Author Topic: Whats the point of a destroyer?  (Read 14328 times)

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Offline Ghostavo

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Whats the point of a destroyer?
They are hybrids as they have both massive fighterbays and anti-cap weaponry.

When we use the word "Destroyer" in this thread, I assume we are specifying these hybrids. When we say "Carrier" we specify a ship who's only purpose is to carry and deploy fighters.
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Whats the point of a destroyer?
Quote
Originally posted by ChronoReverse
Easy, we don't know if antimatter may necessarily explode when coming into contact with matter in a uncontrolled manner.

It has been suggested that the anti-matter may in fact "skip" along normal matter....


This may be a bit off-topic but where the hell did you heard those things? Scientists produce antimatter everyday and quite easily nowadays, it's not something like subspace who don't really exist (or at least we don't know) and i'm pretty sure anti-matter and matter annichilates each other on simple contact

Quote
Originally posted by ChronoReverse
Since AM reactions generate gamma radiation  and gamma radiation only (which doesn't really do too much to matter in terms of physical damage)


Gamma don't do much in term of damage? Lol, it depends on how much gamma radiation you are considering....and i bet that an antimatter bomb can produce enought to melt any kind of armor...

 
Whats the point of a destroyer?
*sigh

We do produce anti-matter routinely... that is we produce anti-particles routinely.  Billions of them.


The problem is, 1 gram of antihydrogen would require about 12.5 million billion billion billion billion billion billion billion anti-protons and anti-electrons in total combined.

The difference of scale here is obvious.

As for the skipping factor, it's a serious and valid possiblity.  Since the edges of anti-matter would immediately react in contact and produce tremendous energy, it's enough to move the antimatter just enough to not touch the matter.  If there's a force pushing them together, then they'll come together and as the edges just touch and start to annihilate, it separates again.

It's not that they don't annihilate on contact, but that we don't have any way of forcing every single particle to annihilate at the same time.  Unless you're suggesting that we use "force beams" to individually manipulate each particle (I won't even go into how this isn't feasible).

In Star Trek, the dilithium convertors were dreamed up (and modified in TNG) for the express purpose of providing a method to make sure the two can mix well, but in real-life AND in Freespace, there is no such thing.



Gamma radiation.  It does indeed do damage to normal matter.  Except it's no more than what plain light would do.  In fact, it's slightly less for inorganic materials.  Indeed, if you can convert ALL the gamma radiation released into heat, then you'd have a huge explosion.  But you'd have to do it all at once.  This would suggest a method of control.  If the conversion material is close enough (a critical density let's call it) then it'll convert enough of the gamma radiation fast enough to create the explosion.  If it's moved further away, the explosion resultant wouldn't nearly be even close to as powerful.

Considering how even the slightly impurities in tritium can cause a fusion bomb to fizzle (despite the fact the fusion naturally produces heat), I'd say even an anti-matter process would be at least at delicate.  In fact, considering the above mentioned effect and problem, it may be even more sensitive to variation.

Finally, gamma radiation is an ionizing radiation.  It does damage on the molecular scale.  It's more likely that extreme levels of gamma radiation would produce an crumbling effect as it disrupts the electrons in the material.  However, in that case, a bomb to deliver it would be rather inefficient.  Something like the Gorgon Cannon would be much more suitable.



@aldo_1

Yes, I realize that.  And I'll re-iterate, I've changed my stance several posts ago to say that destroyers and carrier should in fact be discrete (and both smaller).  They should also focus on their own purposes more.



@kara

You've shown one situation where a carrier would be indeed at a disadvantage.  But under my revised postulation, there would be smaller destroyers with equivalent firepower to an orion as well for situations such as blockade and installation attack.

Also, in an installation attack, the carrier could jump in 5 lighthours out and start launching fighters.  The Arcadia would still have no way to know where the fighters are coming from.


As for the idea of using a destroyer to scare a carrier to run away, then send another destroyer to kill it.  I'll let you think about the idea of using two destroyers to kill one carrier.


