for me to get a good idea of how big each class of ship is. A corvette, a destroyer, a battleship, etc.
Fel, if you wouldn't mind, could you perhaps use this fantasy starship chart to give us a better idea of how big the various ships are?
Space Ship Sizes
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Space Ship Sizes
There are a number of different classes of ships used in the Subjugation universe. It's hard
for me to get a good idea of how big each class of ship is. A corvette, a destroyer, a battleship, etc.
Fel, if you wouldn't mind, could you perhaps use this fantasy starship chart to give us a better idea of how big the various ships are?
for me to get a good idea of how big each class of ship is. A corvette, a destroyer, a battleship, etc.
Fel, if you wouldn't mind, could you perhaps use this fantasy starship chart to give us a better idea of how big the various ships are?
Last edited by imsirius on Sat Jun 22, 2013 11:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Re: Space Ship Sizes
Actually, ships in the Subjugation universe aren't as massive as in some other sci-fi movies/books/genres.
Take, for example the Karinne's first command ship, the Aegis. It's about 3.7 miles long, which compared to some other ships, like the super-star destroyer from Star Wars, isn't all that big. But a ship that size has so much mass that it can affect the tides of our oceans when it's in orbit. The Aegis isn't the largest command ship used by Confederate forces, however. That distinction goes to the Urumi, whose command ship class vessel is about 4.3 miles long and is much wider across the beam, which gives it about 60% more mass. It is the behemoth in the Confederate Allied Navy.
The command ships are significantly larger than the other ships in the inventories. The next largest ship in the KMS, the carrier class, is 1.7 miles long, but is very, very wide across the beam. The main battleship class is 1.4 miles long, and the tactical battleship class is 1.1 miles long.
There's another huge jump down to the next class. The tactical cruiser, the largest of the cruiser classes, is only .6 miles long, or just slightly longer than a kilometer, but is fairly narrow across the beam. Mass wise, this makes it about five times the size of the largest aircraft carrier ever built, while only being about 3 times as long. The largest carrier class in service is 333 meters long, or about 1,050 feet. The standard Mark II Cruiser is .51 miles long, where the orginal cruiser class is .5 miles long.
Again, there's a very large jump down to the destroyer class. A KMS destroyer is 431 meters long, just slightly larger than the largest class of conventional aircraft carrier, with about double the mass (due to the use of high-density metals far heavier than steel). This makes a destroyer about half the size of a cruiser.
The Corvette and Gunboat class ships aren't naval line vessels. They're actually classified as heavy fighter/bombers, but they are MUCH bigger than a fighter. A Corvette is about the size of an old DC-10, maybe just a little smaller, where a gunboat is much larger, about the size of an Airbus 380a. They aren't line vessels because they're tiny compared to a destroyer and have crew complements less than 10. A Marine Corvette command-control vessel has a crew of 7, the cockpit crew and the sensor jockeys. The strike variant used in the Navy has a crew of 5, the cockpit crew and two weapons officers. And a gunboat only has a crew of 3, which is just the cockpit crew.
Fighters in the Subjugation universe are actually about the same size on the average as our own conventional fighters. The largest fighter in the Confederate Allied Navy is a Wolf fighter, which measures 74 feet long from nose to tail and has a wingspan of 58 feet. This makes it slightly larger than an F-18, about the same size as an F-111 Raven. The Raptor is only slightly larger than an F-16, where fighters from other Confederate militaries about about the size of a Raptor, more or less. Wolves are the big bullies in the fighter world, but they're actually faster and more agile than their smaller ilk. In fighter combat, speed and agility is more of a defense than size, which makes Wolf fighters harder to kill. Fighters are small because a small, fast ship is harder to hit, and they don't need to be any larger than they are. You take the engine, weapons, and power plant you need and you design the most compact design around them. That's the methodology behind fighter design and construction.
Why are ships smaller in the Subjugation universe than in many others? For two simple reasons. First, big ships are expensive, so you pack as much as you can into a ship you can afford to build. Second, they don't NEED to be huge. Since it's not really fair to use a KMS ship as an example, I'll take it out into the rest of the universe. A Faey INS line ship packs incredible firepower thanks to its plasma torpedoes and MPAC weaponry, and they don't need to have an immense ship with city-sized power plants in order to power those weapons. Much like a fighter, they took the power plants they needed, the weapons they needed, and the engines they needed, then they designed a ship around them that was as big as it needed to be to support those core systems, to both reduce costs and cut down on crew size and materials.
