UCS Askad-Hazaline

[Graham Kennedy]

The power systems. This is only a somewhat finished pic... on the top view, from forward to aft :

Fuel tanks. There are sixteen tanks. Each is 40.5 m wide, 46.5 m deep, and 58.5 m high. They are interconnected; each contains
sealing mechanisms that can plug leaks, purification systems that work constantly to keep the fuel clean and free of impurities.
The little round thing on the side of the ship near the tanks is an attachment point for a refuelling probe.

Purification system. Aft of the tanks is a fuel purification complex; fuel is pumped into this for final cleaning before being sent aft.
Fuel purity is a big deal with this technology.

Conversion cores : The purified fuel is pumped back aft to the big green ball. This is the conversion core. It's a geodesic sphere;
essentially the sphere itself is just there to hold field generators, power and sensor systems, etc. Within the sphere is generated a
containment field; containment fields are to some degree self sustaining; the field itself can be charged up with energy, kind of like a
capacitor, and that energy will sustain the field for about fifteen minutes or so even if the generators are turned off or destroyed. The
containment field is also pretty much indestructible. You could blow the ship to atoms, and the containment field for the conversion
core would float out of the wreckage undamaged.

Within the conversion core is a special field which has one function; all matter incident on it turns to energy with near 100% efficiency.
It's pretty uber-tech stuff; however it has it's downsides. For one, the fields are built to convert one element and one element only. If you
wanted to "burn" something else, you'd have to strip down and rebuild half the core. That's also why the fuel has to be so pure; every
particle of something else that gets into the core strains it, and will reduce efficiency over time.

The energy blasts out of the bore as a beam of gamma rays, where it passes forward.

The Zero Point Energy Multiplier, or ZPEX; what this basically does is use the output of the conversion core to liberate energy from the zero
point energy field. As a practical matter, it's a booster which multiplies the input by a fixed ratio. The energy comes out as very high energy
gamma rays at the other end where it goes to...

The Power Conversion Tower. This is made of a series of vertically stacked toroids. Each toroid is made of thousands of ield generators that
project a series of many, many forcefields across the centre of the toroid. The now tremendously powerful gamma ray beam blasts through
these, and is gradually absorbed by them and tapped off along the length of the tower. The top and bottom of the Power Tower penetrate the
hull; if anything goes wrong, any excess energy which escapes can blast away from the ship up or down. From here, the energy is tapped
off into the ship's systems to power shields, engines, etc.

[shran]

Couldn't they build multiple units to process more elements. For example, one for hydrogenium, one for helium and so on. It would mean more fuel. Could give us a whole new generation of tankers, by the way.

[Graham Kennedy]

Couldn't they build multiple units to process more elements. For example, one for hydrogenium, one for helium and so on. It would mean more fuel. Could give us a whole new generation of tankers, by the way.

Sure, it could be done. But why do it? What's the benefit? The cores turn any matter to energy with a near 100% efficiency. Using a
different fuel source isn't going to make any real difference to the energy output per kilo.

And if you introduce say two new types of fuel, you've now got the logistics problem of making sure the right tankers get the right fuel
to the right places. Why bother?

I guess if you were operating away from support it might be nice to be able to suck up water from an ice moon, say, and use that.
Or scoop hydrogen off a gas giant. But you're talking about adding ramscoops, pumps, etc, then more purification gear - because
the purifiers they do have are high level stuff designed to take the last 0.000001% impurities out, not the kind of thing where you
pour dirty water in one end and it comes out clean on the other.

And on top of that you then include a bunch of different conversion cores, one for each fuel they might want to use. Look at the size of
that core, sticking another two of them in there would lengthen the ship by around 150 metres! So you end up with a significantly bigger,
slower, less agile ship.

[Graham Kennedy]

Major high energy components. The two long white cylinders in the side view are the midspace drive shunts. Two in this case; usually
small ships have one or two, larger ships four or more. The top view shows the shunts in various stages of cutaway; the top one
shows the exterior casing stripped away. You can see a framework which holds in place forty one toroidal structures. These are
forcefield generators, very heavy duty, made of exotic matter.

