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TheoComm — Viking-class Assault Cruiser
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Published: 2016-10-01 03:58:07 +0000 UTC; Views: 7369; Favourites: 107; Downloads: 0
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I've had this lying around and since I'm moving computers I might as well post this now. Never really worked on a sci-fi setting of my own before, so I'm sure I'll have fun with this one. IIRC I made this as a counter to a friend's sci-fi ship. Mind I'm using plausible technology (Hard Sci-Fi) with the numbers tweeked a bit. The Casaba Lance i describe a bit further below is essentially an upscaled Casaba-Howitzer , which is essentially a nuclear shaped-charge that functions as a laser.For weapons the nose section houses the spinal mounted rail gun (or maybe some super megaton Casaba) as well as eight forward-fixed Casaba Lances. There are fourteen mounts for anti-munition Casaba Lances (six on each side as well as two in the rear), and plenty of missiles all equipped with Casaba Warheads. There are two engine decks with both forward and aft facing thrusters so during relativist speeds the ship doesn't have to turn around half-way to its destination for the deceleration bit. In the aft are two heat radiators. their placement in the back should prevent them from being hit as damage to them will severely inhibit the ship's ability to ditch heat build-up.
Not the most realistic ship, I have no rotating cabin for long-term crew nor a shield to avoid complete destruction at the hands of a single gas particle should i strike one at relativist speeds, but it's pretty and that's what counts in sci-fi, right?
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Comments: 20
Very nice! I like the extensive use of shaped nukes... but if you're using them for weapons, why not for propulsion? If you're going for hard Sci-Fi, even a terribly inefficient Orion drive greatly surpasses the thrust to weight of any other drive system. The radiators are a bit of a pain, but radiators are always a bit of a pain... just ask the P-51 pilots in WWII who were shot down by a single bullet in the radiator.
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Aesthetics, mostly. Giant pusher-plates don't really look pretty. The reason I used shaped nukes extensively as weapons is because of the belief that with laser point defense systems there will be an absolute kill zone around the enemy and it would be costly trying to over-saturate it with nukes. but with the shape charges the missile can sit outside of the arbitrary limit and hit the ship from afar
As for the radiator, yeah. maybe next time i'll put the engines at the front so there's some distance between them and the engines
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Yes, giant pusher-plates are ugly... brutal, unaesthetic, utilitarian... perfect for a warship, in my estimation. 
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For point defense, because I didn't want to overwork the generator for lasers, I instead had fourteen turret mounts for wide-angle casaba howitzers which would shotgun the general area of an incoming projectile, so i could in theory destroy several incoming missiles and rail gun slugs all with a single shot without using any valuable energy.
I might just use Casabas instead of a rail gun though. If a laser (and by extension, a casaba) hits a target within a certain range (for the Megaton Casaba, within half a million km) it will disintegrate armor faster than the speed of sound, causing shock damage to the entire compartment, potentially destroying the entire target in a single hit. The rail gun slug would be a slow (relative to the laser) unguided projectile that at a long distance could be dodged.
If I ever do any real worldbuilding, the entailing arms race would result in this ship becoming obsolete in favor of either really big ships carrying a lot of casaba missiles, or much smaller, more agile ships with a megaton casaba lance
As for the radiators, I find them too valuable to put in the front. If an enemy hits the ship, the ship might survive or i lose it, but if the enemy hits the radiator, even without hitting the main hull, the ship is disabled and i lose it no matter what.
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Ah, you're going for wide-angle point defense... a 'shotgun' instead of a 'sniper' weapon... sounds cool.
At long range a slug could be dodged if the target sees it coming (which is why we wrap all our slugs in nano-black RAM). Usually, the universe has a reason why some factions use energy weapons and some use kinetic... and there should be a reason for a ship to have both... something like "enemy shields are better against one, and their armor against the other" or something that makes both useful. In reality, armor used against lasers is not the armor you use against kinetics for very good physical reasons.
Super-capitol ships with huge weapon arrays are awesome but tend to be single-point-of-failure, and swarm ships tend to be shorter-range and distressingly fragile, so each has it's own tactical and strategic considerations. It's the old "Death Star" vs "1,000,000 X-Wings" argument.
Putting the radiators up front only works if the radiator is also the shield-generator!
