Author Topic: Design of Vasudan capital ships  (Read 13668 times)

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Offline headdie

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Re: Design of Vasudan capital ships
I think it was up-armoured after design but before completion in many ways *except* for deck armour. It also appears there's some debate about the designation. The same page also says that the Hood missed out on planned-for-1941 upgrades which had been applied to other ships, I presume these would have included increased deck armour.

I guess I need to review all the fast battleships/battlecruisers, in retrospect my point was that there were several significant classes of ship originally designed  as fast battleships.  I don't actually know if the number is significant enough such that the statement that "most" were upgraded battlecruisers is incorrect or not.

/pedant
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(sorry!)

I believe reading up on the subject a deck armour upgrade was part of the planned refit.
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Offline -Norbert-

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Re: Design of Vasudan capital ships
Is speed really that necessary? All cap ships are moving at 20-35 but mostly rely on their FTL drives to go anywhere far.
It is. Imagine a GTVA ship just shy of their beam-range to a Narayana. If the Nara has the same or better speed it can just stay ahead of the GTVA chaser and whittle it to death with toprs. If the GTVA ship is faster, it'll close into beam-range and gut the UEF ship.

Granted, this isn't a siguation that will happen often in Sol's sub-space chess setting, but speed still matters. Even sprint drives can only take you so far before needing recharge.

 
Re: Design of Vasudan capital ships
I guess I need to review all the fast battleships/battlecruisers,

Actually that probably also applies in my case. Thank for the extra information, pedantry is a good thing!

Absolutely! This is what I get for leaving my books a hundred miles away  -.-

I'd be interested to see the changes in anti-strikecraft armament too, and whether the blobs have been phased out entirely. Do you think Vasudan ship design will have been influenced by the Sol conflict or be focussed around combatting the Shivans?

 

Offline Mars

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Re: Design of Vasudan capital ships
A world without blobs is dark and full of bombs, at least until pulseguns are accurate.

 

Offline headdie

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Re: Design of Vasudan capital ships
indeed blobs are your best defense against warheads
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Re: Design of Vasudan capital ships
Really? I'd have thought flak and AAAf beams would be more effective.
I have way too much time and ran tests using a Deimos, just by removing the weapons I didn't want. 4 Taurvi bombers were loaded with 4 Shivan Bombs each and entered the mission area after 5 seconds.
I ran the test with no weapons, all weapons, only blobs, only flak, and only beams. With no weapons, the Deimos went down in 2-3 minutes. With blobs it got about a minute more life, with flak the corvette was damaged and a number of bombers were destroyed after all bombs were launched. With beams after all bombs were launched the Deimos was almost destroyed. With all its guns the Deimos mauled the bombers in around four minutes, and lost half its hull.
I ran these tests a couple of times and there was a fair amount of variance, but I'd still take more flak and beams over blobs (An increase proportional to the number of blobs removed).
The issues I can think of with this testing include using AI pilots which didn't always perform exactly the same manoeuvres, and the different numbers and positions of turrets on the Deimos. I didn't want to set all the turrets to one weapon to retain some semblance of weapon balance - a shipful of AAAf beams would obviously be lethal.

Yay... Pulseguns... I hate those things :P

 

Offline headdie

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Re: Design of Vasudan capital ships
iirc flack shockwaves have no effect on bombs so would need to be an impact to kill it.

Beams are overkill for bombs and can only kill 3 bombs tops per burst with a long delay between bursts, enough to allow the rest of the strike trough

Pulse blobs would be the ultimate
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Offline crizza

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Re: Design of Vasudan capital ships
I read that by WW2 Hood had been rearmoured and refurbished  to the point where she was pretty much equivalent to a fast battleship.

EDIT: as qwadtep noted, they were upgraded battle cruisers
But the Iowas are fast-battleships or not?

I can't imagine that the Zods would change the loadout of their ships just because of the civil war in Sol.
With node denial, protection against bomberhosts is of the most importance for them.

 
Re: Design of Vasudan capital ships
Battleships (as opposed to battlecruisers) were often defined as having sufficient armor to protect themselves from their own guns. While the Hood was barely sufficient in this regard, it became massively outclassed by late interwar and early WW2 era battleships (as the Battle of the Denmark Strait showed). The Brits knew the Hood was relatively lightly protected, and always classified it as a battlecruiser and assigned it to battlecruiser squadrons.

I can't speak to the classification of "fast battleship" in WW1 or the interwar period. But by WW2 a fast battleship was one that could keep up with carriers. That made them useful in task forces that were destroying other warships, not just shore bombardment and convoys. The Iowa and Bismarck classes would both qualify, even if the Germans didn't use carriers.

 
Re: Design of Vasudan capital ships
iirc flack shockwaves have no effect on bombs so would need to be an impact to kill it.

Beams are overkill for bombs and can only kill 3 bombs tops per burst with a long delay between bursts, enough to allow the rest of the strike trough

Pulse blobs would be the ultimate

After turning the difficulty up, yup, I agree with you, blobs are pretty good point defence weapons... Though the RoF and projectile speed of flak still makes it useful.

