Covered In Bees

General
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HURRICANE-CLASS DRONE BATTLESHIP (CARRIER)

Operated by: Empire of the Star Type: Drone Battleship, General Operations Construction: Palaxias Fleet Yards

Length: 2.3 km Beam (avg.): 0.8 km Dry mass: 2,900,000 tons

Gravity-well capable: No. Atmosphere capable: No.

Personnel: 1,294

  • 396 crewers
  • 514 flight operations
  • 384 espatiers
  • Thinker-class AI

Drives:

  • Imperial Navy 3×3 “Neutrino Dawn” antimatter pion drive
  • Nucleodyne Thrust Applications 4×4 “Nova Pulse” fusion torch

Propellant:

  • Deuterium slush/metallic antideuterium
  • Deuterium/helium-3 slush blend

Cruising (sustainable) thrust: 5.6 standard gravities (5.2 Earth G) Peak (unsustainable) thrust: 6.6 standard gravities (6.1 Earth G) Maximum velocity: 0.3 c (rated, based on particle shielding, with flight deck doors closed)

Drones:

  • 43,200 x AKVs (loadout varies by mission, typically Daggerfan-class)
  • Associated thrust packs and modular swapout payloads, by mission
  • 64 x “Buckler VI” point-defense supplementary drones, Artifice Armaments, ICC
  • 32 x “Rook” tactical observation platforms, Sy Astronautic Engineering Collective (with supplementary IN hardware)
  • 64 x general-duty modular drones (not counting flight operations hardware)

Sensors:

  • 3 x independent standard navigational sensor suite, Cilmínar Spaceworks
  • 6 x [classified] enhanced active/passive tactical sensory suite, Sy Astronautic Engineering Collective
  • Imperial Navy tactically-enhanced longscan

Weapons (Auxiliary):

  • 96 x “Slammer III” dual turreted mass drivers (local-space defense)
  • Artifice Armaments, ICC “Popcorn” point defense/CQB laser grid

Other systems:

  • 3 x Artifice Armaments, ICC cyclic kinetic barrier system
  • Biogenesis Technologies, ICC Mark VII regenerative life support (multiple independent systems)
  • 3 x Bright Shadow, ICC custom-build megaframe data system, plus multiple EC-1140 information furnaces for sectoral control
  • AKV repair facilities
  • 3 x Extropa Energy, ICC “Calviata” second-phase fusion reactors
  • 6 x Imperial Navy AKV tactical management suite
  • 3 x Imperial Navy DN-class vector-control core and associated technologies
  • 3 x Nanodynamics, ICC “Phage-a-Phage” immunity
  • 6 x modular swapout regions (large)
  • Systemic Integrated Technologies, ICC high-capacity thermal sinks and dual-mode radiative striping; 3 x deployable droplet heat radiators
  • Tactical bridge

Small craft:

  • 4 x Nelyn-class modular cutters
  • 2 x Ékalaman-class pinnace/shuttle (atmosphere capable)
  • 16 x Élyn-class microcutter
  • 32 x Adhaïc-class workpod

(You’ll notice the obvious similarities to the Leviathan-class dreadnought in systems installed, which should come as no surprise; these two came off the drawing board at roughly the same time. And if you’re wondering why a BB-sized carrier has a DN-sized vector-control core – well, you’ll note that the much more tightly packed supplies of, for example, bunkerage plus AKV bunkerage, plus the need to propel all those AKVs, make it mass significantly more than a Leviathan in practice. Carriers tend to be thus.)

The core hull of the Hurricane-class drone battleship (carrier) is divided into five segments: from bow to stern, the flight operations section, the AKV bunkerage, the command section, the bunkerage, and the propulsion bus, laid out tail-lander style. The flight operations section, by design, is a hexagonal prism, flat faces to dorsal and ventral, and the other ship segments follow this pattern.

Attached to this on the starboard side, extending to dorsal and ventral of the core hull, and running from 100 m ahead of the flight operations section (to give AKVs exit and entrance cover) back to cover the first 100 m of the bunkerage, is the starship’s “buckler”. The core hull of the Hurricane-class is relatively lightly armored for an IN vessel, since carriers are intended, doctrinally, to stay out of CQB and mass conservation supervenes. However, to provide protection against long-distance fire in the outer engagement envelope, as a less maneuverable ship class, the buckler – heavy armor plate connected to the core hull by shock-absorbing trusses – covers and extends slightly beyond the two starboard facets, providing additional protection for as long as the vessel maintains the proper attitude.

The flight operations section at the bow, taking up the first half-kilometer of the ship, is effectively a single large flight deck, opened to space by an armored spacetight door in the for’ard hull. (Unlike smaller flight decks, this region cannot be pressurized.) The 43,200 carried AKVs occupy hexagonal cells clustered on the inner hull to port, starboard, dorsal, and ventral from which they launch themselves, while a small conventional flight deck at the aft end of the section provides space for the Hurricane‘s small craft. The after hull of the flight operations sections is heavily armored, to provide what protection it can against a lucky shot penetrating the flight deck.

