Stupid idea that David is going to hate.

Hello - ready for my stupid idea of the week?

Usually these just end up in the trash can - but this one passed enough litmus tests to make it out of my head and onto .... "paper?"

Concept: Jumbo Stingship

Mass ~800-1000 tons
Crew 2-4
Main weapon: 1 2-5 cm spinal laser (10-12 cm if possible)
2nd weapon: 2x6 Missile Box per broadside - Viper missile
Power plant - small boat laser fusion


Everybody who brings up adding a LAC to the latest CL/CA/BC design brings up the fact that, especially when doing convoy escort, 1 ship simply cannot be in all the places it needs to be. And let's face it, LACs are impractical in small hyper ships, a LAC and it's bay takes 30 Ktons out of a ship's defensive/offensive mass - which is a large potion of any ship smaller than an oversized BC.

But, all ships carry Pinnances, shuttles and boatbays. Why not design a Stingship, small and compact with no atmospheric capabilities, which could fit in an ordinary boatbay slot, with weapons that can threaten a LAC or small combatant, and do some (light) antimissile work?

It obviously wouldn't be able to threaten to damage more than a CL, but it could be placed to intercept that first salvo of missiles a stealthed pirate or commerce raider could fire before the DDMs of the Roland or Sag-C take care of things. And it still has weapons that COULD seriously damage a light combatant and do serious harm to a merchie.


As for endurance - give it 24-30 hours. Give it decent ECM, enough to stealth it or make it look like a full up LAC. Yes, they cannot take a hit - any hit they do land on a warship won't be the hardest. Their combat endurance will be pathetic.

They would be cheap - easy to change out for a particular mission - and able to dock in any Merchant's or warship's boat bay. and be that all important visual force multiplier.

Over-gunned for the merchie herding role. Pinnaces with their tiny guns are enough to threaten merchies into line. With that little endurance, they'd have to launch when a threat is detected which really cuts down on their usefulness for escorting.

I'm thinking they couldn't get decent ECM but I can't think of a proper reference, maybe it's the "physics" of a pinnace's wedge or power plant or something. Might also be an issue getting accel rates suitable for a combat environment if they have only a tiny compensator.

I have no idea if you could even fit a laser or a missile box on a pinnace-sized craft.

A ship with a fraction of the capabilities of even an old, obsolete LAC? What's the point outside boarding operations or a planetary atmosphere?

Survivability in any serious threat environment is probably zero, offensive firepower is sorely lacking due to dinky laser and minimal missile loadout, underpowered and it can probably be taken out by just about any impeller wedge above a shoulder-fired SAM. It might be able to somewhat blunt the first two salvos (emptying one broadside against each) but then it is shot dry assuming the first salvo doesn't whack it out of space by wedge contact. A tractored point defense platform powered by the ship would be far more effective as it at least would be directly tied to the mother ship's tactical systems while wasting no power to generate a wedge of its own.

Also I dimly recall a size comparison of missiles showing that countermissiles are considerably smaller than offensive missiles, but still on the big side for anything shuttle-sized to handle in non-negligible numbers.

Theemile wrote:Hello - ready for my stupid idea of the week?

Usually these just end up in the trash can - but this one passed enough litmus tests to make it out of my head and onto .... "paper?"

Concept: Jumbo Stingship

Mass ~800-1000 tons
Crew 2-4
Main weapon: 1 2-5 cm spinal laser (10-12 cm if possible)
2nd weapon: 2x6 Missile Box per broadside - Viper missile
Power plant - small boat laser fusion

BTW the Mk30 Condor pinnace Hexapuma carried in SoS (which I think is still in the 200 - 300 ton range) mounts a 5cm laser.

Still that's not going to scratch the armor (or more importantly pierce the sidewall) of a real warship.

Shadow of Saganami wrote:A proper warship's sidewalls would have brushed the best efforts of those weapons contemptuously aside, and if its sidewalls had been down, its armor would have absorbed the hits with little more than superficial damage.

And I want to say a Viper would be at least 50 tons, so you're looking at over 600 tons just for the 2x6 box launchers (plus there's no way even a 1000 ton ship is wide enough to carry a Viper in both broadsides; I'd be surprised if even one fit sideways...

Don't know how the small craft acceleration curve looks like - the Mk30 was capable of 600 gravites, which is impressive, but lower than a DD of similar era so more than quadrupling the size is probably going to drop the accel more. So now you've got an under-defended, overlarge, shuttle that's over half dogfighting missile yet is slower than most of the motherships that drop it...

Doesn't seem feasibly, much less a good idea.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Theemile wrote:Hello - ready for my stupid idea of the week?

Usually these just end up in the trash can - but this one passed enough litmus tests to make it out of my head and onto .... "paper?"

Concept: Jumbo Stingship

Mass ~800-1000 tons
Crew 2-4
Main weapon: 1 2-5 cm spinal laser (10-12 cm if possible)
2nd weapon: 2x6 Missile Box per broadside - Viper missile
Power plant - small boat laser fusion

BTW the Mk30 Condor pinnace Hexapuma carried in SoS (which I think is still in the 200 - 300 ton range) mounts a 5cm laser.

