Broadside guns feel like drive by guns for this ship. Go full burn on the engines, blasting away with the front guns then flip to side and aft guns during the pass by.
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Department of Starship Design (Trek-ish)
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a) casemates are circumstantially cool
b) this is more like space mid late 19th century ship design anyways- complete with expensive turrets with strong restrictions and an emphasis on ships being partially obsolete before they're even finished
c) turrets in this system seem to scale fairly poorly- or at least the T2 does.
d) the same arguments would be kinda damning for our spinal doom laser and 4c prow casemate
That being said, I don't disagree that the broadside batteries should be light given my above reasoning- but I don't think the concept is fundamentally flawed in this system compared to real life naval development, and even then secondary casemates lasted quite a while.
[ ] Plan: 2 out of 3 ain't bad.
-[] A pair of amidships 4b batteries mounted on the ventral decks. One opposite the other.
Gives us some broadside coverage, and some downwards coverage. Can be powered by turning off the prow guns or turning off a radial battery for each battery. I intend to follow this up with a single rear 4b battery and I really do see these as supplemental weapons to be turned on and off as needed to swat something we can't place underneath the heavy firepower we've got aimed forward.
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They get away with it due to the nature of trek combat having more in common with dogfights than wet navy vessels slugging it out, as well as our ambush centric doctrine.
In a 3d combat space, field of fire and maneuver are king.
I'm not convinced we need broadside batteries at all.
[X] Plan: No Broadsides at all, Thanks
That said, Karagus' lightweight broadsides also look good.
[X] Plan: 2 out of 3 ain't bad.
Though... why worry about broadsides at all, when the main guns are so good? If only we could be sure to line up a shot. Here's a maybe-not-legal write-in:
[X] Plan: Spin to Win
-[X] Add two impulse thrusters, mounted sideways (opposite each other), as far forward as possible
--[X] it's technically a broadside, yeah?
[X] Plan: No Broadsides at all, Thanks
That said, Karagus' lightweight broadsides also look good.
[X] Plan: 2 out of 3 ain't bad.
Though... why worry about broadsides at all, when the main guns are so good? If only we could be sure to line up a shot. Here's a maybe-not-legal write-in:
[X] Plan: Spin to Win
-[X] Add two impulse thrusters, mounted sideways (opposite each other), as far forward as possible
--[X] it's technically a broadside, yeah?
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I'm really not feeling well. Probably coming down with a bug or something. So I'm going to look at things in the morrow if things stop spinning and maybe change my vote. Until then here is a proposed list of things that take up space. With 10x5 Type 1 mounts this will leave 17 spaces free, assuming that there is nothing I've missed and we leave no room for say... the next warp core (Which I admit the removal of Aux power could solve)
2 Torpedo tubes forward for utility costs us 8 spaces. That feels about right to me.
Yes, cutting down the utility would let us pack in more weapons. But the ability to self repair, tend to the wounded after a battle, and science things in emergencies seems important. The Aux sensors are cheap and cheerful units that give some minor nice stats and also help prevent us from being blinded.
This is a Trek-verse. Having at least some science on your warships is a good idea. Not to mention the fact I can easily see these ships doing a bit of survey work while they are guarding a planet or something.
Part of the reason I wanted the type 2s was to cover the broadside. 4 mounts should be good enough to discourage people from doing things when combined with the PD weapons. I remain WANTING a wonderful broadside that would make HMS Victory feel inadequate. But if we want to hit that goal of having some secondary functionality I think we are mostly gunned out.
The 40 degree arcs of fire from the Type 4s also feels... poor for anything that isn't forward mounted. We could make it work, but I think we'd need to rethink the whole ship in order to do so.
[X] Plan: No Broadsides at all, Thanks
Also I noticed after doing all this I'm missing Workshops in here, so yeah. I just don't think we have the room for more weapons. The above table gives an ENG score of like 20. Iron Road is 99. So there is no way to argue that it's going to rival our cargo ship there.
With the 10 mount PD I've been talking about we get this before cloak. 10.8x the BD of the Star Seeker. ~4.8x the SD of the Star Seeker.
With what is locked in right now, again before cloak we get this -
2 Torpedo tubes forward for utility costs us 8 spaces. That feels about right to me.
Yes, cutting down the utility would let us pack in more weapons. But the ability to self repair, tend to the wounded after a battle, and science things in emergencies seems important. The Aux sensors are cheap and cheerful units that give some minor nice stats and also help prevent us from being blinded.
