Zor
More of a Zor than You
In this scenario you are the admiralty of an interstellar nation of three hundred inhabited star systems about 300 light years in diameter and populated by about one trillion sapient beings. Said nation is one of several such entities in your corner of the galaxy and while you have two allies of similar size neighboring you, you also have three hostile states. Said hostile states have been planning for some time the conquest and subjugation of your nation, either piece by piece or to split it in it's entirety between them. It is believed that in the next five to ten years there will be a major interstellar war.
Here is a rough outline of military spacecraft.
Both you, your allies and your enemies each command fleets with hundreds of battleships, about a thousand cruisers, thousands of destroyers and tens of thousands of Corvettes and Frigates as well as about a tenth that number in carriers. Most cargo ships are in the area of 200 to 800 meters long.
Weapons technology is as such…
As a general rule inhabited planets have defensive shield grids and fortresses in high orbit. Indiscriminate use of weapons of mass destruction is avoided and if it is done, it generally has major consequences: most notably the fact that it ends in the side which does it getting dogpiled. If a planet's shield is battered down, the planet surrenders.
FTL travel is achieved through Hyperdrive. Hyperdrive allows ships to make jumps of up to a light year travelling at an effective speed of 300 to 600c for periods of about a day before needing to fall back to realspace to recharge and cool down their hyperdrives which usually takes about a day. Civilian freighters can eliminate most of this deadtime by recharging their power cells and swapping out hot hyperdrives for cool ones at way stations. Due to the fact that hyperspace is inprecise in where ships fall out and it takes about half an hour to power up for a hyperspace jump, using hyperdrive for tactical manuvers in battle generally does not work. Spacecraft cannot safely enter or leave hyperspace too close to a gravity well (in the case of a star like Sol, a safe distance would be somewhere between the orbits of Uranus and Neptune). FTL communications exist, but are low range (about 1 ly) and has a low bit rate. A network of relay stations exist in your nation. FTL sensors exist, but they can only detect when a ship enters or leaves hyperspace with one ly and the approximate size of said ship.
However recently there has been a breakthrough in engine technology. Basically it allows a ship traveling through hyperspace to use only half the energy per kilogram as a regular ship. The only problem is that due to technical reasons this is only really viable if the ship is huge, about ten kilometers in length at least. As such two engineers have provided you with two designs for a super heavy spacecraft for your navy.
The first option is the Dreadnought: an ultra-heavy ten kilometer and (at its widest) 2 kilometer wide long battleship that is very heavily armed, armored and shielded. It would carry twenty four cannons on the scale of a battleship's lance as well as hundreds of regular battleship scale cannons, torpedo tubes and even more PD weapons. It would also carry some 1,536 fighters and 256 gunships. Simply put this Dreadnought would be able to engage entire fleets and win.
The second is the Mothership. The Mothership is even larger than the Dreadnought at twelve kilometers long and 3 kilometers wide but weighs less due to a greater amount of internal room. The Mothership has shields which are about half as strong as the Dreadnoughts as well as weapons comparable to a regular heavy battleship for defense. Her main asset is that inside her is a vast industrial complex which includes asteroid processing facilities, ore refineries, fabricators, assembly lines and assembly craft produce materiel for the fleet. This ranges from food and mechanical consumables through torpedoes, shield generators, armor, fighters and in numerous assembly births new ships up to the destroyer level (of which she can build five at a time taking three months to complete them along with twelve frigates every six weeks and twenty corvettes every three weeks). She can also has a fleet of hundreds of repair ships able to restore damaged ships back into fighting order. Long story short, having a Mothership along with a fleet on a military expedition would simplify logistics massively.
Either way it will take about five years to build either a Dreadnought or a Mothership and you only have the shipbuilding capacity to make one at a time.
Which do you choose?
Zor
Here is a rough outline of military spacecraft.
- Fighters: 15-30 meters long with crews of one or two personnel. Fast (having five times the forward acceleration of a battleship), cheap and maneuverable short range craft useful for raiding, harassment, scouting and attacking targets en-mass. Can operate for either a day or up to 36 hours.
- Gunships: 30-60 meters long with crews of 10 to 30. Heavier strike craft with lower acceleration but carrying heavier weapons payloads, armor, shields as well as a pair of Point Defense turrets. Can operate for up to a fortnight independently.
- Corvettes: 125 to 225 meters long with crews of 40 to 80. Corvettes are the smallest warships which can mount and hyperdrive. Corvettes are used for scouting, raiding light targets, deep space patrols, point defense, escorting minor targets and couriers. Corvettes can operate independently for up to 4 months.
- Frigates: 225 to 400 meters long with crews of 80 to 250. Frigates are the general workhorses of a fleet and broadly speaking come in two categories: the first are generalist assault frigates that are mainly used for engaging other frigates and smaller ships and the other are specialized frigates (torpedo frigates, lance frigates built around a single battleship scale energy weapon, interdictor frigates able to prevent any ship within 50 million kilometers from jumping to and force ships out of hyperspace, point defense frigates, shield frigates able to project a large forward shield) with maybe a few point defense weapons as a concession. Frigates have supplies for eight months on average.
- Destroyers: 400 to 600 meters long with crews of 250 to 600. The smallest capital ships, primary function of a destroyer is to destroy enemy frigates, though they also act as raiders in groups. They are generally well rounded ships and are the largest warships most of your inhabited systems can build. They can operate independently for up to a year.
