Dreadnought or Mothership (RAR!)

[Zor]

In this scenario you are the admiralty of an interstellar nation of three hundred inhabited star systems about 300 light years in diameter and populated by about one trillion sapient beings. Said nation is one of several such entities in your corner of the galaxy and while you have two allies of similar size neighboring you, you also have three hostile states. Said hostile states have been planning for some time the conquest and subjugation of your nation, either piece by piece or to split it in it's entirety between them. It is believed that in the next five to ten years there will be a major interstellar war.

Here is a rough outline of military spacecraft.

• Fighters: 15-30 meters long with crews of one or two personnel. Fast (having five times the forward acceleration of a battleship), cheap and maneuverable short range craft useful for raiding, harassment, scouting and attacking targets en-mass. Can operate for either a day or up to 36 hours.
• Gunships: 30-60 meters long with crews of 10 to 30. Heavier strike craft with lower acceleration but carrying heavier weapons payloads, armor, shields as well as a pair of Point Defense turrets. Can operate for up to a fortnight independently.
• Corvettes: 125 to 225 meters long with crews of 40 to 80. Corvettes are the smallest warships which can mount and hyperdrive. Corvettes are used for scouting, raiding light targets, deep space patrols, point defense, escorting minor targets and couriers. Corvettes can operate independently for up to 4 months.
• Frigates: 225 to 400 meters long with crews of 80 to 250. Frigates are the general workhorses of a fleet and broadly speaking come in two categories: the first are generalist assault frigates that are mainly used for engaging other frigates and smaller ships and the other are specialized frigates (torpedo frigates, lance frigates built around a single battleship scale energy weapon, interdictor frigates able to prevent any ship within 5 million kilometers from jumping to and force ships out of hyperspace, point defense frigates, shield frigates able to project a large forward shield) with maybe a few point defense weapons as a concession. Frigates have supplies for eight months on average.
• Destroyers: 400 to 600 meters long with crews of 250 to 600. The smallest capital ships, primary function of a destroyer is to destroy enemy frigates, though they also act as raiders in groups. They are generally well rounded ships and are the largest warships most of your inhabited systems can build. They can operate independently for up to a year.
• Cruisers: 600 to 1,000 meters long with crews of 600 to 1,500. Heavy hitters able to tackle with most threats head on at a reasonable price, there is a wide amount of variation in cruisers from fast light cruisers able to keep up with destroyers to heavily armored and shielded heavy cruisers with large numbers of destroyer level weaponry to engage fleets of smaller craft to battlecruisers which carry battleship level weapons. They can operate independently for between 1 to 1.5 years depending on their configuration.
• Battleships: 1,000 to 1,600 meters long with crews of 1,500 to 4,000. Ships of the line and the heaviest hitters in the fleet. They are big, ponderous and expensive but when they are brought to bear they can both take and dish out tremendous power. Their main armaments are usually 6 to 12 heavy energy cannons mounted in heavy turrets which they can fire more rapidly than lance frigates along with secondary armaments. Some battleships also have large spinal mounts to get in a single devastating opening shot, though their long recycle periods means that such weapons are often seen as impractical.
• Carriers: A catch all term for ships between frigate scale support carriers and battleship sized fleet carriers that carry fighters and gunships. A fleet carrier can carry up to a thousand fighters or a hundred heavy gunships. At the same time many ships carry a complement of strike craft for support purposes. Some assault frigates can carry four fighters, a destroyer usually carries between eight and sixteen, cruisers carry between sixteen and forty eight while battleships can carry up to eighty six.

Both you, your allies and your enemies each command fleets with hundreds of battleships, about a thousand cruisers, thousands of destroyers and tens of thousands of Corvettes and Frigates as well as about a tenth that number in carriers. Most cargo ships are in the area of 200 to 800 meters long.

Weapons technology is as such…

• Torpedoes: missiles ranging from counter missiles to 50 meter long heavy torpedoes. Torpedoes are used for long range combat up to five million kilometers away. They can do a lot of damage on impact but can be intercepted by PD and require a lot of ammunition.
• Particle Cannons: Particle cannons are the main weapon of battle and range from fighter scale weapons to battleship lances. These have ranges from 30,000 to 500,000 km for heavy weapons.
• Plasma Cannons: Short ranged weapons (125,000 km maximum) that do a lot of damage. They are generally seen as specialist weapons but a plasma weapon armed destroyer can dish out about twice the damage of its particle cannon armed counterpart when in effective range.

