StarDestroyer.Net BBS

swelch51 wrote: ↑2019-01-08 01:34am I prefer these ones:

My favorite is the carrier from CoD: Infinite Warfare. It’s what I think of when I think of an American origin space aircraft carrier.

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/e3xxb

This one looks intriguing too. Maybe as a British or Russian design:

https://www.moddb.com/mods/stargate-emp ... oly-render

Sorry, the post glitched out for some reason and did wierd things to it... Try these ones in my original post attempt above.

The second design would actually be a pretty nice fit for the Russian BC-307's as I envisage them as having an absurd missile armament.

As for the carrier...no I don't think so. It suffers from the same problem that a lot of "space carrier" models have, that is, take a Nimitz-class and make it bigger, add engines and a sci-fi look, but frankly ignoring the fact that a ship in empty space doesn't need landing decks on the "top".

You have however successfully rekindled my interest in that Stargate mod, I may have a gander through some of their models as they feel like a good fit.

The second design looks more UNSC-ish, but it could work for the Rooskie BC-307s as well.

As a nice collaboration between Earth and the Colonials, they could use the Atlas-Carrier design. It's a dedicated carrier, but Ion cannons and Plasma beams provide good offensive power. Though maybe a new fighter design for the Tau'ri will be needed since the F-302 us gigantic compared to the Vipers.



http://battlestar-galactica-deadlock.wi ... wiki/Atlas

It's basically a heavily armored flight pod.

And that first design vertical fins seem useless but are similar to the O'Neill Class Destroyer, so it could be a homage to the Asgard.

Eternal_Freedom wrote: ↑2019-01-09 12:01pm Oooook this is what happens when I spend a day in work away from the forum.
...

Fnord: There isn't an exchange program per-se, but there is a reasonable overlap as Elysium Base over Earth is a joint command.

Dang, There goes the in-universe shout-out to True Names over at the Computer Research Division.

Natzo wrote: ↑2019-01-09 06:00pm As a nice collaboration between Earth and the Colonials, they could use the Atlas-Carrier design. It's a dedicated carrier, but Ion cannons and Plasma beams provide good offensive power. Though maybe a new fighter design for the Tau'ri will be needed since the F-302 us gigantic compared to the Vipers.



http://battlestar-galactica-deadlock.wi ... wiki/Atlas

It's basically a heavily armored flight pod.

And that first design vertical fins seem useless but are similar to the O'Neill Class Destroyer, so it could be a homage to the Asgard.

The fins could be radiators. I imagine even naquida reactors output a lot of waste heat.

@fnord Fun fact. The RL Kirk's a rear admiral too now. Wonder how long it takes for him to be demoted?

Shows how much I've been keeping up with the man. Maybe he has to settle for XO of Enterprise given he only recently made flag rank and this is set in what, 2008/9?

Somehow, I suspect the RL version would rather avoid replicating that part of his fictional analogue's career.

Well, they don't demote admirals in real life. Not as a rule.

They retire them. Or, if your name is John Byng, they shoot you.

To encourage the others.

And now, my friends, the battle continues!

The Thunder of Guns
UNSC Battle Group Zulu, Reach Orbital Space

Shock and chaos reigned in the moments immediately after the Covenant slipspace jump. Stanforth’s flotilla had destroyed their initial enemy force with comparative ease – they had made their FTL jump into a perfect firing position, rippling off a massive salvo of nearly two hundred MAC rounds against the mere nineteen ships they faced. The frigates and destroyers had died and died quickly, their shields collapsed by just two hits, their hulls gutted and shattered by a third. The battlecruisers had fared little better, their shields protecting them from as many as five or six hits before inevitably collapsing under the onslaught. They had died not to MAC’s but to a lethal swarm of Archer missiles unleashed at nearly point-blank range. With no shields and sensors blinded by the flares of MAC impacts and dying escorts the pulse-lasers failed to sufficiently attrite the incoming targets. Heavy shaped-charge warheads had torn deep into the huge, but comparatively unarmoured hulls, destroying vital components and structural elements.