In any case, if you sent a corvette, the carrier wouldn't run since the normal fighter escort could probably disable the corvette, much less a full scale launch and attack from the carrier.  Not to mention that the carrier would have at least one beam corvette guarding it.
« Last Edit: February 25, 2004, 04:40:24 pm by 998 »

 

Offline karajorma

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Whats the point of a destroyer?
Quote
Originally posted by ChronoReverse
As for the idea of using a destroyer to scare a carrier to run away, then send another destroyer to kill it.  I'll let you think about the idea of using two destroyers to kill one carrier.


The whole thing is down to tonnage and I've already explained why 2 destroyers to one carrier fleet is fair.
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Whats the point of a destroyer?
Humour me, explain to me again why a carrier, half the size of a destroyer, full of fighters and bombers would be equivalent to two destroyers full of fighters, but much less.

I mean you surely don't believe that a fighter costs more than 1% of a carrier...

 

Offline Ghostavo

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Whats the point of a destroyer?
Quote
I've changed my stance several posts ago to say that destroyers and carrier should in fact be discrete (and both smaller


Actually the destroyers should be bigger than what they are... why put them more vunerable to bombers?

Quote
But under my revised postulation, there would be smaller destroyers with equivalent firepower to an orion


Quote
In any case, if you sent a corvette, the carrier wouldn't run since the normal fighter escort could probably disable the corvette, much less a full scale launch and attack from the carrier.


:wtf: Define Corvettes in FS2... I know they don't have the firepower equivalent but... they can go toe to toe with bigger ships. Like a foward facing Deimos blasting everything in it's path like there is no tomorrow!! :shaking:
« Last Edit: February 25, 2004, 05:24:23 pm by 1606 »
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Whats the point of a destroyer?
I've made a glaring error in my post.  1 gram of anti-hydrogen isn't 12.5 million billion billion billion billion billion billion billion anti-protons and anti-electrons in total combined.  It is "merely" 1.2 million billion billion combined.

That's still 1 million billion times more than we have ever produced combined.



@Eishtmo

A larger one?  You mean like the Colossus that took 20+ years to design and build?

It seems to me that if you take an orion, remove the fighter bays (and "empty space") then you'd have a smaller orion with the same firepower and armor.  Wouldn't a smaller target be harder to hit (and indeed take less damage from the slash beams)?




And the reason why I've proposed a somewhat smaller destroyer with the same firepower as a normal destroyer is because of Kara's points.  Attacking a blockade would indeed be difficult with a carrier.  Now, while I don't see the problem of sending more corvettes to do the job, I don't see a problem with building a smaller than hybrid-destroyer and larger than corvette destroyer that serves the one purpose of firing beams as fast as possible.


Finally, the reason why a carrier wouldn't run from a corvette is because the corvette, despite how good they are (I personally love them), nevertheless cannot output as much firepower as a destroyer.  Meaning the carrier has even more time to launch fighters from multiple launchbays simultaneously.  Meaning less beams for the fighters to disable.  Meaning more time for the carrier to live.  Meaning more time for more bombers to be launched.
« Last Edit: February 25, 2004, 08:07:23 pm by 998 »

 
Whats the point of a destroyer?
You know what I think? Forget all that fancy-shmancy beam cannon crap. Just load it down with one or two BFGreen, and then the rest is just heavy and long range flak and heavy AAA beams. Now THATS indestructible to bombers. But anyway, remember that the Destroyers were made to carry LOTS of fighters, so they act as a floating base, not a warship.

 
Whats the point of a destroyer?
Some more information.

The Little Boy of Hiroshima contain about 140lbs of uranium.  That's about 63.5kg.

In nuclear fission of uranium, for every 235 units mass of uranium split, 1 unit of mass is lost.  That's about 0.4% lost.

About 1.38% of the uranium in Little Boy actually fissioned.

1.38% of 63.5kg is 0.8763kg or 876 grams.

0.4% of 876 grams is 3.5g

The Little Boy was 15 kilotons.

