Courageous class in HOS

Today I was re-reading House of Steel because I want to do a school project (a CAD model of Fearless CL-56 pre-refit) and it was going fairly well until I realized that I could not figure out which weapons were which in the picture from the Janes section, there is nothing that I could find that would look right for a 7 tube broadside and there is a structure on top of the craft that I can not explain except as a conning tower like on a submarine. Could somone please help because I can not figure It out.

If I remember correctly the stuff on top is more or less because that is what people expect to see.

For the broadside armament. The eleven larger circles are the hatches for the 7 missile tubes, 2 grasers and 2 lasers. Which is which you will have to wait for MaxxQ to see your post. He has done renderings at.

http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/art/C ... -473193407

Hope it helps,
T2M

thinkstoomuch wrote:If I remember correctly the stuff on top is more or less because that is what people expect to see.

For the broadside armament. The eleven larger circles are the hatches for the 7 missile tubes, 2 grasers and 2 lasers. Which is which you will have to wait for MaxxQ to see your post. He has done renderings at.

http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/art/C ... -473193407

Hope it helps,
T2M

Yup, that sounds right. The six dots on the upper gundeck are the PD clusters and CM tubes.

BrigadeΔ wrote:Today I was re-reading House of Steel because I want to do a school project (a CAD model of Fearless CL-56 pre-refit) and it was going fairly well until I realized that I could not figure out which weapons were which in the picture from the Janes section, there is nothing that I could find that would look right for a 7 tube broadside and there is a structure on top of the craft that I can not explain except as a conning tower like on a submarine. Could somone please help because I can not figure It out.

As has been stated by the others, the superstructure, while not strictly book canon, is there to give viewers a sense of dorsal/ventral. It's definitely *not* a bridge, as the Honorverse adheres to the idea that the command center(s) ought to be buried deep in the ship for maximum protection, unlike other SF universes.

The Rolly Things™ behind the superstructure are Gravitic Plasma Dumps, as we call them in BuNine. They are there to help get rid of extra heat, and are the devices that allow the wedge to soak up that extra heat (per textev - well, the fact that heat is dumped into the wedge is textev, but not the device by which it happens).

In my renders, the flat black panels are radiators, for normal heat dumping. The round covers on top of the superstructure are the elevator caps, because at the moment, we are debating whether the elevators can also be used as escape pods. We haven't settled on that yet. The other round covers are the regular escape pod tube covers. Escape pods, at least for the RMN, only eject through the dorsal surface. The only exceptions are the on-mount weapons crew areas, which are covered with an armored blow-out panel, and eject from the sides of the ship in the event of an abandon ship being called.

The gray square panels are EW/ECM emitters. I think the gravitic array blades are pretty self-explanatory. The small black rectangular "panels" are the RCS thrusters, with directional vanes. The black domes are LIDAR emitters - the large ones are for general targeting and the small ones are tube/energy weapon-specific. The small yellowish hexagonal panels (5 hexes) are radar/telemetry transceivers for missiles. The slightly larger ones (4 hexes) are targeting radar panels (and one or more are also placed near the boat bays for flight operations of small craft).

The largest hex panels (13 hexes) are the main radar/telemetry tranceivers. In the image linked to in a previous post, the CM tubes are the larger of the upper weapons deck placements, and the smaller ones are the Point Defense Laser Clusters (only two emitters per cluster). The ovals are indeed the main weapons ports, 7 of which are tubes.* There's no distinguishing which port is which weapon, as the RMN standardizes its weapons ports to only be as large as the largest weapon. In the case of the Courageous, the missile tubes are larger than the energy weapons, so the ports are only just large enough for the missile tubes to function, while the energy weapons look a bit lost in the opening. (for now**) Same goes for the weapons ports on the hammerheads, and the defensive weapons are in the bits that stick out from the angled part of the hammerheads.