Still that's not going to scratch the armor (or more importantly pierce the sidewall) of a real warship.

Shadow of Saganami wrote:A proper warship's sidewalls would have brushed the best efforts of those weapons contemptuously aside, and if its sidewalls had been down, its armor would have absorbed the hits with little more than superficial damage.

And I want to say a Viper would be at least 50 tons, so you're looking at over 600 tons just for the 2x6 box launchers (plus there's no way even a 1000 ton ship is wide enough to carry a Viper in both broadsides; I'd be surprised if even one fit sideways...

Don't know how the small craft acceleration curve looks like - the Mk30 was capable of 600 gravites, which is impressive, but lower than a DD of similar era so more than quadrupling the size is probably going to drop the accel more. So now you've got an under-defended, overlarge, shuttle that's over half dogfighting missile yet is slower than most of the motherships that drop it...

Doesn't seem feasibly, much less a good idea.

Since pinnances and shuttles are atmospheric, they are shaped as such, drop the air requirements and we can build a "blocky" design that fills the boadbays better without underutilized space for the wings - hense 800-1000 tons, yet still able to use the same boatbay space.

The mk 26 has a 2 cm and the Mk 30 has a 5 cm laser. But the small Silesian warship designs use a 12 cm laser. Manticorian DDs use 23 cm lasers in the same locations, so chances are Manty 12 cm lasers are small enough to fit on my design, possibly, and will hurt small warships... just not much.

We've never got a good mass on the Viper, just it has the Mk 32's drive, which is smaller than the mk 29's 12 tons, and only 1 of a 80 ton Mk 35's 3 3.3m lasing rods. I'm thinking somewhere in the 30-35 ton range. making the 24 missiles and boxes somewhere in the 750 ton range.

Perhaps it should have a box of Mk 32s and a box of Vipers on each side.

As for endurance, 30 hours should cover the entire stretch from the hyperlimit to a planet. the crew is small enough that they could swap out on the mothership if longer durations are needed.

Come on - I said it was stupid - but it does address the repeated need stated on this forum for a small sublight presence unit for screening purposes, without eating into the mothership.

Theemile wrote:Hello - ready for my stupid idea of the week?

Usually these just end up in the trash can - but this one passed enough litmus tests to make it out of my head and onto .... "paper?"

Concept: Jumbo Stingship

Mass ~800-1000 tons
Crew 2-4
Main weapon: 1 2-5 cm spinal laser (10-12 cm if possible)
2nd weapon: 2x6 Missile Box per broadside - Viper missile
Power plant - small boat laser fusion


Everybody who brings up adding a LAC to the latest CL/CA/BC design brings up the fact that, especially when doing convoy escort, 1 ship simply cannot be in all the places it needs to be. And let's face it, LACs are impractical in small hyper ships, a LAC and it's bay takes 30 Ktons out of a ship's defensive/offensive mass - which is a large potion of any ship smaller than an oversized BC.

But, all ships carry Pinnances, shuttles and boatbays. Why not design a Stingship, small and compact with no atmospheric capabilities, which could fit in an ordinary boatbay slot, with weapons that can threaten a LAC or small combatant, and do some (light) antimissile work?

It obviously wouldn't be able to threaten to damage more than a CL, but it could be placed to intercept that first salvo of missiles a stealthed pirate or commerce raider could fire before the DDMs of the Roland or Sag-C take care of things. And it still has weapons that COULD seriously damage a light combatant and do serious harm to a merchie.


As for endurance - give it 24-30 hours. Give it decent ECM, enough to stealth it or make it look like a full up LAC. Yes, they cannot take a hit - any hit they do land on a warship won't be the hardest. Their combat endurance will be pathetic.

They would be cheap - easy to change out for a particular mission - and able to dock in any Merchant's or warship's boat bay. and be that all important visual force multiplier.

You're absolutely right. He would hate it.

ldwechsler wrote:You're absolutely right. He would hate it.

Nah. There is no WWSNBN or new use for captured SLN crap. RFC would agree that it is stupid, but there's nothing he'd hate about the idea.

These sort of ideas would boil down to a number of complex factors that only the author knows. Or more likely doesn't know, but just handwaves away as "not logistically feasible" because that stuff's complex! That's generally the reason they won't work.

More specifically, I think a ship of that size would be vulnerable to the area effect of a nuke. Like really, vulnerable. Remember when Honor's yacht turned its wedge to block a nuclear blast? And still got its radiation/particle shields fried? It would have been a cloud of vapor against a missile targeting her that could maneuver at all.

I think that would be the basic problem. You could take it out with a single missile. Its too fragile. Same problem Mr. Weber mentions against missile pods with drives, which this basically is.

All that said: If I was feeling particularly mean, I would consider something similar, but air breathing. You would use it for planetary defense. Not of your own worlds mind you, but of any occupied world. Float it directly above a city. What is the attacker gonna do? Take you out with a nuclear blast? You'd probably want to use a fission pile. Not only is it higher endurance (somehow), but its another reason for your opponent to not blow you out of the sky!

Theemile wrote:Hello - ready for my stupid idea of the week?