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There's no such thing as stealth in space though, not without blinding yourself in the process. The maneuvering thrusters on the space shuttle can be detected from Uranus, for example. considering the amount of energy I'd have to expand to accelerate a slug to a respectable speed, they'd know it's coming from a different star system.
In reality I think it's more of a cost issue. Lasers are nice but they expand a lot of energy, and while they have range, particles spread out so if you want something dead instantly you'd need to get suicidally close, like within half a million kilometers. Kinetic kill weapons like rail guns and solid missiles, or even explosive weapons like the casaba are cheap and don't expand energy, and they will always have the same effect mo matter the distance since there's nothing in space to slow them down. But take up physical space. Like the total volume of a warship will be 50% fuel, 40% munitions, 10% everything else.
Overall the most pragmatic and efficient approach would be missiles with shaped nukes so you don't have to bring many to over-saturate point defense. Or just not fight, since a 1 vs 1 fight is guaranteed to end with both ships dead.
As for armor it depends on what kind of laser that's in use. If the armor is a bit reflective and can manage heat well it can greatly reduce the effectiveness of a light-based weapon. A Casaba and its beam of deuterium or hydrogen (or some light plastic if i want more punch at the cost of effective range) will largely ignore this, being functionally a kinetic kill weapon with the striking distance and speed of a laser, plus radiation and the Munroe effect on an atomic scale added. Instead it depends more on density and composition, and unless it's some super dense material made from the cores of stars, you don't need to shotgun someone with it to pierce and destroy a ship, though composite will largely negate the Munroe effect bit.
Since we're clearly not dealing with warping issues since this ship is clearly far larger than a space shuttle, there isn't really much stopping a large ship from existing other than cost. The ship only needs to carry casaba missiles or space shuttle-sized warships carrying casaba lances and nothing more. literally since we've thrown out physical warping the only weakness a massive ship can have is the radiators.
Since I'm being pragmatic here, I'd prefer the small ships and use pretty basic large ships to carry them. The big ships can be made out of wood for all I care I just want something to carry my fleet so each ship won't have to carry half its weight in fuel. Maybe fit the big ships with orion engines so they're efficient too
I used to be obsessed with sci-fi, but I was also obsessed with realism or at least some kind of basis on reality. So i have a bunch of these research notes I've collected over time here. I was that guy who unconsciously pointed out bits that don't make sense or could have been done to avoid the current situation out loud in the theater watching the Star trek movies. Won't stop me from enjoying the movie, but yeah
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The "no stealth in space" thing is key... but "only if they're looking at you" is the keyhole. If the Uranians are looking for the shuttle and know exactly when and where to look, yes, they will see the shuttle's engines radiating all over the spectrum. But if they're not looking right there, right then, you could blow up a star and they'd never know (stars blow up all the time and we miss them, because we are only watching a tiny bit of the sky at any given moment). That's actually the problem with the real-world asteroid watch... you can't see everything in every direction in every spectrum all at once... at least not with our capabilities. Certainly, a more advanced system will see more than ours... but in the chaos of a space battle, the inputs must be prioritized... and an incoming missile leaking fusion radiation is going to get much more notice than a distant 'blip' of EM radiation... even if the EM blip could be a railgun firing.
Give the slug itself nano-black and RAM coatings and an internal liquid hydrogen cooling loop, and even though they likely will know a shot was fired, they can't know it's current position or target with any degree of certainty. A 1x10 meter slug of tungsten is 192,500 kg and coated and cooled as I suggest is only 'visible' if it transits a star while a sensor is looking at that particular star. If that same slug is moving just one hundredth of one percent of the speed of light (0.0001c = 29 979.2458 meters per second) it hits with 20.675 kilotons of force... all of it on a 1-meter square area... whatever was in that 1-meter square is now high-energy photons and subatomic particles. Also, I'd reserve 'solid' slugs for slow targets, things that can't really maneuver even if they know the attack is incoming.
Because Mass-Energy scales equally with mass and speed, you don't even need a 'big' slug like I described. A 1,925 kg tungsten rod 10cm across and 1 meter long moving at one-tenth of one percent of the speed of light still hits with the same 20.675 kilotons of force, takes the same energy to 'fire', and is far more difficult to 'see' coming.
