I value hitting powers as highest, followed by armor, and speed.
HITTING POWER: This is important for any military-vessel. The ability to inflict cripping damage to the enemy.
The ships should have heavy long-range and medium-range, and short-range weapons...
Long-Range Weapons I constitute as being missiles...
Predominately Anti-Fighter Missiles, and Torpedoes.
-Cruise Missiles: Long-range missiles for carrying out attacks on planetary targets, or stations. They can be used to attack capships as well. They can be equipped with a heavy-warhead of matter/anti-matter, a phase-shield penetrating warhead, a bio-warhead, chemical, or nano-technological warheads.
-Torpedoes: Standard Anti-Capship Missiles: They carry a warhead capable of destroying most Destroyer-Type ships with a single hit... They require a 20-second lock-on for their shield-penetrating systems to determine the exact phase-shift frequency of the capships phase shields. After that, they are on their way. They produce a powerful-dispersion field which disrupts the phase-shields in that quarter and allows the torpedo to bypass the phase-shield un-defended.
-Anti-Fighter Missiles: Small, light missiles for use in destroying fighters. Most will destroy a WC2 or WC3 fighter with a single hit.
Medium Range Weapons: Weapons I constitute as being guns...
I've basically divided the guns into 3 seperate categories...
-Main-Guns: These are anti-matter guns or other guns suited for penetrating Capital-ship phase shields.
-Secondary Guns: These are smaller guns suited for destroying fighters, or certain larger ships not equipped with phase-shields.
-Point-defense guns (I'll get into this one a little bit later)
Short-Range Weapons: I qualify these as point-defenses
These are Point Defense Missiles: These are small missiles which are used to shoot down Torpedoes, and...
Point-Defense Cannons: These are small guns of fighter-strength used to shoot-down fighters-- they are normally computer-controlled, but can be manually over-ridden to manually target a given craft.
ARMOR: This actually concludes shields and armor. I just want to list armor first because these are the only weapons that can't be bypassed by shield-penetrating weapons...
-The shields should be phase-shields of a high centimeter equivalency.
-The armor should be a high-strength super-alloy of a high damage-resistance.
SPEED: This is important... if you're fast, you're not going to be harrassed. You can get in, and get out quickly. You don't want to be in a ship that's going to get constantly harrassed.
The Disadvantages are obvious though...
For the large gun armament, you'd require powerful capacitors and energy generation systems, which leads to a high-power reactor, which leads to high fuel-consumption...
The heavy armor rating also increases the ship's all-up weight, requiring heavy engines to haul the large-mass across space at even reasonable speeds. This requires a powerful reactor, and good engines, all of which drains up fuel.
The high-speed requires even more powerful shields and engines, this requires even more powerful reactors than would just be required to haul it through space at normal, it would also need even more power and even greater fuel-consumption. The greater acceleration demanded would require more powerful acceleration-absorbers and inertial-dampeners.
The ships would require greater fuel-capacity than most WC ships, because of it's more powerful reactors and engines and shield-generators.
This would reduce some reduction in internal area for other things. This would include
-Crew-spaces
-Weapons-supplies
-Food-Spaces
The ships would be a little bit cramped, but they shouldn't be a major problem.
The weapon's supplies would only include missiles and torpedoes. The large-supply of anti-matter guns and such weapons should compensate, they never run out of ammo. The torpedo and capship-missile supplies should still be significant...
I would also prefer to use versatility in my designs akin to the WC2 designs, with other ships in addition to just carriers carrying fighters.
-Concordia