Concept Fanart of Future Terran Ship Designs

[BobBKew]

Thanks guys. I model in 3ds Max.

Here's a few more. The tiny ship is what I'd imagine a really cheap, mass produced Earth ship to look like. The size comparison is a subtle nod to Homeworld's Heavy Cruiser. The first ship I posted is a Destroyer, the small ship in the picture is a Frigate or Corvette, and the large one is a Superheavy.



The models aren't really finished as well. I've been having hard drive problems lately.

[Hālian]

Ah.

I've modelled a few ships in SketchUp, but they're nowhere near as good as yours.

[junk]

To be honest while the designs are very nice, they don't feel like outsider terran vessels.

Everything that I've seen about them makes me feel that they tend to be fairly massive sideways flying blades. But that massive is definitely a part of that.

Your designs look more like muted loroi ones. Feels more like designs married to a hiigaran battlecruiser.

[BobBKew]

I was stating that perhaps they might pass as very heavily Loroi inspired Terran ships.

Also that small ship beside the turret might be a very cheap Terran ship. Gravity plating would after all be very expensive to produce and very power consuming.

[Karst45]

Ah.

I've modelled a few ships in SketchUp, but they're nowhere near as good as yours.

well it SketchUp, easy to use hard to master

Feels more like designs married to a hiigaran battlecruiser.

That actually what he said



I really like the detail you put on them, Thus most of it could be done with a bump texture to reduce the polygon count.

[NOMAD]

Hey bob, welcome to the outsider forums,

very nice designs, I can see the homeworld influence.

I could see these ships with the TCA at loroi tech level

are you planning on coloring and texturing them ?

[BobBKew]

So I made another one. I'm practicing textures, but it's hard to work when the hard drive is threatening to fail on you. It's a probable Battleship inspired by the America design.

[junk]

and yes several minutes is kind of a lot of time, but for something that must weigh a lot to move out of the way only with maneuvering thrusters is going to be very difficult.

In order to make a ballistic projectile miss, you only need to alter your projected position by a single ship length. Even with just a few minutes warning, that doesn't take much thrust at all. If you have only 60 seconds of warning, and the target is a 1km long space station, the amount of acceleration you need to make a ballistic projectile miss is:

s = ½at²
a = 2s/t² = 2*1000m/3600s = .5556 m/s² = 0.0567 g

I think 5% of one g is very probably attainable with maneuvering thrusters, even if your space station weighs many thousands of kilotons.

also whats the max speed of a fighter in outsider?

There's no absolute maximum speed (other than the speed of light), but most fighters won't be able to run at maximum acceleration for more than a few hours, so for a 40g fighter accelerating for 2 hours from a standing start, that's 2,822,400 m/s or almost 1% lightspeed. But that's a one-way trip with no way to maneuver or decelerate afterward.

if its fast enough you could effectively have a rail gun round be guided till a few minutes before impact by strapping several impactors to the hull of a fighter to be released once they get close enough to there target to ensure at least some of them hit.

If you want a guided missile, you can just use a guided missile. But even with a running start, jumping into the system at 10% lightspeed (which seems unlikely) you're arriving at the system edge, and it takes a long time to cross that distance to the target. If you came in say at about the orbit of Saturn (~10 AU), and your target is in orbit around Earth (1 AU), that's a distance of 80 light minutes. The target won't detect you for an hour and twenty minutes, but after that he still has some 12 hours to prepare for the arrival of the projectiles before they can arrive at 10% lightspeed.

Even if you somehow have a 90% lightspeed projectile, and you're arriving close behind your light waves, the target still has almost 9 minutes to react from that distance.

You can always have a combined projectile. A rail gun projectile with delayed guidance system and propulsion. It would make the projectile somewhat more expensive, but not by a great margin and since you already have a very high initial velocity of the projectile you only need a drive to correct the course as opposed to propel.

Overall it would allow the projectile to have a very long passive aproach and combine the best of of a rail gun and guided projectile. And it would significantly improve the effective range of the projectile.

You save a fairly large cost on the propellant, reduce the size of the projectile and have a greater initial velocity compared to a standard guided one.
On top of that, because for the majority of the flight time the projectile acts as a dumb shell, it should be able to escape detection for a far longer time. The detection ping itself could potentially just be a mere laser bouncer tied to a visual interpreter (thermal, whatever) so it could be possible to even reduce the probability of the shell being detected for even longer.

A guided missile on the other hand stands out a whole lot more.

EDIT

I somehow feel that I jut replied to something from ages ago

[discord]

junk: two problems with rail launched missiles/torpedoes

#1 shielding electronics from the rather intense EM radiation, not impossible but damn tricky.
#2 assuming a rather powerful railgun launch, at 10km/s it takes a 30g acceleration about 33 seconds to achieve the same velocity, and given that loroi missile weapons do about 60g, which means under 17 seconds of burn...

conclusion, not really worth it other than to chug it out so the exhaust don't ruin your paintjob.