As a general rule inhabited planets have defensive shield grids and fortresses in high orbit. Indiscriminate use of weapons of mass destruction is avoided and if it is done, it generally has major consequences: most notably the fact that it ends in the side which does it getting dogpiled. If a planet’s shield is battered down, the planet surrenders.

FTL travel is achieved through Hyperdrive. Hyperdrive allows ships to make jumps of up to a light year travelling at an effective speed of 300 to 600c for periods of about a day before needing to fall back to realspace to recharge and cool down their hyperdrives which usually takes about a day. Civilian freighters can eliminate most of this deadtime by recharging their power cells and swapping out hot hyperdrives for cool ones at way stations. Due to the fact that hyperspace is inprecise in where ships fall out and it takes about half an hour to power up for a hyperspace jump, using hyperdrive for tactical manuvers in battle generally does not work. Spacecraft cannot safely enter or leave hyperspace too close to a gravity well (in the case of a star like Sol, a safe distance would be somewhere between the orbits of Uranus and Neptune). FTL communications exist, but are low range (about 1 ly) and has a low bit rate. A network of relay stations exist in your nation. FTL sensors exist, but they can only detect when a ship enters or leaves hyperspace with one ly and the approximate size of said ship.

However recently there has been a breakthrough in engine technology. Basically it allows a ship traveling through hyperspace to use only half the energy per kilogram as a regular ship. The only problem is that due to technical reasons this is only really viable if the ship is huge, about ten kilometers in length. As such two engineers have provided you with two designs for a super heavy spacecraft for your navy.

The first option is the Dreadnought: an ultra-heavy ten kilometer and (at its widest) 2 kilometer wide long battleship that is very heavily armed, armored and shielded. It would carry twenty four cannons on the scale of a battleship’s lance as well as hundreds of regular battleship scale cannons, torpedo tubes and even more PD weapons. It would also carry some 1,536 fighters and 256 gunships. Simply put this Dreadnought would be able to engage entire fleets and win.

The second is the Mothership. The Mothership is even larger than the Dreadnought at twelve kilometers long and 3 kilometers wide but weighs less due to a greater amount of internal room. The Mothership has shields which are about half as strong as the Dreadnoughts as well as weapons comparable to a regular heavy battleship for defense. Her main asset is that inside her is a vast industrial complex which includes asteroid processing facilities, ore refineries, fabricators, assembly lines and assembly craft produce materiel for the fleet. This ranges from food and mechanical consumables through torpedoes, shield generators, armor, fighters and in numerous assembly births new ships up to the destroyer level (of which she can build five at a time taking three months to complete them along with twelve frigates every six weeks and twenty corvettes every three weeks). She can also has a fleet of hundreds of repair ships able to restore damaged ships back into fighting order. Long story short, having a Mothership along with a fleet on a military expedition would simplify logistics massively.

Either way it will take about five years to build either a Dreadnought or a Mothership and you only have the shipbuilding capacity to make one at a time.

Which do you choose?

Zor

[Purple]

The mothership. If I can adapt the inside construction areas to spew out missiles upon missiles I can potentially deliver an absolutely insane alpha strike against any enemy force concentration. And nothing says fuck you as blowing someones planets up and than eating the pieces to build more armaments.

[Grumman]

The Mothership is likely going to be more generally useful, but the Dreadnought makes better use of the fact that it's a single superheavy capital ship. The Mothership would be able to bolster your defense across your territory, but so could a stationary shipyard, while the Dreadnought seems like an unprecedented tool for defense through offense: if a single ship shows up and mops the floor with their entire fleet, the fact that you didn't need to send two means they cannot make any assumptions about the upper bounds of your strength.

[Purple]

On the other hand it is still one ship. And once they catch on to that it's going to be trivial to outmaneuver it and draw it to one side as they attack another to cut its supplies, demolish the shipyards that maintain it and bomb the worlds that feed it. A giant super-warship like that is inherently an offensive tool because you can't afford to let the enemy have the initiative if you can only be in one place.

[Zwinmar]

Mothership as onsite production can churn out many magnitudes more resources with more variation.

[SilverDragonRed]

Mothership. It's too easy a choice. While the Dreadnought is nice and powerful providing an advantage in ship-to-ship combat, it doesn't compare to what the Mothership can give in the far more important logistics category. Production lines, repair facilities, and resupply; all of which is on-site. Given that the max possible travel amounts to about 1.6 light-years every other day, the presence of the Mothership ensures that offensives can continue for far longer than what was previously possible.

