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Department of Starship Design (Trek-ish)

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Mechanis said:
Described earlier, but basically: take a carnivorous lizard, apply the standard Star Trek "people with funny makeup" filter, and then make them look like roughly hewn statues of something dark and volcanic.
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Ah cool felt like doodling something, this is probably not at all what they look like, and the pose is wonky (since I'm no artist and this was drawn by mouse) so I inserted holograms even though they probably don't exist in setting yet.

 
Since it definitely won't spoil anything at this point, they are very loosely based on the Lapis from very obscure 2.5D tactical space sim Genesis Rising in several particulars, with a very hefty slathering of Star Trek and Fallen Empire tropes for flavor.

(That game is weird. At least partially because you have to play through the whole thing three times to get to the actual ending. There's time travel involved, let's just say.)

(Edit: and the last mission involves you literally fighting yourself. Two of yourself. The AI is even programed to ape your playstyle!

Time Travel.)
 
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Really curious what the hell they hit us with. I'm assuming an overclocked plasma torpedo but damn if it didn't do a lot of damage. And from what little I know about Genesis Rising, it makes sense why any interaction with an alien species or foreign ship was instantly meant with hostility (humanity gets quite the body count under its belt there)
 
Karugus said:
Really curious what the hell they hit us with. I'm assuming an overclocked plasma torpedo but damn if it didn't do a lot of damage. And from what little I know about Genesis Rising, it makes sense why any interaction with an alien species or foreign ship was instantly meant with hostility (humanity gets quite the body count under its belt there)
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They catastrophically overloaded their plasma torpedo launcher by dumping the ship's entire supply of hydrogen into it in one go, yes.
Basically, they used their own ship as a massive Casaba-Howitzer rather than firing the thing as actually intended.
(Mechanically they got three critical successes for inflicting damage to Star Seeker, but crit-failed two "Jury rigged scrap objects to this" rolls and rolled "crippling explosion" both times, so I decided (in light of that ship's earlier very good rolls for tactical skill) this meant they blew themselves up on purpose to get your ship caught in the blast, having (correctly) deduced that they would otherwise get carved apart without inflicting meaningful damage.)
 
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The Paths of Medusa, Part II: Battle at the Jamming Array, Part 2
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    • "Engage Cloak! Engage cloak now!"

    "Captain! High-energy readings! Two of the ships are charging… I've never seen anything like this!"​


    ​

    "Maximum impulse! Helm, one hundred fifteen degrees port negative, full evasive!"

    A hail of green and coruscating green-blue spears punctuated Aqyr's commands, as the battlecruiser and four of its escorts opened up with every emitter that could bear, slashing, stabbing beams filling space like a forest of deadly needles. Engines pushed to their maximum, the Star Seeker almost danced through space under the ephemeral veil of her cloaking device, guided by a helm crew as familiar with her limits as their own hands.

    It wasn't enough.​

    Twin roiling stars bust into being, waves of superheated plasma expanding outwards. This was not the suicidal holocost that had disabled almost half of the ship's weapons in one blow, not even close enough to heat her hull… but there were only so many places the ship could be, to evade those detonations, and the crew of the hostile battlecruiser guessed correctly.

    Four searing beams of blue-green fire smashed into the Star Seeker's already wounded port plating, sputtering integrity-fields smashed aside like tissue paper, and carved four lines of fire and ruin in their wake. These were no mere light weapons of a ship barely a tenth the Union ship's mass, but the potent heavy beams of a craft almost half its size, and they cut deep. Compartments flooded with plasmatic fire, turning their contents to ash and slag. Power-grids crashed as critical relays were severed. Small secondary detonations tore even more flesh from the Stellar Union vessel- and worst of all, emergency breakers tripped, shielding the delicate machinery of her cloak from power surges at the cost of failure.

    But Star Seeker had metallic flesh to spare, and even with her cloak stripped away, it had lasted long enough for the ship to reach its goal.​
    "Shoot all weapons!"
    Shrieking particle-beams slashed out, hammering already-depleted shields. Torpedoes poured from her bays as fast as the autoloaders could cycle, a torrent of orange-yellow stars set for maximum yield proximity detonation, each guided by crewmen at the bridge's auxiliary consoles into organic, evasive courses that dodged slashing beams by centimeters.

    Without her cloak, against such numbers, the Stellar Union ship was a trapped rat, and like a trapped rat, she attacked her foes with vicious fury. More wounds accrued as the escorting gunships vanished one after the other, potent vessels for their size but hopelessly outmatched against the titan raging through their midst. Again and again the Battlecruiser's weapons hammered against the ship, and again again the inflicted gaping wounds fit to kill a lesser craft.