[javcs]

junk: two problems with rail launched missiles/torpedoes

#1 shielding electronics from the rather intense EM radiation, not impossible but damn tricky.
#2 assuming a rather powerful railgun launch, at 10km/s it takes a 30g acceleration about 33 seconds to achieve the same velocity, and given that loroi missile weapons do about 60g, which means under 17 seconds of burn...

conclusion, not really worth it other than to chug it out so the exhaust don't ruin your paintjob.

That assumes you're using magnetics-based launchers. With the apparent level of gravity manipulation, it seems probable that gravity-based launchers are possible.

Also, I think he's talking about stand-off bombardment weapons for picking off stations, purely ballistic doesn't work for that according to Arioch. Presumably, one would pop into a system, punt a few of these towards your target(s), then alter course to engage the defending fleets, whilst your semi-guided ballistic rounds punch out their stations.

[Fotiadis_110]

Point to make: people imagine stations in star systems as some kind of immobile object...

The fact of the matter is, if you want to protect a planet, you need the thrust of a starship to react to targets incoming with starship manoeuvrability, otherwise they will just go around your defences, or stand back and throw more kinetic slugs at your planet/thing of value and destroy them all.

If your 'station' is actually more of a starship without a jump drive, then you are best to utilise massed missiles and ship to ship weaponry, because for all intents and purposes, these craft basically ARE starships bound to a single star.

The only reason you can call these craft 'stations' in that situation, is to leave them in orbit of the planet/star of your choice to protect your assets.

After all, Lazers have longer range than the plasma cannons currently in use in the outsider-verse, and against a relatively immobile target they are impossible to dodge (you cannot predict their fire, only move randomly to reduce your odds of getting hit!).

So to survive in a modern battlefield, you need up to date weaponry.
Fortifications are of little use in the modern battlefield due to the mobility of modern combat (tanks driving as fast as modern cars, able to exploit any weakness in a line of defence) and improved artillery technologies (even missiles that happily burrow into rock to detonate and shatter hardened defences).

The best defence is to be able to do the same yourself!

[javcs]

Point to make: people imagine stations in star systems as some kind of immobile object...

The fact of the matter is, if you want to protect a planet, you need the thrust of a starship to react to targets incoming with starship manoeuvrability, otherwise they will just go around your defences, or stand back and throw more kinetic slugs at your planet/thing of value and destroy them all.

If your 'station' is actually more of a starship without a jump drive, then you are best to utilise massed missiles and ship to ship weaponry, because for all intents and purposes, these craft basically ARE starships bound to a single star.

The only reason you can call these craft 'stations' in that situation, is to leave them in orbit of the planet/star of your choice to protect your assets.

After all, Lazers have longer range than the plasma cannons currently in use in the outsider-verse, and against a relatively immobile target they are impossible to dodge (you cannot predict their fire, only move randomly to reduce your odds of getting hit!).

So to survive in a modern battlefield, you need up to date weaponry.
Fortifications are of little use in the modern battlefield due to the mobility of modern combat (tanks driving as fast as modern cars, able to exploit any weakness in a line of defence) and improved artillery technologies (even missiles that happily burrow into rock to detonate and shatter hardened defences).

The best defence is to be able to do the same yourself!

No, jump-drive-less ships aren't stations. They're system defense craft, or system defense monitors, or what have you, depending on which set of sci-fi terminology you're using.

An actual station is not only going to be larger than a ship, but it will be, relatively speaking, more or less immobile relative to an actual ship. It will certainly have thrusters in order to adjust its orbit and position, but most of the time, it's going to stay in more or less the same place, and its maneuvers aren't going to be particularly fancy.

You don't depend on stations for defending your system or your planets or what have you. You need actual ships for that, but you're still going to have actual stations around your planets, for all the things that a station can do and a ship cannot (or at least, cannot do as well).

[Karst45]

Point is: if you reached deep enough into their territory to "punch out" their station, chance are that you are winning the war.

[ed_montague]

Point is: if you reached deep enough into their territory to "punch out" their station, chance are that you are winning the war.

If you can reach deep enough to knock out a stationary platform orbiting a planet, chances are you are also able to chew up the planet's surface before you leave. Loads of mass drivers + vulnerable planet = ohshitohshitohshit

[Fotiadis_110]

No, jump-drive-less ships aren't stations. They're system defense craft, or system defense monitors, or what have you, depending on which set of sci-fi terminology you're using.

An actual station is not only going to be larger than a ship, but it will be, relatively speaking, more or less immobile relative to an actual ship. It will certainly have thrusters in order to adjust its orbit and position, but most of the time, it's going to stay in more or less the same place, and its manoeuvres aren't going to be particularly fancy.

