Rinak Warship

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Graham Kennedy
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Rinak Warship

Post by Graham Kennedy »

Next up for the blenderizing of some minor alien ships... the Rinak warship. The Rinak were conceived as, essentially, a race of evil assholes. From the original description... "A local power located within the Deep Range, the Rinak are regarded as one of the very few species in the galaxy who could be considered to be actively evil. The average Rinak is, when it can get away with it, aggressive, bad tempered, sadistic and generally obnoxious. Roughly as advanced as the average for the Deep Range, the Rinak are scrupulously careful never to directly challenge any species or group which is more powerful than themselves; they will thus rarely risk confrontation with a powerful species even if they have a heavy advantage in any particular encounter. They are positively obsequious towards Coalition ships, even civilian vessels with little or no armament. Despite this many do believe that the Rinak would attack a more powerful species, if they became truly convinced that they could get away with it."

An interesting feature of the Rinak is that they have had periods when their civilisation fell to tyrannical dictatorships... and it's during those time that their foreign policy tends to be more peaceful and benign. Whereas when they embrace democracy, they tend to follow their natural asshole tendencies far more.

The Rinak tend to attack not just weaker interstellar powers, but also pre-FTL and even pre-spaceflight civilisations - we would be a prime target for them. This is considered a major no-no in galactic politics, and one of the marks of being a good galactic citizen is taking care of the pre-spaceflight civilisations in your area of influence and making sure they're not stomped on. Since the Deep Range is a section of the galaxy the Coalition likes to play galactic citizen in, one day there is likely to be a conflict between the two. It will be quite a short conflict, and it will be quite a disastrous one for the Rinak. They know this, and they act like assholes anyway. Because that's what they are.

Original Rinak ship drawing :

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Blenderized. As usual, click to embiggen :

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Those spherical bulges on the side are a mystery to me. I must have put them there for a reason in the original image, but I can't imagine what it is. Maybe I intended them to be the forcefield generators, but I don't think so. Oh well.

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Lanshati sails are the third slowest form of FTL drive (Chéng-Lǚ rings being the first, and allowing relativistic STL speeds, and Gribben coils being the second). Four sail configurations are regarded as 'second generation' designs, and allow speeds of a few hundred c. Sail tech progresses through six sails, then eight - configurations above that are possible, but not very practical. Lanshati (the word is Turgran for 'twister' because they twist space. One might even say they... warp it! Dun dun dun!) sails are cranky, difficult to operate, prone to breakdown, and generally not a very nice form of drive system. They also emit huge quantities of radiation... like 'standing on the roof of the Chernobyl reactor building and then climbing down into the pit' huge. Which is why human-designed ships of this kind have radiation shields more than a metre thick between the sail and pressure hull. But Rinak are almost immune to radiation, so they don't much care. Even so, if you make a career in the Rinak navy then sooner or later you are going to die of radiation-related damage. And the Rinak sign up anyway, because they just want to mess with other species that much. Like I said - assholes.

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Yellow missile hatches; 752 launch tubes in all. Smaller ones hold missiles the size of a Polaris SLBM, larger ones hold missiles the size of an SS-18 (R-36) ICBM. At the bow is a twin barelled plasma cannon. Quad barrel laser cannon are scattered around the ship. Three forcefield generators per side on the "equatorial" bulge.

With ships like this the Rinak could range out maybe 50-100 light years from home base, giving round trips in the 6-12 month range. Realistically logistics would make that tough, and a radius of 30-50 light years is more practical. A Coalition destroyer could cross 50 light years in less than 7 hours; the Coalition itself is essentially a hemisphere over 1,000 light years in radius.

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The silver thing at the back is the power reactor. The five whatsits ahead of that are... another thing I don't remember the purpose of. Could be fuel tanks, though. That sounds plausible.

Notice also that there's what amounts to a deflector dish at the front. Ships don't use deflector dishes in the Coalition universe, but I just thought it needed something there and took inspiration, I guess. It's a big sensor. But it wouldn't have the plot-saving swiss army knife characteristics of a Star Trek deflector.
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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