, low wavelength radiation. If done properly , the beam can sheer away parts of the enemy ship, penetrating shields before the need for reconfiguration is seen, and also giving the rest of the crew a serious case of radiation poisoning. And it better be done properly. because the weapon has to be fired at short range, sends the ship spinning, and temporally disables the FTL system until they can be reconfigured.

[X] Sapper: Inertial Warhead : A special kind of shell for a very special railgun, these weapons would be seen as outrageously expensive, were it not for the fact that anti-matter warheads are in routine, if reluctant use. The Inertial warhead consists out of a heavily armored warhead, containing within it a small quantity of folded hydrogen, and a simple heating element. The weapon itself is simple. While, to the dissappointment of some, the quantities of folded hydrogen needed to crush a spaceship or sweep a deck are prohibitively large, a ship's sensors are far smaller and far more easily fooled. The Inertial warhead, once it has hit and embedded itself in a target vessel, introduces random gravitational changes, disrupting the vessels gravimetric systems and rendering accurate response to sudden changes in acceleration a very frought affair. Until the device can be removed, an enemy vessel is limited to low acceleration or risk hurting it's crew

Would a spinal mount be a viable write in? For example:

Special Weapon
[] Spinal Railgun, A half meter tube of electromagnets running from engineering through the nose of the ship, capable of accelerating ferrous projectiles to a sizable fraction of c.

Eater said:

Would a spinal mount be a viable write in? For example:

Special Weapon
[] Spinal Railgun, A half meter tube of electromagnets running from engineering through the nose of the ship, capable of accelerating ferrous projectiles to a sizable fraction of c.

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Oh! Railguns! I should mention that railguns actually top out at slower muzzle velocities than coilguns because of rail erosion. Even with plasma armatures, you're still going to be getting pretty gnarly erosion issues. It's not a deal breaker - it can even be a fun thing that limits your total number of shots, but realistically you're better off just using a big ol' coilgun which won't have the projectile physically touching the barrel at all.
Railguns do have the edge in rate of fire though for slower bullets!

CyberEnby said:

Oh! Railguns! I should mention that railguns actually top out at slower muzzle velocities than coilguns because of rail erosion. Even with plasma armatures, you're still going to be getting pretty gnarly erosion issues. It's not a deal breaker - it can even be a fun thing that limits your total number of shots, but realistically you're better off just using a big ol' coilgun which won't have the projectile physically touching the barrel at all.
Railguns do have the edge in rate of fire though for slower bullets!

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I was definitely thinking of a coilgun 😓

Edit: although, if it's going through the ship, capping the end and replacing the rails as they wear by just opening up the sections would be pretty trivial so mb a railgun isn't such a drawback?

Edit edit: did some thinking about how this sorta thing might be built around and came up with the following. I grabbed the enhanced ftl capability, although I wasn't sure what exactly it did. Is it something where you can specify a specific additional capability for a cost? If so I was thinking that it would be neat to do a torsion effect with the warp field to allow for changing the vector of the railgun shot in fun ways (maybe making the extra rcs unnecessary?). This is probably impractical due to power constraints I imagine? With the expanded capacitors we could maybe operate shields and the railgun, or the railgun and the warp field?

Anyhow:
[] Plan Big Railgun
-[] Standard antimatter engines with water as reaction mass.
-[] Flexible "sandblaster" mini-railguns.
-[] 250MW main laser arrays. Short ranged but powerful, and useful for point defense.
-[] 250MW main laser arrays. Short ranged but powerful, and useful for point defense.
-[] A heavy, two-tube torpedo and heavy drone bay (1 point)
-[] Spinal Railgun, A half meter tube of electromagnets running from engineering through the nose of the ship, capable of accelerating ferrous projectiles to a sizable fraction of c (1 point)
-[] The standard Star Patrol layered hull of dense metals and silica foam, protected by an artificial magneosphere and a screen
-[] Upgraded shield capacitors. (1 Point)
-[] A shuttle printing bay and external docks.
-[] Overbuilt reaction control systems (1 Point)
-[] Enhanced FTL capabilities (1 Point)

*cheers own design*

Balance! Of! Judgement!
Balance! Of! Judgement!

Here's a tally of the current votes.

It occurs that the BoJ is also a logical extension of how Smith fought the Zinovians: use an overwhelming parasites salvo to render the enemy immobile, keep out of range of their direct fire weapons, and trust in your own point defenses to shield you from counter-attack.

In this respect, it makes sense that they would give the ship to Smith - Kodi basically already did a live fire trial of the doctrine the BoJ is built around.

[] Balance of Judgement

I like this, my only real issue is not having access to torpedos and the options those give us. If we end up outgunned or facing more than one opponent, then I can see them using ftl to outmaneuver us despite the extra engines and delta v. having a bubble popper as a deterrent could be a deciding factor…

Eater said:

[] Balance of Judgement

I like this, my only real issue is not having access to torpedos and the options those give us. If we end up outgunned or facing more than one opponent, then I can see them using ftl to outmaneuver us despite the extra engines and delta v. having a bubble popper as a deterrent could be a deciding factor…

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I haven't seen the stats for a torpedo so I can't say how useful it is for sure, but if you FTL in combat then the opponent can contest this - presumably this means if an enemy tries a tactical jump we get some sort of say in the matter? (Or, it could very well be that the rules for that aren't written yet. )

Through there's also our emotional support frigatecorvette, perhaps it could be fitted with a single shot torpedo tube module if we need to cover that weakness? I'm imagining something like an Osa class missile boat.

CyberEnby said:

I haven't seen the stats for a torpedo so I can't say how useful it is for sure, but if you FTL in combat then the opponent can contest this - presumably this means if an enemy tries a tactical jump we get some sort of say in the matter? (Or, it could very well be that the rules for that aren't written yet. )

Through there's also our emotional support frigatecorvette, perhaps it could be fitted with a single shot torpedo tube module if we need to cover that weakness? I'm imagining something like an Osa class missile boat.

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Mmm. Fair enough I suppose? I'll be honest, I have a maybe irrational dislike of corvettes/shuttles in combat. Having an entire extra craft with ftl, artificial gravity, etc just to launch torpedoes seems a little backwards. I'd rather have a fixed number of torpedoes clamped to the side, which won't have to worry about squishy vulnerable crewfolk.

I can see how in action economy and having more than one target to divide an opponent's attention it could be a good thing but I'd rather do that with drones than risk lives, I guess.

Edit: I don't want to come off as overly critical, and it's a bit unreasonable to just write off corvettes as 'risking lives' when they could save the ship and all. Combat is inherently risky and there's not a safe place in it and i should just accept that. Changing my vote

[x] Balance of Judgement