As the door opened, Don's eyes fell upon a rather odd looking ship.
As a point of reference, it should be noted that ships generally took a more aerodynamic shape the smaller they got. Fighters and scouts tend to be shaped the most like conventional planes, followed by strike craft, then pickets, corvettes, and finally frigates. Once a ship reached the size of a destroyer, it no longer made sense for them to be aerodynamic as they were far less likely to perform atmospheric operations and the potential mobility gained from such a design was irrelevant in comparison to what was lost in terms of space and gained from the increased mass.
From there, ships usually got long and flat, with a gentle slope to their sides to maximize firepower that could be brought to bear with a broadside. Spinal armaments, those weapons that were placed on the flat faces of a ship's six cardinal axes, still found use, but they were generally limited to one or two rows or columns to minimize the amount of flat armor that was presented to the enemy.
This ship did not conform to the stereotypes.
Laying at what he estimated to be around 50 meters long, 10 meters tall, and 20 meters wide, this ship was far smaller than the standard 200 meter long frigate class, but looked almost identical to a battleship in shape.
In other words a long angular brick.
There wasn't a glass cockpit, but he had expected that. A good part of his training was flying off of strictly sensor data, something that was a prerequisite for a non-visual cockpit.
The thing that surprised him was the apparent lack of weapons on the ship. For something of this shape and size, there were no obvious openings for guided munitions like missiles. He didn't see any protrusions that indicated autocannons either. There were two rather large circular holes in the small vertical plate on the front of the ship that he recognized as potentially being a weapon system, but he had no idea what weapon would be placed on a ship this small that was that big.
"Ugly right?" The Doctor couldn't help but smirk and laugh dejectedly at Don's unhidden display of confusion. "Don't worry, I assure you she flies better than she looks like she will. I was one of the unlucky bastards who had to work on her after all."
Don still examined his new craft for a few more minutes, his head tilting side to side as he looked at it from different angles. He made a lap around it, admiring it's pitch black color, before going back to converse with Helmsguard.
"There's gotta be more to her right?" Don couldn't help but display how underwhelmed he was by this thing. Part of him was wondering how his parents would laugh at him for denying their invitations to run their real estate business only to be stuck flying UES Shadow Brick.
"Would you like to see it?" The Doctor asked, grinning from ear to ear. "Would you like to see why this ship is quite possibly the most lethal piece of technology in the solar system?"
He handed Don a tablet with some basic information on it. However, this information was anything but basic.
"Let's start off with her concealment. Second tab. In the most simple terms she is impossible to spot by conventional means. RADAR, LADAR, or any other form of wave or light based detection systems are completely useless against her. She has a low level projection around her that completely absorbs those forms of energy. As per usual with most ships, visual spotting is already difficult, but that black coating will have a startling effect in combination with that energy shield I mentioned earlier."
"You don't have to worry about being spotted via heat scanning either. There is some very complex sciencey shit that the onboard computer is in charge of that will take the heat from the sink and dump it in a direction that wont be spotted by sensors. Not gonna explain how that works because I have no idea. The manipulation of thermodynamic principles isn't my field of study" Helmsguard could only shrug at this. It was outside of his field of expertise after all.
"There is a special treat for you onboard, but that cant be activated inside the hangar. I'll show you once we get under way."
"Mobility and Armor are next. Tab three."
"I can't tell you much about how her engines and the like works, classified of course. What I can tell you is that this is currently the fastest ship in the solar system. Linear speed, short jumps, medium jumps, and long jumps are all the fastest that have ever been made. Forward acceleration is around 200 meters a second squared officially, short jumps take less than a second to calculate, medium jumps around five, and long jumps are twice as fast to run to completion than the last generation of jump drive. Only downside is that she turns slower than my wife after a buffet."
Don couldn't help but whistle in admiration. 200m/s^2 was about 50 more than the fastest scout ship model in the fleet. The jump times were also astonishing. In every distance category except for medium, she was twice as fast as the nearest competitor.
"As far as armor is concerned it's a new compound from ACE Labs. From the front you are rated to take kinetic projectiles from anything up to cruiser class railguns. At the sides and rear you can take up to a destroyer class railgun, but they don't recommend it as it would damage internals. You are completely impervious to any sort of shaped charge or blast type munitions. Keep in mind to watch out for nuclear munitions and capital class fire. It's less of the case that you can't take it but more the case that getting hit by something with that much energy is bound to shake up your innards."
"Moving on to weapons systems. Tab four. To her front she has two 30mm autocannons each capable of firing at a rate of 3 rounds a second or 180 rounds per minute." He tapped a button on his own tablet, causing two flaps to open up on the front of the ship. "That's where they are."
"She also has 10 laser weapon systems. Four to the front, two to the rear, and one on every other side. They are variable angle and the lenses are flush with the hull. In a pinch, or in the unlikely event that there is something that has locked on to you, they are capable of burning warheads and blinding scanning systems, all under the control of the onboard computer."
"Nice" Was all Don had to say to that. He wasn't the biggest fan of laser systems during training. They were way too finicky and required that the beam be kept on the same spot for a length of time in order to work properly. The simple act of rolling a ship was more than enough to render a laser useless.
Not having to worry about controlling them was a blessing.
"As I'm sure you've already noticed, there are not ports or pods for guided weapons. Part of the reason for this is that it would ruin her stealth, but primarily it's because that isn't going to be your job."