Here was the great weakness of Covenant vessels, the reason that they succumbed so easily – they relied on their shields for protection, the hull armour being mainly intended as a defence against space debris and low-velocity collisions, not as a defence against dedicated anti-ship weapons. The Archer missiles, once deemed ineffective in the fact of shielding and the undeniably brilliant Covenant point-defence weaponry now proved their worth after all. They were originally designed to fight other human vessels, ones with no shields but anywhere from sixty centimetres to five metres of titanium armour plate on the outer hull and further protections within the vessel. And these missiles were very good at punching through such armour. Against the thin-skinned Covenant battlecruisers it was like using anti-tank shells against brick-walled houses.

The single huge Assault Carrier had died an even more spectacular death. The assembled UNSC ships had fired off a second, smaller volley of missiles at the Covenant behemoth, this one comprised entirely of Shiva missiles bearing thirty-megaton fusion warheads. As with the battlecruisers the shields had been battered down by the last few dozen MAC rounds of the opening cannonade and the sensors blinded by the focused ECM systems of the human ships even as the twenty Shivas raced in, unseen except by a handful of pulse-laser turrets. That handful opened up promptly, slagging one, then two and finally four of the inbounds before it was too late.

One missile detonated within the vulnerable starboard hanger bays, thankfully empty of fighters and dropships. A second detonated right off the bow, a third, a fourth and a fifth erupting directly on the main sublight thrusters at the stern. The rest exploded around the main hull and when the flares faded away, only a collection of dust and debris remained of the once-mighty Covenant warship.

The human crews had taken a moment to cheer before Stanforth barked orders to reload the MAC’s and recharge the jump-drives ready for another sortie against a second task force. It was then that he looked at the holo-display showing the strategic situation. He let out an involuntary gasp at the sight of the massed Supercarrier squadron engaging the Fortress-shield directly, even as the defences within began hitting back. A quick count revealed some of the light carriers were missing, a flashing set of red icons showed just where they were. The enemy had gotten passed them to land on Reach itself.

Stanforth had to ruthlessly push that aside. He had his own enemies to kill, he and the others in his Battle Group, and Keyes, and Harper and Jellicoe and Cole would have to trust that the Marines and the Spartans would be able to deal with the ground forces and keep those generators online. Losing the Fortress-shields would be as good as a loss, especially if those Supercarriers were firing on it when it failed. The amount of plasma those seven ships could hurl at the enemy was truly frightening, enough to slag the entire orbital infrastructure in a single volley if unopposed.

His Battle Group was just about ready to re-engage the enemy when the Covenant independent squadron jumped back into slipspace. Stanforth had a few scant seconds to think that maybe they had bloodied the Covvies’ noses enough for them to pull back when the twenty-nine light carriers dropped back into realspace directly aft of his force. He frantically shouted for evasive action, even as the ship-borne AI’s acted on their own initiative in throwing the frigates, destroyers, carriers and heavy cruiser this way and that. The Covenant ships fired, a wall of plasma charging in, boiling and raging like the fires of hell itself. Through that sea of flame came the bright white beams of energy projectors, the focused power of those weapons reaching out for the dancing UNSC ships.

Some of them managed to evade that opening salvo. Others did not. The Lancelot spun out of formation, her starboard engines shorn away by one of the deadly white beams that had also drained her shields – she blundered straight into a trio of plasma torpedoes and the ship soon vanished forever. The Galahad and the Allegiance were struck head-on; their shields held for an instant before collapsing. The beams gutted both ships from front to back, opening every deck and almost every compartment to space. The ships remained structurally intact but both were out of the fight with most of their crews dead and the main reactors in emergency-shutdown mode.

The Leviathan herself fared somewhat better. She had more powerful generators and thus stronger shields, letting her survive the deadly white beam that slammed into her port flank. The protective fields held against one, then two shots, but a third finally punched through not just the shields, but the flank hull armour as well. The beam blew through thirty internal compartments and then the starboard armour as well, leaving the heavy cruiser with no shields and a ragged hole blown through her midsection.

Other ships managed to dodge the beams enough to avoid major damage but almost every ship had their shields drained completely, leaving them open to the punishing plasma salvo that was burning into their collapsing formation at that very moment. At a stroke the two sides returned to the pre-Sigma Octanus style of battle, where the Covenant fired and the UNSC died. Hull armour boiled away, sensitive antennas and transceivers evaporated, internal compartments burned.