Impeller nodes are pretty obvious.

http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/art/C ... -473193411

The above linked image shows the boat bays, the flight ops center (the "blister" just aft of the boat bays), and the midships external personnel and cargo tubes (directly below the side gravitic array). On a Courageous, a full complement of small craft is two Mk-28 pinnaces and two Mk-something (sorry, can't recall at the moment) cutters. The space between the forward pinnace and the forward bulkhead of the boat bay is there to allow deployment of Recon Drones, which are roughly half the size of a pinnace and are always deployed through the boat bay, no matter which ship you are talking about.

http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/art/F ... -427887665

Above image shows a better view of a boay bay setup for the RMN. This one is for the CA-286 Fearless, but the same general arrangement of equipment holds for all classes of RMN ships. Cargo and boarding tubes, fixed docking arms (the large pads), travelling docking arms (the small pads), power and refueling umbilicals, tractors (the bluish strips along the walls), personnel hatches for external EVA maintenance (the thin lines going near the hatches and around the periphery of the bays are safety line bars for personnel working in the bays), larger hatches for bring in parts to be worked on indoors, and if you look carefully behind the tail of the pinnace, you can see the RD deployment hatch.

http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/art/F ... -427888076

The final image is just me showing off an image I'm especially happy with. Just a detail shot of a pinnace parked in the boat bay. Also, there's a video of a pinnace performing a flyaround of the Fearless, as well as a docking sequence. The link to the video is in my signature below (the HMS Fearless link).

*Weapons arrangement is (aft to forward in the HoS line art):

M, M, L, M, G, M gravitic array M, G, M, L, M

For the chase weapons, the top ports (as seen in my renders) are missiles and the single lower one is the laser port. This is the same forward and aft.

**"For now" applies to almost everything. These are canon as of now, but there will most likely be changes made in the future, both major and minor. Sometimes we make changes on our own (the CA Fearless started out as a single weapons deck ship), and sometimes David mentions something that ends up making us scramble to change something we thought was "finished".

Hope the info I provided helps.

MaxxQ wrote:http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/art/Fearless-009a-427888076

The final image is just me showing off an image I'm especially happy with. Just a detail shot of a pinnace parked in the boat bay.

This is the first time I have seen this particular image, and it is as amazing as all of your others, but I always figured that the boarding tubes were smaller than you portray. I always pictured them as more or less square, not much more than a double arm length across. Because of the fact that they are not under gravity, you would want the walls to be close enough so that you can't easily drift away from them. We know that people travel down them head first, (because of the need to avoid looking up Honor's dress while following her) and having them shaped like regular hallways would seem to me to be a waste of space and material.

MaxxQ wrote:

BrigadeΔ wrote:Today I was re-reading House of Steel because I want to do a school project (a CAD model of Fearless CL-56 pre-refit) and it was going fairly well until I realized that I could not figure out which weapons were which in the picture from the Janes section, there is nothing that I could find that would look right for a 7 tube broadside and there is a structure on top of the craft that I can not explain except as a conning tower like on a submarine. Could somone please help because I can not figure It out.

As has been stated by the others, the superstructure, while not strictly book canon, is there to give viewers a sense of dorsal/ventral. It's definitely *not* a bridge, as the Honorverse adheres to the idea that the command center(s) ought to be buried deep in the ship for maximum protection, unlike other SF universes.

The Rolly Things™ behind the superstructure are Gravitic Plasma Dumps, as we call them in BuNine. They are there to help get rid of extra heat, and are the devices that allow the wedge to soak up that extra heat (per textev - well, the fact that heat is dumped into the wedge is textev, but not the device by which it happens).

In my renders, the flat black panels are radiators, for normal heat dumping. The round covers on top of the superstructure are the elevator caps, because at the moment, we are debating whether the elevators can also be used as escape pods. We haven't settled on that yet. The other round covers are the regular escape pod tube covers. Escape pods, at least for the RMN, only eject through the dorsal surface. The only exceptions are the on-mount weapons crew areas, which are covered with an armored blow-out panel, and eject from the sides of the ship in the event of an abandon ship being called.

The gray square panels are EW/ECM emitters. I think the gravitic array blades are pretty self-explanatory. The small black rectangular "panels" are the RCS thrusters, with directional vanes. The black domes are LIDAR emitters - the large ones are for general targeting and the small ones are tube/energy weapon-specific. The small yellowish hexagonal panels (5 hexes) are radar/telemetry transceivers for missiles. The slightly larger ones (4 hexes) are targeting radar panels (and one or more are also placed near the boat bays for flight operations of small craft).