This is a Trek-verse. Having at least some science on your warships is a good idea. Not to mention the fact I can easily see these ships doing a bit of survey work while they are guarding a planet or something.
Part of the reason I wanted the type 2s was to cover the broadside. 4 mounts should be good enough to discourage people from doing things when combined with the PD weapons. I remain WANTING a wonderful broadside that would make HMS Victory feel inadequate. But if we want to hit that goal of having some secondary functionality I think we are mostly gunned out.
The 40 degree arcs of fire from the Type 4s also feels... poor for anything that isn't forward mounted. We could make it work, but I think we'd need to rethink the whole ship in order to do so.
[X] Plan: No Broadsides at all, Thanks
| # | CI | Space | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Large Science Lab | 18 | |
| 10 | Aux Sensors | 5 | 10 |
| 1 | Matter Printer | 2 | 24 |
| 4 | Large Cargo Bay | 48 | |
| 1 | Large Transporter Bay | 12 | |
| 1 | Small Transporter Bay | 4 | |
| 1 | Large Medical Bay | 18 | |
| 2 | Small Medical Bay | 4 | |
| 1 | Crew Lounge | 8 | |
| TOTAL | 146 |
Also I noticed after doing all this I'm missing Workshops in here, so yeah. I just don't think we have the room for more weapons. The above table gives an ENG score of like 20. Iron Road is 99. So there is no way to argue that it's going to rival our cargo ship there.
With the 10 mount PD I've been talking about we get this before cloak. 10.8x the BD of the Star Seeker. ~4.8x the SD of the Star Seeker.
| SD | BD | PD |
| 259.1 | 342 | 79.8 |
With what is locked in right now, again before cloak we get this -
| SD | BD | PD |
| 159.1 | 242 | 4.8 |
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[X] Plan: No Broadsides at all, Thanks
I'm on board. Worst case scenario, we have room to install better weapons when we get them. Definitely need to pick up either a heavier turret or a medium weight beam on our next development cycle.
I'm on board. Worst case scenario, we have room to install better weapons when we get them. Definitely need to pick up either a heavier turret or a medium weight beam on our next development cycle.
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[X] Plan: No Broadsides at all, Thanks
Id rather have all weapons point forward to maximize as much damage as quickly as possible before cloaking, then only have half the weapons point for a broadside slugging match.
The broadsides kinda pointless for a cloak capable craft.
Id rather have all weapons point forward to maximize as much damage as quickly as possible before cloaking, then only have half the weapons point for a broadside slugging match.
The broadsides kinda pointless for a cloak capable craft.
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This is a poor justification imo even if I agree that a heavy broadside isn't desirable.
There are conceivable situations where we will be forced into a battle where we cannot cloak. Either because we must keep an enemy from destroying a hard target, we find an enemy that can pierce our cloaking tech, or a ship simply loses its cloak to malfunction or damage.
Now we have turrets already in place for this, and the PD beams can contribute to DPS, but saying that we will NEVER need weapons to shoot port and starboard is shortsighted.
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[X] Plan: 2 out of 3 ain't bad.
I want the Horatio Hornblower expy, but without the 6 legged treecats and missile spam.
I want the Horatio Hornblower expy, but without the 6 legged treecats and missile spam.
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[X] Plan: 2 out of 3 ain't bad.
-[X] A pair of amidships 4b batteries mounted on the ventral decks. One opposite the other.
No broadsides is hardly a bad idea, I think we can get away with it- and I think for future designs it'll help if we experiment with weapon loadouts that aren't intended to be all powered at once.
We can probably down rate the transporter to a medium and a small, that saves 4 spaces, we can remove ~8 of the sensors if we're tanking science anyways. That's room for 2 workshops. I'd still suggest multiple smaller labs without getting too obscene with it.
-[X] A pair of amidships 4b batteries mounted on the ventral decks. One opposite the other.
No broadsides is hardly a bad idea, I think we can get away with it- and I think for future designs it'll help if we experiment with weapon loadouts that aren't intended to be all powered at once.