It really is the space vs energy thing you have to balance. Do you have lots of energy and little space? Then go with lasers or particle beams. Do you have a good bit of energy, and a good bit of space, but your energy is 'slow' and needs to be 'stored' to make a 'big shot'? Then go with rail guns. Do you have very little energy but lots of space? Then go with missiles and mines.
A clever shaped nuke missile could have a 2-mode charge, with "X-Ray laser" as the 'standoff' option and "Nuclear Casaba" as the 'close in' option. You'd put a good sensor suite on the missile (for terminal guidance if nothing else) and if the missile thinks it's about to be destroyed it detonates whichever mode is most useful for the current distance to target. Defending against a nuclear casaba is a real challenge, and I'd definitely suggest not getting hit should be the first line of defense 
A 'cheap' big ship with a full complement of 'expensive' fighter craft would be able to project an incredible amount of firepower. I like the idea of a huge ugly 'flying can' Orion drive carrier with a lot of really nice fighter/bomber craft inside it just for the ride... you could easily make the Orion Can disposable... just drop off the smaller craft and use the carrier's mass and pusher plate as a kind of flying armor/battering ram to soften up the enemy and give the smaller craft 'cover'.
Sci-Fi and Realism are a great combination! I am also 'that guy' in the theatre watching Star Trek (or even Star Wars, as silly as that may seem).
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True, but with passive detection, the moment i lock onto the enemy using anything but my eyes (which, with my arbitrary minimum range of a few hundreds of thousands of km, is impossible) they'll know I'm there. If for some reason they can't figure out the location of the slug, they could use a radiation emitter im a similar fashion to a search light.
Either way for defense I'd make these ships unmanned so they can change directions and velocity at random at the flip of a coin without having to worry the sudden change in inertial turning the crew to mush.
For the Casabas they'll emit both when detonated into the cone. I think the 2-mode charge should instead chose between the casaba or detonating normally if it either gets close but misses or if it's being used to destroy other missiles. Either way a system that detonates the nuke when it detects damage might not be too useful. Nukes are delicate and if you poke a hole in the detonation chamber or set off some of the explosives inside prematurely or out of sync, the nuke will fail to go nuclear, in fact since we're in a vacuum they won't explode at all, turning it into an expensive kinetic kill missile
I'd rather not have the carrier disposable, however, since the idea was to eliminate the fighter's need to carry a lot of fuel. If i lose the carrier I'm losing all of those fighters in the area regardless of the outcome of the battle. In fact in order to reduce the weight of the fighters again, i'll have the drone communications go through the carrier and the carrier to command, or just have the drone operators on the carrier itself to eliminate light-lag.
To protect the carrier itself, i'll have it full of nothing but unpressurized compartments so if a casaba hits it, I have a small chance to not lose the entire thing.
Oh yeah, like From Darkness when the enterprise is falling into atmosphere, they could have literally avoided the issue had they put the ship in an actual orbit and not just hover in place relative to the planet, or in starwars why a massive station that could destroy a planet? where's the return on investment in a planet-killer? You can't colonize an asteroid field or cheaply mine it for resources now that all of it is everywhere. And for the rebels, destroying the deathstar should have sent the entire galaxy into a great depression considering all the materials that went into building it. Like everyone living on those single industry planets would all starve, or in the very least get angry with their gov't and join the rebels, so i guess it works out sorta.
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That's why all your long-range targeting needs to be passive. Active targeting is for terminal guidance of munitions... and desperate people who don't care that they are giving away their position on the chance of finding the enemy. If Uranus can see the shuttle's engines, they can shoot at the shuttle's engines.
Unmanned ships with very good combat systems are the only way to go in space. Humans are just too squishy.
I wouldn't wait for the nuke to detect damage, just the high probability of being destroyed in the next 100 milliseconds. Physics is pretty solid and knowing "that thing is about to hit me" or "the laser tracking me will burn through my shell in 120 milliseconds" would be very easy to determine for any decent computer.
I had the idea that the fighters were "victory or death" machines... if they don't win, they die. But I guess having the option to reuse them is pretty cool too. Drone operators (and highly independent drones) sounds fun.
Taking combat unpressurized is the safest idea.
Some of the things in sci-fi movies make me want to scream and throw things at the screen... but I don't. I just complain at length on the internet!
