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vessels:starships

Starships

This article is intended to act as a guideline and idea of ship sizes and classes and how they work. Design your ships how you please and feel free to reference this as to what that ship class might entail to give you ideas.

Starships, as a term, are self-explanatory. A vessel that travels through space in the Calliope Star Cluster and can be of military, civilian, corporate, independent, or even mercenary use. (Expand this description in the future, im not imaginative enough! -Char)

Starship Classes and Purpose

There are varying degrees of starships. But for simplicity sake this section will cover a broad military description.

Cutter

A cutter, known by other names such as clippers, sloops, patrol ships, escorts, etc. Are typically the smallest type or class of vessel categorized as a warship.

They are relatively small and carry extremely light armaments such as a single main cannon and supporting or defense weaponry. This is due to being used to keep peace and patrol friendly areas of space against light threats and is not typically considered anything more than fodder in an actual fight.

Cutters often carry a higher than normal compliment of security, marines, etc. Considering their purpose is border or territroy patrol and security.

Corvette

Corvettes are typically a larger and more military version of a cutter. Larger, faster, more armed, and generally tooled to be more aggressive than a cutter it carries two or more main weapons but like their smaller sister-class cutter ships are still generally lightly armed and are not front-line warships.

Unlike cutters, Corvettes have more survivability in the form of EWAR1) and ECM2) capabilities allowing them to electronically attack other vessels targetting, sensors, communications, etc. And counter the same while also giving it increased countermeasures against missiles and torpedoes due to ECM capabilities.

Due to its light and specialized nature Corvettes should focus more on point defense and avoid power-intensive systems like shields or heavy armored that would slow it down.

In a magical capacity, a Corvette would still be lightly armed but swap its EWAR and ECM for effective magics that increase its defensive abilities and weaken those of other ships.

Gunboat

Essentially specialized Corvette; The Gunboat is a Corvette that trades its defensive and support capabilities for more teeth. Gunboats are often the first class of ships to have missiles or even torpedoes and are the preferred vessel for crippling or flanking slower vessels with missiles, rockets, or light torpedoes.

Frigate

Frigates are the first class of true warships. Slower than a corvette but still not considered slow, they have a single or double-turret and have an exceptional amount of missiles and even some light torpedo utility. They often are used to escort larger vessels in groups or hunt down solitary larger vessels in wolfpack-style groups where they can pick them apart with their speed.

Frigates are small and popular enough to be a good starting plotship!

Interdiction Frigates

IFs' are a specialized class of Frigates that trade armor for speed and are specialized in intercepting vessels through the use of webbers that snare a ships engines, tractor beams used to slow a vessel, or specialized missiles that target the thrusters heat signatures in order to cripple a vessel.

IFs' are typically either lone-wolf hunters that act as heavy patrol craft in high-threat or important systems or as a specialized member of a small team of other ships that slows or snares a ship while the others move in for the kill.

Stealth Frigate

Stealth frigates are a rare class of black-ops vessels that employ some form of stealth technologies or magics to hide from enemy vessels. They often employ more Torpedoes compared to missiles that a frigate would carry to get sneak-attacks on larger vessels and are essentially the space version of the classic Submarine.

For survivability reasons EWAR and ECM/ECCM or magics that employ the same purpose are a must to ensure enemy ships do not detect a stealth frigate when it has its sights on them.

Assault Frigates

AFs' are the Gunboat version of a frigate and are armed to the teeth with as much weaponry as possible even if that weaponry is lighter than its typical load. They are the fastest version of the frigate class and act as high-risk/high-reward hunter-killers who either go all in for a kill or die in a blaze of glory.

Due to their extraordinary amount of light weapons, an AF typically is specialized in fighting ships of its own class or smaller and loses survivability drastically against vessels larger than itself or those that can snare or webb it and ensure an almost certain kill against it.

Heavy Frigates

Heavy frigates are a strange breed of Frigates that are slower than its sister classes, only just as armed, but with more armor. They are typically found as lone-wolf ships in need of high survivability or even as unique exploration vessels due to their survivability over lighter vessels of its class.

Destroyers

Destroyers are a staple class of ships for any fleet or military. They are heavily armed with missiles or torpedoes and excell at fighting ships their own size or smaller, and even groups of ships. Compared to Frigates they have a much longer travel range, weapon load, armor, and survivability.

They are excellent leaders of frigate fleets or hunter-killer fleets. Due to their large missile load they are also useful for overwhelming point defense or saturating space around where one might suspect a stealth vessel to be hiding.

They are also excellent at chasing down and killing stealth vessels due to their powerful sensors compared to frigates.

Force Recon Destroyers

FRDs' are specialized stealth-destroyers used to infiltrate enemy territory or unknown space and have a large contingent of marines or typical borders or military types. They are not as scaled as a stealth frigate so are only slightly better at the role but make up for it with survivability and the ability to deploy more marines or borders onto ships, stations, planets, installations, etc.

FRDs' also typically carry space mines and are useful for stealthy ambushing ships or mining well-traveled space lanes or leylines.