    And again and again, those wounds, as grievous as they were, were not enough, tearing, rending and burning outer compartments, yes, but failing to reach critical systems, even if surges and lucky beams gradually deprived the ship of its weapons and sensors. Then, strained to the breaking point at last—for even as the battlecruiser had hammered away at her, Star Seeker's particle lances had howled their fury back—the shields of the battlecruiser flickered and died. Her last remaining starboard particle lance snarled-
    ​
    -and it was over.
    Voting will resume ​
     
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    • Let's not try that again. We survived, we're going to get plenty of loot and salvage, maybe even some prisoners- but that was far more close than I think any of us prefer. Hopefully we'll be able to repair a lot of the damage with our onboard workshop and the plentiful feedstock our alien friends have helpfully supplied us, but I doubt we'll be able to get this ship fully functional until she limps back home.

    Edit: You have to love the contrast in hull durability- once the BC lost shields it was gutted by a single particle lance. Meanwhile the Star Seeker started this second fight as a maimed whale and just plowed through an entire task force's firepower without breaking up. I suspect our design philosophy is still going to emphasize hull durability even with shields after this being our formative experience.
     
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    Karugus said:
    Let's not try that again. We survived, we're going to get plenty of loot and salvage, maybe even some prisoners- but that was far more close than I think any of us prefer. Hopefully we'll be able to repair a lot of the damage with our onboard workshop and the plentiful feedstock our alien friends have helpfully supplied us, but I doubt we'll be able to get this ship fully functional until she limps back home.

    Edit: You have to love the contrast in hull durability- once the BC lost shields it was gutted by a single particle lance. Meanwhile the Star Seeker started this second fight as a maimed whale and just plowed through an entire task force's firepower without breaking up. I suspect our design philosophy is still going to emphasize hull durability even with shields after this being our formative experience.
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    Mass tells, in this case- Star Seeker just has so much hull that it takes a LOT to actually start hitting vital systems.

    Now, granted, it was very close at the end there, Star Seeker shot her entire ready magazine dry and had only three functional energy weapons left at the end, but she battered down the shields just in time and got a lucky critical success, hitting the Warbird right in the fusion reactor. But yeah, that was entirely too much like a fair fight after the Warbird got that first lucky* hit in and knocked out the Cloak.

    But yeah, the ship can recover the bulk of the damage. Crew losses, not so much, but a few hours of work and the holes in the hull with be patched, the Cloak will be fixed as soon as DamCon gets to and resets the emergency cutoff (it's a physical switch, so a Crewman has to go crawling around in the maintenance tubes to physically reconnect the thing) and so on.

    Probably don't want to get into any more punchups until you've had a few days to replace the particle lances and emitters that got a little broken around the edges, but as mentioned, you didn't actually lose any critical systems to damage.

    * Well, "Lucky." It was very much deliberate, with the task force deliberately limiting the areas the ship could be. Fanatic doesn't mean idiot, after all.
     
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    Thank Glob the star seeker is so thicc and optimally shaped for internal volume with the important bits placed deep in the hull
     
    the swarm said:
    Thank Glob the star seeker is so thicc and optimally shaped for internal volume with the important bits placed deep in the hull
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    This fight really put into perspective how hard it is to get through all the useless cargo bays you see in the hull diagram and actually start hitting the systems that matter. It's kinda a shame most of our future designs probably won't be mostly cargo bays by volume.
     
    Basic spaceship design 101; if it doesn't need access to the hull and is a critical system, you shove it as close to the middle as you can, with as much noncritical stuff between it and the outside of the hull as can be managed; even if you aren't expecting to get shot at there's all sorts of hazards you want a good few bulkheads away from, say, your primary reactor.

    It's also important to remember that significant cargo capacity is going to remain a necessity for quite some time, by this point Star Seeker is the better part of fifteen T-years out and has barely managed to poke around the proverbial front yard. And aren't necessarily just a room full of crates, either; for example Star Seeker has a number which are set up as greenhouses and aquaponics bays, because that's easier-not to mention better for morale!-than trying to cart around enough rations for literally the population of a small town over two and a half decades; and the indefinite-cruise modification mentioned for the Iron Road class definitely includes conversion of some of its cargo space to, at the very least, an aquaponics setup to feed the crew.
     
    Mechanis said:
    Basic spaceship design 101; if it doesn't need access to the hull and is a critical system, you shove it as close to the middle as you can, with as much noncritical stuff between it and the outside of the hull as can be managed; even if you aren't expecting to get shot at there's all sorts of hazards you want a good few bulkheads away from, say, your primary reactor.

    It's also important to remember that significant cargo capacity is going to remain a necessity for quite some time, by this point Star Seeker is the better part of fifteen T-years out and has barely managed to poke around the proverbial front yard. And aren't necessarily just a room full of crates, either; for example Star Seeker has a number which are set up as greenhouses and aquaponics bays, because that's easier-not to mention better for morale!-than trying to cart around enough rations for literally the population of a small town over two and a half decades; and the indefinite-cruise modification mentioned for the Iron Road class definitely includes conversion of some of its cargo space to, at the very least, an aquaponics setup to feed the crew.
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    This makes me wonder if we might eventually see a concept similar to AON armor schemes and basically have both an outter armor belt and deeper in the ship an armored citadel containing the most critical ship systems like the reactor and the bridge.

