The Great Thalvetian Starship Redesign Project (Moonstruck/Vendetta)

[Azardin]

If you look at the view from port and starboard, that line running through the command pod is supposed to be a separation plane, with the destroyer sandwiched between the two parts and only its main weapons allowed to protrude in docked conformation, so an emergency blast-apart shouldn't be that hard.

Oh, I saw that line. My concern is that in the event when a speedy get away is necessary, that is a lot of mass that has to be ejected/pushed away. I would think that the inertia of that much mass might in some situations be an issue, but if you think that the defensive/other properties of the part outweigh that potential issue than that is what matters.

Re the crew and fighter complements, the intention was that the ship has quite a spidery hull and most of what interior space it does have is reserved for fuel and torpedo/missile storage for topping up the fleet craft when they dock: although I think the 300-odd I originally put is too small, I don't think it will be as high as you suggest for that reason (only a small part of the interior of the main hull would be inhabitable).

Aha, well, that makes sense. Perhaps a number between 500-1000 would be more representative of what is necessary.

Will post some more ships later and it should become clearer.

Looking forward to it.

 

[Thande]

Okay, here is another one: B'Stilan Vortex-class (Battle) Cruiser

 

[Thande]

This was actually the first capital ship I designed for the B'Stilans, and while the sketch is lopsided I still like the design as it exists in my head, properly proportioned! The design was somewhat inspired by Thunderbird 2 - the curved forward hull, the forward-swept nacelle pylons, and the central swapout dock.

The Vortex is the mainstay of the B'Stilan Confederate fleet and can operate either alone, as part of a force supported by two or three Tornado-class destroyers, or as the largest ship in a flotilla attached to a Nebulous-class fleet carrier.

Looking at the ventral plans you will notice six retracted landing legs. Due to the harsh conditions of their home nebula the B'Stilans adopted a 'planet hopping' strategy (compare Polynesians if you go with 'Space Is An Ocean' ) and this meant they engineered all but the largest of their ships to be capable of landing on a planet. This in turn put certain restrictions on size, meaning that the B'Stilan scale of ship classification is somewhat out of step with everyone else's (most people's cruisers are at least twice the size of this). The Vortex benefits from a very potent quantronic coil power core, but the dangers associated with this mean that there is a separation plane so that the forward hull (with most of the crew) can be ejected in an emergency and escape on a one-shot fusion flame escape motor.


Technospec

Length: 340 metres

Crew: 333 (again, this needs revising upwards)

Maximum speed: 115 Mdals

Armament: 25 dual phasebolter turrets, 3 heavy phasebolter cannons, 4 hailfire torpedo launchers, 4 high energy monotwist missiles.

Ancillary craft: Carries 10 fighters as standard - 9 used for combat and 1 as an executive shuttle. If the cargo bays are also employed this can be squeezed up to 13 in an emergency.


Colour code guide - the purple items are either sensors or deflector beam projectors, the blue ones are magnoweb projectors (similar to tractor beams) and I can't remember what the multicoloured object next to the aft torpedo launcher is, possibly a teleport node.

 

[BlackWave]

When did you come up with these designs, btw?

Also, 'monotwist missiles'?

 

[Thande]

When did you come up with these designs, btw?

Also, 'monotwist missiles'?

These would have been done circa 1997.

As for 'monotwist' (also called 'monophasic', 'monobrane', etc.) this is a terminology I invented to describe a weapon based on M-theory. This is a contemporary physics theory based on a development of string theory. For the purpose of this discussion, the important part is that it states that reality consists of several layers or 'branes' (as in mem-branes), only one of which corresponds to the physical reality we see. This is used to explain why gravity is a much weaker force than electromagnetism,* which is one of the main problems for modern physics - gravity's effects are spread across lots of branes so our own brane only gets a fraction of its strength, whereas magnetism's effects are focused on our own brane so are stronger.

I ran with this concept and the monotwist weapons work on the principle that a bomb will inevitably waste some of its explosive force across several other branes as well as the one you want it to. Conventional explosives are therefore sometimes known as "polyphasic" weapons in the Thalvetia setting. However, quantum twist technology (hence -twist) can be used to focus the explosive force only onto the brane you want. This is monotwist or monophasic. Inferior, earlier forms of the technology could only focus it onto two, three, four branes including some useless ones, and are known as 'biphasic', 'triphasic', etc.

If you want to think about it in contemporary terms, it's like saying a bomb wastes some of its energy in light and sound when you want to turn it all into percussive force and heat, and inventing a technology to mean it all goes into that.

Having said that, the terminology is a bit misleading here because the B'Stilan missiles are quite different technologically to the monotwist weapons used by other races - most monotwist weapons use an ordinary matter-antimatter warhead and then amplify it by the brane-twist, whereas the B'Stilan missiles, while still monotwist, are acting upon a charged quantronic coil as the core explosive in the warhead, a technology which is unknown almost anywhere else.