That's the balance, when your power and weapons technologies are that advanced. You build a ship big enough to hold everything you want, but you don't make it much bigger, because it's gonna be expensive to do it. And this is where the Benga are so different. They don't care about cost because of the nearly unimaginable resources they have at their command, so they can AFFORD to build a 500,000 ship fleet filled with ships that approach the size of a Star Wars genre Death Star. The Consortium themselves could follow this policy, but they build their ships smaller for a specific reason, to give them a tactical advantage against Benga ships in combat. Consortium vessels are smaller, faster, and more maneuverable, which makes them harder to destroy by Benga behemoths while still packing a serious punch with their own weapons.
Big ships have a role in a navy as more resilient ships that can withstand more damage, but "lean and mean" puts more overall firepower into the theater. 20 destroyers pack more firepower than one battleship, when you have highly advanced weapon technology at your disposal.
Take, for example the Karinne's first command ship, the Aegis. It's about 3.7 miles long, which compared to some other ships, like the super-star destroyer from Star Wars, isn't all that big. But a ship that size has so much mass that it can affect the tides of our oceans when it's in orbit. The Aegis isn't the largest command ship used by Confederate forces, however. That distinction goes to the Urumi, whose command ship class vessel is about 4.3 miles long and is much wider across the beam, which gives it about 60% more mass. It is the behemoth in the Confederate Allied Navy.
The command ships are significantly larger than the other ships in the inventories. The next largest ship in the KMS, the carrier class, is 1.7 miles long, but is very, very wide across the beam. The main battleship class is 1.4 miles long, and the tactical battleship class is 1.1 miles long.
There's another huge jump down to the next class. The tactical cruiser, the largest of the cruiser classes, is only .6 miles long, or just slightly longer than a kilometer, but is fairly narrow across the beam. Mass wise, this makes it about five times the size of the largest aircraft carrier ever built, while only being about 3 times as long. The largest carrier class in service is 333 meters long, or about 1,050 feet. The standard Mark II Cruiser is .51 miles long, where the orginal cruiser class is .5 miles long.
Again, there's a very large jump down to the destroyer class. A KMS destroyer is 431 meters long, just slightly larger than the largest class of conventional aircraft carrier, with about double the mass (due to the use of high-density metals far heavier than steel). This makes a destroyer about half the size of a cruiser.
The Corvette and Gunboat class ships aren't naval line vessels. They're actually classified as heavy fighter/bombers, but they are MUCH bigger than a fighter. A Corvette is about the size of an old DC-10, maybe just a little smaller, where a gunboat is much larger, about the size of an Airbus 380a. They aren't line vessels because they're tiny compared to a destroyer and have crew complements less than 10. A Marine Corvette command-control vessel has a crew of 7, the cockpit crew and the sensor jockeys. The strike variant used in the Navy has a crew of 5, the cockpit crew and two weapons officers. And a gunboat only has a crew of 3, which is just the cockpit crew.
Fighters in the Subjugation universe are actually about the same size on the average as our own conventional fighters. The largest fighter in the Confederate Allied Navy is a Wolf fighter, which measures 74 feet long from nose to tail and has a wingspan of 58 feet. This makes it slightly larger than an F-18, about the same size as an F-111 Raven. The Raptor is only slightly larger than an F-16, where fighters from other Confederate militaries about about the size of a Raptor, more or less. Wolves are the big bullies in the fighter world, but they're actually faster and more agile than their smaller ilk. In fighter combat, speed and agility is more of a defense than size, which makes Wolf fighters harder to kill. Fighters are small because a small, fast ship is harder to hit, and they don't need to be any larger than they are. You take the engine, weapons, and power plant you need and you design the most compact design around them. That's the methodology behind fighter design and construction.
Why are ships smaller in the Subjugation universe than in many others? For two simple reasons. First, big ships are expensive, so you pack as much as you can into a ship you can afford to build. Second, they don't NEED to be huge. Since it's not really fair to use a KMS ship as an example, I'll take it out into the rest of the universe. A Faey INS line ship packs incredible firepower thanks to its plasma torpedoes and MPAC weaponry, and they don't need to have an immense ship with city-sized power plants in order to power those weapons. Much like a fighter, they took the power plants they needed, the weapons they needed, and the engines they needed, then they designed a ship around them that was as big as it needed to be to support those core systems, to both reduce costs and cut down on crew size and materials.
That's the balance, when your power and weapons technologies are that advanced. You build a ship big enough to hold everything you want, but you don't make it much bigger, because it's gonna be expensive to do it. And this is where the Benga are so different. They don't care about cost because of the nearly unimaginable resources they have at their command, so they can AFFORD to build a 500,000 ship fleet filled with ships that approach the size of a Star Wars genre Death Star. The Consortium themselves could follow this policy, but they build their ships smaller for a specific reason, to give them a tactical advantage against Benga ships in combat. Consortium vessels are smaller, faster, and more maneuverable, which makes them harder to destroy by Benga behemoths while still packing a serious punch with their own weapons.
