Oggy
Rear Admiral
I’ve been out of the loop over the weekend and missed a few questions; I’ll try and clarify my thoughts as I put my sketch together.
My first thoughts were what does the battleship want to do. From Action Stations they are there to deliver massive firepower to enemy ships to crack the shielding and destroy them, and to soak up punishment. From that I thought “massive plasma guns”, which in turn I thought would need massive reactors to feed them.
I think I had in my head that the Reactors would take up about half the mass of the ship.
I then thought about the cannons and considered doing a broadside only vessel like the old sail ships, but discarded that as they aren’t very flexible when it comes to firing arcs so I went with turrets, configured a bit like the 20th century battleships, so every gun can be brought to bear on a target broadside. Because it’s in space, and bearing in mind the Plunkett, I made it so all the guns can fire forwards by elevating the rear turrets.
Only the rear turrets can fire at targets dead rear, my thinking there was that if you are engaging a target directly to the rear, you are probably running away from superior opposition and would direct all energy to the shields and engines.
The front of the ship is angular to deflect enemy fire, I don’t know how plasma would behave, is it purely energy or is it like a liquid or something, I had an image in my head that if a glancing blow struck the angled armour it would “splash” away from the ship, like if you fire a water pistol at an angled surface, I was also thinking of solid ordnance as well, angled armour works well on tanks in WW2 for example, so missiles might ricochet off.
I had also seen the front of the ship being extremely heavily armoured, with massive slabs of armour facing the front.
Bearing in mind the comments regarding whether it would need an exposed bridge at all I went with the thought that it could have blast shields that close when engaging enemy ships, a bit like the Battlestar bridges in BSG:Original.
The kilrathi bombardment weapons are mentioned in Action Stations. These could just be the main weapons of the Battleships, but I thought maybe they are dedicated weapon systems and perhaps Confed would have them too, I saw them being mounted on racks on the underside of the ship to bombard surface targets as the ship passes overhead in orbit.
The two Fire control towers are nods to the Conning tower structures of the later Confed designs
For the engines, I picked up on the Victory style engine pods as the Yorktown is referred to as an old design that is brought back into active service. I angled them so they wouldn’t interfere with the turrets angles of fire.
I didn’t include any AA guns as Fighters and Bombers are considered a threat to larger ships because of the strength of the shielding. I imagined that in a fleet, corvettes and frigates would interdict fighters and bombers. As the BB primary mission is to engage enemy Captial ships I imagined that every scrap of power would be directed into the main guns and shields
I tried to keep the design as compact as possible, as compact structures tend to be more structurally robust which I would imagine would be of benefit if you are taking fire on the line.
I'd like to take a crack at the Kilrathi Battleships, but its finding the time
My first thoughts were what does the battleship want to do. From Action Stations they are there to deliver massive firepower to enemy ships to crack the shielding and destroy them, and to soak up punishment. From that I thought “massive plasma guns”, which in turn I thought would need massive reactors to feed them.
I think I had in my head that the Reactors would take up about half the mass of the ship.
I then thought about the cannons and considered doing a broadside only vessel like the old sail ships, but discarded that as they aren’t very flexible when it comes to firing arcs so I went with turrets, configured a bit like the 20th century battleships, so every gun can be brought to bear on a target broadside. Because it’s in space, and bearing in mind the Plunkett, I made it so all the guns can fire forwards by elevating the rear turrets.
Only the rear turrets can fire at targets dead rear, my thinking there was that if you are engaging a target directly to the rear, you are probably running away from superior opposition and would direct all energy to the shields and engines.
The front of the ship is angular to deflect enemy fire, I don’t know how plasma would behave, is it purely energy or is it like a liquid or something, I had an image in my head that if a glancing blow struck the angled armour it would “splash” away from the ship, like if you fire a water pistol at an angled surface, I was also thinking of solid ordnance as well, angled armour works well on tanks in WW2 for example, so missiles might ricochet off.
I had also seen the front of the ship being extremely heavily armoured, with massive slabs of armour facing the front.
Bearing in mind the comments regarding whether it would need an exposed bridge at all I went with the thought that it could have blast shields that close when engaging enemy ships, a bit like the Battlestar bridges in BSG:Original.
The kilrathi bombardment weapons are mentioned in Action Stations. These could just be the main weapons of the Battleships, but I thought maybe they are dedicated weapon systems and perhaps Confed would have them too, I saw them being mounted on racks on the underside of the ship to bombard surface targets as the ship passes overhead in orbit.
The two Fire control towers are nods to the Conning tower structures of the later Confed designs
For the engines, I picked up on the Victory style engine pods as the Yorktown is referred to as an old design that is brought back into active service. I angled them so they wouldn’t interfere with the turrets angles of fire.
I didn’t include any AA guns as Fighters and Bombers are considered a threat to larger ships because of the strength of the shielding. I imagined that in a fleet, corvettes and frigates would interdict fighters and bombers. As the BB primary mission is to engage enemy Captial ships I imagined that every scrap of power would be directed into the main guns and shields
I tried to keep the design as compact as possible, as compact structures tend to be more structurally robust which I would imagine would be of benefit if you are taking fire on the line.
I'd like to take a crack at the Kilrathi Battleships, but its finding the time