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I generally want to keep the missiles as cheap as possible so I can still spam them if needed. I'd prefer it if the most tech on each missile is a laser guidance receiver, and each warship to carry a separate guidance module it can release during battle.
What i mean by unpressurized compartments is layers and layers of redundant rooms in a similar function to sectioned off spaced armor or torpedo bulges. That way shock damage might not compromise the entire ship, just about half of it.
But yeah, the fighters will be expensive, so i want to be able to reuse them as many times as i can. If they were single use I might as well just make missile carriers that launch MIRV casaba missiles
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I understand keeping the missile light and spammy, but a single guidance unit is a single point of failure. Surely an economy capable of creating such ships can cheaply mass produce a circuit board with some sensors and logic that allows each missile to find and attack their own targets, at least as a backup for the inevitable enemy strike against the targeting and guidance module.
In a vacuum, there is no shock damage. "Shock" is a concept based on matter-matter interaction, most of that matter being the atmosphere. Build your ships with an outer armor 'skin' and an inner framework that then holds modules on shock-dampening mounts (and even better shock-dampening mounts to the armor itself), with empty space between the modules and the armor and each other. Keep the modules pressurized and linked by pressurized flexible corridors during non-combat activities for ease of use, but during combat all the modules and corridors depressurize and all crew are in armored space suits linked to a ship-wide multiply- redundant power/information/air/water node-based network that allows broken links to be bypassed (like the DARPA's vision of the internet) without general failure in the system. Each module has it's own supplies, and each suit as well, with multi-band wireless/laser info/power nodes for emergency use. Such a system is almost shock-immune, in that you have to apply energy to each individual part of the system before it 'ripples down' to the other systems. If the inner structure of the ship is a spaceframe them you've got something almost impossible to destroy without applying massive, overwhelming force... even an armor-contact-detonation of a nuke would not be guaranteed to kill everyone on board.
Expensive reusable fighters make sense only if they have human pilots. An expensive reusable drone could make sense if the economy building them is strained to its limit in doing so. "If they were single use I might as well just make missile carriers that launch MIRV casaba missiles"... and that is the real way it's done today. The most offensively powerful ships in our (or any) navy are the missile carriers, not the aircraft carriers. Aircraft carriers are a defensive system that exists to protect itself, and the fact that they can be used offensively is only because we do not yet have missiles good enough to simply "fire and forget" on distant moving targets. It's also why we are more and more going to drones instead of piloted aircraft. There is no need for piloted aircraft unless you for some reason have a situation where someone has to be on site to decide if you're going to attack or not.
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I was thinking more along the lines of a single AIM-120 without its electronic package costing a few hundred grand but the electronic package increases it to $1,786,000. Sure if you can afford a $100M stealth aircraft you should be able to afford 50~ $1.78M missiles, but is that really economic?
To clarify what I mean by shock damage, I mean Impulse Shock which is independent of the presence of atmosphere. As long as something is touching the affected armor, it'll warp and tear apart. Literally the only way to be fully immune is to either be far away enough that the armor won't be damaged fast enough to cause impulse shock, or have a ship inside of another ship with absolutely nothing touching (assuming the laser doesn't pierce the first layer and go into the next)
True, however the reason I wanted drone fighters is because fighters are more versatile than a missile. If I wanted to take a planet, for instance, nuking it from orbit isn't really an option, nor would dropping in dropships without an escort. Outside of direct combat, I can fly them unarmed to probe and harass a ship or installation similar to what Russian and American pilots do (If they're armed it shows intent and I will have no excuse for provoking them if they fire back, but if unarmed I am technically not a problem and it would be their fault for shooting me. Politics). I could also use them to ferry supplies and goods between points if a normal transport is unavailable or if i need to move a lot of supplies and/or people around quickly.
Outside of that, lightlag would be an issue which means I need to put expensive equipment on the drone to project itself without the need for a human operator. Which leads back to my first argument of why i didn't want overly expensive computers on my missiles.
But for real, if money really isn't my concern, I wouldn't use any of these. I's use a big, heavy ship and just ram the target or their planet or whatever at relativist speeds. If I'm travelling at 90% the speed of light and i hit anything, I'll be hitting it with the force of my mass in antimatter. Lets say my ship weighs as much as the Iowa (45,000 tons). One gram of antimatter reacting with normal matter would give the force of 43 kilotons of TNT, therefore I'm striking with the force of 1.755 trillion kilotons of TNT which, if i did the math correctly, would be just under enough to deorbit the moon and have it fall straight down.