Immediately behind the flight operations section is the AKV bunkerage section, which houses fuel and propellant, along with ammunition and other consumables, for the carried AKVs, permitting refueling and rearming. This is the most protected area of the ship, as AKV fuel and ammunition tends to be highly volatile.

The command section, the primary habitable area of the starship, is a relatively small area sandwiched between the AKV bunkerage and the carrier’s own bunkerage, also protected behind the buckler, and housing both the starship’s own operations and the majority of the outsize flight operations department. From dorsal and ventral, sensor towers extend beyond the buckler, allowing line-of-sight sensing and communications with the battlespace without exposing the core hull.

(As a side note, the Hurricane-class, like most large carriers, is an example of the IN’s dual command system. The starship itself is commanded by a Flight Commander, ranked Captain [O-7], from the line branch, while the AKV wings are commanded by a Group Captain, an equivalent rank. Overall command of both is held by a Mission Commander, ranked Commodore [O-8].)

Aft of these, a conventional bunkerage section and propulsion bus, equipped with droplet radiators for primary cooling, fills out the remaining length of the vessel.

Scattered about the length of the vessel is the same heavy-duty (“Popcorn”) point-defense grid used on the Leviathan-class dreadnought, along with 96 small turreted mass drivers – similar to those used on lighter IN classes – for heavier local-space defense.

(They are not intended as offensive weapons; the carrier has 43,200 of those in its AKVs, and would-be Flight Commanders who can’t resist the urge to take their ships into close-quarters battle are redirected towards frigates, destroyers, and other roles where such is (a) tactically useful and (b) much less likely to get one either cashiered for gross incompetence or relieved of command by an XO for whom it is not a good day to die.)

 

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://eldraeverse.com/2018/09/29/covered-in-bees
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Comments migrated from WordPress:

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So, does the IN believe in, say, dreadnought-sized or superdreadnought-sized carriers? Or would they just send N regular carriers with an equivalent sized set of AKVs, to avoid the single point of failure?

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The dreadnought-sized carriers (such as the Tesselation-class¹) are referred to as dreadwings. There’s something of an argument going on in BuShips and BuInnov as to whether or not this is a good idea, as the scaling advantage is substantially less for dreadwings than big-gun dreadnoughts, and it does reduce redundancy.

On the other hand… fight in the shade, IN SPACE.

(As was mentioned back in the day, superdreadnoughts are better typified as peculiar specialized types than “a dreadnought, but bigger” for volume-area reasons, so at this point the distinction breaks down anyway, much as it does for warmoons and dirigible battle planets.)

  1. Why? Because it’s space-filling.
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6

That would be resolved when the fittler comes along, one assumes. If FTL drives are a pain in the ass to stow and deploy and run, having one massive ship with the spare mass and volume for the drive is probably better than having 10 smaller ships with ten drives.

That argument gets a lot more nuanced for one dreadnought vs 10 battlecruisers (can be in ten places at once rather than one) than it would for one supercarrier vs 10 escort carriers (the AKVs handle that either way).

Or, I’ve finally found a reason for war moons to actually exist.

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If fittlers can haul stargate pairs around they clearly don’t have WEIGHT limitations that can’t be engineered around, but they could have volume restrictions that cap how large a vessel you want to try launching around. Which could also nudge things in favour one way or the other.

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Adding a frameslip drive to a carrier or dreadwing isn’t that big a deal. The thing you have to accomodate are the frameslip rings (see here), and –

(Side note:

Stargates - post the ninth millennium - are usually transported by the Metamotive-class frameslip superlifter, an upscaled modular version of the Flatbread-class, which wraps itself around the whole gate like a megastructure burrito.

There is a theoretical limit on volume, based on your ability to coordinate multiple rings and manage the decrease in envelope efficiency - as per post above - but it’s not there yet. Except maybe for warmoons.)

– putting them on carriers is easier than putting them on ships of the plane because carriers are expected to stay further back and not put themselves directly in harm’s way.

Think “mobile forward operating base”.

That’s what a warmoon is. It’s a portable fleet station that has some big guns on it.

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That’s what I’d use one for, yes. What kind of n-space drive systems do they have?

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Well, bloody big ones…

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“I thought you said we weren’t allowed to run antimatter torches in-system!”
”We aren’t, no. That thing? Nothing else will shift it…”

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Not that you probably want to take it all that far into the inner system, in most cases.

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“We’re calling it the Dread Moon class. Yes, it has a moon-sized dreadnought-scale close quarters battery and a point defense grid and shields to match, but mostly it’s a mobile hangar for far too many AKVs and the manufacturing/mining/engineering drone fleet to repair and replenish them indefinitely from whatever it finds to ingest in the field.”

”…you found the one designer in BuShips who also works at Eye-in-the-Flame Arms and you briefed them in on CASE ADHAÏC PARASOL, didn’t you.”

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Ye gods, the punishment!

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The currently-in-prototype Eclipse-class warmoon is intended as the eventual replacement for the Supremacy-class mobile fleet bases, insofar as time and the ongoing expansion and evolution of the six directional fleets has turned the Supremacies into bases which are at best only technically mobile. Having grown from their original super-capital design into massive space structures that would require a lot of months to dismantle, a fleet of tugs and superlifters to move, and more months to put back together at the other end, that is.

