Viability of a large battleship. 500m to 1 Km size.

[DarkAssault]

Has anyone tried making ships that are this large or even larger. This game helps me scratch the itch I have for a Honor Harrington type game so I am curious as to if anyone has built any "ships of the line" and if they have been effective for you.

[Dog]

Largest ship I build was a 400m+ laser craft, though it cost over 32 billion credits.
Largest practical ship I build (mission capable) is 269 meters. Basically a carrier-siloship hybrid.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=775098118

My updated design however is only 144m long, primarily because it uses an ion engine and one less drone type.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=775101696

Someone on the official forums build a 1km ship.
It can be done, and you could use it as a giant carrier/silo ship, but I'm not sure a practical one could be build for mission running. In comparison, both of the ships above can be used in missions from Main Belt Extraction onwards).

[Ξ ＮＹＯ]

Could I see the engines design of your ship, Catface?

Also, how good are said books you mentioned, and what other realistic space warfare books do you know of?

[Dog]

Originally posted by Crawling Chaos:

Could I see the engines design of your ship, Catface?

Also, how good are said books you mentioned, and what other realistic space warfare books do you know of?

Engine:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=775121496

Reactor powering it:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=775121511

I found that high power ion engines work better on carriers/silo ships than nuclear thrusters. This way I can massively decrease the mass, size and cost of the ship.

The max (20m) radius gives more thrust at the cost of efficiency. Mercury is used as it has the lowest ionization energy out of all available fuels and a high density that allows for very compact fuel tanks.
Reactors running at 2500k ensures a much lower radiator area. All my radiators are also thinned out to make them less vulnerable.
Sadly they aren't nuke proof, I still have to find a solution to that.

[Cuddlefission]

For protecting radiators against nuking, the only real thing I can think of is running them much cooler than their maximum temperature (so that they can take a kilo-kelvin of heating and shrug it off), but that's obviously a hard sell.

[lt_ethe]

@Catface I love your designs and attention to aesthetic with the limitations we have. Since you're playing with ships this big, using the compare button with one of the default ships, or the orbiter to give us a sense of scale would be super cool. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=775162077

[jageriv.rodan]

Originally posted by Ϟ|ǂɈҒǂ|Ϟ Catface:

Largest ship I build was a 400m+ laser craft, though it cost over 32 billion credits.
Largest practical ship I build (mission capable) is 269 meters. Basically a carrier-siloship hybrid.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=775098118

My updated design however is only 144m long, primarily because it uses an ion engine and one less drone type.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=775101696

Someone on the official forums build a 1km ship.
It can be done, and you could use it as a giant carrier/silo ship, but I'm not sure a practical one could be build for mission running. In comparison, both of the ships above can be used in missions from Main Belt Extraction onwards).

My god, those are some pretty ships. How did you get that banding?

[Ξ ＮＹＯ]

Originally posted by Ϟ|ǂɈҒǂ|Ϟ Catface:

Originally posted by Crawling Chaos:

Could I see the engines design of your ship, Catface?

Also, how good are said books you mentioned, and what other realistic space warfare books do you know of?

Engine:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=775121496

Reactor powering it:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=775121511

I found that high power ion engines work better on carriers/silo ships than nuclear thrusters. This way I can massively decrease the mass, size and cost of the ship.

The max (20m) radius gives more thrust at the cost of efficiency. Mercury is used as it has the lowest ionization energy out of all available fuels and a high density that allows for very compact fuel tanks.
Reactors running at 2500k ensures a much lower radiator area. All my radiators are also thinned out to make them less vulnerable.
Sadly they aren't nuke proof, I still have to find a solution to that.

Your reactor looks rather inefficient, you should be getting at least 2 GW for that much cost

Anyway, I made some of my own engines with a slightly higher exhaust velocity and more power consumption for my own missile ship, and I have definitely found it to be the better fuel, even if it feels strange to see your DDG being mostly missiles, reactors, and crew modules rather than fuel tanks.

[Cuddlefission]

What sort of actual acceleration are you guys getting? Those ships looked like they were getting only a handfull of milligees...

[spudcosmic]

There was a ship on the main forum designed around a custom 1 GW laser that was 2km long and had 3km/s Dv

[SquallTemnov]

Originally posted by Crawling Chaos:

Your reactor looks rather inefficient, you should be getting at least 2 GW for that much cost

And you will have to use 36x times more radiators, eating all the mass and cost benefits of "efficient" reactor, because lower coolant temperature, means less efficient radiators. 2500k reactors rules, to hell with efficiency!

[Dog]

Originally posted by lt_ethe:

@Catface I love your designs and attention to aesthetic with the limitations we have. Since you're playing with ships this big, using the compare button with one of the default ships, or the orbiter to give us a sense of scale would be super cool.

This is the first one compared to the patrol ship (first combat ship in the campaign).

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=775562365

This is the second one compared to a fleet carrier

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=775562390

Using an ion engine has given it a noticeably smaller volume, which allows it to pack more armour and drones.
I've since made some tweaks, including adding another drone type, but it's still roughly the same size (<150m).

Originally posted by jageriv.rodan:

My god, those are some pretty ships. How did you get that banding?

Limited armour made of silver & gold. The radial slider can be used to make a "stripe" on one side of the craft or partial and segmented rings. It was inspired by a design posted on the official forum design thread.

This does however leave me with only one layer of propper armour, but I find this is usually enough. Theoratically I could use the outer layer as a whipple shield and armour the modules with vanadium chromium steel (I.e. citadel armour scheme). Basalt fibre composite is pretty much all-in-one armour, good at everything but at a steep cost.

[jageriv.rodan]

Could you direct me to this official forum design thread? I didn't actually know we had a forum besides this one.

[lt_ethe]

@jagertv.rodan http://childrenofadeadearth.boards.net

[dpidz0r]

Originally posted by Crawling Chaos:

Also, how good are said books you mentioned, and what other realistic space warfare books do you know of?

The Honor Harrington series is ok, lots of politics and planning before the space battles though. It's not really "realistic" (reactionless drives, hyperspace, etc.), but internal consistency is fairly good.

The expanse series (or at least the first 2 books) is quite good as far as plausible spaceships and space battles go. It supposes a few hundred years or so of space development with reasonably small iterations on present day tech (basically the most advanced specialized stuff we have now is about as refined as a commonplace consumer good). Only exception being fusion reactors and an absurdly efficient kind of rocket engine (1G of thrust for days).

Then there's the whole codomminium universe by Jerry Pournelle. The Mote in Gods Eye, King Davids Spaceship, and the Falkenbergs Legion series. There aren't really space battles per-say, but the spaceships are well thought out and have the kinds of capabilities that you'd expect of nuclear warships that reach multiple Gs of acceleration. The whole "metagame" surrounding the spaceships is also well thought out (e.g. no one wants to start an all out war because one pissed off captain on the losing side could basically turn his ship into a fraction of lightspeed planet killer), and the way shields and FTL travel are handled is exceptionally good.

Then there's also the atomic rockets site if you just want to read more than you ever wanted to know about space battles in a hard sf setting: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarintro.php

[Havear]

If we're recommending media, I can't help but mention the Vatta's War series. It's not completely hard but fits fairly comfortably in the "one miracle" category with FTL travel and comms that forms a central point in the story. Otherwise, it at least mentions fuel concerns, battle debris is fairly serious, and light-lag is critical.