UCS Ark Royal - carrier concept

[Graham Kennedy]

I dunno. I'm not sure I like the idea of a PT Boat or PT Boat carrier, if only because it's an Honorverse copy.

One thought about them is that even a PT Boat, tiny as it is, is potentially a very long duration ship. This thing is still 360 m long - it's the size of an aircraft carrier. So carrying a significant crew and supplies for them to last months is not going to be a major problem. Things like fuel might be, of course. But this isn't going to be a ship limited by how long a person can stay awake or go without bathrooms or whatever, the way a fighter might be.

Overall, my instinct is that such a ship really wouldn't bring much to a fight; the firepower is tiny compared to even a Destroyer - 2 Mark 2 AMP compared to 32 Mark 2 and 16 Mark 5 on a Destroyer, meaning in broadside weight it's 140:1 for the Destroyer. And 2 heavy torpedoes from 2 tubes, compared to 75 from 3 tubes. So 50% more firepower and 37 times the endurance. As you say, it's going to be fast but I don't know that it's going to be fast enough to make much difference.

[Mikey]

Pretty much what I was trying to say: a torpedo is a torpedo, the difference between this and a cap ship as far as that mode of firepower is two and done vs, as you say, 75 or more.

[Coalition]

The advantage with a PT boat is that once it has fired its 2 anti-shipping torps, it has done its job and can run away (or serve as flak defense for its partners). It also means that it and its partners can perform a single massive torpedo wave against an enemy, vs a destroyer tossing a series of anti-shipping weapons over a longer period of time.

The destroyer might have greater staying power in a fight, but that means it has to survive long enough to do so.

So assuming you can get 60 PT boats for the same mass as a destroyer, that means the PT boats can have a single 120-torp salvo going in, while the Destroyer has a single salve of 32 of those torps, and 16 Mark 5 torps coming in, for a total of 48 munitions (not sure the power ratio of each).

The problem is the anti-shipping munitions are not worth the effort to use on a Destroyer, so the PT boats have to get past the destroyer wall somehow, to use their torps against the enemy capital ships.

I am using the Type 47 destroyer as my comparison, and estimating its length at 2.4 km, while the PT boat above is 360 meters long.

[Teaos]

Kind of a tangent, but why are your ships a bit aerodynamical? Rather than just blocky space ships?

[Graham Kennedy]

Kind of a tangent, but why are your ships a bit aerodynamical? Rather than just blocky space ships?

One of the ideas of the Coalition universe is that the ships start out as close to real world science as I can make them, and then gradually become more and more "a wizard did it" as tech advances.

So the early ships are what a real ship would be - mostly fuel tank, with rotating ring hulls for gravity. No aerodynamics going on.



When antigrav tech comes along those hulls essentially do become simple boxes, though with some sloped angles to the hulls.



Now when the midspace drive comes in, the physics dictates that there are two "drivefields", a smaller forward one and a larger rearward one. Each must have an anchoring "mass" in it. Having any part of the ship penetrate through one of those fields is a Very Bad Thing, doing all kinds of nasty things to the stability of the drive. Hence the first midspace ship looks like this :



So the physics dictates that the ship have two hulls, and ideally no part of a hull should stick out of the field. And in early drives, those fields are relatively small because bigger fields take more energy to generate. Hence each hull is basically constrained to fit ellipsoid shape, just smaller than the drive field itself. And yes, the neck connecting the hulls does penetrate the fields, and that's a major difficulty of the design - that neck has to be strong enough to keep the ship in one piece, but also as slim as possible to minimise the effect it has on the drive.

As time and tech goes on, the ships can generate larger fields and so the need to conform to field shape decreases. Field management tech also advances, allowing thicker, stronger necks. You can see that a ship from a generation or two later still has the same basic hull plan, but with more freedom to vary the shape. Nevertheless, you could (and I did) put in the ellipsoid drive fields over these hulls and they would fit perfectly within them. Indeed you can see that the forward hull is an ellipsoid shape with chunks cut off from it.



After a while, the next advance allows the drive itself to generate a "virtual mass" in one of the fields, eliminating the need for two linked hulls. So you can have a midspace ship that is a single hull. By this time there's very little need to conform the hull to the shape of the field - but the place where they still do so is the bow. Midspace has something analogous to whether, with storms, and having a bow shaped like that helps a ship to batter through a storm. That's also why the bows tend to be heavily reinforced. (Which gives them a hilariously phallic shape. T'Pau calls the modern Coalition ships 'penis ships'.)



As you can see, the bow is still shaped to fit within the drivefield, but it's really the only part of the ship that is.