There's no where near enough science with just a single large lab to justify all 10 aux sensors, and if we're going to be frugal with science without being too gamey, a small science lab on each deck is more science for less space. Likewise, I'm not sure we need a full 4 cargo bays. Furious Wind has 4 cargo spaces, this is 12 times that in something x3.25 times the size. I think dropping one of the large cargo bays altogether or at least for a medium is something we should reconsider. Nearly ~10% of the hull being cargo bays might not be necessary.
We can probably down rate the transporter to a medium and a small, that saves 4 spaces, we can remove ~8 of the sensors if we're tanking science anyways. That's room for 2 workshops. I'd still suggest multiple smaller labs without getting too obscene with it.
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Then why not do something similar to a deck gun? top and bottom so it can forward and broadside. Although I have no sense of scale yet Im unsure how big turrets are or why they arent as effective, I just figured they were something about the same size of a 76 mm gun or something and due to the size doesnt scale well or something.
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To make a long story short, we simply did not design the type 4 to be mounted in a turret, so we cannot simply slap it into a rotating housing and call it a day.
The cannons have a limit of a 40 degree firing cone, and always will until we put in the development time to repurpose them. They arent chemical guns that will work in any housing that will support the barrel, they need power feeds and complex electronics.
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TBH I just kinda put the things you mentioned on the list and called it close enough. I"m not tracking well enough to do a solid list, see the fact I forgot a workshop. Those could replace some cargo bays. What I wanted to illustrate was how much stuff we need. The details are variable. I needed to stay awake for a while to do something, but now I'm going to crash.
See the big orange turret? That's a Type 2. See the little blue person for scale?
The turrets we have are going to give pretty good coverage. We've got them top and bottom, forward and aft.
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Sorry to say it, but that image is broken I dont see what you mean.
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On top of that, these ships are so massive and so broad, we can't actually just mount turrets on the ventral and dorsal ridges of the ships and get adequate coverage outside of a few spots. If we wanted to, for a future design we could probably do something interesting with a vertical hemisphere ship having most of it's weaponry being turrets mounted on the ventral/dorsal edges of the ship- but neither the cone or the ovoid seem to lend themselves well to that kind of weapon placement it seems and turrets are expensive- therefore an all turret warship is also going to be expensive.
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Ok now I see the issue. Im guessing future designs be miniaturizing the technology to make them more compact. Unless we go the other way and just keep building larger ships till the biggest type can be put into something the size of a giant turret the size of normal ships.On top of that, these ships are so massive and so broad, we can't actually just mount turrets on the ventral and dorsal ridges of the ships and get adequate coverage outside of a few spots. If we wanted to, for a future design we could probably do something interesting with a vertical hemisphere ship having most of it's weaponry being turrets mounted on the ventral/dorsal edges of the ship- but neither the cone or the ovoid seem to lend themselves well to that kind of weapon placement it seems and turrets are expensive- therefore an all turret warship is also going to be expensive.
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The Type 2 is a ten-meter diameter dome turret, with a seven-meter diameter, five meter tall (iirc) well*. It carries a pair of 80 centimeter disruptor cannons.
Basically: it's a turret that wouldn't look out of place on an early Dreadnought era wet-navy battleship.
The big Type 4cs have a bore you could comfortablely stand in if you aren't especially tall, they're 1.2 meter bores. The lesser medium and small sizes are "only" 60 and 30 centimeter guns, respectively. These are not at all small weapons systems.
Of course, they're still technically smaller than particle beam weapons, since they don't require a great big ring of very powerful electromagnets devoted to making ions go really, really fast, but semantics.
*The part that goes down into the hull.
Edit: also, the Type Two got hurt a little by not having any of the big synergies that stuff like the Type Three and four did, or even the type one for that matter, so ended up in a sort of awkward place where it's only a little above average for your tech level, whilst the rest of your weapons ended up well above average to "literally almost as powerful as your current technology allows", so it looks kinda bad in comparison.
(The Type Three is ridiculous. You are almost matching the race that has specific techs that make their beams more powerful and have invested into having powerful beam weapons for pure power. Theirs are still much more efficient of course, a few centuries of head start and all, but the fact you managed to even get in the same zip code is an impressive achievment.)
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We'll probably design a set of turrets for our next weapon group that scales bigger, but chances are even then our biggest ships will likely only use turrets as a supplementary weapon rather than a primary. Bigger ships can fit more weapons in the same space for cheaper- judging by the Type 2, this doesn't play very nicely with a bulky turret mechanism compared to the casemates of the Type 4 where we can wind up with funny scenarios like 5 guns grouped together costing as much MI and space as a single gun of the same type on a smaller ship.