The largest hex panels (13 hexes) are the main radar/telemetry tranceivers. In the image linked to in a previous post, the CM tubes are the larger of the upper weapons deck placements, and the smaller ones are the Point Defense Laser Clusters (only two emitters per cluster). The ovals are indeed the main weapons ports, 7 of which are tubes.* There's no distinguishing which port is which weapon, as the RMN standardizes its weapons ports to only be as large as the largest weapon. In the case of the Courageous, the missile tubes are larger than the energy weapons, so the ports are only just large enough for the missile tubes to function, while the energy weapons look a bit lost in the opening. (for now**) Same goes for the weapons ports on the hammerheads, and the defensive weapons are in the bits that stick out from the angled part of the hammerheads.

Impeller nodes are pretty obvious.

http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/art/C ... -473193411

The above linked image shows the boat bays, the flight ops center (the "blister" just aft of the boat bays), and the midships external personnel and cargo tubes (directly below the side gravitic array). On a Courageous, a full complement of small craft is two Mk-28 pinnaces and two Mk-something (sorry, can't recall at the moment) cutters. The space between the forward pinnace and the forward bulkhead of the boat bay is there to allow deployment of Recon Drones, which are roughly half the size of a pinnace and are always deployed through the boat bay, no matter which ship you are talking about.

http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/art/F ... -427887665

Above image shows a better view of a boay bay setup for the RMN. This one is for the CA-286 Fearless, but the same general arrangement of equipment holds for all classes of RMN ships. Cargo and boarding tubes, fixed docking arms (the large pads), travelling docking arms (the small pads), power and refueling umbilicals, tractors (the bluish strips along the walls), personnel hatches for external EVA maintenance (the thin lines going near the hatches and around the periphery of the bays are safety line bars for personnel working in the bays), larger hatches for bring in parts to be worked on indoors, and if you look carefully behind the tail of the pinnace, you can see the RD deployment hatch.

http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/art/F ... -427888076

The final image is just me showing off an image I'm especially happy with. Just a detail shot of a pinnace parked in the boat bay. Also, there's a video of a pinnace performing a flyaround of the Fearless, as well as a docking sequence. The link to the video is in my signature below (the HMS Fearless link).

*Weapons arrangement is (aft to forward in the HoS line art):

M, M, L, M, G, M gravitic array M, G, M, L, M

For the chase weapons, the top ports (as seen in my renders) are missiles and the single lower one is the laser port. This is the same forward and aft.

**"For now" applies to almost everything. These are canon as of now, but there will most likely be changes made in the future, both major and minor. Sometimes we make changes on our own (the CA Fearless started out as a single weapons deck ship), and sometimes David mentions something that ends up making us scramble to change something we thought was "finished".

Hope the info I provided helps.

Thank you, you accually gave me way more info then I really needed but it is certainly useful, now I just need to figure out how to CAD model PD mounts and gravitic sensors, they given that I am using KeyCreator are going to be a chalenge, another problem I ran into is that I have no good idea of exectly how big and what shape impeller nodes are, your drawing was good but it is 389 meters of ship compressed to be 9.2 cm long, I have them as cones that are 2 meters tall and 2 meters in diameter for alphas and hlaph that size for betas, in one ring of 8 of each type on each set of impeller rings, the conning tower may have been a problem in the long run though in the mobile game most of your ships have odd flying bridges that are outside of the ship, so much so that I am afraid that they will put windows in the bridge ( and probably leave out Aux Con completely) in the movie

crewdude48 wrote:

MaxxQ wrote:http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/art/Fearless-009a-427888076

The final image is just me showing off an image I'm especially happy with. Just a detail shot of a pinnace parked in the boat bay.

This is the first time I have seen this particular image, and it is as amazing as all of your others, but I always figured that the boarding tubes were smaller than you portray. I always pictured them as more or less square, not much more than a double arm length across. Because of the fact that they are not under gravity, you would want the walls to be close enough so that you can't easily drift away from them. We know that people travel down them head first, (because of the need to avoid looking up Honor's dress while following her) and having them shaped like regular hallways would seem to me to be a waste of space and material.

The reason they are that large is because the seals have to fit *around* the hatch(es) on the small craft, which are, IIRC, 1.25 meters wide. That makes the smaller personnel tubes about 1.5-1.75 meters across on the inside, less if you include the handholds on all four sides. That's close enough to touch both sides with the average outstretched arms.