* If this hasn't occurred to you before, think about the fact that you can wave a bar magnet over a nail or something and the nail will jump up into the air to stick to the bar magnet. In other words, the magnetism of one tiny bar magnet has overcome the gravity of the entire Earth.

 

[Thande]

Is it OK if I use this as a general resources thread? I've just started work on another alphabet you see.

 

[Thande]

Is it OK if I use this as a general resources thread? I've just started work on another alphabet you see.

So...here it is then. The Immeritan alphabet, as used by the Sahdavi of Moonstruck among others. Product of thousands of years of degradation from the Classical Trehóritan runes or, alternatively, one hour's worth of dull meeting with access to pens and paper earlier to-day.

 

[Landshark]

You really don't want red hemispheres with prongs sticking out the middle on your spaceship.

 

[Thande]

You really don't want red hemispheres with prongs sticking out the middle on your spaceship.

Too obviously derivative of the original Enterprise?

If you mean the other thing, it would be ironically appropriate - the B'Stilans are asexual.

 

[Azardin]

Is it OK if I use this as a general resources thread? I've just started work on another alphabet you see.

You ask permission to use your own thread?

So...here it is then. The Immeritan alphabet, as used by the Sahdavi of Moonstruck among others. Product of thousands of years of degradation from the Classical Trehóritan runes or, alternatively, one hour's worth of dull meeting with access to pens and paper earlier to-day.

Dull meetings are great for that sort of thing. I like the alphabet, obviously not a knockoff of the Latin alphabet (in Spaaace), more phonetically based (I think, I could be using improper terminology here).

Some of the degradations don't seem linearly logical, while some look like direct derivatives, others look like they've been spliced some. Intentional?

Too obviously derivative of the original Enterprise?

If you mean the other thing, it would be ironically appropriate - the B'Stilans are asexual.

Do they too consider their ships female?

 

[Azardin]

Looking at the ventral plans you will notice six retracted landing legs. Due to the harsh conditions of their home nebula the B'Stilans adopted a 'planet hopping' strategy (compare Polynesians if you go with 'Space Is An Ocean' ) and this meant they engineered all but the largest of their ships to be capable of landing on a planet.

Does this requirement also dictate the vaguely aerodynamic form? I was looking at it and thought "Damn, it looks kind of squished." But after a moments thought it reminded me almost of a distorted discus.

Granted if you modeled it after the Thunderbird 2 (which I had to look up), the shape makes sense likely for my stated reason, if indirectly, though I'm curious to see if there is any further thinking behind it.

Crew: 333 (again, this needs revising upwards)

Considering it looks to be about the size of an Enterprise-Class CVN, perhaps the 5828 cited on the Wikipedia article would be a realistic upper bound (although in terms of crew, the article gives 3000 (2700 Enlisted, 150 Officers, 150 Chiefs)).

Ancillary craft: Carries 10 fighters as standard - 9 used for combat and 1 as an executive shuttle. If the cargo bays are also employed this can be squeezed up to 13 in an emergency.

Using the Enterprise as a ruler:

10 shuttles with 3 pilots each (using your previously mentioned complement), sans one active fighter means 27 pilots. The Enterprise has 250 pilots to 1550 support, meaning a ratio of 1:6.2, which means you'd perhaps need another 167.4 crewmen. Considering you need them to do work, that .4 crewman should be the torso up, say, mid ribcage.

Seriously, a 1:6 ratio or perhaps even a 1:8 or :10 would be a realistic and generous estimation.

 

[Thande]

Dull meetings are great for that sort of thing. I like the alphabet, obviously not a knockoff of the Latin alphabet (in Spaaace), more phonetically based (I think, I could be using improper terminology here).

Some of the degradations don't seem linearly logical, while some look like direct derivatives, others look like they've been spliced some. Intentional?

Yeah, it's supposed to be a gradual corruption of Trehóritan by the Immeri, so some of the characters represent slurred forms of the runes while others are made up. I have also missed out several runes which were simply lost in the process, although they're still used by other races such as the Doagori.

I also intended to make the Immeri alphabet look vaguely similar to the Vároto one I've posted elsewhere - the two languages are not in any way linguistically related, but it makes sense that the Vároto would have based their own writing system on that of their Sahdavi masters.

Do they too consider their ships female?

Absolutely not. Stilan society is sort of like modern South Africa. Their "apartheid" was the asexual B'Stilans suffering as second-class citizens under the less numerous, sexually dimorphic (but otherwise fairly similar - it's complicated) K'Stilans. After this system was brought crashing down in a violent revolution, however, it hasn't gotten equitable as much as the positions are now reversed.

Needless to say, when they first encountered sexual beings from our galaxy, the B'Stilans needed a lot of convincing to look past their ingrained prejudices.

 

[Thande]

Okay, another design: the Tornado-class destroyer:

 

[Thande]

The Tornado class is an overpowered, overgunned ship which actually carries similar armaments to the larger Vortex cruiser. Because of its oversized power core, it blows through its fuel stocks rapidly and thus is basically incapable of acting alone on all but the shortest missions (at least, unless additional tanks are installed to the swapout docking port): it's designed to function as part of a flotilla or larger fleet, refuelling from a Nebulous or a dedicated tanker.