Which leads to an unrelated question, what do you think of civilian ownership of spaceships in sci-fi? Even if it's small if it can travel to other star systems it'll be like giving nukes to random people in hopes they're either not a horrible driver (which, if you live here in the US or Canada, is a completely irrational belief), or they're not terrorists. A terrorist could take out an entire country in the primary blast and the rest of the world in the ensuring fallout.
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The dollar 'cost' of an AIM-120 is completely divorced from it's actual economic 'cost'. If your economy is set up to produce an AIM-120 with proper economy of scale then the whole thing become just another commodity that rolls off the line for little or no actual cost past the labor and materials (which are quite reasonable for any kind of missile, it's a metal tube with some chemicals and electronics in it). Military equipment only costs what it does because 1: the producers can charge what they do, so they have no incentive to charge less, and 2: if you only make 20,000 of something per year, then it's going to cost more than something you make 20,000,000 of a year simply because of economies of scale. Nothing in an AIM-120 is more difficult to produce than a modern touchscreen cell phone or modern agricultural fertilizer... both of which are effectively commodities.
"Impulse Shock" is the shock that happens in an atmosphere... it's just happening in something else. I know exactly what you mean... and "a ship inside of another ship with absolutely nothing touching" is almost precisely what I suggest. You have Armor that only 'touches' the Structure via long-throw high-speed electromagnetic elastomer shocks and the Structure only 'touches' the Modules via long-throw high-speed electromagnetic elastomer shocks and the Modules only touch the Crew via high-speed electromagnetic elastomer shocks... and in the end, you have a system that can take a surface detonated nuke at one end of the ship and have living humans still capable of responding appropriately at the other end of the ship... and an energy weapon would only take out the single Module it actually breached, assuming it gets through the Armor in the first place.
The flexibility of drone fighter/bombers is an excellent point. I had only considered direct combat... but if you are going to use them for more than "blow up that thing" then yes, they can be useful to keep around for more than 1 sortie. 
The power of the Relativistic Kill Vehicle lies in its ability to do just what you say... deliver kinetic energy at near-antimatter efficiency. And really, it's not that expensive either. A H-H fusion engine (or network of them) placed on a water-ice (and gravel) Oort cloud object, using that object's own ice as reaction mass and H-H fuel, would take several years to hit a planet in the habitable zone... but once it got there, nothing could stop it from turning most of that planet into quite a lot of high-energy plasma. In my own Sci-Fi universe, that is how the 'viewpoint' aliens lost their homeworld... although their enemies used a blacked-out, gravity-neutralized planetoid the size (and composition) of Europa, sent from a nearby solar system, to do it.
The thing about civilian ownership of spacecraft is relative levels of energy use and interdiction. Right now, we see no problem giving a child control of a car or truck or small boat or small aircraft... but we do take care who we give semi-trucks and ocean freighters and trains and large aircraft to. I think it would be much the same thing with spacecraft. A "small" 'inter-system' craft with 'only' a fusion engine is fine for civilians... but a "large" 'starship' with antimatter or singularity engines requires special training and clearance... just like Jumbo jets and Cruise Liners do. And of course you have military aircraft flying around with actual nuclear warheads on board which could be detonated by a clever terrorist in real life... so clearly we don't care too much about that kind of thing even now.
If the 'civil authorities' have some kind of 'interdictor' or 'shields' that they can use to divert a runaway spaceship or protect an urban area with, then for sure they would give civilians access to 'small' spacecraft. And you only have to look at 9-11 and realize that same thing could happen again right now today to understand that humans value convenience far more than they value actual security.