[PREDATOR490]

Mothership - Not even a contest.

5 Destroyers every 3 months
12 Frigates every six weeks
20 corvettes every 3 weeks.

so...

5 years pass to build the mothership then 3 month later:

5 Destroyers - 1,250 - 3,000 crew
24 Frigates - 1.920 - 6,000 crew
80 Corvettes - 3,200 - 6,400 crew

Total:

109 ships - 6,370 - 15,400 crew

Force composition:

3 Allied Empires
3 Hostile Empires

'Hundreds of battleships each'
'Thousands of cruisers each'
'Tens of thousands corvettes and frigates each'

Being completely lazy minimalist:

100 Battleships - 150,000 - 400,000 Crew
1000 Cruisers - 600,000 - 1,500,000 Crew
10000 Frigates - 800,000 - 2,500,000 Crew
10000 Corvettes - 400,000 - 800,000 Crew

Total:

21,100 Ships - 1,950,000 - 5,200,000 Crew
Multiply this by 3 Empires

63,000 - 5,850,000 - 15,600,000 Crew

-----

With those kind of numbers being thrown around, a Titan flagship is a poor investment. Even if the Dreadnought could be expected to engage 21,100 ships in a single battle and WIN, any sensible opponent would be using hit and fade strikes that would run the Dreadnought to the breaking point.

I cannot help but expect the Dreadnought to die to an EVE style cluster fuck blob. Enemy faction lures the Dreadnought into a fight then drops so many ships on the damn thing that it gets swarmed to death. The allied faction then keeps pouring their own ships into the fight because they NEED to keep the Dreadnought alive while the enemies keep pouring their own forces into it to keep them pinned.

In fairness: The Mothership is quite likely to be blown to bits by the enemy because it is a high priority target but the major difference is the Mothership is not designed to be on the front lines and ideally would be heavily defended to the point that attacking it would be a major investment for the enemy. While it is sitting in the back it can still be useful. The Dreadnought is a gigantic white elephant as long as it is not on the frontlines actually using it's super offensive ability to destroy enemies.

[Borgholio]

The Dreadnought would only be useful if it is capable of actually using it's firepower advantage. As per the OP, it can take on entire fleets and win. Great, but if the fleets avoid pitched combat, then the dreadnought may only be useful for planetary assaults or defense. Now if you could build a dreadnought and use it to protect your own shipyards...that would be a major advantage since the enemy would be unable to touch your factories, while your fleets can assault theirs. If your own production centers are too far spread out to be projected by a single ship, then the mothership would definitely be the best way to go since a horde of smaller ships can cover more territory than one big one.

Now if battering down the shields of their capital world can be done with a single ship, you could potentially force them to surrender by holding their government and population hostage. But if they know you would never actually bombard the surface, that amounts to an empty threat and the dreadnought would essentially be useless.

[Purple]

Why would you never actually bombard the surface? I mean, there isn't exactly anything stopping you from selectively depopulating continents until their government finally surrenders.

[Borgholio]

Why would you never actually bombard the surface? I mean, there isn't exactly anything stopping you from selectively depopulating continents until their government finally surrenders.

As stated in the OP, doing so is a major war crime and could result in everybody else turning against you. I doubt one or two dreadnoughts could stop the rest of the known galaxy attacking you at the same time.

[hunter5]

double post

[hunter5]

Could the mothership build a dreadnought?

[Eternal_Freedom]

OP states it can build up to destroyer-size vessels, so I think the answer is no.

[hunter5]

OP states it can build up to destroyer-size vessels, so I think the answer is no.

need to read better . well in that case the mother ship still seems to be a better option to go with destroyer spam while your main shipyards can build more battleships.

[Kingmaker]

I cannot help but expect the Dreadnought to die to an EVE style cluster fuck blob. Enemy faction lures the Dreadnought into a fight then drops so many ships on the damn thing that it gets swarmed to death.

Eve may not be a good analogy here, since large ships in Eve have pathetic-to-nonexistent secondary armaments for game balance reasons and their primary armament is gimped against small targets because of the same. This dreadnought has hundreds of battleship-caliber weapons, which should shred light ships sent against it, and unless the opposition commits a truly massive force to killing it, it can probably fight its way out of any sticky situations.