Helios are at least as powerful as the Cyclops, which is multi-megaton.  Let's set it at 2 megatons.

2000 kilotons divided by 15 kilotons is 133 and a third.

This means that a Helios would have, at minimum, 233 grams of anti-matter (half of 466).



Take this antimatter and find a way to all annihilate within 1 microsecond (in a modern atomic 1us is how long it takes for 70% of the energy of the bomber to be released).

A stick of dynamite takes 420 us to explode.  It is a very fast reaction of molecules.  It also occurs naturally.  Antimatter may not (see above post for explanantion) necessarily react this quickly since it cannot be premixed uniformly.

The particles may attract each other, but they have to be kept separate and then mixed.  How can you make it so that they mix together in 1 microsecond?







This isn't part of the arguement.  I was just doing some research and came upon this rather interesting information.

 

Offline Ghostavo

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Whats the point of a destroyer?
Actually... you need corvettes as well as destroyers... and cruisers... you can't have an destroyer fleet, each has their task and that is where we are trying to say it would be the downfall of a destroyerless fleet!!! :mad: Not building destroyers (I consider 1,8Km the minimum requirement for a destroyer, anything below that is just some uber frigate or corvette, it is not a real destroyer), is suicide as one will try to have a balanced fleet of ships, fighter, cruisers, corvettes, destroyers, superdestroyers, juggernauts, and... well... go see inferno!! Although they have carriers, their carriers have... er... well... put one of those carriers aiming at an Orion... you'll get the picture.

I wasn't talking about an uber corvette, I only said a normal one would be a danger given the size of the carriers you purposed.
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Whats the point of a destroyer?
Quote
Originally posted by ChronoReverse
The problem is, 1 gram of antihydrogen would require about 12.5 million billion billion billion billion billion billion billion anti-protons and anti-electrons in total combined.


so what? i'm not arguing on how much we produce

Quote
Originally posted by ChronoReverse
As for the skipping factor, it's a serious and valid possiblity.  Since the edges of anti-matter would immediately react in contact and produce tremendous energy, it's enough to move the antimatter just enough to not touch the matter.  If there's a force pushing them together, then they'll come together and as the edges just touch and start to annihilate, it separates again.


That's an interesting theory indeed, it has it's points, it may in fact prove that antimatter bombs require some sophisticated way to be armed; much like a nuclear bomb don't explode if it's shoot at...

 
Whats the point of a destroyer?
Quote
Originally posted by Ghostavo
Actually the destroyers should be bigger than what they are... why put them more vunerable to bombers?


Bigger? Have you any idea on how big FS2 destroyers are? They are 2000 meters long while a real world US supercarrier is around  400 meters.  So it means an Orion has roughtly 125 times the mass (and internal space) of a real carrier...

Why the hell do you think bigger ships are needed?

 

Offline karajorma

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Whats the point of a destroyer?
Quote
Originally posted by ChronoReverse
Humour me, explain to me again why a carrier, half the size of a destroyer, full of fighters and bombers would be equivalent to two destroyers full of fighters, but much less.

I mean you surely don't believe that a fighter costs more than 1% of a carrier...


Look at the size comparison I did. I don't believe you can produce a carrier half the size of an orion.  Not if you want to give it more fighters and any kind of armour. Making the flight bays seperate will also mean that you need more space.

Besides I'm not talking about the carrier alone. I'm also including the fleet needed to protect it. You always have to include the weight of the fleet in any discussion of advantages and disadvantages.
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Offline Ghostavo

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Whats the point of a destroyer?
Yes, there should be bigger destroyers... A good fleet is composed of fighters, cruisers, corvettes, destroyers, super-destroyers, juggernauts, etc... see the shivan fleet (don't come to me about comparison crap about the shivans being superior because THAT is one of the reasons they are, if you're still complaining about that, take a look at the Colossus and imagine if it was better designed (not shapped like a machine gun, more oval).