The Hood was destroyed by a magazine explosion, which feels faintly ironic considering Rheavatarin's comment about the definition of a battleship

 

Offline qwadtep

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Re: Design of Vasudan capital ships
Is speed really that necessary? All cap ships are moving at 20-35 but mostly rely on their FTL drives to go anywhere far.
It is. Imagine a GTVA ship just shy of their beam-range to a Narayana. If the Nara has the same or better speed it can just stay ahead of the GTVA chaser and whittle it to death with toprs. If the GTVA ship is faster, it'll close into beam-range and gut the UEF ship.

Granted, this isn't a siguation that will happen often in Sol's sub-space chess setting, but speed still matters. Even sprint drives can only take you so far before needing recharge.
The fast battleship philosophy applies to subspace as well. A task force's mobility is only as good as that of its slowest ship; see the drawing-out and isolation of the Orestes and Temeraire.

 

Offline Mars

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Re: Design of Vasudan capital ships
Your test is getting results with flak because you only have one wing of bombers. After multiple waves of bombers, the corvette will be in better shape with a combination of anti-fighter (beam and/or flak/pulse gun) and anti-warhead (blob) weapons.

 
Re: Design of Vasudan capital ships
I also didn't have the difficulty turned up high enough to boost the refire rate of the blobs. But yeah, a balanced weapon set would work best, though if I were a zod I'd work on blob projectile speed.

 

Offline Fury

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Re: Design of Vasudan capital ships
iirc flack shockwaves have no effect on bombs so would need to be an impact to kill it.

Beams are overkill for bombs and can only kill 3 bombs tops per burst with a long delay between bursts, enough to allow the rest of the strike trough
Do note that shockwave and blast damage are different. Weapons can be tabled to take/do blast and/or shockwave damage.

So basically you can have flak that deals blast damage to bombs, not requiring direct hit. You can also have a beam that does blast damage on impact that can kill multiple bombs in single hit. Both weapons would make blobs against bombs redundant and inferior.

 
Re: Design of Vasudan capital ships
If my memory doesn´t play tricks on me in "Deals in shadows" we see a refurbished Hatshepsut with VasPulse (= red pulses). So the Vasudans also have upgraded their capships.
Also we don´t know what progress they have made in terms of fighter development.
So almost everything about the performance of the Vasudan fleet are speculations based on what we know of their Capella-era fleet and the few ships we saw in WiH.
Based on the technological superiority of the Vasudans my personal assumption is that they also developed a new set of beam and pulse weapons which are at least on par with the blue beams and fit (at least the pulse weapons) into the older ships. Also I think that they strange up their fighter wings with new designs.

 
Re: Design of Vasudan capital ships
Isn't the Vasudan focus on "node-denial" basically turtling?

That worked out so well for France in 1940.

 

Offline niffiwan

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Re: Design of Vasudan capital ships
If its possible for the Shivans to use unstable nodes to bypass a blockade then yes, node-denial could be fundamentally flawed. If not then it seems like a reasonable tactic since (unlike the French in 1940) you can't really be outflanked, everyone has to come through the node.
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Offline The E

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Re: Design of Vasudan capital ships
Even unstable nodes are known quantities. The GTVA may not be able to use them, but thes definitely know about their presence. Detailing a few ships to blockade them once you know that the Shivans are on the move again should not be too hard.
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Re: Design of Vasudan capital ships
Isn't the Vasudan focus on "node-denial" basically turtling?

That worked out so well for France in 1940.

France almost stopped germany, they just had horrible communication screw ups and poor leadership, the Maginot line worked as planned until they forgot to counterattack properly.

 
Re: Design of Vasudan capital ships
If its possible for the Shivans to use unstable nodes to bypass a blockade then yes, node-denial could be fundamentally flawed. If not then it seems like a reasonable tactic since (unlike the French in 1940) you can't really be outflanked, everyone has to come through the node.

Even unstable nodes are known quantities. The GTVA may not be able to use them, but thes definitely know about their presence. Detailing a few ships to blockade them once you know that the Shivans are on the move again should not be too hard.

I'd imagine that a node-denial design would necessitate heavy armor and heft to have the endurance to last an engagement. I'm not sure how it works in FS2, but I'd imagine that this would impose restrictions on subspace maneuverability if not certainly impact real-space maneuverability. The end result is that you have a fleet that is very good at holding down nodes, but can't respond very quickly to contingencies elsewhere.

Additionally, if a node blockade force is lost at one of those uncharted nodes, Shivans will spill into the system en masse. A defensive Vasudan force isn't going to be able to quickly engage and put up much of an offensive fight - unless they can get Tev ships to quickly jump in and mount alpha-strike shock jump attacks (Eg. Bellerophon, Chimera, Titan etc). And with relations between the Vasudans and the Tevs deteriorating and the Medjai pretty much doing their own thing, coordination is going to be very difficult.