Terran Shipkiller Concept

What do you think

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Vinman

Vice Admiral
I designed a ship whose main armament would be a large plasma weapon based upon the weapon added to Midway. In addition to the plasma weapon, the ship would be armed with seven laser turrets for point defense. Unlike its inspiration, the Kraken, the Terran shipkiller demands an escort.

Crew would be minimal, as the gun and associated machinery takes up a tremendous amount of the ships internal area. The ship would be about the size of a Tallahassee cruiser, and its armor would be somewhere between that of a Murphy Destroyer and a Plunkett Cruiser.

To facilitate precise aim, the shipkiller has a set of small drives located in a pod that can be moved along the forward half of the ship. In the pictures below, the pod is in the aftmost position.

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I admit, I'm an old SRA guy so I can't tell if my designs are ridiculous or not. Is this a dumb idea or could Confed field a ship like this?
 
i really don't see why confed would invest money in something like this. having had the Midway prove its worth, and with the cerberus kicking ass as well, investing a crapload of money in a big gun (especially after the behemoth debacle) seems kind of out of place. but thats just one mans opinion.
 
BradMick said:
i really don't see why confed would invest money in something like this. having had the Midway prove its worth, and with the cerberus kicking ass as well, investing a crapload of money in a big gun (especially after the behemoth debacle) seems kind of out of place. but thats just one mans opinion.
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I'm thinking that if Midway's gun was such a success, Confed would be interested in a similar weapon that could be fired repeatedly.

You definitely have a point, and Confed is cutting back on smaller ships, but if they had a ship that could eliminate an enemy fleet in a couple shots, I figure that they might be interested.
 
hmm....indeed, but then again, the midways gun was pretty temperamental. who knows, it'd be a fairly lengthy and pricey deal, i guess if it was something designed specifically to counter the nephilim threat, i could see its value. but given that confed can clean their clocks fairly easily through conventional means, i just can't see them using the expense of it.

good modeling though!
 
I'm with Vinman on this one.

IIRC, the Midway's big gun had problems because the big Nephilim gun wasn't made to interface with Confed technology. Confed has shown it has the tech to make something like this, or if they don't they would probably figure out how through the data the Midway gathered.

Through most of Prophecy and SO, they seem to imply that the Nephilim have huge numbers of ships and that the forces Confed had already engaged were smaller "advance" forces. If they have a shot at making a weapon that could knock out a whole fleet in one swat, I'm sure they'd try to implement it.
 
This again raises the same question that was posed to the creation of the Midway in the first place. If you make a ship-killer ship, all you have to do is destroy that and you've lost your primary asset. There must be something expensive and/or extraordinary about this shipkiller, or else we'd just be talking about regular Cruisers and Destroyers that already exist. So why would one be compelled to create this ship instead of field something like the Midway, a ship that could send dozens of cheaper bombers to take out a fleet without risking the mother ship.
 
BradMick said:
hmm....indeed, but then again, the midways gun was pretty temperamental.
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All three of confeds big guns was. The confederation dreadnaught, the behemoth, and the midway. AFAIK the Concordia and the Midway had a huge chance of blowing themself to hell when firing them.
 
Well I think confed would replicate the Nephs plasma weapons if they could, but to field a class of cruiser sized ships each with the firepower to take out a fleet seems a bit too fanboy ubershipish and expensive. I think at most confed would build a couple of dreadnought sized ships with the weapon system and they would also be pretty large, inefficient and unreliable because they are based on an alien design (obviously the design would be later refined and improved)
 
Bombers might be cheap but they don't have the instant kill power of a plasma weapon and modern military doctrine calls for the maximum firepower to be utilised as quickly as possible.
 
There is no such thing as an 'instant kill'. A glancing blow may not do much more than minor structural damage.

If anything, Bombers increase the chance, as you could deploy more bombers from a single carrier than sending more than one 'ship killer' capital ship to a sector.
 
Paddybhoy said:
Bombers might be cheap but they don't have the instant kill power of a plasma weapon and modern military doctrine calls for the maximum firepower to be utilised as quickly as possible.
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I don't know what military doctrine you're following, but the level of force is determined by the objective. It doesn't just escalate to "maximum" by default.
 