As such, and given that the fittler and the Spice Way Program will be ringing the death knell of the neat directional fleet organization anyway, the long-term plan at the Admiralty is to replace them with smaller regional “sextant fleets”¹, each covering a multiple-constellation region based out of its own Eclipse. The Eclipse-class, therefore, while equipped with appropriate armaments for a super-cap, leverages the square-cube law to include a complete command base, multiple cageworks, vast stockpiles of bunkerage, ammunition, and chandlery, manufacturing plants, training facilities, research labs, a complete set of matching support facilities for the other military services, and basically everything else that a certain other Empire would have crammed into the Death Star had it been designed by competent celestime architects rather than Tarkin’s fantasy life.

  1. Ultimately, the regional centers represented by the intersections on the Spice Way map may play host to hypothetical larger fleets based out of hypothetical dirigible battle planets, but that’s in the super-distant future.
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16

Superlaser? Or is the doctrine the same as for carriers, if you’re in melee range of a planetful of hostiles, even a planet you can melt, you’re doing it wrong?

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Despite what certain other Empires who regrettably possess some of the few size-comparable warmoons might think, the Imperial Navy has no RFPs for planet-cracking wunderwaffen, due to their basic galactostrategic uselessness.

(Or indeed anti-usefulness, since adding such things to your regular fleet mix is more or less having yourself announced at diplomatic parties as Genocide Sam The Genocide Man.

Having a few special weapons systems tucked away in the Black Flotilla - or equivalent - against the galaxy going to hell is one thing; forward-deploying planet-crackers with every regional fleet base when their main job is nominally showing the flag, protecting trade, and upholding treaty obligations would be quite rightly seen as declaring war on the universe and that only ends one way.)

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18

I should perhaps clarify that the general thinking here is that warmoons aren’t ships in the big naval assets table; they’re bases. They shouldn’t be engaging things directly: their weapons are the equivalent of defensive shore artillery, and like SDs, they’re basically using dreadnought/dreadwing weapons systems.

(Weapons systems and the ships to house ‘em don’t scale up that far: dreadnoughts - battleships, really - already house the biggest mass drivers that have anything worth firing at, and as such further force increases are done better, cheaper, and faster by simply building more of them.)

Their closest equivalent in Earth naval terms isn’t the aircraft carrier, although that might be closest in ship terms; it’s what you would hypothetically get if you could take Norfolk, or Pearl Harbor, or Portsmouth, or Scapa Flow, or Yokosuka, then wrap a hull around it and move it to wherever you happen to need a major naval base today.

(In Star Wars-analogy terms, thus, I conclude that the fleet faction that concluded that spending the budget on more bases and Star Destroyers was absolutely correct, in military terms, and that which favored “Tarkin’s Folly” was absolutely wrong, especially since you only can build a Death Star if everyone’s already so cowed and controlled that you don’t need to.

The only practical use for the thing even in its ‘verse is to feed Palpy’s hoodoo, and without that, it has none at all.)

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19

Not disagreeing with any of the above, but I would point out that the only thing you might use a warmoon-scale superlaser for, in a non-apocalyptic war, is to break another warmoon, or larger defended construct, quickly enough and from far enough away that its conventional defenses don’t eat you alive on approach. Also something slow enough to not effectively dodge.

But how often does someone do an attack run on Esilmur? And as you say, who could build a viable target of that kind other than the Presidium powers in peacetime, and why would they?

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Yeah, but even then the fleet procurement guys take one look at your design and ask you why you’re mounting it on a warmoon and not a bombardment-specialist superdreadnought, because in such a scenario you have no use for everything that makes the warmoon a warmoon, and definite use for ship-type maneuverability ratings.

tl;dr You don’t want the Death Star for that. You want the Eclipse, or at least the slimmed-down version of it that would pass BuShips review. In the meantime, an escorted squadron of bombard-dreadnoughts and/or a shitton of torpedo cruisers will get the job done.

(As a side note, even leaving aside its difficult location to get to with a hostile fleet and it being one jump from Prime Base, Palaxias, Esilmúr is the system least likely to have anything to fear from a Death Star-type weapon, because it’s freakin’ huge, massively redundant, and mostly empty space.

It’s like shooting at a zeppelin.

“Oh noes,” says the Sunlord, “someone has put a pinprick in my over-500-million-times-the-size-of-a-typical-lithic-planet bubble. Whatever shall I do?”

[Then he pushes a button and returns fire with one of the polar beams, and treats you to the energy of maybe two million tons-mass-equivalent per second, because there is very little point in commanding the full might of a star if you can’t unleash truly Docsmithian ravening beams of actinically lambent flame every so often.

(Side effects include the annoyingly tricky task of rebalancing the star after this irregular energy beam gave it an irritating unplanned thrust vector, and hurt e-mails from the captain of Photophoros, who you just deprived of his award for Most Gratuitous Use Of Overkill (Photonic Category).)])

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