Post by Kitten on Dec 26, 2016 11:33:45 GMT
For a lot of the game's purposes you can probably do without tankers. But if we're speculating on what would really happen, you see that fuel tanks have a huge volume and you can't reliably protect them in battle even against even incidental damage. Besides, most of the fuels can be reasonably treated as inert in space, so I think ships would actually be designed like warships at the end of the 19th century, that used their bunkered coal as extra armour. Why bother with tons of dedicated armour when you can just take the kilotons of inert Helium you will be carrying anyway and put them as ablative between the ship's vital parts and open space?
And the real armour, rather than going outside, would go under the fuel like the armoured citadel of a sea-going battleship. This allows for a reasonable armour protection for crew compartments, computers, even the reactors—the parts of a ship you actually care about.
Of course, the consequence of this is that losing fuel in battle is something even the winners will suffer (as well as losing radiators—but I think real warships would shave as much surface off the radiators as possible, with every trick their designers can think of). So any serious space navy would need tankers and space tugboats to support the battle fleet.
Another reason to have tankers is they can actually ferry large ammounts of fuel around; drop tanks have to be fitted at a base. If you want your ships to be able to conduct long patrols away from port you need tankers for potentially unlimited underway replenishments. Drop tanks are fine for a pre-planned mission but they haven't replaced the need for tankers in real-life air forces either
And the real armour, rather than going outside, would go under the fuel like the armoured citadel of a sea-going battleship. This allows for a reasonable armour protection for crew compartments, computers, even the reactors—the parts of a ship you actually care about.
Of course, the consequence of this is that losing fuel in battle is something even the winners will suffer (as well as losing radiators—but I think real warships would shave as much surface off the radiators as possible, with every trick their designers can think of). So any serious space navy would need tankers and space tugboats to support the battle fleet.
Another reason to have tankers is they can actually ferry large ammounts of fuel around; drop tanks have to be fitted at a base. If you want your ships to be able to conduct long patrols away from port you need tankers for potentially unlimited underway replenishments. Drop tanks are fine for a pre-planned mission but they haven't replaced the need for tankers in real-life air forces either