Big ships have a role in a navy as more resilient ships that can withstand more damage, but "lean and mean" puts more overall firepower into the theater. 20 destroyers pack more firepower than one battleship, when you have highly advanced weapon technology at your disposal.
Just another guy from the shallow end of the gene pool.
Re: Space Ship Sizes
Nice little info pack there Fel.
There are several even larger ships to be found in sci-fi books, two such examples are...
Utu-class Battle planetoid "3202.795" kilometers in diameter, Fourth Imperium.
**Note Unit Dakak Hull Number 172291 spent 50,000 years in Sol System under a 272 kilometer layer of lunar soil masquerading as Terra's Moon.
Imperial Terra-class battle planetoid size unknown, substantial increases in capabilities compared to Utu-class, Fifth Imperium.
Check out Dan Carlson's site for the latest starship size charts.
http://www.st-minutiae.com/misc/comparison/
There are several even larger ships to be found in sci-fi books, two such examples are...
Utu-class Battle planetoid "3202.795" kilometers in diameter, Fourth Imperium.
**Note Unit Dakak Hull Number 172291 spent 50,000 years in Sol System under a 272 kilometer layer of lunar soil masquerading as Terra's Moon.
Imperial Terra-class battle planetoid size unknown, substantial increases in capabilities compared to Utu-class, Fifth Imperium.
Check out Dan Carlson's site for the latest starship size charts.
http://www.st-minutiae.com/misc/comparison/
Last edited by Wolfee on Sun Jun 23, 2013 2:24 am, edited 1 time in total.
Re: Space Ship Sizes
Thanks for the in-depth explanation! It aids the imagination.Fel wrote:Actually, ships in the Subjugation universe aren't as massive as in some other sci-fi movies/books/genres.
Re: Space Ship Sizes
I forgot to mention one thing that many probably noticed.
KMS vessels differ a great deal from other Confederate vessels in that in most other ships, the vast majority of the ship's volume is dedicated to its jump engines. KMS vessels are built to be roughly the same size as most other ships in the sector, but since they don't have to host immense jump engines, they can devote more space to other systems, such as larger/stronger conventional grav engines and power plants, which lets them run higher-energy weapons than their Confederate counterparts. The fact that singularity plants output more power on average than a similar sized fusion plant also increases the available power, but the tradeoff there is that singularity plants are larger than fusion plants for the same "class" of power plants.
A bit of trivia for everyone. The only ship that's truly honeycombed in the KMS is the carrier class. It's a hell of a lot larger than it technically needs to be. It's a 1+ mile long ship that only carries 500 fighters, after all. The carrier has a very large amount of "empty space" inside it, mainly devoted to massive internal hangers for storing, repairing, and preparing fighters for combat sorties, as well as a large amount of crew quarters. Carriers have WAY more crew than a battleship, because it has to hold the ship's crew, the fighter pilots, and all the personnel devoted to maintaining those fighters. Faey and Karinne design theory don't skimp on crew quarters in their ships, making them larger than they really need to be (there's no dorm style bunking or "hot bunking" in the INS or KMS), and the large number of crew eats up a large amount of a carrier's internal volume. The most crowded a carrier gets is that enlisted personnel share a room until they reach E-4, then they get their own room. And when you have upwards of 14,000 people on a ship, most of them with their own private room...well, that's a hell of a lot of empty space. Then you add that to the support system you need for those crew members, from entertainment to fitness, and you add even more space. The carriers are the only KMS ships that have shopping malls inside them for the convenience of the crew members.
The KMS carriers are truly floating cities, much like the aircraft carriers in our own oceans.
They made the carriers very big for another reason...defense. That may sound a little strange, but they made the carriers oversized to spread out the carrier's critical operations, put a lot of bulkheads, internal hard shields, and a lot of empty space between its major operational centers. A hit on the ship by a piercing weapon can only really take out one of its major hangars or systems, where if it was much more compact, that same hit might have struck multiple major operational centers and done considerable damage to the carrier's ability to carry out its mission. By making the carrer very big and very "open" in its design, it cuts down on the chance that it can be crippled in its task of launching and recovering fighters.
KMS vessels differ a great deal from other Confederate vessels in that in most other ships, the vast majority of the ship's volume is dedicated to its jump engines. KMS vessels are built to be roughly the same size as most other ships in the sector, but since they don't have to host immense jump engines, they can devote more space to other systems, such as larger/stronger conventional grav engines and power plants, which lets them run higher-energy weapons than their Confederate counterparts. The fact that singularity plants output more power on average than a similar sized fusion plant also increases the available power, but the tradeoff there is that singularity plants are larger than fusion plants for the same "class" of power plants.