You don't depend on stations for defending your system or your planets or what have you. You need actual ships for that, but you're still going to have actual stations around your planets, for all the things that a station can do and a ship cannot (or at least, cannot do as well).

a 'Station' as you imagine it is exactly what you say it is: a very easy and vulnerable target.
A single mass-driver round that hits and that thing you spent billions of man-hours building is suddenly falling out of orbit...
In modern warfare on earth today: such a large and immobile station would be equivalent to a modern oil derrick. An unbelievably vulnerable target that has no purpose ever existing in a warzone.
Such stations would only exist in home systems, not systems where actual combat is taking place: not to mention that any weaponry mounted on a station would require to be within the same range as a star-ship to hit a Umiak star-ship in combat, but the Umiak could knock it out at a ridiculously longer range.
IF you build your station to be a more of a mobile starbase, with drives and construction able to manoeuvre like a starship, then it can be a tactical asset in combat, rather than something you have to defend.
The fact that you don't have to set aside engine energy capacity, nor space aboard such a starbase to allow FTL, you can fit bigger and perhaps better engines, and actually increase the star-bases manoeuvrability, making it go from 'tactical asset' to 'tactical ADVANTAGE', an object that the Umiak have to get even closer and spend even longer inside the Loroi effective range in order to have a reasonable chance to hit with their preferred weaponry.

In short:
In all forms of known modern warfare, if all you can do is sit still while everyone else manoeuvres around you, you are dead meat.

Lets not forget, the armour of the starships in outsider are already far outgunned by actual weapons in it (if your ship gets hit by a ship to ship weapon, either you are barely scratched(glancing blow or deflected by screens), or random scrap), and it is thanks to things such as their screen technology and engine technology that combat is survivable in the first place, with a couple exceptions regarding the heaviest of battleships and other blockade breakers (which Arioch hasn't explained how exactly their armour handles repeated hits, it might just be they use layered screens to reduce the damage inflicted enough to make their armour valuable).
I struggle to understand how any actual value can be derived from having a station in stable orbit, when the first time an actual attack comes it becomes almost instant scrap metal

[discord]

proper stations would be either civilian in nature(transport hubs) or industrial, and therefor infrastructure, not fighting assets.

although monitors are not to be dismissed as a idea, but seems mostly wasteful, other than as moral boosters, fortification is not a good idea on a mobile battlefield.

[Fotiadis_110]

Hence: Any station will be in a civilian system far from the front, because they'd already be destroyed in outsider during earlier hostilities.

But monitors, kept with high manoeuvrability, built by those populated planets based near the front, supported by more conventional fleet assets can contribute a heap to system defence, largely because of the ability to dispense with space using, weighty, and expensive jumpdrives, allowing them to be a more effective combat force.

If the system is worth protecting, it is worth protecting properly.
It's not like you can 'raid' poorly defended targets in total warfare of this scale.
On the other hand it wouldn't be very sensible to station entire fleets of Monitors (to coin your terminology) in every star-system in the off chance they get attacked, they are still expensive to use and support.
However, if we were to make a small division in each forward star-system, then they can provide a resistance element against Umiak incursions, enabling the star-system to suppress and hold back the Umiak till reinforcing star ships can arrive.

A group the size of Tempos would serve well in such a role.

[javcs]

I did say that you don't use stations for defending the system against attacking fleets - that's what actual ships are for.

Stations are, however, a rather important part of one's infrastructure, both military and civilian, that provide functions that nothing else can. Therefore, they will exist, and they will exist in systems that could get attacked. For example, I'm quite confident that Azimol has Loroi stations in it, along with a hefty fleet component - and if/when Umiak raids reach Azimol, the ships do the fighting, not the stations.

[Absalom]

Actually, I half-recall Arioch mentioning that Azimol has this big battlestation. Pulls less than 10 g if I recall correctly. I am certain that several Azimol battlestations have been lost in combat.

It helps to remember that this setting has shields of some sort, and that these shields presumably follow something along the lines of the square/cube law in their effectiveness: larger spherical volumes are more efficient to shield. Also, Arioch has said that the larger sizes of vessels that the various combatants can build are not very efficient to send on jumps. Thus, you can build very 'heavy' ships, but the 'lighter' ones are the ones that make sense for FTL use. Also consider the Wave-Loom: Greywind's flagship has two of them, suggesting that the power/heat problems might begin to be circumventable around that size. If you assume that the battlestation is several times (more likely at least one or two scales) larger than the Imperial flagship, then it becomes easy to imagine the battlestation using Wave-Looms like ordinary ships use blasters... or even pulse cannons.

[Arioch]

Your fleets at the borders need bases at which to resupply and repair, and these bases are going to be near the border, by definition. So you're going to need orbital infrastructure that may eventually come under direct attack. There are a lot of ways to deal with this, but you do have to deal with it.

You may have most of your infrastructure as cheap space platforms, perhaps with minimal point defense, and rely on separate armed battlestations (and fleets, of course) to protect them. Or, if your system is directly under siege, it may make more sense to build huge starbase-like battlestations that combine defenses with shipyard and depot facilities (as was the case at Seren).

However, all space stations, even the most ungainly space platforms, are still spacecraft with the ability to maneuver. Even a space platform is hard to hit with a mass driver at any kind of long range.