ChrisReid said:
This again raises the same question that was posed to the creation of the Midway in the first place. If you make a ship-killer ship, all you have to do is destroy that and you've lost your primary asset. There must be something expensive and/or extraordinary about this shipkiller, or else we'd just be talking about regular Cruisers and Destroyers that already exist. So why would one be compelled to create this ship instead of field something like the Midway, a ship that could send dozens of cheaper bombers to take out a fleet without risking the mother ship.
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The Midway and the Cerberus only succeeded through the fenomenal skill of 1 pilot, namely Lance Casey. :D
With this ship-killer ship, victory would have been a lot easier.
Your point that it would be a primary target for the enemy is valid, but that simply means that you should have an adequate escort for it.
However, as often, cost would probably be the deciding factor, and I can imagine Confed wouldn't order more than 1 or 2 until it becomes cheaper
 
I figure that if Confed is building something as wasteful as enormous Plunkett cruisers, ships that can't stand up to fighters and must get in close to an enemy capital ship to do any damage, they'd procure a couple of shipkillers
 
Well if your facing off against a fleet you usually want to eliminate as many as them as possible as quickly as possible especially if the enemy outnumbers you and/or is about to hit a population centre. I'm not saying Confed should or would outfit a fleet of these thing to go after pirates and renegade Kats (that would be overkill) but a couple would certainly give them an added dimension to their offensive and defensive options if the Bugs or some other species launched another overwhelming invasion against any Confed systems especially since the bugs have the proven ability to sting confed in the arse when they're not expecting it.
 
Vinman said:
I figure that if Confed is building something as wasteful as enormous Plunkett cruisers, ships that can't stand up to fighters and must get in close to an enemy capital ship to do any damage, they'd procure a couple of shipkillers
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They're escort ships - you need SOME cruisers and close-action capships to defend carriers from other people's destroyers and cruisers. They're fairly cost-effective, compared to losing a whole carrier and the fighters and pilots and ground crews who inhabit such craft. The shipkiller's a whole different beast - in a way, it's more reminiscent of the aforementioned Behemoth and Confederation-class dreadnoughts; an expensive, massively powerful craft which you can't afford to lose but which can do a lot of damage at any one time.

However, the Confederation-class ship could stand up to other capship's and other bombers' weapons without getting one-shotted, as did the Behemoth... and it had the capability to carry part of its own escort, in the form of fighters. The Behemoth was prohibitively expensive, at least to judge from the size and the energy output, plus the fact that it was pretty experimental. This ship-killer of yours would probably be along the same lines, as in 'pricey and a tragic loss if blown away', and it would have to close in far closer (if our experiences with the Bug cannon are correct) than a carrier or similar large capship needs to get to the enemy craft in order to take them. Also, remember that Confed needed to use a primer disk in order to get the fleet-killing reaction going, which limits its effectiveness to some degree, especially if they can't fully reproduce the enemy's technology in that respect - if you have to use a fighter for the ship-killer's punch... then why risk that big gun in the first place, and why not send in a bunch of relatively cheaper craft which can do a similarly deadly strike?

Besides, the 22 dual laser cannons and 3 heavy particle cannons on the Plunkett seem to give the Plunkett some protection from fighters. :D Definitely better than 7 laser turrets, and as a cruiser with more mundane weapons the Plunkett is probably a less prohibitively costly craft, and one whose loss would be thought of as unpleasant but by no means a disaster in terms of resources or construction time.

Besides, the big-killers don't seem to be the Confederation's style, so far as warfare goes, at least outside of the Kilrathi War, when the Kilrathi were the first to go that route. That's probably as important, if not more so, in the post-Kilrathi war era, with its emphasis on cost-effectiveness and a lack of a major enemy with a generations-spanning struggle that killed whole worlds - they might technically have the capability now, but I doubt the will and monetary support is there for such a craft, especially since it CAN kill ships... but it's too bloody expensive to risk in the ship-killing business.
 
Hmmm... maybe a 'ship killer' type of capitol ship might not be ideal when compared to the effectiveness of bombers... but I wonder if Confed would have the capability to mount the ship killer plasma cannons on orbital or planetary turrets, as a planet's final defense against invasion... sort of like the ion cannon on Hoth.
 
It's a reasonable design in terms of Wing Commander as a fictional universe and it's certainly a nice looking model.

It's not a reasonable design in terms of storytelling. The 'one shot one kill' superguns make for a very uninteresting universe... hence we have elaborate explanations and retroactive continuity to deal with why the Sivar-class, Terran Confederation-class, Behemoth-class and captured Kraken Plasma weapons are unique rather than the norm.
 
Ignoring, for the moment, the tactical issues regarding the proposed ship, there's an important factor that seems to be mostly neglected, in this thread: the cost

As per the ISIS manual, Sen. Taggart had to twist more than a few arms to get the Midway class project going through. How much easier do you think it would be to get a project through whose sole purpose is for killing alien fleets, even if it wasn't based off of technology very few actually understand (ignorance often being a contributing factor to fear, whether justifiably so or not)? At least with the Midway class, they can also serve non-strike functions (emergency relief for a planet being only one possibility, with that relief supported by the class' science department; hell, the USMC's 15th MEU was deployed at the beginning of this year to help with victims of the tsunami that hit SE Asia, and "gator freighters" don't have any dedicated science facilities whatsoever).
 
Hmm, I don't see cost as being an insurmountable issue -- the Confederation *after* Prophecy is facing an ongoing Nephilim invasion.
 
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