A bit of trivia for everyone. The only ship that's truly honeycombed in the KMS is the carrier class. It's a hell of a lot larger than it technically needs to be. It's a 1+ mile long ship that only carries 500 fighters, after all. The carrier has a very large amount of "empty space" inside it, mainly devoted to massive internal hangers for storing, repairing, and preparing fighters for combat sorties, as well as a large amount of crew quarters. Carriers have WAY more crew than a battleship, because it has to hold the ship's crew, the fighter pilots, and all the personnel devoted to maintaining those fighters. Faey and Karinne design theory don't skimp on crew quarters in their ships, making them larger than they really need to be (there's no dorm style bunking or "hot bunking" in the INS or KMS), and the large number of crew eats up a large amount of a carrier's internal volume. The most crowded a carrier gets is that enlisted personnel share a room until they reach E-4, then they get their own room. And when you have upwards of 14,000 people on a ship, most of them with their own private room...well, that's a hell of a lot of empty space. Then you add that to the support system you need for those crew members, from entertainment to fitness, and you add even more space. The carriers are the only KMS ships that have shopping malls inside them for the convenience of the crew members.
The KMS carriers are truly floating cities, much like the aircraft carriers in our own oceans.
They made the carriers very big for another reason...defense. That may sound a little strange, but they made the carriers oversized to spread out the carrier's critical operations, put a lot of bulkheads, internal hard shields, and a lot of empty space between its major operational centers. A hit on the ship by a piercing weapon can only really take out one of its major hangars or systems, where if it was much more compact, that same hit might have struck multiple major operational centers and done considerable damage to the carrier's ability to carry out its mission. By making the carrer very big and very "open" in its design, it cuts down on the chance that it can be crippled in its task of launching and recovering fighters.
Just another guy from the shallow end of the gene pool.
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Re: Space Ship Sizes
This was super informative Fel, thanks a bunch for it all!
Re: Space Ship Sizes
Since the syndicate are less troubled by fighters, would the karrines go for a missisle aproach. They have access to 2 great delivery systems, hypermissiles and that alternative ftl method aimed at allowing missiles to go to ftl in real space then detonating as the it passes through the ship.
hypermissiles would go directly into the ships, we know the consortium was defenseless against them and the syndicate is lacking in comparison. It would be a Martine only weapon as o one else has ftl missiles.
The mass field catapult tech the imxi could be adjustered so missile launchers only effect them long enough to allow missiles to deal with any intercept fireand go into the ships. Then they would restores themselves and detonate. With the indo becoming shared territory, this tech may spread, but would take awhile for tech aimed at ships to be set up formissiles.
They could create ships as large as carries or larger, but instead of it built fornormal ship weaponry or even fighters, it is completly dedicated to missiles. It would be capable of launching enough missiles simultaneously as whole fleets. It would allow hem to fight at great ranges. Anti matter seems the best explosive, both for power and safety, but I wondr if antimatter and other missile explosives can be created to be a shaped explosives, like those stay missiles proposed where a nukes edplosive is not omni directional, but funneled to a smaller surface area.
hypermissiles would go directly into the ships, we know the consortium was defenseless against them and the syndicate is lacking in comparison. It would be a Martine only weapon as o one else has ftl missiles.
The mass field catapult tech the imxi could be adjustered so missile launchers only effect them long enough to allow missiles to deal with any intercept fireand go into the ships. Then they would restores themselves and detonate. With the indo becoming shared territory, this tech may spread, but would take awhile for tech aimed at ships to be set up formissiles.
They could create ships as large as carries or larger, but instead of it built fornormal ship weaponry or even fighters, it is completly dedicated to missiles. It would be capable of launching enough missiles simultaneously as whole fleets. It would allow hem to fight at great ranges. Anti matter seems the best explosive, both for power and safety, but I wondr if antimatter and other missile explosives can be created to be a shaped explosives, like those stay missiles proposed where a nukes edplosive is not omni directional, but funneled to a smaller surface area.
.S.A.M.K.M
Re: Space Ship Sizes
Very nice to get all the ship sizes together for reference
Re: Space Ship Sizes
With the syndicate coming and fighters being not as effective as they were against consortium vessels, might it be possible for a jacked pilot to merge with the new class ship being designed at the moment and treating it like an oversized fighter with running repair capabilities due the crew on board. Imagine if a generation was able to merge with the ships like Jason has shown us? it would be a way for a lot of the other generations to help the house out while they are confined to Karis for their own safety.
Re: Space Ship Sizes
With jacks, using one or more pilots, can capital ship be able to move in a manner similar to fighters?
.S.A.M.K.M