In a span of a few seconds, UNSC Battle Group Zulu was gutted. The carrier Langley was blown in half as a pair of plasma torpedoes slammed into her exposed hanger decks, igniting the magazines for fighter ordnance in an eye-searing blast. Five more destroyers and a dozen frigates were reduced to little more than rapidly-cooling blobs of metal, what had once been armour and internal compartments and weapons and crew melted together into amorphous masses. The Leviathan took another hit, this time to her bows and the forward compartments burned, luckily it did not seriously impede the ship’s fighting capacity.

The most serious non-fatal damage was to the remaining carrier Hiryu. A trio of plasma torpedoes had burned away all but one of the sublight engines and ignited fires throughout the engineering spaces, forcing the main reactors to be shut down as the fuel and coolant lines were severed. A third of her crew died in a few moments as those fires spread before the ship’s AI automatically sealed the bulkheads and vented the burning compartments to space. The ship was saved from immediate destruction but would need a year in drydock to be even remotely close to operational again.

The heavily reduced force, now just twenty-five ships was saved from complete destruction in a rather dramatic fashion. From seemingly out of nowhere a massive green beam speared into the flank of a Covenant carrier, cutting it in half amidships before continuing onwards to ravage a second vessel, leaving that one too adrift and aflame, most definitely out of the fight. 010 Dying Light had aimed his shot perfectly as the mammoth bulk of the Shield of Eternity appeared like a devil in the dark, her stealth field shut down and all power devoted to the formidable weapons array. Alongside the monster flew the UNSC Everest, looking small and toy-like in comparison to the Keyship but deadly nonetheless. Her improved MAC’s and her hardlight beam cannons spoke, sending fifteen superdense plasma rounds and forty smaller green beams out to slam into the shields of two more carriers. When the flares of the plasma detonations faded, both targets were nothing but scrap.

The Covenant carriers began frantic turns to engage the new arrivals, most especially the Everest when the remains of Battle Group Zulu once more engaged them with their thirty-three remaining MAC’s and countless dozens of missile pods. Just shy of a hundred heavy rounds thundered out in a staggered volley, concentrated on only three ships; vessels whose shields could not possibly withstand such an assault. The protective fields collapsed quickly, in two of the three cases allowing a couple of slightly-late MAC rounds to slam into the exposed hull like a thunderbolt from Zeus or Jupiter Themselves. The damage and the strain combined to prevent an effective anti-missile defence, and in less than a minute all three of the light carriers collapsed into fire and debris as the swarms of missiles delivered their lethal cargo to their targets.

Cole and Dying Light had not been idle. The Forerunner AI was making the enormous vessel dance and exploiting every system he could think of to hurt the enemy. The mighty repulsor generator that had given the death-blow to the Unyielding Hierophant weeks before flared once again in a display of power unfathomable to Covenant science. The two sections of the bisected carrier, themselves still burning and sparking as they automatically shut down were hurled forth on collision courses with two more carriers that were likewise held in place, unable to evade. The velocity was decidedly lower than a MAC would be capable of, but the impromptu projectiles were far more massive. The deep black of space was once more lit up with flares as the two hapless carriers, never designed for frontline combat, died.

As the flares faded the Fleetmaster commanding the light carrier squadron did the only thing he could – the force, now reduced to twenty-two ships, jumped back into slipspace, aiming for the relative safety of the Supercarriers that were engaged elsewhere. The human ships took a moment to catch their collective breath even as Stanforth and Cole examined the larger tactical picture. The sight was not a pretty one. The Kobolian forces and Harper’s Strike Fleet were heavily engaged, the close-in defenders and the Fortress-shield were still recovering and the Covenant ground forces were pressing heavily against the UNSC and Terran Marine divisions.

Worse still, the Covenant still had thirty-one of their smaller battle groups, each built around an Assault Carrier that were steadily closing in on the orbital positions while the human defenders were tied up elsewhere. Stanforth and Cole had won this round but at the cost of nearly half their ships for barely a third of the enemy, and those enemy ships had not been built for close engagements unlike their larger brethren.