Assault Destroyers

The speed of a frigate and the weapons of a Light cruiser but with none of the armor; An Assault destroyer is the apex of light-warship combat and carries more missiles and torpedos than it could ever fire with cannons and turrets to boot.

Cruiser

A cruiser is a midline vessel with medium armor and weapons that favor guns over missiles or torpedoes. They are neither fast nor slow, heavy nor lightly armored, under or over-armed, and are a typical staple ship for any fleet that can be designed in any number of ways to fill a role.

Cruisers excel in fleet support in combination with destroyers and frigates. They are also the first class of ship that should be able to provide bombardment of planetside targets and can be converted to light carriers.

Light Cruiser

A Light cruiser is the first class of Cruisers. They typically fill the role of destroyer and frigate leaders and as light flagships for a fleet. Unlike the former classes of frigates and destroyers they are the first class to prioritize weapons such as cannon and turret-style weapons over missiles or torpedoes (though are still likely to have both). They are fast for their size and while heavier armored than any destroyer or frigate are still weak comparatively.

Heavy Cruiser

Larger and slower than its base class a heavy cruiser but not considered slow despite its heavy class, the heavy cruiser is made to take hits to its heavy armor while whittling down other vessels with its own.

Heavy cruisers are designed for long range and high speed, armed generally with guns and turrets instead of missiles or torpedoes.

Battlecruiser

The goal of the battlecruiser is to outrun any ship with similar armament, and chase down any ship with lesser armament; they were intended to hunt down slower cruisers and destroy them with heavy gunfire while avoiding combat with the more powerful but slower battleships. Battlecruisers are heavily armed and fast but are not especially well-armored compared to heavy cruisers.

Light Carriers

Light carriers are cruiser-sized vessels that carry a light complement of a couple of dozen fighters, bombers, shuttles, gunships, transports, etc. They lack the speed, armor, or weapons of any other cruiser class but are especially deadly due to their fighter or bomber compliments.

Capital Ships

Capital ships are uncommon ships that almost always act as the flagship or anchor for a large fleet. These can be powerful Battleships with devastating weapons and armor, Carriers with tens of dozens of fighters or bombers that can cripple smaller fleets, Maruaders made to punch into the heart of a fleet, or Force Auxilaries that pick apart other capital ships with siege weaponry.

Battleships

Battleships are massive warships with quite possibly the heaviest armor any nation can feasibly field and matched with a small but powerful complement of heavy weapons made to combat other ships their size. Battleships are often unwieldy and slow and while they often enter battles late, they are also what almost always finishes the fight.

Battleships often either have a powerful broadside of weapons or a small but powerful array of heavy weapons such as turrets. As a rule they are slow and heavily armored and favor guns over missiles or torpedoes. They struggle to target and combat vessels smaller than cruisers and are best suited to picking apart the heavier vessels of a fleet such as cruisers, other capital ships, or a vessel that acts as a fleet anchor.

Battleships often have extremely heavy armor and shields but are traded for being likely the slowest vessel in a fleet and forces a fleet to match its pace or risk such an important vessel being overwhelmed by numerous smaller ships able to slowly pick it apart.

Fast Battleships

Lighter armed and armored but still a force to be reckoned with a Fast Battleship is designed to keep pace with a fleet that needs mobility but can't afford to have a fleet anchor such as a normal battleship slowing it down. Fast battleships while still not particularly fast are still mobile enough to join fleets needing to flank an enemy, invade a system with speed, or intercept a fleet with other capital ships while not giving them the advanced warning a regular battleship would give.

Fast Battleships sometimes trade some of their weaponry to have light-carrier capabilities.

Carriers

Carriers are large but not heavily armed or armored vessels that carry large amounts of fighters, bombers, boarding craft, shuttles, gunships, and even sometimes smaller ships such as corvettes or gunboats. It can often carry a couple of hundred fighters or other craft and can overwhelm entire fleets if properly protected.

Gunship Carriers

Gunship Carriers act as a strange and niche type of carrier that instead of carrying fighters or bombers deploy a small number of small ships such as corvettes, gunboats, or gunships. These types of carriers are often used in military invasions in order to deploy ships and marines or borders into a system where such smaller vessels would not have the range to reach.

Stealth Carrier

A rare and very niche vessel. Stealth carriers are often small but still capital-grade carriers the size of a large cruiser and are used to infiltrate enemy territory alongside other stealth vessels and deploy stealth fighters and bombers to either support such stealth vessels or perform first-strike attacks.

Marauders

Marauders are the capital class of ship and are a very broad term for a type of close-quarters vessel that trades the heavy-firepower of a battleship for a massive degree of medium and light weapons, often in a broadside, to combat small and medium ships. Where a battleship struggles to target faster cruisers, destroyers, and frigates with its weapons; A marauder is made to turn such vessels, or even small fleets of them, into proverbial pin-cushions with massive salvos of smaller weapons.