Like aldo_14 said
Quote
The point of a destroyer is to destroy things. That's why it's called a destroyer and not a lightlymassagetheenemyer.


And you can't compare mass because you don't know what kind of materials (and how dense) the ship is composed of (unless they tell you that somewhere and if that's the case I apologise)

The destroyers are already fully loaded with wings and wings of fighters and bombers. Just take a look at the entry hall and tell me, what do you see? Take a look at the description of the Orion.
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Whats the point of a destroyer?
Just have a bunch of Juggernaughts. That will do the trick nicely.

 
Whats the point of a destroyer?
@kara

First of all, the fighters in even a destroyer _are_ stacked.  Just look at the main hall.

But before that.

Even if a carrier carried exactly the same number of fighters and bombers as a destroyer, the carrier would have a sizeable advantage.

The reason is because it can launch much faster (it scales almost linearly with each additional launchbay), especially when first launching (when it takes less time for fighters to be moved into position).

But let's take on 152 fighters and bombers.

Even if the destroyer's guards manage to take out 1 fighter for each fighter they have, that still leave 50 to destroy the destroyer.  And the attack has the advantage since being able to launch faster means that at a given point of time, there would be more carrier fighters flying.  But let's ignore that part for now.


Your example there of the Ursas taking up a huge space is indeed valid point.  But how many Ursas are there in a fleet?  Considerng how many ships there are, even in a fleet of 100 (25 wings), you can't have more than 4 wings of Ursas considering that there's a least 8 type of fighters and bombers.  But let's pretend every bomber is as big as it possible could be.  So let's say that there's 6 wings of bombers that are Ursas.  A tad less than 50.

How big are Ursa's?  According to modelview it's 36x22x54.   That's huge.  How big are normal fighters?  The widest fighter is 23x6x26 (Pegasus).  The tallest fighter is 10x14x26.  The typical Myrmidon is 21x11x22.

Seems most fighters are also pretty big.  There's 104 of them (26 wings).

Now, let's look at the Orion and Ursas again.  Let's give each of the 4 sets of 25 Ursas more than 4 times the volume required to be simply stored (because they obviously can't be stacked edge to edge).

Rename this to .jpg

And see the large volume above the bombers?  That's still a lot of room (volume equal to the Bombers and its 4x total storage space) for prepping.  In fact, it's probably more than the Orion uses since it doesn't specialize in fighters.  Of course, you also need space for munitions.  I don't suppose that the munitions take up 50% of the Orion.  And there's more than 50% of the ship left.  Either way, this supports destroyers with more firepower and armor, or that carriers don't need to be bigger than a destroyer.  So about 100 wings take up a little less than 50% of an orion.

Therefore a smaller carrier (I will stand corrected that 50% is too small, but 75%) is capable of carrying at the very least the same number of fighters as an Orion, but with a launch advantage.  A carrier the same size as a destroyer can carry more.  With the exception of a node blockade attack, the carrier retains its special advantages in battle (primarily, not being there).  So even without a single cruiser to help guard it, it would still have an advantage.  If a destroyer jumps in, it jumps out, the destroyer can't jump in again.  Carrier launches fighters back to kill the destroyer.



Also, it's fairly obvious that even the hangar in an Orion is compartmentalized from the title screens.  And if you read what I've been saying so far, I've suggested multiple _launchbays_ not multiple hangars.  There's no reason why a single hangar must be associated with a single launchbay.

And so far, for my arguments, I've been using a single carrier that protected by a cruiser or a corvette.  That is, not an entire fleet.



@ryuune75

My point isn't how much we produce either.  But to show the degree of complexity it requires to cause antimatter to actually explode with more force than a nuclear bomb.  My point (which you've agreed to) was that an anti-matter bomb, while volatile, wouldn't explode even nearly as powerfully (or even at all) without a precise sequence of procedures.  Just like modern nuclear bombs.


@ghostava

Did you read my revised statements yet?

