New Manty ship ideas.

What would be the best implementations for the RMN for new ships.

Streak hyper drives, yes.

How about combo SD-P and CLAC, twice or ten times as big or more, half as fast or less, with LAC's capable of running any other ships down, 12 times the number of pods and 100 to 400 LAC's. Grazers etc...

Mobile forts, only with a wedge and hyper capable.

A true dreadnaught, they see it coming, they might be able to out run it, but not the LAC's it is carrying. A true dread inspiring ship capable of taking on or out any fleet the Sollies might put up against it. If it is big enough it might even carry a destroyer or two. Put one of these with Apollo in orbit and that planet is yours, put 10 and anything is yours.

I suppose instead of pods a "Skimper" class could just have lots of missile tubes, and extra ammunition. However many missiles Apollo can control in a cluster. If big enough it could even make new missiles.

Lord Skimper wrote:What would be the best implementations for the RMN for new ships.

Streak hyper drives, yes.

How about combo SD-P and CLAC, twice or ten times as big or more, half as fast or less, with LAC's capable of running any other ships down, 12 times the number of pods and 100 to 400 LAC's. Grazers etc...

Mobile forts, only with a wedge and hyper capable.

A true dreadnaught, they see it coming, they might be able to out run it, but not the LAC's it is carrying. A true dread inspiring ship capable of taking on or out any fleet the Sollies might put up against it. If it is big enough it might even carry a destroyer or two. Put one of these with Apollo in orbit and that planet is yours, put 10 and anything is yours.

Face-palm

At this point, that is as necessary as a story arc in a porn. An SDp has the same or better accel than an SLN destroyer, and an SLN SD can be taken out by a CL, PROBABLY WITHOUT PODS! The only navies that can do more than scratch the paint of manti task force are all allies. If you concentrated every remaining active SLN ship, you could take them out with two, maybe three, squadrons of Apollo equipped SDp's and a couple of reloads.

Now, you could do it. David has said that they could build a Death Star if you wanted to. But why in the Tester's name would you want to. Do you know how many SDp's you could build for the cost of one?

Lord Skimper wrote:What would be the best implementations for the RMN for new ships.

Streak hyper drives, yes.

How about combo SD-P and CLAC, twice or ten times as big or more, half as fast or less, with LAC's capable of running any other ships down, 12 times the number of pods and 100 to 400 LAC's. Grazers etc...

Mobile forts, only with a wedge and hyper capable.

A true dreadnaught, they see it coming, they might be able to out run it, but not the LAC's it is carrying. A true dread inspiring ship capable of taking on or out any fleet the Sollies might put up against it. If it is big enough it might even carry a destroyer or two. Put one of these with Apollo in orbit and that planet is yours, put 10 and anything is yours.

The problem with a ship that big is that it could not use an inertial compensator. Manticoran superdreadnoughts are already pushing the size limits for their inertial compensators, and they have the best compensators in the galaxy. So your deathstar will be limited to accelerations that can be countered by grav plates, about 100 gravs for Manticoran tech. There have been frequent arguments here about whether a ship limited to 100 gravs would make a credible warship.

crewdude48 wrote:Face-palm

At this point, that is as necessary as a story arc in a porn. An SDp has the same or better accel than an SLN destroyer, and an SLN SD can be taken out by a CL, PROBABLY WITHOUT PODS!

We haven't heard that the improved grav lensing has been minaturized into anything smaller than a Mk16 DDM, and (to the best of our knowledge) the newest Manti CL design is still the Avalon-class uses the older smaller (and shorter ranged) Mk36 LERM (lighweight extended range) missiles.

It's not clear to me that several hundred of those could take out a SLN SD. Now a few Rolands, or a Sag-C, sure we know the Mk16's been beefed up to near pre-war capital missile standards. Yeah, you might need to go to multiple DDs or up to a CA to singlehandled take out a SL SD


But your real point that a slow hybrid monstrosity isn't required is certainly true. There are more resource efficient ways to get the firepower you need.

Lord Skimper wrote:Mobile forts, only with a wedge and hyper capable.

Apart from everything else everyone has said, forts can already generate wedges. That was stated right back in Basilisk Station.

Werrf wrote:

Lord Skimper wrote:Mobile forts, only with a wedge and hyper capable.

Apart from everything else everyone has said, forts can already generate wedges. That was stated right back in Basilisk Station.