Of course there's also a degree to which aesthetics drive all of this. I design ships that I think look cool!

[Teaos]

Do all species use fundamentally the same drive system just more or less advanced? How do your space dinosaures power ships?

[Graham Kennedy]

No, there are several different types of FTL.

Gribben rings - the most primitive type. Good for about 1 - 30 x c.
Lanshati sails - second most primitive, good for up to about 1,000 x c.
Twin lobe midspace drives get you about 2,000 - 10,000 x c
The Coalition's midspace tech allows capital ships to go from about 40-60,000 x c, with small short duration fast craft able to do ten or fifteen times that.

The Coalition isn't that advanced as major galactic powers go. Others have faster ships, but they're mostly just better implementations of the same basic principles - an SR-71 as compared to a Sabre, essentially.

Nobody has a better method that I've thought about, but I suppose one could assume that there are species out there with better tech.

[Bryan Moore]

No, there are several different types of FTL.

Gribben rings - the most primitive type. Good for about 1 - 30 x c.
Lanshati sails - second most primitive, good for up to about 1,000 x c.
Twin lobe midspace drives get you about 2,000 - 10,000 x c
The Coalition's midspace tech allows capital ships to go from about 40-60,000 x c, with small short duration fast craft able to do ten or fifteen times that.

The Coalition isn't that advanced as major galactic powers go. Others have faster ships, but they're mostly just better implementations of the same basic principles - an SR-71 as compared to a Sabre, essentially.

Nobody has a better method that I've thought about, but I suppose one could assume that there are species out there with better tech.

This is some of the most well thought out fan fiction tech I have read over the years. Do you have extensive hand-written notebooks (obviously you have years of work into this) dealing with your universe or is this largely all electronically documented? I have to imagine you have compiled some sort of "writer's bible" over the years - if not, then you have my compliments for your insanity! This really is some magnificent stuff you've created.

[Graham Kennedy]

No, there are several different types of FTL.

Gribben rings - the most primitive type. Good for about 1 - 30 x c.
Lanshati sails - second most primitive, good for up to about 1,000 x c.
Twin lobe midspace drives get you about 2,000 - 10,000 x c
The Coalition's midspace tech allows capital ships to go from about 40-60,000 x c, with small short duration fast craft able to do ten or fifteen times that.

The Coalition isn't that advanced as major galactic powers go. Others have faster ships, but they're mostly just better implementations of the same basic principles - an SR-71 as compared to a Sabre, essentially.

Nobody has a better method that I've thought about, but I suppose one could assume that there are species out there with better tech.

This is some of the most well thought out fan fiction tech I have read over the years. Do you have extensive hand-written notebooks (obviously you have years of work into this) dealing with your universe or is this largely all electronically documented? I have to imagine you have compiled some sort of "writer's bible" over the years - if not, then you have my compliments for your insanity! This really is some magnificent stuff you've created.

Thank you kindly!

Much of it is in my head - I like to think I could recreate the entire thing from memory if I had to. There's really nothing written out by hand, but there is a webpage-style document with a whole slew of stuff on it. It's not online though, just sits on my hard drive.

[Tinadrin Chelnor]

Much of it is in my head - I like to think I could recreate the entire thing from memory if I had to. There's really nothing written out by hand, but there is a webpage-style document with a whole slew of stuff on it. It's not online though, just sits on my hard drive.

I have hundreds of notebooks and 2 portable hard drives for all my stuff for my own universe, been creating it for 27 years since I was 8. I have only shared any of it with a very few people, but I plan on a Wikipedia at some point, I am just in the midst of a complete reboot. I have thousands of spreadsheets for maps, economics and demographics, starship/small craft/starbase design, and much more, and extensive technology reports.

Anyway, I really love your stuff, I always look froward to it when I see a new post. Your ships and species are great.

[Graham Kennedy]

Much of it is in my head - I like to think I could recreate the entire thing from memory if I had to. There's really nothing written out by hand, but there is a webpage-style document with a whole slew of stuff on it. It's not online though, just sits on my hard drive.

I have hundreds of notebooks and 2 portable hard drives for all my stuff for my own universe, been creating it for 27 years since I was 8. I have only shared any of it with a very few people, but I plan on a Wikipedia at some point, I am just in the midst of a complete reboot. I have thousands of spreadsheets for maps, economics and demographics, starship/small craft/starbase design, and much more, and extensive technology reports.

Anyway, I really love your stuff, I always look froward to it when I see a new post. Your ships and species are great.

Thank you kindly