Torpedoes are for when you're not fast enough to close to energy range. The clip you shared looks like an instance of the "close to spitting distance and merge warp bubbles" that Mechanis mentioned.
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Department of Starship Design (Trek-ish)
- Thread starter Mechanis
- Start date
- Sci-Fi
Torpedoes are for when you're not fast enough to close to energy range. The clip you shared looks like an instance of the "close to spitting distance and merge warp bubbles" that Mechanis mentioned.
- Location
- Canada
With how close that ship had to be to shoot those weapons to hit and not to mention you can see some of the curve and warp around I figure energy weapons are traveling at lightspeed, but since they were warp the energy weapons is just to slow.
So being so close makes the energy weapons being fired inside the warp bubble, so you got two warp bubbles of the enemy ship and the enterprise interacting with one another and be able to at least fire energy weapons.
So I guess torpedoes fired at warp can have their own warp bubble so they can travel in warp to the target.
Mechanis
Confirmed Extremely Screwed
- Location
- Absconding with Alacrity
It's notable that Vengeance closes to visual range of Enterprise before opening up; in the context of this quest, Vengeance had enough speed to overtake Enterprise and merge warp bubbles, allowing her to freely engage with energy weapons- after all, as long as they don't leave the warp bubble, they're perfectly fine, it's only exiting the warp drive's area of effect that smears the things into uselessness. The reason one uses torpedoes is, having themselves a warp coil, they can sustain their own warp bubble, and thus cross between the bubble of the launcher and the target without dropping back to normal space in between.
And yes, warp bubbles are generally considerably larger than the ship generating them (this being why one can't fly ships too close together in formation, and why one needs a good bit of distance from a space station or planet to go to warp safely), so point defense weapons will generally have a couple of seconds to try to knock out an incoming torpedo. Granted this is significantly more difficult than doing so in normal space, very much a "hope your targeting algorithm is better than the enemy's terminal attack evasion algorithm" due to the split second timing involved, but it very much can be done.
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
When that section comes up, could you give some guidance on what we need to minimize dead-zones in coverage? Maybe some best guesses on how much PD would be needed to be resistant to a salvo of 5-7 torps? I'm quite sure the military has done a lot of exercises on that topic.
Torpedos have splash damage in this system, normal cannon shots dont.
- Location
- Canada
They should have splash damage, they did use it if I remember right to bombard a planet to kill all life on it before.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/They
Given that in realspace our maneuverability is better than par and our punch and durability are both completely insane relative to our overall tech level, I expect warp hit-and-run to be literally everyone's* preferred tactic against us. Being able to go to warp ourselves won't matter much in general given how fucking slow our warp speed is, but being able to go to warp and then fire substantially faster torpedoes could easily make all the difference.
*that doesn't straight out-tech us by enough to win outright.
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You guys make excellent points, and I stand corrected.
I was initially thinking only two tubes, but now I'm leaning 4-6.
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
More torps would be wonderful. If we had the space for them and for all the other things we need. We are running on the ragged edge of being able to fit the needed utilities into the hull. I don't even know if we'll be able to fit everything in, because of the shape of the hull.
I could be wrong. I could have mathed things out wrong. I could be assuming we need something that we don't. But if you think I've done so I invite you to do your own spreadsheet and check my work. I like to think that I'm willing to examine new evidence. Just remember that when things are X spaces per Y kilotons that means you need to round up. 1 per 50kt and if it's 51kt that is 2.
Remember the note on the hull that would be 400kt talked about a need for secondary features. This ship is only 10kt less, so I feel comfortable assuming that will be the case here. We need power, computers, workshops, cargo space, medical facilities, a matter printer, and at least some science labs (It's Trek. I'm not willing to send a ship out without at least SOME kind of science)
We CAN make more tubes fit. But we are going to be sacrificing something. Things I think will be more important then any more weapons. I've been talking about space for the entire process, so if I was utterly off base I'd hope that Mechanis would have chimed in and said I was crazy. Well... wrong. I'm pretty clearly crazy.
I thought I remembered your stating an earlier plan that included something like one large science lab and four small, which I found excessive. Looking back, I can't find that post, and instead found a more reasonable post (requoted below). So, I think I was mistakenly assuming we had a little more fat to trim than we actually do - apologies for that.
Though from that same post, it looks like you're planning for 5 PD batteries? I'm leaning towards just the 3 on the radial hulls, which would free up a little bit of space from reduced power needs.