The Tornado is also one of the faster B'Stilan ships and its chief vulnerability is its low loadout of fighters.

Technospec

Length - 180 metres

Crew - 213 (as before, should be revised upward)

Armament - 26 dual phasebolter turrets, 5 heavy phasebolter cannons, 4 hailfire torpedo launchers, 4 high energy monotwist missiles.

Maximum speed - 130 Mdals

Ancillary craft - 4 fighters (3 used for combat, 1 as executive shuttle)

 

[BlackWave]

The design looks fairly lame, tbh, but I suppose you've got to work with what you've got. Incidentally, and sorry if this has already been talked about, what sort of firepower can these ships be compared to? 40k, Star Wars, Trek, etc? Can they burn planets, or is shattering asteroids a feat for them?

 

[Thande]

The design looks fairly lame, tbh, but I suppose you've got to work with what you've got. Incidentally, and sorry if this has already been talked about, what sort of firepower can these ships be compared to? 40k, Star Wars, Trek, etc? Can they burn planets, or is shattering asteroids a feat for them?

What's wrong with it? The only thing I can see is it looks a bit bare of detail, but that's mainly because the original sketch included windows and I removed those after realising it would be a bit daft considering the setting and design philosophy.

Re power levels, the basic weapons of the B'Stilans were inspired by the look of those from Star Wars - discrete bolts and relatively little damage done (which is actually a plot point) so they work in large volumes. Their monotwist missiles on the other hand are very powerful and a couple of dozen of them could more or less destroy a planet's crust. The heavy cannons also deserve mention: the one of the Spiral-class mothership is capable of splitting anything up to the size of a small moon or could take out, say, Switzerland in one shot.

 

[Azardin]

The Tornado is also one of the faster B'Stilan ships and its chief vulnerability is its low loadout of fighters.

Why is the low loadout of fighters a vulnerability?

Crew - 213 (as before, should be revised upward)

But only so much, in my space opera experience the smaller ships have small crews. Some manner of exponential increase occurs as you get larger and larger.

Armament - 26 dual phasebolter turrets, 5 heavy phasebolter cannons, 4 hailfire torpedo launchers, 4 high energy monotwist missiles.

With that number of smaller weapons, I'd think that it'd have a decent anti-fighter defense, hence my above question.

The heavy cannons also deserve mention: the one of the Spiral-class mothership is capable of splitting anything up to the size of a small moon or could take out, say, Switzerland in one shot.

Good thing the Swiss are neutral.

 

[MrP]

But only so much, in my space opera experience the smaller ships have small crews. Some manner of exponential increase occurs as you get larger and larger.

Aye, e.g. Star Wars:
Carrack Cruiser: Length: 350m, Crew: 1,092
ISD: Length: 1,600m, Crew: 46,000 odd (including troops)

 

[Thande]

Why is the low loadout of fighters a vulnerability?


With that number of smaller weapons, I'd think that it'd have a decent anti-fighter defense, hence my above question.

Their doctrine is largely fighter-based and the turret guns are of limited capacity: they'd be okay against strikers or large bombers but the smaller and more nimble fighters would be able to evade their fire most of the time. Hence the need for a fighter screen.

These ships are also equipped with low-power laser point defences (originally designed for supplementary protection against asteroids etc) which can be used against fighters but these aren't powerful enough to be more than a nuisance to any reasonably shielded fighter. (To the extent that I don't actually note them under the table of armaments).

Aye, e.g. Star Wars:
Carrack Cruiser: Length: 350m, Crew: 1,092
ISD: Length: 1,600m, Crew: 46,000 odd (including troops)

Yes, that was a shock when I was first reading about SW ships at the time I was designing these, after being used to ST in which a ship 600 m long has a crew of 1000...

Having said that I don't see the B'Stilan ships reaching the crew density of your average Imperial ship from SW due to the factor of their use of A.I.s and nanotech - they were always intended to be more lightly crewed than the norm in Thalvetian navies.

 

[Nugax]

...and this meant they engineered all but the largest of their ships to be capable of landing on a planet.

I was going to comment on the vertical asymmetry before you said this. Is the mothership too big to land on a planet? If so its three sided prism design seems awkward - better to have 6, 9, 27 etc sides, as the closer you approximate a cyclinder the more space you enclose per amount of carrier. Also if you keep the prism a trifoil nacelle design would really drive the 'rule of three' home in comparison to the iconic ST Federation vehicles .

A question remains regarding the 'nacelles' - I assumed they were like Star Trek where you needed pairwise outriggers to generate an all enclosing field, but the Nebulous appears to belay this and variable unbalanced field geometries appear possible. In this case why don't the larger ships have multiple small devices, reducing their profile, increasing robustness, and allowing interoperability for the 'modular' designs of the B'S with one/a few set FTL components that they can plug into any size of frame by just increasing the number used?