Significantly, the dreadnought's status as a one-ship war fleet forces your enemies to commit more of their forces to defending key targets unless they can keep very good track of it.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I think the Dreadnought might be my choice. With all empires having roughly equal navies, me having a single massive offensive ship works to my advantage. I can leave my complete force to defend my various worlds whilst the enemy has to deal with my Dreadnought rampaging around his systems destroying anything it sees, even if I'm not firing on the planet's themselves. Even if the enemy keeps all of his ships around his worlds to defend them, they will not be able to stop the Dreadnought unless concentrated to the point where most of their worlds will be totally undefended. And it also means they can't commit to offensive actions because they have the Dreadnought to worry about, and with my full fleet on the defensive (plus any orbital defences) I will out-gun any attacking force.

So, yeah, I'll build the Dreadnought and send it out on a pre-emptive strike. The Mothership may be a better choice in general terms but given the scenario (balanced sides, war is imminent/expected) I can use the Dreadnought to decisively win, force a surrender and annexation and thus emerge stronger afterwards.

[Tandrax218]

Dreadnought all the way !!!

Why ?

Because as someone said above the number's of ship that the mothership can build in a year do not make a big difference and it is a squishy target.

The Dred on the other hand is a powerful scalpel that can go anywhere and kill anything and its relatively "small" one object 10x2km vs a fleet that takes up a much larger space in a formation. But then again that might not be the case since the OP does not say anything about the sensors so thats just my idea...

But if you have two opposing forces with equal firepower and ships then the Dred can be the decisive tool to stop the war because while the two sides are locked in place over a significant front the Dred being a 1-ship fleet can just waltz around the enemy empire destroying everything it sees, and if the enemy wants to stop it then he has to divert its forces from the front which in turn causes the Drednought army to punch through the weakened lines.

The mothership on the other side can't do the sheer destruction the Dred can and lets face it if you have a 300 hundred worlds/systems in a empire then what is another small factory to the grand picture ? Its not like the few extra ships it makes in a year will help win the war, maybe just help bolster the lines and contribute to lowering the attrition rate ....


So yeah

Dreadnought

[Tandrax218]

Oh and don't get me started on the commerce raiding possibility of the Dred
First it FTL's into the enemy periphery, then it flies away on a set way point's all on the routes of known trade lanes and then either by itself or with ist fleet of gunboats kills all the trade ships = 0 ammo, fuel, food for the war effort

Picture it as a German cruiser Admiral Graf Spee but in space with enough firepower to annihilate the whole Pearl harbor fleet...
And it raids convoys

[Purple]

Seems like a waste to me. Convoys typically won't require a fraction of the capability this ship has. And there is going to be more of them than it can catch. Sooner or later the enemy is going to pin it down and swarm it.

[Zeropoint]

None of the above. "Too big to lose" is too big to risk in battle, and a giant ship that you can't actually use is just a colossal waste of resources. I use the shipyard capacity that would have gone into the money-waster to build a crapload of smaller ships, which will get me FAR more fight for my money and time. I also have my analysts look into making armored, shielded, and/or point-defended torpedoes and also into mini-missile swarms. You know, to find out whether the best way to beat torpedo defenses is by overpowering them or by overwhelming them.

[Esquire]

With an FTL speed of... what, about .8ly/d averaged at the high end, it would take over a year to travel from one end of the nation to the other. Logistics are going to be a massive problem, especially if we're fighting a distant enemy, so I vote for the mothership.

EDIT: But yeah, basically what Zeropoint said.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah. Having a mobile base for repair and resupply of an expeditionary fleet is a big deal when travel times to and from the zone of combat are measured in months or years.

Honestly, in such a setting, there would almost have to be an existing category of dedicated fleet support ships which would have a significant fraction of a mothership's equipment and manufacturing capability, just because it would be nearly impossible to prosecute modern warfare at the end of such a long logistics pipeline. You need some way to produce spare parts for your ships, and repair damaged ships, without having to sail six months each way to get there.

(For an example of this see the Lost Fleet series by John Hemry)

People were able to manage empires with six-month sailing times back in the 1700s, but that was when an armed force could maintain itself using local supplies of timber and local blacksmiths to make most of its needs. It wouldn't have been sustainable with literally every ship and piece of equipment down to soldiers' personal weapons needing to be precision-machined from factories in the home country.

[Enigma]

Dreadnought.

If it can take on a fleet and win then it is pointless to defend a Mothership if the side that has the Dread knows where it is. Dread hypers in, vapes the fleet and the Mothership and takes off. Or it comes in, destroys the fleet, boards and takes over the Mothership and then takes it back. Now you have a Dreadnought AND a Mothership.