And worst case, we can shrink one of our large cargo bays, or drop it entirely.
I respect and appreciate your efforts to track everything. I do however remain optimistic that we can manage at least four torpedo tubes.
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
That's not a perfect chart, but some of the tweaks are mostly splitting some of the larges into a couple smalls. Some it can be trimmed, but on the other hand there are going to be spaces where things don't fit. That chart didn't have any workshops (because I forgot them until after I'd typed up the entire post) which we are going to need. So some of the trimming will just be turned into a workshop.
A Furious Wind has 2x medium bays and isn't expected to leave the home system. These ships are 3x the mass and are expected to work over vastly longer a duration. Going home for supplies is a multi-month trip, as would calling for an Iron Road to bring those supplies in. Cargobays cover repair parts, but also food + other supplies for the crew. The Iron Road is about the same size as this ship. It's a cargo ship. It has 762 personnel for crew. In general military ships will have a much larger crew then a cargo ship.
Current plans are 9-10 PD batteries to prevent us from having serious deadzones. That's what that math is based on. Going for just the three is not going to cover our rear, for example. The one space free on the Radials is on the front of the mount. It gives you some pretty darn good coverage to a degree, but parts of the ship are going to block lines of fire. PD mounts do more damage then a torpedo and improve our defense score. A defense score that will stay up even if our shields are down...like say right after dropping the cloak. Or if the cloak gets disabled, like it was against the battle cruiser.
Compared to either of our other ships the support scores are going to be really low. I certainly don't want a ship that is useless for anything except pure combat. We have too few interstellar ships to make anything purely monopurpose. At least anything this size. If we ended up selecting the frigate I'd be fine with more pure focus on firepower.
- Location
- Australia
If you don't mind me asking @Mechanis, how many major planetary bodies (beyond Venna of course) were colonised or other significantly important and/or large colonies (in space stations, on planetoids, moons or minor bodies, etc.) established before the Planet Wars? And how many survived the Planetary Wars, and in what state? We know that Yenna was significantly (although not totally) depopulated and devastated, but were any of the colonies also impacted/damaged, or did they even survive the Planetary Wars?
While in the New Era Yenna has recovered significantly (although importantly not totally in terms of population), have the other colonies in the star system (assuming they were attacked and damaged or destroyed) also recovered, and if so, have they yet returned to or even potentially surpassed (especially if poor homeworld conditions encourage more to emigrate off-world) pre-Planetary Wars levels in scale/scope and/or development/sophistication?
I'm guessing that in-system colonisation and colonial presence remain significant considering the substantial interest and investment that the Stellar Union has poured into not only exploring other systems but also logistically and defensively preparing for extrasolar colonisation (which if I understand correctly is part of the purpose of the "Iron Road" class and the currently in development "Guardian" class, as well as providing faster intra-system transport and defence capabilities as well), considering that would seem to be both a cheaper, faster and overall easier priority if in-system significant colonisation targets remained unoccupied. Now that the Iron Road class is being rolled out, once the Guardian project is completed and has started to be built, and the Star Seeker has completed its maiden voyage and expedition (and presumably found some suitable or interesting candidates) - are one or more extrasolar colonies, outpost, stations, structures/elements/infrastructure, etc. being planned, or have they already begun being founded/constructed, for (long-term) habitation, scientific (eg observatories), economic (eg resource extraction/exploitation, trading, resupplying and repair, etc.) or defensive (eg monitoring, stationing forward elements, repair and resupply, weapons platform, etc.) purposes?
I'm guessing there's probably also a bunch of smaller colonies (asteroids, space stations, etc.), maybe dozens or even hundreds of smaller outposts on minor celestial bodies/objects that are probably beyond the scope of detailing too much at our level of simulation outside of considering them and their needs as a group (for instance, if all or many of them joined or didn't join the alluded above Outer Union), correct?
Thanks for any questions you can answer and thanks for creating such an interesting quest and setting - can't wait to see where you'll take us next!
- Location
- USA
The matter printer is NOT a hard requirement. Very nice to have yes, but not a NEED.
It just means these ships need to return to a drydock more often if we ditch it.
Similarly, we do not NEED 5 whole years of consumables. But I wouldnt want to go less than 3.
It just means these ships need to return to a drydock more often if we ditch it.