Force Auxilaries

Often coined as Seige or Artillery ships; Force auxiliaries are not as heavily armored as a battleship, or as fast as a Fast Battleship, but have devastating long-range weaponry such as anti-capital torpedoes capable of breaking the back of any battleship, cruise missiles that can outrange any torpedo from across a system, massive siege railguns or lasers or energy weapons half the size of the ship, or just plain moonbreaker style weapons capable of cracking a planets mantle or any citadel shield.

Force Auxiliaries are extremely rare due to the nature of their weapons and are almost never brought out unless absolute space-superiority can be assured while it is present.

Super Capital Ships

Super Capitals are the end-all-be-all ships of massive scale and purpose and almost always the flagship for an entire war effort. Due to the sheer raw materials, manpower, and logistics needed to field them they are a rare sight only ever employed in the direst of circumstances and anyone nation should never have more than one of these ships.

Drednought

A frightening bulwark of armor and weapons. A Dreadnought is a massive iteration of a Battleship to an extreme degree. They carry weapons enough and of all types to end an entire battle by themselves and could cripple a planet outright or even destroy a moon. They are quite possibly the slowest thing to ever traverse the Calliope Star Cluster and are about as noticeable as staring at the sun; Making their arrival all but advertised well before it enters a system.

A battle between dreadnoughts is speculated to last for days if one should ever occur, and the loss of a Dreadnought could very well cripple the morale of a nation if not financially devastate them if not turn a war altogether.

A nation capable of building a dreadnought should not be able to do so and should take a massive undertaking of supplies, time, finances, and logistics. And just fielding one should be no trivial matter.

Fleet Carrier

A carrier of massive scale, able to deploy enough fighters, bombers, or even smaller starships enough to fight an entire war on its own; A Fleet Carrier can field a thousand or more heavy fighters, bombers, gunships, etc. While being just an upscaled carrier it is by no means a paltry combatant and carries enough craft to overwhelm an entire starsystem or large fleet.

Compared to the Dreadnought, the Fleet carrier is a safe type of supercapital ship due to most of its size being space dedicated to its craft. It is in no war any less deadly and its fighter and bomber complement alone and the bombs and torpedoes they carry could cripple a Dreadnought if it's unable to kill it first.

Due to its size, a Fleet Carrier is still not remarkably fast and very easily detectable. Its size also allows it to have the facilities to manufacture its own fighter and bomber craft on demand; Making it a very self-sustaining and dangerous threat the longer it is allowed to remain in a system. It is not at all uncommon for resource stockpiles in a system to be raided and delivered to such a vessel to feed the immense demand of providing almost an entire war effort demand of craft.

Other types of Ships

Not quite conventional or common in any fleet, the following ships are uncommon or unique but still common enough to warrant most Nations investing in them.

Q-Ships

Q-Ships are often a niche type of stealth vessel that trades stealth systems and subsystems of incognito camouflage to lure in or trick enemy ships. Q-ships can be any size of ship even up to a cruiser and are disguised as civilian or merchant ships on the outside while hiding their weapons in bays and their armor under the surface.

They excel at surprise attacks, first strike actions, and infiltration.

Mobile Dry Docks

As large as a supercapital ship and almost as rare. A Mobile Drydock is a massive repair yard able to enter FTL and is used to move to fleets with a large number of damaged ships incapable or making it home or even leaving a system. They also have limited fabrication functions that can replace entire starships if given the raw material.

Ships by Nation

Here is a list of all Primary Nations starships. (I will add unaligned nations later. -Char)

this namespace doesn't exist: bts:bamf:starships

this namespace doesn't exist: ndc:starships

this namespace doesn't exist: nation:uns:starships

Standard Ship Template

The standard ship template to help you make a nice looking starship article on the wiki~

small_image
Vessel Overview
Nation ie, “NDC”, “Independent”
Manufacturer ie, “Conclave Ship Works”
General Characteristics
Class ie, “Carrier”
Role ie, “Force Projection”
Length ie, “100 meters”
Width ie, “20 meters”
STL Speed ie, “1 AU/day”
FTL Speed ie, “1 sector/2 weeks”
Complement ie, “1000 crew”
Armament ie “4 guns
2 missile racks”

Appearance

Required. Include a text description sufficient for others to get a general idea of what the exterior of the vessel looks like.

Images appreciated, but not required.

Interior

Optional. Describe the cockpit, ship interior, floors, and whatever else seems useful to the story.

History

Optional. Less about “why was this made” and more about “how has it been used in the past”.

Development

Optional. If you would like to include notes on what went into creating this vessel, this is where it goes.

Activity

Optional. What have vessels of this type accomplished?

Systems

Optional. Engines, weapons, generators, security systems, etc, can all go under this.

OOC

  • Player char created this on 2021/10/28 17:57.

Usage

This content adheres to Project Multiverse's submission and usage rules.

  • This Vessel can be used by (anyone/only those with permission/etc).
  • In the event that the Vessel's creator is no longer available, …
1)
Electronic warfare
2)
Electronic Countermeasure
vessels/starships.txt · Last modified: 2022/02/01 21:42 by charaa