Don was a little displeased with this part actually. He was neutral towards autocannons and hated lasers, but he was fond of the guided missile. Something about watching a five meter long explosive stick moving at eight times the speed of sound towards a target to then explode with enough force to level a skyscraper had always made him giggle a little bit.
"Instead, and I think you will love this, she has a pair of Capital-Class railguns."
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Yes Votes: 231 70.2%
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Don't waste your time Votes: 16 4.9%
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Make a poll for each individual ship Votes: 51 15.5%
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I don't care Votes: 31 9.4%
my first instinct seeing the fire rate of the 30mm autocannons (180 rounds per minute) was "Wow, that is slow"
My point of reference is the GAU-8 avenger (30mm autocannon ~3900 rounds per minute)
But I guess that's unfair, and the munitions for this particular 30mm are almost certainly special in some way that serves to either limit the fire rate of the cannons or makes the effect of a faster firing gun negligible, with the space required being better used for more effective parts of the ship.
The biggest reasons are that A: this is space, and B: you need to limit the firing rate to reduce ammo consumption. These are not spray weapons for ground attack, they are precision weapons for use against mobile targets. Your engagement window is small, yes, however your accuracy and aim are not limited by the aerodynamic qualities of the ship and projectile in atmosphere, you can actually just turn and shoot at wherever your target is expected to be. It is far more important that your shots are fast (less time to dodge) and accurate (so they actually land on target). For the Noah in particular there is an added benefit, armor penetration. Seeing as it is basically impervious to all small caliber fire, its ‘predators’ are actually much larger ships, ships with more armor. The ones to worry about aren’t those ones though, but the smaller and more agile sensor craft. They might have more armor than a deployable craft, but it isn’t really enough to warrant using the big boys. See, you don’t actually need to land too many shots on a smaller spaceship in order to render it combat ineffective, you just need to make sure they penetrate and expose the insides (people) to a vacuum.
Tftc
LADAR
do you mean LIDAR? As in "laser imaging, detection, and ranging"?
LAser Detection and Ranging, and this one is a deliberate decision. Notice that it is LASER, not light. There is no imaging here, only detection and ranging. One beam that gives a high precision value. It is harder to detect and is less taxing computationally.
The purpose of this ship is stealth, kind of, so literally shining a light (even if not on the visible spectrum) on your enemies is not advisable. Instead, pointing a laser at their center of mass is much less likely to be picked up on their sensors. Inferences can be made on the specific shape of the ship from other metrics, but you would want a precise value for your range and orientation relative the main fleet.
You save energy and computational power by doing things this way, so for a ship already wanting for space this is the way to go.
How do scout ships do Earth-to-orbit? That's an awful lot of time operating above mach 5 in atmosphere to do it on 0.5 * g of thrust, even with really good lift/drag ratios.
What do you mean by this? No ship that is going to be entering an atmosphere is going to have their primary element of thrust be lower than 9.81 m/s^2, which is 1 G of acceleration. In fact most craft are going to have nothing to do with low atmospheric operations, hence the Domino's progression away from the aerodynamic shape. Before it's development, that was perceived to be a potential scenario.
Space ships are built in space, for the most part at least, while 'ground to space' and 'space to ground' transit is handled by methods that I have been intentionally vague about.
Additionally, scout ships have zero reason to operate anywhere near Earth, a planet which is very much friendly territory. They are more useful in scouting out enemies hiding in/around asteroids and extending the 'sight range' of a fleet.
If the acceleration of The Ship is 200 m/s^2, which is 50x a scout ship, that puts the scout ship's acceleration at 4 m/s^2. If scouts are not designed for in-atmospheric work, aerodynamic design seems a bit off (as you said), though it's explicitly stated they are designed to look aerodynamic. Depending on what you intend by scout, it may have very long mission durations where the extra storage for being a brick or hexagonal prism would be very advantageous. It's just a weird conflict of design criteria to be both aerodynamic and have such a low acceleration spec.
edit: I'm dumb, it's +50, not *50. Obvious brain goof on my part.
@adr_ no problem, but the reason that you would want an 'aerodynamic' ship is that the general profile of an aerodynamic shape is easier to make 'stealthy' from a sensor's point of view. You want your most vulnerable and isolated ships to be able to avoid damage somehow, the best way of doing that is to avoid detection.
For a bomber, something large and with a payload that (let's be honest) isn't going to be hard to spot, being stealthy isn't your largest concern. Armor is a better way to guarantee survival. But for a fighter stealth might mean the difference between a missile hitting or missing entirely, not to mention how hard it would be to land hits with cannons against a target that you can only see intermittently.
I didn't notice any mistakes. It's 2934 and they still have tablets? Didn't they develop augmented reality? Or is it because they are on a spaceport?
Skinnik + nothing beats the good ol rectangle. Additionally, tablets are less likely to get all fugged up when your capital ship takes a railgun shot, no recalibration. Besides, if you're just looking at documents then all that flair isn't really necessary, the military isn't supposed to be artistic.
@cakeonfrosting Oh, alright, your answer makes sense. Thanks.
Modeling this one would be easy; it's just basically a rectangle, as you said. Well, unless you're planning on modeling the inside too
It would be, many of the ships I have in mind would be owing to the utilitarian designs I have in mind. The issue is that I've found Blender is sub-optimal for precise measurements and I don't want to pay for fusion-360 or auto-cad
@cakeonfrosting Makes sense
@cakeonfrosting speaking from experience, there are ways to get a 1semester/year license for fusion if you have an educational mail account
@JJR I have it already, check the glossary for some of the ships I've drawn up