[Simon_Jester]

The Dreadnought would only be useful if it is capable of actually using it's firepower advantage. As per the OP, it can take on entire fleets and win. Great, but if the fleets avoid pitched combat, then the dreadnought may only be useful for planetary assaults or defense. Now if you could build a dreadnought and use it to protect your own shipyards...that would be a major advantage since the enemy would be unable to touch your factories, while your fleets can assault theirs.

It would, in that case, be cheaper to build static or semi-static fortifications of the system containing your primary shipyard. Anchoring the dreadnought to defense of a single target sounds... inadvisable.

I think the Dreadnought might be my choice. With all empires having roughly equal navies, me having a single massive offensive ship works to my advantage. I can leave my complete force to defend my various worlds whilst the enemy has to deal with my Dreadnought rampaging around his systems destroying anything it sees, even if I'm not firing on the planet's themselves.

Your biggest concern in this case is that the enemy will be using the same economic capability to produce a quite large battlefleet of their own. Ton for ton, the dreadnought masses about as much as five hundred conventional capital ships (assuming equal density, and that the dreadnought isn't significantly fatter or skinnier than said capital ships).

Assuming the enemy's economic capability is comparable to your own, that is a LOT of battlewagons they can send into your territory, striking your conventional war fleet in a large number of places, with local numerical superiority in ALL of them.

...

I am reminded of the situation faced by German and American tanks in France circa 1944. What is often overlooked in comparing the German and American armor is that tanks and infantry are a mutually supporting team. Infantry don't accomplish very much without tank support. Conversely, infantry which have any tank support will almost invariably defeat infantry with no tank support.

The US had far more of its Sherman tanks deployed on the field than the Germans. Most of the German armored vehicles were things like tank destroyers and Panzer IVs that a Sherman could face on equal or slightly inferior terms. The Germans had a relative handful of Panthers and Tigers that could destroy vast numbers of Shermans.

But so what? The practical result of this was that while American troops nearly always had armored support, German troops only occasionally had armored support. Sure, if the German armored support happened to show up, the US armored forces might have a Very Bad Day. But on any given day, only a few percent of American forces were having such a Very Bad Day, while the rest were pushing forward slowly but surely with the reliable support of their plentiful (but theoretically inferior) tanks.

In this case, unless the enemy has a single target which you can destroy with the dreadnought before their advantage in conventional fleet numbers becomes decisive... you're screwed. And with FTL travel being so slow, it's entirely possible that you could punch out that single vital target with the dreadnought, and lose the war anyway, because the enemy has already captured most of your star systems thanks to the overwhelming numbers of their conventional fleet.

See the short story Superiority, by Arthur C. Clarke.

...

Of course, the mothership presents the same difficulty. Its support is valuable in one place, but it can only support one place. Its support can make itself felt across a (relatively) small volume of interstellar space without too much difficulty thanks to its logistics functions, but it's still relatively small in scale compared to the overall size of a war between major powers.

It might be more cost-effective to simply plow the resources that would have gone into the supertransturboship into a better fleet logistical train overall.

Even if the enemy keeps all of his ships around his worlds to defend them, they will not be able to stop the Dreadnought unless concentrated to the point where most of their worlds will be totally undefended. And it also means they can't commit to offensive actions because they have the Dreadnought to worry about, and with my full fleet on the defensive (plus any orbital defences) I will out-gun any attacking force.

Their ships can simply arrive at a system the dreadnought defends, realize it is there (it can hardly be mistaken for any lesser entity), and go attack another, entirely different system instead.

Or better yet, attack two systems simultaneously, with one fleet of capital ships going "aw hell no" when it realizes it will be facing your dreadnought, while the other goes "WHERE IS YOUR DREADNOUGHTGOD NOW!?" and ravages its target. Their superiority in conventional ships makes this a distinct possibility.

So, yeah, I'll build the Dreadnought and send it out on a pre-emptive strike. The Mothership may be a better choice in general terms but given the scenario (balanced sides, war is imminent/expected) I can use the Dreadnought to decisively win, force a surrender and annexation and thus emerge stronger afterwards.

If the enemy has a single critical target you can punch out before the enemy's conventional fleets grind forward and cut your territory to shreds, this will work...