The larger cargo handling tubes are about 2.5-3 meters across. Height is a bit more problematic, as the tube needs to fit around hatches on curved surfaces, such as that on the pinnace in the image. A hatch in a side view might be only two meters tall, but the curved length may be as much as 2.5 meters. This is even more of an issue on a surface curved in two dimensions - vertically *and* horizontally.

This is why 3D modeling from line art such as in HoS is such a challenge, and why some people don't understand why some things just won't fit, no matter how they try to do the math - they are only thinking in two dimensions, not three. Even I had to make changes in my meshes because the line art and dimensions didn't work with what needed to fit into a ship.

Also, BuNine decided that boarding tubes in the Honorverse should be standardized across all star nations, for rescue purposes at the minimum, even if hatch design is different from one star nation to another. This means that another star nation, maybe the Andies, might have slightly larger hatches for whatever reason, and RMN boarding tubes have to accomodate that.

Lastly, these are also wide enough to accomodate power-armored marines. The inner and outer "walls" of the tubes are an airtight elastic material that is tougher than Kevlar/carbon-fiber composites designed to resist punctures while still being flexible enough to extend and flex. Actuators between the "skins" extend and curve the tubes as needed. Those "dots" you see around the inner and outer edges of the seal are hinges to allow the seal to conform to any surface.

I imagine the "standardization" rule came from the Sollies back when they were worth paying attention to.

BrigadeΔ wrote:Thank you, you accually gave me way more info then I really needed but it is certainly useful, now I just need to figure out how to CAD model PD mounts and gravitic sensors, they given that I am using KeyCreator are going to be a chalenge,

I can't help you there, as I've never even heard of Key Creator.

For closer images of the PDLC and CM mounts, look here:

http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/art/P ... -427890178

Granted, this is a six-emitter PDLC mount, but the Courageous is very similar, just a bit smaller and with only two emitters.

BrigadeΔ wrote: another problem I ran into is that I have no good idea of exectly how big and what shape impeller nodes are, your drawing was good but it is 389 meters of ship compressed to be 9.2 cm long, I have them as cones that are 2 meters tall and 2 meters in diameter for alphas and hlaph that size for betas,

Close enough, but not quite. The nodes are rounded cones, like the nose of a rocket or missile and are somewhat taller than they are wide. My mesh has them at about 2.5 meters wide and about 3 meters tall, including the little nubbin on the tip (somewhat more visible in this early version of the nodes: http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/art/M ... -465724724 ).

BrigadeΔ wrote:in one ring of 8 of each type on each set of impeller rings,

Nope. Eight Alphas and sixteen Betas, for twenty-four total per ring. Fifteen degrees between each node, and the pattern is, starting at the top: Alpha, Beta, Beta, Alpha, Beta, Beta...

BrigadeΔ wrote:the conning tower may have been a problem in the long run though in the mobile game most of your ships have odd flying bridges that are outside of the ship, so much so that I am afraid that they will put windows in the bridge ( and probably leave out Aux Con completely) in the movie

Ah... the problem is that what you see in the game and the comic is *movie/game/comic* canon, and not *book* canon. Evergreen has gone mostly with their own designs, to better accomodate a visual medium that is supposed to appeal to a wide range of people (including those who have never heard of the Honorverse) as opposed to appealing *only* to the fans of the books. People expect to see bridges on the surface - after all, that's what you see in other SF series/movies, and even in war movies featuring wet navy ships - and so that's what may/will/is be seen in the movie/game/comic.

Evergreen is in the business of making money, and to do that, they need to appeal to as many people as possible, and part of that is giving non-fans something to relate to. They expect to see flying bridges, so they will most likely get flying bridges. They expect to see ships duking it out at spitball range, so they will most likely get that. They expect to see lasers and grasers glowing in many colors, they expect to see flame trails from missiles, they expect to see... etc, etc. Even David has said that if every hardcore fan bought 5 tickets to the movie, (and *only* the hardcore fans) Evergreen would lose money, because there simply aren't enough of us to satisfy the gamble of making a multi-million dollar movie.

OTOH, BuNine is dedicated to making our designs match as closely as possible the descriptions David has given in the books - thus *book* canon. BuNine does what we do to appeal to the hardcore fan, who prefers the more "realistic" aspects of space warfare and ship design.

