Re: Favorite ship?
Justin Ho (iluvatar45@hotmail.com)
Wed, 09 Aug 2000 02:50:55 CST
>From: Josh Yuan
>Reply-To: logh@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU
>To: logh@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU
>Subject: Re: Favorite ship?
>Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 11:23:34 -0700 (PDT)
>
>
>On naval design doctrine, we could only speculate.
>But if you have played Traveller or it's variations
>and used the Fire Fusion Tech design souce book, you
>could draw some similarity. I think the war ship are
>made up of 7 primary parts. 0:Anti Grav Engines
>1:Sublight Engines 2:FTL Drives 3:Primary Weapons
>4:Secondary Weapons 5:Fighter/shuttles Bays 6:Troop
>quarters.
>
>The FPA Fleet:
>The FPA fleet's design doctrine could be seen as
>"maximum firepower". I don't think they have Anti
>Grav Engines. Since they use shuttles to move troops
>between planet side to the ships. (ofcouse this could
>also be done to minimize maintance on ships) This
>allow Aliance ships to use the extra space for Shuttle
>bays and weapons. Their Sublight drives and FTL
>drives is probably similar to the Imperials. Because
>they dispense with the Gravity drives Aliances ship
>could carry more primary and secondary weapons. Some
>fighters are carried but FPA use carriers for fighter
>support. (Reason why they always forget to launch
>them?) Don't know what is the troop complement of the
>ships. Basically FPA warships are just that warships.
> They are build to destroy enemy ships.
Of course it might conceivably be argued that the necessity of transporting
by shuttle raises time to outfit and requires preparation of dedicated
launch facilities, which could make the whole operation less efficient
despite a potentially higher combat effectiveness
>Imperial
>Imperial doctrine is base on utility and control.
>Their ships have the full complement of drives so they
>could land their ships and dis/embark troops and
>supplies. (Quicker turn around time to prepare ships
>for combat.) Ofcouse this mean ship for ship Imperial
>ships carry less weapons than FPA ships.(They probably
>skim on the secondary lasers, and keep the same number
>of primary Partical cannons.) But the ships could be
>use for other duties when not in combat, unlike the
>FPA's battle only ships. They carry more fighters
>(Oh, no carrier strike here.)
While the standard Imperial battleships appear to carry more fighters
than their FPA counterparts, the FPA dedicated carriers have an enormous
fighter capacity compared to the Imperial version (which appears more of a
battleship with a hangar module slapped on top than a dedicated carrier).
The trade off appears to be the extreme vulnerability of FPA carriers to
gunfire and weak weaponry of its own. Perhaps this greater reliance on
fighters explains the general superiority of the Spartanian fighter corps
over the Valkyries.
The hardest part of this speculation to me is the lack of knowledge
regarding the "caliber" or firepower of each individual gunport. How does
one of the 32 main guns on the Hyperion compare to one of the 6 main guns on
a standard Imperial battleship? The only observational data (and even that
is sketchy at best) I can think of is to examine FPA ships with "pinched"
weapon sections, such as the Panku (aka Bang-goo, which btw is a Chinese god
in keeping with FPA naming conventions). The pinched section presumably
places an upper limit on the length of the particle accelerator, which can
then be compared to the listed ship length for a rough upper limit in
meters. The problem is that this comparison is impossible for Imperial
ships.
Justin (who hasn't even started on the Spiral Labyrinth ships yet :P)
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