But if the enemy reacts differently, you're screwed. Say, the way the Soviets reacted to the loss of territory in 1941, which was to relocate all available industry out of the path of the enemy advance, relocate administrative centers if necessary, and just keep fighting, relying on conventional numerical superiority to wear down the enemy until an unsecured flank opened itself up.

Plus, the enemy will have constructed a large fraction of their extra surplus capital ships before the dreadnought can realistically finished. This gives them a "golden moment" when your dreadnought is not ready for prime time, and when they outnumber you. They would be complete idiots NOT to attack you at this point in time. Since they were going to attack you anyway, after all...

Which means that if you are fortunate, the best case scenario for building the dreadnought (or, for that matter, the mothership) is that it will be finished while you are in the middle of fighting a defensive war against a more numerous enemy military.

Dreadnought all the way !!!

Why ?

Because as someone said above the number's of ship that the mothership can build in a year do not make a big difference and it is a squishy target.

The mothership is not squishy compared to conventional capital ships. It is only squishy compared to a great fleet of such ships.

The Dred on the other hand is a powerful scalpel that can go anywhere and kill anything and its relatively "small" one object 10x2km vs a fleet that takes up a much larger space in a formation. But then again that might not be the case since the OP does not say anything about the sensors so thats just my idea...

Odds are that the dreadnought will be visible from much longer ranges than any individual normal capital ship, and therefore is likely to be visible from much farther away than a fleet of such ships.

It's like, the range at which your radar can detect 50 bombers is not very different from the range at which your radar can detect one bomber. Not unless those bombers fly much, much closer together than would make sense in modern warfare.

But if you have two opposing forces with equal firepower and ships then the Dred can be the decisive tool to stop the war because while the two sides are locked in place over a significant front the Dred being a 1-ship fleet can just waltz around the enemy empire destroying everything it sees, and if the enemy wants to stop it then he has to divert its forces from the front which in turn causes the Drednought army to punch through the weakened lines.

Meanwhile, what will the enemy do, with the, oh... 100 to 500 normal capital ships that they built using the same money you used to build the dreadnought?

The mothership on the other side can't do the sheer destruction the Dred can and lets face it if you have a 300 hundred worlds/systems in a empire then what is another small factory to the grand picture ? Its not like the few extra ships it makes in a year will help win the war, maybe just help bolster the lines and contribute to lowering the attrition rate ....

The mothership can also provide spare parts and ammunition for your fleets without forcing you to fly for months to get resupply, allowing you to keep ships fighting actively for longer, and fighting harder. It can repair damaged ships, allowing you to put your ships back in the front lines while the enemy's ships have a long, painful limping voyage back to dockyard.

Picture it as a German cruiser Admiral Graf Spee but in space with enough firepower to annihilate the whole Pearl harbor fleet...
And it raids convoys

Did I ever mention that the German surface commerce raiders were a really stupid use of money and resources? Seriously, they were very inefficient. The Graf Spee took some effort to hunt down, sure, but ultimately it went down like a chump without taking any enemy warships with it, and managed only a handful of kills against isolated merchant ships.

Large capital ships are too expensive to be used flailing around at random looking for small elusive targets that can easily scatter and flee. They must either be used to defend against a well-known and plausible threat, or to become a well-known and plausible threat to an enemy. Anything else is a stupid waste.

Dreadnought.

If it can take on a fleet and win then it is pointless to defend a Mothership if the side that has the Dread knows where it is.

Why would they ever know that? I would take considerable pains to avoid them knowing that, and given the low speeds of travel and communication, I suspect I could achieve that goal.

Moreover, the mothership may well be weaker than a dreadnought, but being built to the same scale with at least broadly comparable shielding and defenses, this is actually the one scenario where it might be plausible to swarm and defeat a dreadnought without taking overwhelming casualties. The mothership can engage the dreadnought concentrating on defense, while swarms of smaller capital and sub-capital ships maneuver for advantage, trying to exploit a weakness and land hits while the dreadnought is too busy to maneuver and fire against them with its full weapons fit.

Also, the enemy may not even have a dreadnought, preferring to rely on overwhelming conventional forces... in which case I don't need one supertransturbobattleship. I need a force multiplier to make my existing ships more effective.

[Zor]

The advance in hyperdrive which makes Dreadnoughts or Motherships possible was devised by your scientists and engineers. Your enemies won't be able to build either for some time.

Also the advantage in hyperdrive efficiency means that either supership can stay in hyperspace for up to 54 hours before needing a break (which will take about as long).

Zor