On the Role of the Dreadnought

[avatar (Alistair Young)]

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@Michael A Hutson <mikehutson@q.com> on 2018-09-23 16:20:23 wrote

Except of course that in David Weber’s Honor Harrington novels, the classic dreadnought and superdreadnought over the course of the series were made obsolete when advances in weapons and fire control made carriers and missile pod layers practical. So much so that by “Mission of Honor” the Solarian League finds itself in the equivalent of a 1935 navy facing a 1945 navy.

@ahd <horatio@puntbow.net.au> on 2018-09-23 20:49:35 wrote

Bloody terrifying. Excellent, in the eldrae sense.

Speaking of terrifying: could we get a detailed look at the Imperiatrix class and God of War class hyperdreadnoughts? Or are these going to be looming vaguely in the background (in case of plot, break glass and grab hyperdreadnought)?

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2018-09-24 00:20:50 wrote

There’s not a lot to Imperiatrix that’s particularly exciting; it amounts to a fat Imperiatrix-class heavy SD with a palace and a strategic command center stuffed into the midships volume. Sure, its primaries can sear continents, crack planets open, and vaporize small moons, but that’s just a matter of linear scaling.

As for God of War, my policy remains that I’ll write that one up when I feel capable of doing justice to a starship designed by a god for Its personal use.

(I mean, ain’t much point in just noting that maybe two-thirds of its internal volume is occupied by disturbing-looking, did-Yog-Sothoth-fuck-the-protomolecule-to-make-this? machinery with long, elegant technical names that sound like “Plot Device” even in-universe.)

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2018-09-24 00:27:16 wrote

By “disturbing-looking”, in this case, I mean “at first glance, it appears to make no sense and have no meaning; at second glance, you think you might be beginning to find some meaning; at third glance, you’re pretty sure that the meaning in question will not fit in your brain and you really need a drink or two lest you keep thinking about it”.

And those weapons have modes of operation like “induce amnesia in a given volume of space-time, causing all particles therein to adopt randomized quantum states”; or “transmute a randomly chosen 50% subset of protons into antiprotons with a foam of tiny non-orientable wormholes”; or “rejigger the strong force until stable elements spontaneously fission”; or, y’know, “summon a dragon to eat the sun”. That kind of stuff.

@Jade Nekotenshi <nekotenshi0@gmail.com> on 2018-09-24 17:53:39 wrote

Yowch - from the “that’s gonna leave a mark, even by deific standards” files! Those are the sort of armaments that even make the Imperium of Man and the Galactic Empire sit up and spontaneously brown their trousers.

@Edward Keyte <dastormdragon@gmail.com> on 2019-01-20 02:59:54 wrote

How big (roughly) would the dreadnought be (volume-and-mass-wise) compared to a battleship, and how would the other IN starships compare likewise?

@Edward Keyte <dastormdragon@gmail.com> on 2019-01-20 04:41:58 wrote

EDIT: Especially, how big is the Imperiatrix? (roughly)