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Post by Pttg on Nov 13, 2018 3:52:43 GMT
Wealthy plastics magnate Hui Chia has decided to play privateer. She's put out quiet contacts to a number of shipyards to express her interest in purchasing a number of light combat warships designed for purchase by her newly-formed PMC, Star Strategic Synergies, or S3. While true space piracy is a bad deal, a PMC that focuses on distributing small forces near points of interest and renting out firepower as an instant force multiplier has, in her opinion, promise. Throw in salvage rights and S3 has the possibility of becoming a valuable property in this war-torn system.
As a non-governmental military force, the PMC has no nuclear warheads. Additionally, conscription is not an option, so each crew member costs 200k credits. Your budget is 200M credits total.
Additionally, extra weight will be given to designs that feature unconventional tactics of any kind. A small force needs creative and flexible.
Materials used should be sane -- no running water through lithium radiators, for instance.
EDIT: Reduced budget from 500M to 200M, representing the fact that the PMC plans to launch at least two separate ships to start, and wants to have budget left over for administration, maintenance crews and facilities, and so on. |
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Post by airc777 on Nov 13, 2018 7:52:23 GMT
If mass isn't an issue but cost is then laserstars with 4.3% efficiency lasers and low cost calcium radiators will win yes? Do we have a limit on fissile materials for reactors and ntr's? Do we have a limit on mass?
Edit: corrected intended grammar.
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Post by bigbombr on Nov 13, 2018 7:59:22 GMT
The LM Fireshot is armed with two 4.33 GW output lasers for point defense, but it's main armament consists of 2 VLS systems each carrying 100 M Atlatl missile boosters. Each M Atlatl carries 25 FraMi Mummy fragmentation missiles. It costs 443 Mc, and has a crew of 53 (costing 10.6 Mc) bringing the total cost to 453.6 Mc per ship. It's lightly armored, as it's designed for fire support and indirect fire, the lasers are mostly for point defense. It's excellent fire support for increasing the amount of firepower leveled against an opponent while staying far enough away for the fight itself to hopefully come out unscathed to minimize expenses for repairs and crew replacements. Note: it uses modded materials. LM Fireshot: M Atlatl: FraMi Mummy: _BigBombR LM Fireshot.txt (12.51 KB) |
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Post by Pttg on Nov 13, 2018 8:34:53 GMT
If mass isn't an issue but cost is then laserstars with low 4.3% efficiency lasers and calcium radiators will win yes? Do we have a limit on fissile materials for reactors and ntr's? Do we have a limit on mass? I'm judging this one with the soft restriction that it needs to be plausible in the setting, so nuclear reactors are OK, but they probably need to be either low-enrichment or low-mass. Also, I'm thinking of updating the OP to add a clause that will make that budget proportionately smaller...
Bigbombr, that looks quite good, but I realize now that the budget is way too high for this starting scenario, so that's probably going to need serious refactoring.
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Post by airc777 on Nov 13, 2018 9:08:54 GMT
Well, I was going to include a fleet carrier but then the budget cut hit. Corvette pictured has a crew of 45, and has 50.7 km/s railguns that do not fire needles because of lag, and has more than ten times the radiators it actually needs. Cutter pictured has a crew of 38 and makes 100 MW/m^2 @ 1,000 Km and it does not have extra radiators. I'm going to need a sanity check on the ships because I suspect they will fail, I am using apophys reactors and slightly modified apophys ntr's.
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Post by bigbombr on Nov 13, 2018 9:42:31 GMT
Now that the budget has been decreased, my second submission: DL Fotophoon. Armed with 2 4.33 GW lasers for point defense, it also carries 13 L Spotlight drones. Each drone carries a 4.33 GW laser. A cost of 65.1 Mc and a crew of 48 (translating to 9.6 Mc crew cost) gives a total cost of 74.7 Mc, meaning every fleet of 200 Mc can buy approx 2.5 Fotophoons. Slightly more heavily armored, but it's still pretty frail against anything that isn't lasers as it's supposed to mainly use the drones, and use it's own lasers as backup/point defense. Uses water as propellant for easy resupply. _BigBombR DL Fotophoon.txt (12.88 KB) |
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Post by airc777 on Nov 15, 2018 3:39:19 GMT
Re submission of my 'I. Corvette' ship, with some revisions.
Required Crew is up to 59. Cost is down to 43 million. Projectile velocity is up to 86.6 Km/s. Armor thickness has been significantly reduced, but it's still more then enough to defeat non needle railguns and lasers and small nukes and previously it wasn't enough to defeat needle railguns and large nukes so nothing's really changed. Radiator redundancy has been reduced from greater then 10 times to only 4 times.