- Cruisers: 600 to 1,000 meters long with crews of 600 to 1,500. Heavy hitters able to tackle with most threats head on at a reasonable price, there is a wide amount of variation in cruisers from fast light cruisers able to keep up with destroyers to heavily armored and shielded heavy cruisers with large numbers of destroyer level weaponry to engage fleets of smaller craft to battlecruisers which carry battleship level weapons. They can operate independently for between 1 to 1.5 years depending on their configuration.
- Battleships: 1,000 to 1,600 meters long with crews of 1,500 to 4,000. Ships of the line and the heaviest hitters in the fleet. They are big, ponderous and expensive but when they are brought to bear they can both take and dish out tremendous power. Their main armaments are usually 6 to 12 heavy energy cannons mounted in heavy turrets which they can fire more rapidly than lance frigates along with torpedo tubes and point defense weapons as secondary armaments. Some battleships also have large spinal mounts to get in a single devastating opening shot, though their long recycle periods means that such weapons are often seen as impractical. Battleships have supplies for 2 years.
- Carriers: A catch all term for ships between frigate scale support carriers and battleship sized fleet carriers that carry fighters and gunships. A fleet carrier can carry up to a thousand fighters or a hundred heavy gunships. At the same time many ships carry a complement of strike craft for support purposes. Some assault frigates can carry four fighters, a destroyer usually carries between eight and sixteen, cruisers carry between sixteen and forty eight while battleships can carry up to eighty six.
Both you, your allies and your enemies each command fleets with hundreds of battleships, about a thousand cruisers, thousands of destroyers and tens of thousands of Corvettes and Frigates as well as about a tenth that number in carriers. Most cargo ships are in the area of 200 to 800 meters long.
Weapons technology is as such…
- Torpedoes: missiles ranging from counter missiles to 50 meter long heavy torpedoes. Torpedoes are used for long range combat up to five million kilometers away. They can do a lot of damage on impact but can be intercepted by PD and require a lot of ammunition.
- Particle Cannons: Particle cannons are the main weapon of battle and range from fighter scale weapons to battleship lances. These have ranges from 30,000 to 500,000 km for heavy weapons.
- Plasma Cannons: Short ranged weapons (125,000 km maximum) that do a lot of damage. They are generally seen as specialist weapons but a plasma weapon armed destroyer can dish out about twice the damage of its particle cannon armed counterpart when in effective range.
As a general rule inhabited planets have defensive shield grids and fortresses in high orbit. Indiscriminate use of weapons of mass destruction is avoided and if it is done, it generally has major consequences: most notably the fact that it ends in the side which does it getting dogpiled. If a planet's shield is battered down, the planet surrenders.
FTL travel is achieved through Hyperdrive. Hyperdrive allows ships to make jumps of up to a light year travelling at an effective speed of 300 to 600c for periods of about a day before needing to fall back to realspace to recharge and cool down their hyperdrives which usually takes about a day. Civilian freighters can eliminate most of this deadtime by recharging their power cells and swapping out hot hyperdrives for cool ones at way stations. Due to the fact that hyperspace is inprecise in where ships fall out and it takes about half an hour to power up for a hyperspace jump, using hyperdrive for tactical manuvers in battle generally does not work. Spacecraft cannot safely enter or leave hyperspace too close to a gravity well (in the case of a star like Sol, a safe distance would be somewhere between the orbits of Uranus and Neptune). FTL communications exist, but are low range (about 1 ly) and has a low bit rate. A network of relay stations exist in your nation. FTL sensors exist, but they can only detect when a ship enters or leaves hyperspace with one ly and the approximate size of said ship.
However recently there has been a breakthrough in engine technology. Basically it allows a ship traveling through hyperspace to use only half the energy per kilogram as a regular ship. The only problem is that due to technical reasons this is only really viable if the ship is huge, about ten kilometers in length at least. As such two engineers have provided you with two designs for a super heavy spacecraft for your navy.
The first option is the Dreadnought: an ultra-heavy ten kilometer and (at its widest) 2 kilometer wide long battleship that is very heavily armed, armored and shielded. It would carry twenty four cannons on the scale of a battleship's lance as well as hundreds of regular battleship scale cannons, torpedo tubes and even more PD weapons. It would also carry some 1,536 fighters and 256 gunships. Simply put this Dreadnought would be able to engage entire fleets and win.
The second is the Mothership. The Mothership is even larger than the Dreadnought at twelve kilometers long and 3 kilometers wide but weighs less due to a greater amount of internal room. The Mothership has shields which are about half as strong as the Dreadnoughts as well as weapons comparable to a regular heavy battleship for defense. Her main asset is that inside her is a vast industrial complex which includes asteroid processing facilities, ore refineries, fabricators, assembly lines and assembly craft produce materiel for the fleet. This ranges from food and mechanical consumables through torpedoes, shield generators, armor, fighters and in numerous assembly births new ships up to the destroyer level (of which she can build five at a time taking three months to complete them along with twelve frigates every six weeks and twenty corvettes every three weeks). She can also has a fleet of hundreds of repair ships able to restore damaged ships back into fighting order. Long story short, having a Mothership along with a fleet on a military expedition would simplify logistics massively.
Either way it will take about five years to build either a Dreadnought or a Mothership and you only have the shipbuilding capacity to make one at a time.
Which do you choose?
Zor
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