"Interstellar Cruiser" - 1000t
"Cruiser, Fast Attack" - 3000t
"Cruiser, Large Flagship" - 10,000t
for fuck's sake just call it a battleship
This cruiser inflation is getting silly.
I'll admit to doing it partially as a bit, partially because switching to "battleship" feels trite (we're not a navy), and partially because for the most parts these ships vaguely do fit the traditional niche of a cruiser, where the definition is doctrinal as opposed to "a cruiser is a ship that's smaller than a battleship but bigger than a destroyer". The CLF would be a mix between the cruiser role and the battleship role, but I am adamant that it not be called a battlecruiser or else I will use the nuclear option
(the "is Iowa a battlecruiser" debate)
This isn't very "rules-based international order" but if you're a hegemon with thorough superiority to any possible rival you can get away with a lot of shit. The question is, are they overconfident from too long beating up on low-tech planets who can only muster a handful of light defence boats, or are we overconfident from never getting into a real fight and about to sign ourselves up to get facerolled by a squadron of 50,000t battlewagons?
We don't know, but we've also kinda passed the buck on doing the imperialism thing for a while now. We've been told that the primary mechanic for us to grow more capable is conquest, either military or some other approach. We've managed to fail our way into sphere-ing Cassalon and Xyri, but that's it. If we don't pick someone to push against eventually, we'll be at a greater and greater disadvantage.
I would note that they didn't immediately throw a squadron of 50,000 ton battlewagons at Menorb, despite us getting uncomfortably close to winning the "border conflict" there. The war plan we're thinking of is also to take things relatively slow, building logistics links north and connecting probing attacks, meaning if we do need to deescalate, we have options to do so.
And hey, if it really is an existential enemy, then the quest dies, we're all sad, and we bug Section to start a new one
For a "submarine", would it actually need to be big? You could probably do it on 500t I'd think.
So, just to be clear, there's two roles we're looking at here. One of them is a stealth boat that we can use to do unexpected things. The other is an extreme-range cruiser which can strike at rear areas. While they may overlap, there's also an argument that they shouldn't.
As for minimum sizes, stealth adds nothing to the tonnage, so we can make it as small as we want. The extreme jump range does impose some limits, but that gets into what we want it to do - it's possible to make something with 6 jumps of range on very low tonnage, but it'd have no ability to do anything when we get there.
Rolewise something like this would have a couple duties:
- Sneaky backline bombardment
- Commando raids on insufficiently-protected targets
- Wartime combat service
- Stealth recon
If you're just jumping in, creeping in-system, kicking some mass driver slugs down range, watching the impact and booking it you don't really need armour or much of a ship at all.
If you want to use it like the Lydians or specialise in commando ops or build something that can be completely self-sustaining in the field you might need a bigger ship but I'm not sure a full-size cruiser is necessary.
1 is a very viable use case, but it runs into questions of if there's something we want to be doing a hit-and-run bombardment of. If we can identify, for example, the enemy's orbital shipyards, then that could work.
2 is iffy. Commando raids require enough FLF troops to bypass automated defensive measures, which they presumably have, and then achieve a meaningful effect on target. Personnel suffer fatigue after extended periods aboard a ship, as well as large supporting infrastructure (e.g., FLF require armouries, medical bays, assault shuttles, and training spaces) that means that we'd be looking at a very large ship for what I think is a questionable role. Edit: also, you'd be alerting the locals that something jumped in, and if there's a high enough value target to justify deploying an expensive stealth ship, they'll probably be willing to defend it with something that will be painful if alerted.
3 isn't very worthwhile IMO. For one, we're unlikely to win a sensor/stealth fight against the Lydians. The ~2 TL advantage in sensors and software means they have to roll something like 3-4 lower than us for detection. Our current strategy of waiting for the Lydians to open fire, weathering the damage, and then hitting back hard enough to disable their now-revealed ships seems to be working out. Also, most of the fleet is designed around a 2-jump range, so a 6-jump ship wouldn't provide any benefit while interoperating.
4 might be surprisingly viable. To quote the rules, beyond 50,000 km, a jump flash is just a blip on the display that could alternately be a comet. If we jumped into a system, released a recon platform on an unexpected trajectory, then jumped out, it'd be very difficult to determine where that recon platform is and they'd need to waste a lot of time searching for it. However, such a platform is probably going to want to be unmanned to maximize how long it can stay in the system before the crwe goes insane, meaning it can't jump itself.
1 and 4 favour a jump tug combined with a stealthed payload. Jumping is relatively obvious and requires humans (which possibly suggests why the Lydians don't reinforce systems we've taken - they would throw away the stealth advantage). In case 1, we can save mass if we have a "weapons pod" that contains a supplementary J-drive, the fuel tankage needed to get into the system, and a torpedo or LMDC bay (A-5 Vigilante vibes). In case 4, we would want the smallest, stealthiest, longest lifetime sensor platform possible so that it's less likely to get intercepted.
2 and 3, meanwhile, are things I'm not as gung-ho about.
I also think this is missing option 5, which would be interdiction of enemy commercial and logistics traffic.
Features that would be good for one, as I see it:
- Range, of course, to fuck around outside the reach of supply lines. But how much? We could, for example, have a wolfpack staging out of deep space supply caches or linking up with flotilla ships. More than 6 jumps is probably a waste, and even then I'd probably want some of it to be droptanks.
- Armament - torpedoes are flexible and could be used in combat but can be intercepted; mass drivers are destructive but can't hit a movable target; mdcs are both murderously destructive (perhaps imbalancedly so?) and lethal in combat, but are relatively short ranged against a moving enemy.
