Star Wars: Ship Designer Quest (1.5)
- Thread starter Jax
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I know it's mostly folly to speculate on, because shields in star wars just work, but a part of me wonders what the reason for that is. Is there some sort of power or size issue with shields on smaller craft?
Except, on larger craft there seems to commonly be coverage issues, like with the Star Destroyer.
Barondoctor
The things I chase come to me.
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Watsonian: small fighters have small available power for devoting to shields. Big ships have big power plants and can devote a lot of energy to shields, but because of the locations of projectors may not be able to deflect fire coming from snubfighters in underneath the shielding intended to stop big-ship guns from punching through.
Doylist: Star Wars fighters tend to be based on WW2 dogfighting. Capital ships tend to be based on battleships. One has a much greater reputation for durability than the other.
Star Wars is more transparent than most about the fact that the Watsonian justifications exist to serve the Doylist purposes.
Power issues essentially are size issues. Though in this case I expect that SW power production scales exponentially.
HolyDragoon
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I think fighters don't carry hypermatter reactors, so yeah, would make sense that larger ships are more reliant on shielding.
In fact, what is the smaller ship size confirmed to carry a hypermatter reactor as a powerplant?
I'll hazard a guess that it's anything mounting a hyperdrive.
[X] Plan Marketability
So an X-Wing?
Cause they are kinda known partly for having a hyperdrive...
Sir_Travelsalot
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Y-Wings also have hyperdrives, and are contemporary designs for the time period this quest is set in.
I'd reckon that makes sense, X-Wings were dropped by the Imperial Navy in favor of TIE fighters because X-Wings were more expensive. It is kinda unnecessary for most starfighters that are intended to be launched from a larger vessel to have a hyperdrive to begin with.
Barondoctor
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"Things that go into hyperspace" is the generalized answer, though an X-wing and a Y-wing specifically use a cryogenic power cell with an ionization reactor.
Acclamators (Heavy Cruiser) have them. The Munificent-class Frigate (sized to be a heavy cruiser but called a frigate just because) have them. Many frigate-and-smaller craft don't have an explicit listing for their powerplant, and oddly starships have a lot of variation in powerplant (chemistry, fission/fusion, hypermatter annihilation).
The X-Wing, in concert with the Star Destroyer and the Death Star, is in the conversation of the three most defining vehicles of the Galactic Civil War. Always Late explains it better than myself, but the short-and-sweet for X-Wings isn't strictly just the hyperdrive (although it helped), but also the sensor suite.
The sensor suite in the nose means you don't need a dedicated carrier because you don't need a flight control bridge / air traffic control because the sensors in the nose do that, which was unheard-of before X-Wings did it. This enabled X-Wings to have a tiny footprint: just somewhere you can stash an X-Wing and a supply cache (provided by friendly smugglers) to keep them running. Which enabled rebels to jump in from anywhere, blow things up, and then run to anywhere else. The fact that they carried ordnance that let them punch way above their weight class was just icing.
You know we might be able to do a lesser version of why the X wing was so good with our courier. We can take that hull and modify it to serve as an AWACs bird there by allowing worlds without the budget to support carriers to have anti pirate force projection.
Yeah, the design itself is really good for both a light freighter and a star fighter. I expect that we'll see a lot of desire for a wartime refit, militia style, should conflict reach our sector of space.
Wouldn't even be that hard, it specializes in having space and being cheap so it's kinda perfect.
My original plan for its war refit is being a torpedo bomber. Basicly imagine ship able to dump a full spread of torpedos into a lucrehulk before running away at high speed.
That's rather ingenious, especially if we could find a way to have our cargo bay module double as a torpedo bay somehow. It would also make for a better weapon than whatever small blasters or lasers we could affix to the ship, I think, given that size doesn't necessarily denote payload in the same fashion with torpedos.
Likewise, it's much harder to make a deflector shield that dynamically reacts to torpedos/missiles. Their speed/kinetic energy isn't what does the damage, so they can be moving so slow that they might not register to the shields as an attack.
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Sir_Travelsalot
Never wakes up tired.
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The flip side of that is that most of the ships that you're supposed to fire torpedoes at have a lot of point-defence guns on them, which is a significant factor in whether or not the torpedo will actually get through and hit the target.
Hence my mentioning that the ship should launch a spread of torps.
[X] Plan Marketability
- Location
- Kiel; Germany
That is a write-in option for the Research department. Has synergy if you buy a missile or torpedo system before.
Currently, the Vote stands at 8 Vs. 8 between these two plans:
[ ] Plan Marketability
-[ ][Design][1B] Upkeep
-[ ][Research][1B] Upkeep
-[ ][Research][2B] Basic Blaster
-[ ][Production][1B] Upkeep
-[ ][Production][3B] Ask for Shielding
[ ] Plan Alex Mercer 2: Electric Boogaloo
-[ ](Design)(1B)Upkeep
-[ ](Research)(1B)Upkeep
-[ ](Production)(1B) Upkeep
-[ ][Research][2B] Basic Blaster
- [ ][Production][1B] Ask for Ship Accessories
-[ ][Production][2B] Begin the Prototype construction
I leave the vote open until this evening. If no decision has been reached a dice will decied.
[X] Plan Alex Mercer 2: Electric Boogaloo