<shrug> It's one of those times where people will have to decide which is more canon to their own perceptions. I forsee many heated arguments in the future

MaxxQ wrote:

BrigadeΔ wrote:Thank you, you accually gave me way more info then I really needed but it is certainly useful, now I just need to figure out how to CAD model PD mounts and gravitic sensors, they given that I am using KeyCreator are going to be a chalenge,

I can't help you there, as I've never even heard of Key Creator.

For closer images of the PDLC and CM mounts, look here:

http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/art/P ... -427890178

Granted, this is a six-emitter PDLC mount, but the Courageous is very similar, just a bit smaller and with only two emitters.

BrigadeΔ wrote: another problem I ran into is that I have no good idea of exectly how big and what shape impeller nodes are, your drawing was good but it is 389 meters of ship compressed to be 9.2 cm long, I have them as cones that are 2 meters tall and 2 meters in diameter for alphas and hlaph that size for betas,

Close enough, but not quite. The nodes are rounded cones, like the nose of a rocket or missile and are somewhat taller than they are wide. My mesh has them at about 2.5 meters wide and about 3 meters tall, including the little nubbin on the tip (somewhat more visible in this early version of the nodes: http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/art/M ... -465724724 ).

BrigadeΔ wrote:in one ring of 8 of each type on each set of impeller rings,

Nope. Eight Alphas and sixteen Betas, for twenty-four total per ring. Fifteen degrees between each node, and the pattern is, starting at the top: Alpha, Beta, Beta, Alpha, Beta, Beta...

BrigadeΔ wrote:the conning tower may have been a problem in the long run though in the mobile game most of your ships have odd flying bridges that are outside of the ship, so much so that I am afraid that they will put windows in the bridge ( and probably leave out Aux Con completely) in the movie

Ah... the problem is that what you see in the game and the comic is *movie/game/comic* canon, and not *book* canon. Evergreen has gone mostly with their own designs, to better accomodate a visual medium that is supposed to appeal to a wide range of people (including those who have never heard of the Honorverse) as opposed to appealing *only* to the fans of the books. People expect to see bridges on the surface - after all, that's what you see in other SF series/movies, and even in war movies featuring wet navy ships - and so that's what may/will/is be seen in the movie/game/comic.

Evergreen is in the business of making money, and to do that, they need to appeal to as many people as possible, and part of that is giving non-fans something to relate to. They expect to see flying bridges, so they will most likely get flying bridges. They expect to see ships duking it out at spitball range, so they will most likely get that. They expect to see lasers and grasers glowing in many colors, they expect to see flame trails from missiles, they expect to see... etc, etc. Even David has said that if every hardcore fan bought 5 tickets to the movie, (and *only* the hardcore fans) Evergreen would lose money, because there simply aren't enough of us to satisfy the gamble of making a multi-million dollar movie.

OTOH, BuNine is dedicated to making our designs match as closely as possible the descriptions David has given in the books - thus *book* canon. BuNine does what we do to appeal to the hardcore fan, who prefers the more "realistic" aspects of space warfare and ship design.

<shrug> It's one of those times where people will have to decide which is more canon to their own perceptions. I forsee many heated arguments in the future

"Many heated arguments"? Like in the same way as the argument between manpower of mesa and the autobon ballroom? Though at least we do not have access to pulsars and nukes. I did however think of a reason to possibly put the bridge at the top of the ship at least on dd's anc CL's, it would be a way to limit the angles that it could be shot at from and those ships do not have any armor anyway. Sadly I expect them to cut a lot of characters like armsman candless and probably even Paul Tankerslly. Sorry for the spelling however I am on a Ipad and spellcheck is not compatible with the forum for some reason.

BrigadeΔ wrote: I did however think of a reason to possibly put the bridge at the top of the ship at least on dd's anc CL's, it would be a way to limit the angles that it could be shot at from and those ships do not have any armor anyway. Sadly I expect them to cut a lot of characters like armsman candless and probably even Paul Tankerslly.

You know, nothing prevents use of observation platforms actually out on the surface for non-combat stuff. (Or some poor schmuck caught in the wrong place when combat shuts down blast doors....) And with the holographic technology, nothing but the risk of distracting people keeps you from displaying a whole lot of space from the ship's POV in the bridge itself, wherever it's located. I'd think they could preserve more of the book canon (or violate it in milder fashions, anyway) and keep things nifty and visual that way.