Usually these just end up in the trash can - but this one passed enough litmus tests to make it out of my head and onto .... "paper?"

Concept: Jumbo Stingship

Mass ~800-1000 tons
Crew 2-4
Main weapon: 1 2-5 cm spinal laser (10-12 cm if possible)
2nd weapon: 2x6 Missile Box per broadside - Viper missile
Power plant - small boat laser fusion


Everybody who brings up adding a LAC to the latest CL/CA/BC design brings up the fact that, especially when doing convoy escort, 1 ship simply cannot be in all the places it needs to be. And let's face it, LACs are impractical in small hyper ships, a LAC and it's bay takes 30 Ktons out of a ship's defensive/offensive mass - which is a large potion of any ship smaller than an oversized BC.

But, all ships carry Pinnances, shuttles and boatbays. Why not design a Stingship, small and compact with no atmospheric capabilities, which could fit in an ordinary boatbay slot, with weapons that can threaten a LAC or small combatant, and do some (light) antimissile work?

It obviously wouldn't be able to threaten to damage more than a CL, but it could be placed to intercept that first salvo of missiles a stealthed pirate or commerce raider could fire before the DDMs of the Roland or Sag-C take care of things. And it still has weapons that COULD seriously damage a light combatant and do serious harm to a merchie.


As for endurance - give it 24-30 hours. Give it decent ECM, enough to stealth it or make it look like a full up LAC. Yes, they cannot take a hit - any hit they do land on a warship won't be the hardest. Their combat endurance will be pathetic.

They would be cheap - easy to change out for a particular mission - and able to dock in any Merchant's or warship's boat bay. and be that all important visual force multiplier.

As another poster pointed out, pinnaces and other small craft are already armed at least sufficiently to threaten other craft with no sidewall or armor protection and IIRC Assault Shuttles already have the capability to deploy somewhat larger missiles for CAS / Defense Suppression than Pinnaces can.

Both pinnaces and assault shuttles are designed to operate in space and pinnaces are impeller driven.

While your "super sting-ship" is probably possible there are already small craft capable of undertaking many of those missions. For anti-missile work would the "super sting-ship" have the weapon detection and guidance capability the counter-missiles need, how many counter-missiles could it carry and could it guide at one time?

robert132 wrote:

Theemile wrote:Hello - ready for my stupid idea of the week?

Usually these just end up in the trash can - but this one passed enough litmus tests to make it out of my head and onto .... "paper?"

Concept: Jumbo Stingship

Mass ~800-1000 tons
Crew 2-4
Main weapon: 1 2-5 cm spinal laser (10-12 cm if possible)
2nd weapon: 2x6 Missile Box per broadside - Viper missile
Power plant - small boat laser fusion


Everybody who brings up adding a LAC to the latest CL/CA/BC design brings up the fact that, especially when doing convoy escort, 1 ship simply cannot be in all the places it needs to be. And let's face it, LACs are impractical in small hyper ships, a LAC and it's bay takes 30 Ktons out of a ship's defensive/offensive mass - which is a large potion of any ship smaller than an oversized BC.

But, all ships carry Pinnances, shuttles and boatbays. Why not design a Stingship, small and compact with no atmospheric capabilities, which could fit in an ordinary boatbay slot, with weapons that can threaten a LAC or small combatant, and do some (light) antimissile work?

It obviously wouldn't be able to threaten to damage more than a CL, but it could be placed to intercept that first salvo of missiles a stealthed pirate or commerce raider could fire before the DDMs of the Roland or Sag-C take care of things. And it still has weapons that COULD seriously damage a light combatant and do serious harm to a merchie.


As for endurance - give it 24-30 hours. Give it decent ECM, enough to stealth it or make it look like a full up LAC. Yes, they cannot take a hit - any hit they do land on a warship won't be the hardest. Their combat endurance will be pathetic.

They would be cheap - easy to change out for a particular mission - and able to dock in any Merchant's or warship's boat bay. and be that all important visual force multiplier.

As another poster pointed out, pinnaces and other small craft are already armed at least sufficiently to threaten other craft with no sidewall or armor protection and IIRC Assault Shuttles already have the capability to deploy somewhat larger missiles for CAS / Defense Suppression than Pinnaces can.

Both pinnaces and assault shuttles are designed to operate in space and pinnaces are impeller driven.

While your "super sting-ship" is probably possible there are already small craft capable of undertaking many of those missions. For anti-missile work would the "super sting-ship" have the weapon detection and guidance capability the counter-missiles need, how many counter-missiles could it carry and could it guide at one time?

The real point of my exercise was to come up with a "feasible" ultralight escort unit to replace the LACS everyone tries to stuff into hyper escorts to get expanded coverage.

Yet none of them rallied to my side (sniff). People ask for fighters and I supplied - for nothing! I give manna and they shun me.

Ahem

Everyone is right - for the RMN this is a stupid design. It's something that a third rate navy would do if faced by the Silesian pirate threat and needed a force multiplier for their limited # of hyper combatants available for use on convoy duty.

Unfortunately, to be even 1/2 way decent, it requires 1923 Manty technology, at a time when the Manties are no longer facing the pirate threat and would never field such a design.