    I'm not sure if you want that kind of complication, and we still couldn't afford to ignore the first armor belt given its highly unlikely the inner citadel could cover weapon batteries. But that kind of armor scheme would let us say- include massive armor slabs around our hypothetical hyperspace taps to protect the load bearing explodium.
     
    Mechanis said:
    if it doesn't need access to the hull and is a critical system, you shove it as close to the middle as you can, with as much noncritical stuff between it and the outside of the hull as can be managed
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    It would be cool to see more sci-fi do this, but a ton are literally just a naval ship in space.
     
    There are of course plenty of things where doing that isn't desirable; you do, for example, want at the very least a pilothouse or flying bridge with windows so you can, for example, navigate on dead reckoning and the mark one eyeball if your sensors are out, and of course there's always going to be crew spaces with windows for morale reasons. And every ship with several labs probably wants at least a couple near the outside of the hull, so they can be set up to eject the whole dang lab if that's what it takes.

    It also gets into physical geometry and size of the ship itself, too; Star Seeker for example has both a very large internal volume for its exterior surface area and is just a very large ship in general, which allows it to be built that way quite easily.

    The main reason why most Trek setting people don't bother (which remains true in this quest) is that, fundamentally, armor has definitively lost the arms race between weapons and defenses- there's only so much even polerized integrity fields can do to stave off the kind of weapons a starship can bring, even before Exotic Subspace Fekery™ comes in, and the entire technical paradigm has sharply diminishing returns compared to increased costs in difficulty of manufacturing, technical complexity and resource requirements, not to mention fairly hard physical limitations, that once you have shields it's generally more cost effective to invest in better shields.

    Which is not to say there aren't armor technologies that can at least heavily supplement shields, just that they're generally very high on the technological investment scale compared to equivalently protective shields.

    For example, that fair fight with the local Warbird was very close to a last minute victory, and that's against a ramshackle pile of scrap (with a nice looking casing) that had already significantly strained its shields plunging though a serious environmental hazard- and it still managed to nearly outlast Star Seeker, and inflict pretty significant damage even if it didn't actually hit anything critical.
     
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    Star Seeker bridge WiP
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    • I would have had this sooner, but Vectary keeps randomly deleting swaths of my geometry every time I load the fekker, so it's taken ages to get to an even mostly done state.
    (It's gotten to the point where every time I load the damn thing I have to look it over to check what's been deleted this time, since there's no pattern to it. Things that were fine on one load vanish even though I didn't edit them at all, sometimes; it's *exceedingly* annoying.)


    View from the Captain's chair:


    She BEEG
    (Though in fairness, Starfleet (and most canon powers) doesn't(/don't) bother with individual gunnery control stations for every single weapon, and would probably put the rear support functions off in their own rooms.)
     
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    • The Paths of Medusa, Part II: Disabiling the Array
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    • Wounded, but victorious, the Star Seeker now turns to the matter of the ancient jamming array…​
    "After some consideration, three overall options present themselves, Captain. Firstly, there is a proposal to use an experimental shield configuration on a purpose built extra large torpedo, which the team believes will successfully navigate the particle arc zone to reach the station itself. This poses negligible risk to the ship, but will take some time, as the torpedo itself will have to be fabricated and it may take several attempts to achieve a successful hit.
    The second proposal is to attempt a repeat of what was used against the vortex station, and use the deflector to induce destructive resonance in the station's energy emitter. The obvious advantage of course is that this will require no material cost to the ship, but it would require closing to the edge of the arc zone and could potentially result in a particle arc being drawn to the deflector.
    The final proposal is to sacrifice a shuttle as a kinetic impactor—while the particle arcs are powerful enough to destroy a ship, they are not of sufficient strength to vaporize one, so an automated shuttle at maximum impulse should be able to inflict sufficient damage to disable the station. While obviously the most expedient option, it would require considerable time to replace the shuttle itself."
    How do you disable the jamming station?
    [ ] Use experimental torpedo
    Pros: No risk to the ship, testing of larger scale shields in real world conditions.
    Cons: Requires the most time, and may need several tries to succeed.    ​
    [ ] Use the Deflector
    Pros: least damaging to the station, no material cost.
    Cons: potential damage to/destruction of the main deflector, adding significantly to Star Seeker's repair time if so.    ​
    [ ] Use a shuttle
    Pros: requires no special preparations and can thus be done immediately, zero risk to the ship.
    Cons: you lose a shuttle for the immediate future.    ​
    Ve're bek, keedos.
     
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    • [X] Use a shuttle

    We can afford to be temporarily without a shuttle, we can't afford to lose our deflector or be stuck here for too long in case another group comes looking.
     
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