The forcefield they create supports and encases what is the actual engine part of the engine... the part so small that you will never
see it.

In the lower shunt you can see the interior of the toroids. The "spike" at the front is an anchor; emerging from that spike and running
down the center is a thin "straw" of neutronium. The energy from the power conversion tower is fed into the big thing at the front
of the shunt, where the energy is focused down into the interior of the straw. The straw is *very* small; the neutronium in a single
drive is on the order of tens of tons. There's probably on the order of a thousandth of a cubic millimetre of neutronium in the whole
shunt.

Very, very precise manipulation of the shape of the straw controls and focuses the energy flow. Harmonic waves are set up as the
energy flows along; that much energy, focused on that small a volume, creates energy densities that haven't been seen since the
big bang; it does funny things to spacetime, generating the fields that allow the ship to move around within midspace.

Neutronium is fabulously difficult to mine and thus fabulously expensive. It beats gem quality diamond in terms of cost per ton. There's
also an insatiable demand for it since it's so good for applications like this, and since it tends to break down after a while in use,
necessitating occasional replacement - about as often as a carrier or sub would need it's nuclear reactors replaced now. Neutronium
is at least as important to the galactic economy as oil is to Earth right now. And with one of maybe ten pulsars in the galaxy within their
borders, the Coalition is Saudi Arabia...

Between the shunts at the stern are the ECAS - Emission Control and Attenuation Systems. The Midspace shunts produce all kinds
of highly detectible emissions; the ECAS tap most of this off and bounce it around in a honeycomb structure inside, ultimately converting
it into a much less detectible set of emissions. Without an ECAS a ship would be far, far easier to detect on passive sensors (think
submarine with noisy, noisy engine).

Forward of the ECAS, the big brownish thing is the ship's shield generator.

Below the ECAS are the sublight engines; propulsors. Essentially a reactionless antigrav-style engine, the propulsors
do not emit any exhaust; the glowing things at the back are thermal radiators.

[Graham Kennedy]

The boat deck and associated spaces.

Larger capital vessels have two sets of subships. The forward hull holds the fighters and attack craft; high speed ships that are
launched into and recovered from midspace, mostly travel in midspace themselves, operating over interstellar distances.

The boat deck is almost always at the upper stern. It handles the craft that are used mostly in normal space; transport craft which
ferry crew to planets and back, land ground forces, etc. Midspace capable craft can be carried and launched from the boat deck,
but generally not launched into or recovered from midspace itself.

In the picture we have the boat deck itself, at the upper level. It is 178.5 m long and 121 m wide; deck area is around 20,000 square
metres. There is a launch window on each side at the forward end, and a pair of elevators further back.

The boat deck is five decks tall (standard deck height on all Coalition vessels is 4 metres, by the way, which includes about half
a metre of 'tweendeck space.)

Beneath the boat deck is a storage/maintanence hangar space. It's lower, four decks tall, but is wider at 152 m and longer at 195 m;
about 27,000 square metres.

Forward of the hangar is a set of workshops; two runs, on either side of the aft dorsal AMP turret. They total about 12,000 square
metres of repair bays and worshops.

Above these, forward of the boat deck, is a series of tanks holding fuel and other consumables for the craft.

The boat deck is shown with 27 Mule class transports shown, albeit at very low resolution. There's no real set number it can take as
such; the complement would vary with the mission. But in the region of 25 to 45 craft would be about right.

[Mikey]

I guess this is the "hero" ship of one of your stories, judging by the level of detail you've expounded?

[Graham Kennedy]

Nope. They all have this level of detail. I just decided to post it all on this one rather than cluttering up the forum with ship after ship.

[Mikey]

Are you merely dedicated, or in fact monomaniacal?

Seriously, your hard work = our benefit

[Graham Kennedy]

Are you merely dedicated, or in fact monomaniacal?

I tend to have a lot of free time on my hands.

Seriously, your hard work = our benefit

[Sionnach Glic]

Now that is detail.