One remembers forts being immobile until Trevor's star smaller forts. They had bubble sidewalls that wouldn't allow them to move, hence early on they were susceptible to bomb attacks.

Yes you could make many SD-P but then again you could make many more Rowlands than SD-P. You could also make many more LAC's with tractor "donkey" emitters and tow them with Rowlands 'Slowly'. Or Q ship conversions depending how many transports and freighters one starts with. Numbers range from 1000 to 100,000. Modular, whatever current Manty conventions call for, container size. Make a sensor module, make a pod module, make a pod anti missile module, LAC module... Pull a Graser from one of the many Sollie SD's mount it fore and aft.

Lord Skimper wrote:
<Snip>
How about combo SD-P and CLAC, twice or ten times as big or more, half as fast or less, with LAC's capable of running any other ships down, 12 times the number of pods and 100 to 400 LAC's. Grazers etc...

David already shot down a SD(p)/CLAC combo in one of his next-gen build infodumps. Basically a CLAC and and SD are at complete separate ends of armoring schemes. CLACS has Huge hatches and huge bays behind those hatches, and SD(p)s have the 1 massive hatch and bay, the rest is massive armor and cofferdaming. CLACS are not designed to close and do the dirty work where SDs are expected to take anything thrown at it and dish it back out, over and over again.

Pruning the 2 together would get you a ship suboptimal at both jobs.

However, forts seem to combine both to a degree, but I'm not certain if David has separate Missile centric and LAC centric Forts or not (no text-ev)

Lord Skimper wrote:

Werrf wrote:Apart from everything else everyone has said, forts can already generate wedges. That was stated right back in Basilisk Station.

One remembers forts being immobile until Trevor's star smaller forts. They had bubble sidewalls that wouldn't allow them to move, hence early on they were susceptible to bomb attacks.

One can certainly remember that if one likes. Or one can read the damn books; books like, say, On Basilisk Station which says:
The forts weren't hyper-capable, for they used mass a warship might have devoted to its hyper generators and Warshawski sails to pack in still more firepower, but they were far more than immobile weapon platforms. They had to be.
...
the forts in the outer rings had to be able to move to fill in the gaps and mass upon an attacker. Their maximum acceleration rates were low, well under a hundred gravities, but their initial positions had been very carefully planned. Their acceleration would be enough to intercept attacking forces headed in-system, and their engines were sufficiently powerful to generate impeller wedges and sidewalls to protect them.

Lord Skimper wrote:One remembers forts being immobile until Trevor's star smaller forts. They had bubble sidewalls that wouldn't allow them to move, hence early on they were susceptible to bomb attacks.

Yes you could make many SD-P but then again you could make many more Rowlands than SD-P. You could also make many more LAC's with tractor "donkey" emitters and tow them with Rowlands 'Slowly'. Or Q ship conversions depending how many transports and freighters one starts with. Numbers range from 1000 to 100,000. Modular, whatever current Manty conventions call for, container size. Make a sensor module, make a pod module, make a pod anti missile module, LAC module... Pull a Graser from one of the many Sollie SD's mount it fore and aft.

Forts could always move - they have wedges and use Grav plats (not compensators) and are limited to ~100 Gs. Their movement allows them to not be a "Fixed point" which can be blind fired upon. However, when they use the bubble sidewall, they have to drop the wedges and become immobile - gaining them 360 x360 fieds of fire and losing the impenetrability of theirl wedges.

The Q-ship you are speaking about is being attempted by Maya - at the BoT they fielded 3 2 Mton Arsenal ships with pod-bays. These ships are modular, Starlifter class transports, but the intention was to construct modules (25Ktons each) which would do as you supposed - some would have missile launchers, others defensive systems (sidewalls, PDCLs), and other would have energy weapons. At Torch, none of these modules were finished yet. In Silensia, shuch an arrangement was also used by some pirate bands in the same design.

The probelem is the ship itself is structurally weak and has no armoring or cofferdaming and is susceptible to ANY hits whatsoever. Armoring the individual containers may slightly eleviate this, but the impact of the strikes will be carried to the ship's structure - which is not designed for such abuse, and could cause catastrophic failures.

Manty LACS are limited to 3 Pods which limits their accel to about 1/3 normal - Donkeys would be useless for them, as a Donkey would take the place of one of the Pods, limiting the LAC to towing only 2 actual pods.