- Sensors - a stealth craft probably shouldn't be using extendo-eyes or extension net drones but an on-board observatory could be very useful for target identification. Though would every ship have them, for solo missions, or would these operate as a wolfpack with one of the ships being a dedicated stealth surveyor?
- Defences including M-drive speed - a stealth ship's main defence is not being seen. Anything else is to buy time to jump away. Ideally you should never be in range of an armed opponent, so more than token armour and point defence is pointless. Though defence weapons don't weigh much.
- Reaction drive boosters are handy for making an escape or for keeping up with your own torpedoes while you fire multiple salvoes for a simultaneous impact but need fuel.
- Raiding capacity - cargo, marines, assault shuttles. Helping ourselves to vital intel or grabbing prisoners for interrogation could be useful, but heavy to carry and dangerous. Dumping a stack of mines onto someone else's backline might also be a trick, though damned unfriendly behaviour.
- Crew endurance - common spaces, RnR facilities etc. I know about submarines but we have a small population and most people aren't built for living in a tin can for months. Even if you tough it out, better facilities means better performance in the critical final moments of a mission.
- Self-sustainment - hydroponics, self-refueling drones and refineries, small-scale mining, refining, and manufacturing capacity to fabricate parts and either pad out supplies or perform missions of potentially indefinite length. Automating away crew positions makes hydroponics a lot easier.
Not to rain on your parade a bit, but I'm pretty sure it's not possible to include everything you've listed on a single hull. I did the math quickly, and you're using more than 100% of a hull. For example, a M-6 drive and its powerplant requires around 7.11% of the hull, added onto the 62.5% of the hull needed for the J-drive and its fuel. Reaction drives are even heavier. There are ways to get around this, but it's still going to be a very large spacecraft for what is, right now, an undefined mission.
I'd suggest that we try and pare this down to the bare minimum of what we intend for it to do. It's tough enough making a spacecraft that can do everything when 60% of the hull isn't already taken up by other things.
That said, the ideas are pretty good for their specific roles - if we want to engage in commerce raiding or use these ships as a "nuclear deterrent in space", for example, the stuff you list in 7 and 8 would be very useful.
I suspect it might actually be easier to make a spacecraft which has nice enough accomodations that the off-duty crew are on R&R time, and combine that with a ramscoop or fuel refinery and a small manufacturing facility to let it operate "forever", once we hit a certain jump range...
Droptank inaccuracy presumably only matters for the final jump, so if your target is 3 parsecs away and you have to make the whole flight alone you'd want a ship with 2 droptanks and 4 fuel internally; you'd arrive accurately using internal fuel, then return.
I've been toying with the idea of not having drop tanks at all. If we instead use an oversized jump drive and dock crewless spacecraft that are 99% fuel tank (and 1% small fusion plant) to the ships, we don't have to worry about the possibility of misjumps (with the horrific consequences) that drop tank usage brings. It'd also let you deploy your own fuel depots on the way in that you can rendezvous and tank off of on the way home.
Do we have Emissions Absorption Grids or are those the wrong edition?
That's been replaced by the lowest tier of stealth coating, and doesn't stack with other stealth stuff.
I think there's also some kind of half-thrust stealth M-Drive but I'm not sure what TL it is or if I hallucinated it.
CONCEALED MANOEUVRE DRIVE
Manoeuvre drives, whose function is described in
Ship Design on page 15, use thruster plates to move
a ship without the need for propellant. Manoeuvre
drive thruster plates are typically located on the outer
surface of a ship (facing aft is standard) where they
can perform best. While acceleration to their facing is
optimised, a ship may accelerate in other directions at
reduced thrust without turning the ship to a new facing.
For example, thruster plates can accelerate a ship at
up to 25% of their maximum thrust to port or starboard
and 10% to fore. Therefore, a ship with Thrust 4 could
exert one G of thrust to left or right and 0.4G to fore
without the need to turn the ship on its axis.
As such, thruster plates need not be exposed at all
and can optionally be concealed behind bulkheads.
This rather severely degrades performance but there
are some ship designs that are willing to accept the
trade-offs for added stealth. See the Sensors chapter
on page 55 for more information about features that
make a ship easier to detect, including the use of their
manoeuvre drives.
Concealed manoeuvre drives are contained within
ship bulkheads but must be within three metres of the
accelerating surface of the ship. Concealed manoeuvre
drives add 25% to the tonnage and cost of the drive.
The additional tonnage comprises a system that
contains and exhausts thruster plate ionisation out of
specially designed ports, reducing their detectability
to almost nil. Concealed manoeuvre drives cut
performance in half (round down), so a ship with Thrust
2 is reduced to 1 and so on. These drives are designed
to operate within confinement, so simply removing the
outer bulkhead does not add to their performance.
TL;DR, half thrust, 1.5x the cost, and they let us maneuver without being detected. Could be very useful for something we drop into the outer orbitals and then allow to coast around the inner system.
Settling into a cold war could still be expensive if we have to fortify our three main systems on the assumption that a stealth squadron could jump out of the black at any moment. Though we'd have to do that in wartime too.
We should do this anyways. It's also very cheap.
Greater strike range. If we had a supply point in menorb, for instance, we could strike anywhere in that exclusion zone Lydia has. With one parsec of jump range it restricts us to just the systems around Menorb. Additionally, Menorb is easier for the Lydians to strike in return, so my ship proposal would able to strike Lydian territory while keeping our logistics further away from them.
Strike range to do what, though? Is this a platform for us to bombard their planets? Attack their fleet? Target their merchants?