I say, that destroyers should give up the room used for fighters (which is considerable) and replace it with heatsinks, armor and more beam weaponry.  This means that a destroyer of the same size as an Orion of this focused type would not only have firepower to wither the Orion, it'd be able to take a much bigger beating too.

We also wouldn't need as many of them, since they would be most useful as blockade busters (in other situations, they could jump in to mop up).

I didn't say get rid of cruisers and corvettes.  In fact, I called for a balanced fleet.  But corvettes would focus on anti-cap weaponry while cruisers would focus on anti-fighter weaponry.

Why?

Because cruisers can't stand again capitals anyways, so why bother?  Make them more useful for killing bombs and fighters and set them to guard the carriers and destroyers which would kill the capitals.

The corvettes, they can kill fighters too, but that just drains power from the engines and the beams and underminds their primary purpose of standing up to ships larger than themselves and bloodying the enemy's nose in spite of it.

Carriers.  These ships would be giant hangars floating in space for the express purpose of servicing and launching fighters.  With multiple launchbays, fighters from its hangar(s) in its interior are quickly launched to establish space superiority.  When an enemy capital is discovered, it shortjumps nearer and send it's fighter and bombers to shortjump again within striking distance.

AWACS.  With the extended sensor range this provides, it becomes much more difficult to ambush capitals since scout wings would be seen.



@.::Tin Can::.

The reason I suggested this, is because it was becoming clear, by the end of FS2, that the versatileness of the destroyer class was starting to hurt the GTVA.  The biggest example is the Colossus (which should've traded some of the hangar space for 60 wings with heatsinks instead) of course, but there's still many smaller examples like the success of the Corvettes and the rather useful (IMO) Aeolus cruiser.  That and the fact that the GTVA destroyers get killed by the Shivan destroyers very quickly.  They obviously need something that can take more and dish out more.  Something like a destroyer without hangars.  But they'll still take a lot of damage.  So you need a carrier to launch a huge wave of fighters to help.  This way a destroyer and a carrier can accomplish something that two destroyers previously weren't able to achieve.
« Last Edit: February 26, 2004, 11:03:06 am by 998 »

 

Offline Killfrenzy

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Whats the point of a destroyer?
Carriers will lose against a dedicated gun-platform any day. The amount of fighters/bombers a carrier will launch can be negated by a Destroyer's own wings, or indeed anti-fighter/bomber fire from the ship itself.

If you want a real life carrier vs gun-platform fight, I point you to 1940 when HMS Glorious got jumped by the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau which neatly disposed of her, and her destroyer escort. She didn't have time to launch her torpedo bombers, and even if she had, their effectiveness would have been doubtful.

When it comes to a sci-fi setting, once energy weapons start getting thrown about you can kiss a dedicated carrier goodbye. Why waste depletable stocks of fighters when you can just fire and recharge your energy beams?
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Offline karajorma

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Whats the point of a destroyer?
Chrono, you've forgotten to include the amount of space taken up by the engines, reactor and other systems like navigation and sensors etc.

I believe that those systems together with the hanger bay take up the majority of the space aboard a destroyer. You seem to believe that they don't and that weapons systems take up enough space to make a large difference in the Orion's size.

Unless one of us can find definative evidence in one way or the other neither of us can win this arguement. But the fact that FS2 doesn't contain carriers seems to show that [V] agreed with me :D
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Whats the point of a destroyer?
You just have to realize that the bigger the ship, the more it takes to move it and so you are going to have to put a big-ass reactor inside the Colossus to get it to move. That thing was a slow little MoFo, and when it jumped out of Subspace, it took it a while to come to a full stop. You know what I'm getting at.

Frankly, I dont think the ships have ENOUGH guns on them. I mean, sure, the Destroyer vessels like the Hecate have about 5 or 6 different beam weapons on them, but the Colossus only had like, 12. For a ship that size, thats not that much...

 

Offline Odyssey

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Whats the point of a destroyer?
[color=cc9900]Retrofit an AWACS to hold Alpha 1 and some ammunition. Sorted.

That's the sort of carrier I like.[/color]