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My main goal here is to maximize returns for every bit I've invested here. Sure, the AIM-120 might be able to produced cheaply in bulk, but would the public care? I'm talking about the kind of people who'd tell me "why didn't we just use smart bombs instead?" when trying to justify the nuclear bombings on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, or tell me the V-22 Osprey is an expensive piece of garbage based on a few tests conducted early in the program and refusing to consider that maybe we've improved on the design. I kinda want my public to support my wars over insignificant planets light years away and continue to vote me back into office without having to brainwash them. (also im willing to admit im one of those people when i saw the price-tag for a general use missile)
Yeah, I don't want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a new drone aircraft after every engagement, but there'll always be a push to make a cheaper, universal fighter instead of one for combat, one for scouting, and so forth. Could always use older models for wild weasel support instead of scraping them, and since I don't have to worry about air drag, I can make their hardpoints or internal storage modular, so during combat it'll carry nukes, and when in need of transporting materials i have shove some storage pods on the hardpoints and in the internal missile bay (remember, since I'm going for realism these drone fighters are probably going to be as big as the space shuttle since nukes aren't small, so plenty of room).
Err, I'd have an issue giving a child a car or a boat or a plane, since children don't tend to be fully developed. Some years ago a kid, after playing GTA, thought it was okay to shoot people so he took a shotgun to school and killed a kid (to be clear, I'm not condemning the game. If anything the irresponsible parents). I know what you mean but even today I wouldn't trust a lot of people with cars let alone planes and boats. I can understand giving them a car since what's the most damage they can cause, a few deaths but not much else, but I'd rather civilians never get access to anything that can level an entire population center
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Maximizing the return on "Murder for Money" is important... and in that case, tricking a third party into killing your target for you is really the most cost-effective way to go!
"Universal" fighters never excel at everything (they can't match a dedicated system) but if supply chain, parts commonality, and efficiency are your thing, then a 'universal system' does work if you can afford to "spam" your enemy with the things... which we do.
Modular system, creative use of 'leftover' units, and a fine disregard for atmosphere is really where your space combat systems shine. And Shuttle-sized drones make perfect sense if you want them to be able to carry enough fuel (of any kind) to manoeuvre and have the cargo capacity to carry a meaningful amount of weapons.
We give children cars and boats and planes every day. You can legally drive at 16 (while a fully adult mind is not completely grown until 25-26), you can get a pilots license at 12, and there is no hard age-limit for boating. Add to that the fact that in rural areas people ignore these 'age-limits' all the time, and you have plenty of 6-year-olds who can't see over the steering wheel driving cars all across rural America... and I'm sure it's even 'worse' in other, less regulated countries.
Any person can, at any time, kill many other people through pure negligence... and if you want to kill someone? It's literally impossible to prevent a sufficiently motivated person from killing someone else... unless you kill them first. Most of what we call society or civilization hangs on one simple premise: Most people don't really want to kill another person. And on that slender thread lies everything you hold dear.
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Nice design!
The radiators are inspired by Venture Star?
However, there is a big issue with radiator placement. First, if they are so close to the engine nozzles, some(a lot) of the heat from thrust would go directly to them, and make them heat up the ship instead of cooling it. Second, since they are parallel, they would radiate heat into one another, essentially turning it in to a single radiator, but with twice the mass.
But still a good design, nice combination of a classic warship and realistic details added to it.
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Honestly i had nowhere else to place them. I was considering placing them on the sides of the engine decks but my concern was the profile of the ship was already pretty wide. Maybe when the thrusters are in use, they can fold in, and when in use extend further outwards and rotate
Oh well, like all of the things i make, at least it's pretty
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Radiators are huge pain in the ass to design... This caused most ship of my verse to not have them, despite that I know that heat is THE biggest problem in space... Yet to find a plausible or at least technobabblic explanation for their lackness.
In this case I'd probably designed only one radiator, rotated 90° in relation to yours: that way it will expose only it's thin side to the exhaust, so it should mitigate heat impact from it, plust it will be relatively higher efficiency, as these two radiators radiate roughly half of their heat onto each other.
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Yes I know I've been told in their current configuration they act like one big radiator since they're radiating into one another. I still want them in the back however, since they're too valuable to lose. I'd rather have the engines knocked out then the entire ship knocked out. I'd say they're retractable and rotatable and only pulled out when the engines are off.
If I ever do more hard sci-fi ships, I'll put the engines in the front so that stops being an issue
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It is pretty, no doubt about it
There are some options about placing them, for instance, cut them in half and place them like X-wing wings on engines...or keep them like this, but put one above, and one bellow the ship, kind of like shark fins. Or they could just be some future tech, with special material or field shielding that works just the way they are now.
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