Doing a self sanity check sense nobody else said anything. Crew radiators are lithium, so a non reactive oil will have to be used as coolant. Crew modules have structural calcium metal walls so they will need a super hydrophobic interior lining for the crews safety, but that can be done with various carbon based or silicon based coatings. Any puncture of the crew module is already considered a total loss, and it's more likely to be punctured by a gram of osmium at 100 km/s then it would be to be punctured by a kg of water ice at a velocity low enough for the reaction to make a difference. Magnesium also burns anyway and it would realistically only make the mass difference of having 4.7 cm of boron filament armor or 4.5 cm of boron filament armor.
Inb4 AtomHeartDragon response.
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Post by doctorsquared on Nov 15, 2018 23:56:46 GMT
In honor of the PMCs of old who drove around the battlefield in pickup trucks armed with heavy machine guns in the back, presenting the SquareCo Technical-class Gunboat. Each one has a crew of 32 which gives a total cost of 15.62 Mc per unit. If you were interested in swarm tactics you could field twelve of these and have enough leftover for spare parts and support staff.  |
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Post by Pttg on Nov 16, 2018 6:13:53 GMT
Anytime you've trimmed the cost of the vehicle down to less than the cost of the crew, you're doing something impressive. Also I like that you're pulling off 1.3 gs and 8.5km/s. I might say that engine might be over-engineered if anything...
I also like your radiator positioning. Despite the bargan-basement cost, you've at least made it hard for lasers to snipe your cooling.
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Post by doctorsquared on Nov 17, 2018 2:14:24 GMT
Anytime you've trimmed the cost of the vehicle down to less than the cost of the crew, you're doing something impressive. Also I like that you're pulling off 1.3 gs and 8.5km/s. I might say that engine might be over-engineered if anything... I also like your radiator positioning. Despite the bargan-basement cost, you've at least made it hard for lasers to snipe your cooling. It really needs that 1.3g acceleration and all of that dV to throw it into a retrograde orbit to give the 60mm cannons a gravity assist to boost their muzzle velocity and keep that sloped nosecone on it pointed towards the enemy. One meter of graphite aerogel sandwiched between two layers of diamond is enough to be resistant against all of the stock EM guns but it's not great against conventional guns and almost useless if you get broadsided. The engine is very much overengineered. It could probably be made much more efficient if I switched over to methane or decane but I find that the density of RP-1 works really well for smaller, more compact vehicles. I've also developed a scaled-down model for larger drones.   |
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Post by newageofpower on Nov 17, 2018 6:56:50 GMT
I find forwards mounted guns cause flattened nose geometries, so accurate enemy weapons absolutely tear through your armor.
(Check my signature for suggestions on improving this)
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Post by doctorsquared on Nov 18, 2018 0:10:31 GMT
I find forwards mounted guns cause flattened nose geometries, so accurate enemy weapons absolutely tear through your armor. (Check my signature for suggestions on improving this) Oh they're not spinally mounted, they're in a ring of six turrets mounted at the base of the nosecone. |
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Nov 18, 2018 18:05:06 GMT
I find forwards mounted guns cause flattened nose geometries, so accurate enemy weapons absolutely tear through your armor. (Check my signature for suggestions on improving this) Interdasting.  (Although admittedly that's easier to do in larger ships)
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Post by doctorsquared on Nov 19, 2018 2:40:29 GMT
Another cheap and cheerful model, the Redshift-class Laser Boat mounts a single 100MW Near-UV Laser with a 101MW/m 2 output at 100km and uses the same general platform as the Technical-class Gunboat for ease of maintenance.  - Total cost with 34 crew is ~11Mc which means you could field ~18 units within the budgetary limit
- While not as powerful as heavier laserstars, the cheap cost and swarm tactics force the enemy to either focus on one smaller, harder to hit ship or split their fire amongst multiple targets.
- 4-5 can beat Vesta Overkill by targeting weak points (decoy launchers, guns on drones, etc).
- The primary weakness the long, spindly radiators that cool the laser.
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Post by 17hellion76 on Mar 19, 2019 0:08:17 GMT
After reviewing Ms. Chia's contract and specifications Armaments Dynamics Weapons Systems would be pleased to offer up one of it's more experimental projects for her consideration.  The Armadyne Unmanned Weapons System type 6 "Quasar" space combat drone ship is an experimental autonomous spacecraft designed to greatly reduce human risk in direct space combat scenarios and to act as a mobile missile defense platform. The Quasar operates on a highly advanced solid state AI core running Armadyne's proprietary Genetic Fuzzy Logic AI algorithm, which allows the operator to easily give complex commands to the Quasar and expect that the weapon will carry out it's orders promptly and efficiently. Each Quasar is armed with forty self contained 50MW LX6-1 laser weapons capable of of quickly and precisely dispatching missiles and disarming hostile ships without directly harming their crews. The Quasar is propelled by a pair of 1GW Neon magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters giving the ship 40.5km/s of Delta-v. Each UWS weighs in at a very low 166t fully laden with propellant and reactor fuel, and each UWS costs only 1.4Mc, making the platform highly effective from a pure cost standpoint as no human operation is necessary except to task drones with their missions. |
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