Round one went to the UNSC and their Kobolian allies, but it was a grim portent of things to come.

=========

Mwahaha.

For those keeping score:

UNSC losses: 2 light carriers, 7 destroyers, 13 frigates, moderate damage to 1 heavy cruiser and all surviving escorts (22 ships out of 248, or ~9%)

Covenant losses: 9 light carriers (4 to Dying Light, 3 to Battle Group Zulu and 2 to Everest.

Total Covenant losses so far: 4 Assault Carriers, 27 light carriers, 20 battlecruisers, 20 destroyers and 32 frigates (103 ships out of 812, or ~12.5%)

Casualty rates are so far in the human's favour...however I have yet to describe the fun of what happened to Harper and Jellicoe's forces, mwahahahaha! indeed.

Ouch...

Very ouch.

That'll leave a dent.

When will we see Jacob's Wild Ride?

On a side not, I have an artist lined up for some ship concept art. Time to start gathering descriptions.

Fnord: Next chapter, or next but one I should think. I have a pair of lectures to write this weekend but may fit some Thirteenth Tribe in around that.

DKeith: That's rather excellent news. Feel free to PM me the ship classes you're looking at (I'll throw in the Warstars as well since I have good mental picture of them) and I'll get back to you on a description. The US Yorktown class is coming together in my head as well.

Probably start with the Brits since the Dreadnought is actually involved atm and use that mini I linked back up there a bit as a starting point.

Eternal_Freedom wrote: ↑2019-01-11 12:58pm Fnord: Next chapter, or next but one I should think. I have a pair of lectures to write this weekend but may fit some Thirteenth Tribe in around that.

Just don't mix your lecture notes with your story materiel.

Hahaha...

"And thus we see that the Star Trek warp drive simply isn't a plausible system. Next, Fleet Admiral Harper was flung against the starboard bulkhead when a plasma torpedo slammed into the unshielded flank of the Valiant..."

Eternal_Freedom wrote: ↑2019-01-11 02:42pm Hahaha...

"And thus we see that the Star Trek warp drive simply isn't a plausible system. Next, Fleet Admiral Harper was flung against the starboard bulkhead when a plasma torpedo slammed into the unshielded flank of the Valiant..."

Which Star Trek warp drive theory? There have been several competing mechanisms presented on how warp drives work, including an attempt by TNG producers to compare it to Doc Smith's inertialess drive, and the fans' recent attempt to shoehorn ST warp drive theory with Alcubierre's maths in an attempt to claim their show predicted warp drive.

Just curious.

Looking at the ST version as presented and comparing it to Alburierre's version, mainly because it turns out one of my committee members was roommates with Alcubierre at uni.

Oh, okay. Knock 'em dead.

Eternal_Freedom wrote: ↑2019-01-11 02:42pm Hahaha...

"And thus we see that the Star Trek warp drive simply isn't a plausible system. Next, Fleet Admiral Harper was flung against the starboard bulkhead when a plasma torpedo slammed into the unshielded flank of the Valiant..."

KEYBOARD...KILL!

Will Jacob's Wild Ride cause as much wear and tear on its mastermind as the original did?

Probably not to the extent that Keyes himself and the Pillar of Autumn bite the dust, but it will still be bloody for both sides.

EDIT: And that's two keyboards lost while reading this thread alone. You guys need to stop drinking while checking this thread! I am not responsible for any such losses, and I have a handful of Circuit and High Court Judges at work who would rule in my favour in this case....mwahahaha....

My keyboard's fine. As it's attached to my laptop, I sincerely hope that continues being the case. Also, is it me, or do USB keyboards just not last as long as their old PS/2 port predecessors?

My USB keyboard is nearly six years old now and works just fine thank you. Avoiding spit-takes while reading certain threads probably helps in that regard

The longest-lasting USB keyboard I had for my desktop was from Logitech, and that was about five years and change. The HP wireless keyboard I had before then gave me all sorts of problems, while the Microsoft USB keyboard I had before that just died one day, no explanation. And, it wasn't because I spilled anything on it, since I don't eat and drink in close proximity to my computer anyway, due to an unfortunate incident with an exploding can of Coca-Cola and a 286 lunchbox I once owned...