Similarly, we do not NEED 5 whole years of consumables. But I wouldnt want to go less than 3.
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- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I disagree 100% with the matter printer not being a requirement. I've already made a couple posts talking about how essential the ability to do self repair is. Besides it gives more engineering score for space than cargo.
If the Star Seeker didn't have a matter printer it would not have returned from its mission. Even with its utterly insane number of cargo bays it still didn't have enough of a key component to repair its damaged warp drive.
The ability to print components is huge. Far more important than say a brace of torpedo tubes that are only really relevant in a few niche possible engagements. Trying to replace a damaged or destroyed Disruptor Cannon is going to be much trickier without the industrial power of the matter printer.
Having that level of self repair means a starship is vastly more likely to survive and bring its crew home again. I consider comparably important to the cloaking device and the shields.
Also I wasn't saying anything about 5 years of endurance. What I was saying is that we need a lot more supplies for ships that will probably have a thousand people on it as compared to a small torpedo boat that is never going to be more than a very short trip from the nearest base. Even at warp zero you can cross a star system in hours.
- Location
- his hidden lair
This is again reaching a no limits fallacy. We can literally store and carry all the components for a disruptor cannon and assemble them. The notion that repairs are patently impossibly without a matter printer when all it lets us do is print some of the refined materials we need for the workshops to make components is excessive. We can afford to just carry parts and refined materials if need be. We can afford a warship that has to return to port for major repairs. Replicators are on par with Cloaks. Probably on par with shields or exceeding them too. But Matter Printers are emphatically not. They let us make materials. None of that means we can't make things in situ without them. We would have flat out died without a cloak in the Torkan Nebula most likely, I don't think the loss of a particle lance or two in the final major confrontation the Star Seeker had of its tour would have destroyed the ship. The Field Refit was incredibly useful, but we also would not have fought the battles we did without it- because the Cloak let us pick every single fight we had.
I'm not going to pretend we can field refit the Guardians without them- but the Guardians aren't going to need field refits. And first and foremost they're going to be used to protect our systems. Where we'll either have infrastructure set up or an Iron Road passing through semi-consistently to set up that infrastructure. We have 25 slips that can build this thing, of which 20 are currently open iirc- we are not so desperate that we need one to continually fight in the field until it dies or makes it home like the 1 Star Seeker we have. Its useful, and I think we can afford it- but it should not be a mandatory golden cow.
I'm not going to die on the Matter Printer hill but twisting a rough estimate into a hard guideline that traps us, a guideline you made on the spur of the moment and told me afterwards should be optimized more thoroughly is bad for all us. There are no hard and fast rules besides we need a warp core and primary computer, everything else we need to critically examine and contextualize rather than just assuming and making asses of us all.
45 T1 shaves off ~15 spaces from your 50 T1 estimate. We can drop the vast majority of Aux sensors since people seem to be interested in the minimum of science. That's ~22 spaces conservatively. We can change the large transporter to a medium transporter because we don't need high throughput on transferring things and the multipliers are wasted on us. ~26. I think we can settle for 40 cargo spaces and I think more importantly that number is useful for us because it lets us establish a baseline (How long can a warship operate with roughly 1 cargo space for each 10kt of displacement- this ship is as much a test bed and a learning experience as it is anything else for us). ~34 spaces. Add the 17 spaces your own planning left and that's 51 spaces Enough for 6 torpedo tubes (25-26 spaces) and a large+normal workshop (21 spaces) - and we can probably find further savings if we need to, that was only off the cuff.
None of these are crippling losses in capability, the capacity for an enemy to run from our burst damage monster anytime they feel like the current fight isn't going their way? That is a crippling gap for a warship and I imagine most large warships are going to have at least 2 torpedoes stern. If we assume their torpedoes are more powerful- as we have WoG almost no one else is currently at even the basic starting techs from character creation, we'd probably want at least 6 prow photonic launchers to try and match 2 aft photon launchers. We can absolutely afford that, and dismissing tangible concerns over hypothetical sacrifices based off a very rough estimate is just tying our hands and trapping ourselves from making informed decisions.
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- Location
- his hidden lair
I'm not even against keeping the Matter printer in if we can afford it- and I think we can. My issue is I think comparing it to the Cloak that let us avoid literally every single fight we encountered in the Nebula up until we left because they finally figured out some minor anti-cloak tactics is a bit much. I can't find anything that the matter printer was the only thing that let us fix the Warp Drive, and it shouldn't have been since it can only make refined materials for the workshops to play with. Presumably we had some stockpiles of materials to machine with the workshop incase the matter printer itself ever broke.
