Type 25 Dreadnought

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Graham Kennedy
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Type 25 Dreadnought

Post by Graham Kennedy »

From this thread.

The Areldeni are behind the Coalition technologically, but make up for it by building ships that are huge with bags of raw power. On the downside, they seriously strain their economy to do this and some aspects of ship design just don't scale up easily.

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Note the large hatches in the upper dorsal hull. These are launch tubes for truly gigantic anti-ship missiles. They're intended to allow very long range attacks, with single hit kills on even a battleship. Typical Areldeni philosophy - build your weapons immensely powerful, but to do so you build on a scale that pushes practicality to the limit. The size of the weapons means even this behemoth only carries eight of them.

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One issue for the Areldeni with building a ship so huge is to what extent they can actually support it; it's questionable as to whether it can even fit in most of their dockyard and repair facilities, and whether their logistics system can really support it effectively. Refitting them all to take these ships would be a huge undertaking, on top of the huge undertaking of building the ships in the first place. No matter how powerful they are, they're not going to affect the outcome of a war if there is only a handful of them.

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A mess of engines at the aft end, along with power system vents.

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Note the fixed AMP cannon in the dorsal hull. These are huge, and more powerful than any Coalition AMP cannon. On the downside, they're only able to move a few degrees off axis, so you have to point the whole ship to aim. Very similar to the Gelch version of the AMP cannon on their own warship. It's questionable as to how practical these weapons would be - on the one hand, they're not nearly as flexible as proper turret mounted weapons. But if you can line up a shot, it would be a bad day for even a Kororra class if it took a hit from these.

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Type 25 and Kororra. Note the rifters; the Kororra has enough to allow any AMP cannon to fire in any direction it can. Not so the Type 25, meaning for instance only two of the main or secondary AMP cannon can fire forwards, even though eighteen of them can actually shoot in that direction. So the ship has to fire two, wait for the rifters to recharge, fire two more, wait, fire two more, etc. For all the firepower, the Type 25 is less able to use it than the Kororra is.

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Flight pods on either side of the forward hull; these are the launch tubes, which would launch fighters forwards. in the bow the large apertures are landing strips. Compare to the Kororra arrangement, which shoot fighters out of the side of the ships; in the Kororra the recovery traps extend the entire length of the ship, so a craft can land from the rear, overshoot, and pass out the front and back out into space to try again. Not so on the Type 25 - if you overshoot the landing trap, you hit a crash barrier.

Flight pods make a lot of sense, really, and I'd have put them on the Coalition ships except that I worried that what you ended up with would be too similar to a Battlestar.
Give a man a fire, and you keep him warm for a day. SET a man on fire, and you will keep him warm for the rest of his life...
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