A small ship wants high performing weapons that don't need a battery to be practical- ironically like the huge Type 3 doom beams. A big ship wants powerful and power/runtime efficient weaponry that it can put into big batteries for cheap but might not be all that impressive outside of batteries- like the Type 4 cannons. Judging by the Type 2- while it's power/computer efficient, turrets seem to be both very expensive by default (the Type 2 is -cost and significantly more expensive than the larger 4b and 3b- the latter was something like +7 cost), and perform poorly in batteries.
I'm hoping both larger turrets and turrets that take more +cost penalties (assuming the turret mechanism is a relatively flat extra expense) make them more viable in the future.
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@Jalinth we should both try to remember this for when we develop the plasma weapons so we can hunt those syngeries. it looks like the type two's issues are more player error then something wrong with it.
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The Type 2 failing to find a synergy explains a lot why every other one of our weapons feels really solid with a useful role by comparison. It's not terrible, it's just not as compelling. I think the big thing is the relatively high cost and the poor scaling with batteries. Are turrets naturally more expensive than other mounting types? We tried to keep it fairly cheap but it feels more expensive to use than the Type 3s and 4s.
Can we expect all turrets to generally be less efficient in batteries?
It's speculative- but I think a big part of it was trying to do a standardized singular design where the turret assembly/weapon mechanism was too small for the actual weapons housed by the turret. A single Type 2 packs 2 80cm cannons in a space smaller than the 60cm T4b- and that single 60cm is almost as potent as the pair. I wouldn't be surprised if we accidentally made the equivalent of 80cm mortars compared to a 60cm high velocity cannon.
Hopefully having scaling turret sizes helps, or accepting a larger footprint/turret ring for the next generation.
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So what you're saying is that for our next trick, we need to start beefing up the Type Three even more...
we'll need to do two scalable turrets next weapon development, a fast tracking rate of fire focused one and a proper battleship's main gun model. we need the contrast to better understand the system.
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[X] Plan: No Broadsides at all, Thanks
Honestly I'm pretty happy with this. I wouldn't argue too much against the single pair of 4bs, but I think solid Type 2+Type 1 coverage + very solid maneuverability = broadsides are of lesser concern. Not none, but def9nitely lesser. And we're running low on space as it is.
God, where's future-Nvidia when you need 'em? Would give my left tentacle for a GPU supercluster right about now lmao
Honestly I'm pretty happy with this. I wouldn't argue too much against the single pair of 4bs, but I think solid Type 2+Type 1 coverage + very solid maneuverability = broadsides are of lesser concern. Not none, but def9nitely lesser. And we're running low on space as it is.
God, where's future-Nvidia when you need 'em? Would give my left tentacle for a GPU supercluster right about now lmao
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See... I'm just not willing to discard our proven formulas if we still only get 4 design slots. The T3s are good, the T4s are our bread and butter on larger ship sizes, the T1 is a flexible and solid small weapon. We can undoubtedly improve on these things, from experience using them, increased familiarity with our needs, and a better understanding of the development process... but I don't want to give up any of those roles if we don't have to.
Given the choice between the two concepts, I'd prefer the battleship main gun in terms of size- but an emphasis on RoF over just raw power. The T1 concept seems to largely cover the PD role (we at least need it to) and PD is only part of the Defense stat. A bigger turret doesn't miss out as much on battery discounts it can't use, and it lets us do things like stack RoF and to a lesser extent power much higher if we're willing to pay for it and synergize that with HC power feeds and the like. If we make the turret scalable/bespoke they could potentially still have solid PD ratings on the smaller turrets.
From what I can tell, the real + turrets get the most of (if not necessarily the most cost effective access to) is Fire Rate. The Type 2 could have been +8 Fire Rate as an example. +5 Fire Rate would have been more practical most likely, but Fire Rate definitely seems to be where turrets can shine beyond more abstract bonuses like tracking rate- and I'm not sure if a turrets traversal will ever exceed a beam emitter's within it's field of fire.
I nearly lost my shit when Jalinth broke down how much space and CI proper secondary computers would have saved. It hurts. With any luck only the first generation of Guardians will need these shitty hordes of Alienware laptops we've strung together.
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