[X] Plan The brave Guardian bravely ran away
[X] Plan The brave Guardian bravely ran away
I think I might have found the point of disagreement here:
That snippet is from right after the Star Seeker was boosted into the nebula. The points that stick out to me are
- Warp was impossible until power was restored.
- repair required more conduit than was carried as spares
- making more conduit was difficult even with a matter printer.
My reading is that the Matter Printer was necessary for more than repairing a few lances, that without a printer the Star Seeker actually might not have been able to return home at all.
The cloak lets us pick many of our battles, but without a printer I think we might have wound up forced to engage ships anyway, just so we could strip them of enough conduit to repair our warp capability.
None of that detracts from your points that the Guardians are probably going to stay close enough to home that they won't actually need extensive self-repair capabilities. Including a Matter Printer would make that practice a choice, instead of a necessity. (or at least reduces the chance we need to scuttle a ship, if we do send them far afield. ships are expensive)
The ships are looking to be pretty great either way. I just think a printer would be very nice.
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This idea I very much like. Being able to tune ship endurance would be a boon going forward.
- Location
- his hidden lair
Fair enough, it was more important to repairing the Warp drive than I realized. I looked up warp core when I was searching for repairs so I missed that. Given how little combat we needed to do to get all the salvage we did- I still think we would have been able to successfully leave the nebula- and while I know it isn't your argument I'm not sure the example really justifies the Guardian either.
That damage was the result of our warp nacelles being overcharged by the Booster Stations right? Exotic and inexplicable internal damage you have to somehow account for makes perfect sense on an Explorer like the Star Seeker, not necessarily for something like the Guardian. As for recovering a ship- ideally we have enough of these they aren't deployed alone, and the first upgrade package or two will probably include tractor beams to tow a damaged ship. I know I'm going to advocate for tractor beam research because with the more limited refit the Furious Winds are going to get, we'll probably need to tow them into a colony system and use them as System Defense Boats.
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- Location
- Fort Worth, TX
[X]Plan: The turrets will do the job.
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I've got to head out and I don't know when I'll be back today. So I'll not respond to most items until later. I will repost my warp chart.
We have a Warp 4 engine. Let's say the new deflector lets us get a full 0.5 warp factor over the Iron Road. So cruising at Warp 3. A star is going to be 7.5 to 15 months away at the shortest. I don't know what the closest Star is in this quest so I'll use Earth. There are about 5-6 stars at a quick count larger then a red dwarf in that distance. The closest is 4.something LY away.
7.5 months back for repairs, 7.5 months out to return to station. Over a T-year round trip. For the 1 or 2 stars at the shortest possible distance. Returning to dock for any ship that isn't in our home system is a major undertaking. Slipping into drydock for repairs is not going to be easy. Yes, this will get somewhat shorter, but even if the Warp 5 engine lets you cruise at a full Warp 4 it's still an ~8 month round trip. With those kinds of distances you can't count on having just the right spares. Especially in the face of combat damage.
We have a Warp 4 engine. Let's say the new deflector lets us get a full 0.5 warp factor over the Iron Road. So cruising at Warp 3. A star is going to be 7.5 to 15 months away at the shortest. I don't know what the closest Star is in this quest so I'll use Earth. There are about 5-6 stars at a quick count larger then a red dwarf in that distance. The closest is 4.something LY away.
7.5 months back for repairs, 7.5 months out to return to station. Over a T-year round trip. For the 1 or 2 stars at the shortest possible distance. Returning to dock for any ship that isn't in our home system is a major undertaking. Slipping into drydock for repairs is not going to be easy. Yes, this will get somewhat shorter, but even if the Warp 5 engine lets you cruise at a full Warp 4 it's still an ~8 month round trip. With those kinds of distances you can't count on having just the right spares. Especially in the face of combat damage.
| Warp Factor | C | Earth Months to cross 5 LY | 10 LY | 20 LY | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 30.0 | 60.0 | 120.0 | |
| 2 | 4 | 15.0 | 30.0 | 60.0 | |
| 3 | 8 | 7.5 | 15.0 | 30.0 | |
| 4 | 16 | 3.8 | 7.5 | 15.0 |