B'Stilan Mothership, Spiral-class - Technospec
This ship occupies a similar niche to an aircraft carrier in a contemporary sea navy, but is a bit different because it typically docks the entire 'carrier battle group' inside, including capital ships, and then deploys them at its destination.
An interesting way to get past the basic limitations of a space-aircraft carrier, which is that it isn't so useful in the same way a naval ship is. However, by describing it as you have, it seems like a way to consolidate a whole fleet into a single discrete unit, which would make transport simpler (a single mass for flux travel vs. many more engines (have you considered the scale-up/scale-down potential for this engine type?)) and then you have substantial subunits to provide viable surface area for weaponry without devolving into the "bristling gun ports with no way of firing them" syndrome.
Because of this it is much bigger than every other ship of the B'Stilan Confederate Navy, and the BCN only has nine of them.
A very good limitation, after all, how many Carrier Battle Groups does the US maintain?
At least, until... but that would be telling.
You and your damned cliffhangers.
B'Stilan combat and fleet doctrine focuses on:
- Use of fighters. Said fighters emphasise durability rather than maneouvrability, typically mounting turret weapons and having a crew of three or more.
More like the Skipray Blastboat out of the EU in SW, which is considered almost (if not a full) capital ship, even though it's only 25 meters, if I remember correctly. A sort of Flying Fortresses or Spectre Gunships - lots of firepower but theoretically vulnerable to more maneuverable craft, or a big blast from a bigger ship.
The use of combat groups in units of three or nine.
Particular reason why?
Using docking ports that allow specialised equipment, such as particular heavy weapons or sensor devices, to be swapped out for specific missions.
Weapon hardpoints, like the points where they attach mission specific armaments?
Because their energy weapons ("bolters") can only, as the name suggests, deliver discrete bolts of energy, they use a variety of systems such as mounting two cannons per turret or using a Gatling-style rotation to allow them to keep up a continuous fire against a target (important due to the way deflector shields work under Thalvetian physics).
Is this to create a near continuous stream of fire, or for cooling reasons?
Their ships are powered by fusion-plasma reactors with forced induction by quantronic coils, the latter being a kind of 'battery' derived from some of the exotic matter found in the B'Stilan Nebula. This power system is both a blessing and a curse, very potent but prone to overloading.
This sounds interesting, how much is based on real science, and how much is whizzing past me because of fanciful terminology?
And now the technospec of the Spiral-class:
Length: ~5,000 metres
What about height and breadth? I know you mention somewhere that she's hollow(ish), but more dimensions would give a better idea of proper volume and thus proper crew complement
Thande said:
Crew: 3,600 - not including crews of ships (I think this is probably too small)
Aye, I think 3,600 might be a bit small a crew for a ship that size. At three shifts that'd give 1,200 crew on duty, with the rest on downtime of asleep. Assuming they're of approximately human dimensions, I'm not sure they have the numbers to fight, protect and maintain a 3 mile-long ship. Although, of course, you can double or triple that figure during combat. What sort of maintenance requirements do the armaments have? The 3 heavy phasebolter cannons, 30 hailfire torpedo launchers, 4 high energy monotwist missile launchers all sound as though they'd have dedicated crews looking after them, but the phasebolters and medium bolters sound small enough to be slaved to some sort of central control system. Though I'm not sure of maintenance requirements. The fighters and so on held in empty mode seem as though they'd need maintenance crews, too. Just peering at the USS
Enterprise on Wiki, as you say carriers have a similar role, she's got about 6,000 crew and slightly fewer fighters (70-90). She's a lot smaller, too (342m), but spaceships will need more space for hydroponics or stores for long missions and what-not.
Good point P. Will have to think about it. At a rough starting guess I'd say a ten times multiplier would be close (36,000).
I echo P, although 36000 seems a rather large number, since if they have so much in the way of nanotech and AI, shouldn't they have a good bit of automation?
I think minimum 10000, with a proper range between 15000 and 36000 as you posited. The proper number would be pinned down once you had a more clear idea of what the ship has for space, and necessities.
Maximum speed: 80 Mdals (baseline design) (1 Mdal = 1000 times the speed of light)
That's across the Milky Way in a year, right? That's fast.
Armament: 2,547 dual phasebolter turrets (standardised small size found on all B'Stilan ships - too small to see on image above), 666 medium bolters (ditto), 3 heavy phasebolter cannons, 30 hailfire torpedo launchers, 4 high energy monotwist missile launchers.
The dual phasebolters are presumably Point Defense/CIWS?, where as the medium bolters are a kind of small 5 inch gun, and the heavies seem unbalanced, as what arrangement could they be in to provide useful fire in a maximum zone?
Maybe 4 would be better? But I cannot say specifically, as I can't tell where they might be on your drawings.
Re the weapons, you're right - the small turrets are automated by default (the B'Stilans being one of the best producers of combat A.I.s in the Thalvetia universe) but the larger weapons have dedicated crews.
If the small turrets are best used as a CIWS, do they really need combat AI? I mean, the current Phalanx system on US carriers (to me) seems to just be a gun slaved to a pair of radars.
Perhaps you mean to have AI's acting as a sort of gunnery officer for a specific part of the ship? So that in an instant all the automated fire can be best used and let loose on individual targets instead of perhaps several systems tracking the same incoming object?
Also re 'skutters' - the B'Stilans' mastery of nanotechnology is such that they tend to use clouds of nanotech rather than robot helpers (basically like the stereotypical uber-vision of nanotech) which tends to creep out other races a bit.
What of a sort of circulatory system that carries this nanofog around? It would be released only in the event of damage, and would act like platlets of a sort?
