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Caelg
Caelg
4 years ago

What is the length on this ship? Are those four ventral cutouts hangar bays?
Also, it kinda looks like a stealth corvette.

TheIcthala
TheIcthala
4 years ago
Reply to  Caelg

As you can see on the finished product (link below), those are hangar bays, yes.
https://fractalsponge.net/?p=3737
The ship is 880m long and looks a lot less stealth corvette-y when finished.

caelg
caelg
4 years ago
Reply to  TheIcthala

oh, I was not aware this was a w.i.p. lol, sorry.

The SWTCW Freak
The SWTCW Freak
5 years ago

Are there any planes in it (when yes which and how much)
Looks a Bit like the acclamator class

TheIcthala
TheIcthala
5 years ago

For your second point I would like to refer you to the thread started by StormCommando, below.
I can’t remember where answers are for the first, but I do remember carrying capacity being discussed on one of the threads.

Hello there
Hello there
5 years ago

It can’t be classified as a frigate according to the Anaxes war college system. By its length it is classified as a heavy cruiser

Ryadra777
5 years ago
Reply to  Hello there

You must be new here.

CRMcNeill
CRMcNeill
5 years ago
Reply to  Hello there

You may classify it however you like. I write game stats for a D6 forum, and if I end up really liking the finished product, I’ll likely end up classifying this ship as a Heavy Cruiser or Light Star Destroyer on that stat. That doesn’t require fractalsponge to alter his classification system to fit mine, and the fandom is more than big enough for both perspectives to exist with room to spare.

CRMcNeill
CRMcNeill
5 years ago
Reply to  Hello there

On top of that, the Anaxes System is crap. To quote a guy on the D6 forum (who is also a History Professor), the Anaxes System has little military value beyond impressing politicians and uninformed civilians. Form follows function, and size is a subset of form. A system that classifies vessels purely by size fails to take into account the far more important classification of mission.

Hello there
Hello there
5 years ago
Reply to  CRMcNeill

Thanks for the statement

CRMcNeill
CRMcNeill
5 years ago
Reply to  Hello there

You’re welcome. If I might make a suggestion, simply telling the man he’s wrong on his own website might not get you the response you’re hoping for. A better alternative would be:

Hey, fractalsponge, I’ve noticed that your ship classification system doesn’t adhere to the Anaxes system. Why is that, and can you explain the system you do use and the reasoning behind it?

Hello there
Hello there
5 years ago
Reply to  CRMcNeill

Yeah I’m new here and too naive so thanks a lot for the suggestion.

StormCommando
StormCommando
5 years ago

Fantastic, have been looking forward to this since the first preview! It’s an instant favourite. The protruding hunchback bridge, the hull’s low angle, and broad sweeping wedge-shape gives it a real elegance. Going by the bridge I am guessing it’s between 750 and 850 metres long. Reactor draw… 2e24w?

StormCommando
StormCommando
5 years ago
Reply to  Fractalsponge

Nice, thanks. If it’s missing the huge carrying capacity of the Acclamator, but uses roughly the same chassis, only enlarged, it must have room for more reactors where those big hangar bays are? Perhaps two ‘engine reactors’ which can also contribute to main power generation and channel that energy to weapons and shields if needed.

Mr. legends is best canon
Mr. legends is best canon
5 years ago

I wonder why capital ships and smaller craft don’t use droid brains or computers to fire their weapons than actual people since droids can react a lot quicker than organic and shooting things don’t require a lot of experience for a droid

MidnightPhoenix
MidnightPhoenix
5 years ago

One the droids has less probability of improves and two it takes a lot less space and maintenance for person compared to Droid

PhantomFury
PhantomFury
5 years ago

In Star Wars, droids are often regarded as sub-sentient entities, with organics having better instincts and judgement than droids, even at the expense of faster reaction time. Although this can be build up with time, droids that don’t go through regular memory wipes will develop personalities away from the baseline (refer to Artoo’s attitude) and the last thing you need is a turret that feels like it doesn’t feel like shooting anymore or that the best solution to solve the conflict is to do friendly fire. And if you choose to endure less effective gunnery droids over that risk, periodic memory wipes of all droids onboard will add to the ship’s upkeep cost.

Mr. Legends is best canon
Mr. Legends is best canon
5 years ago

I know about the nebula class sd I meant design was

Mr. Legends is best canon
Mr. Legends is best canon
5 years ago

Totally unrelated to this ship, but what would happen if some engineering decided to combine the designs of a mon calamari ship and an imperial one? Like how effective would a ship with redunted mon calamari shields and have the firepower of an ssd with point defence be? (I know ssd don’t have point defence, I meant it as a part of the mon calamari ship)

AlexHurlbut
AlexHurlbut
5 years ago

EU has Mon Cal equipping their ships with three times as many shield generators as Imperial ships do. This mean more redundancy, more shield strength, and high shield recharge. Mon Cal ship could have one shield generator be active while the other two stand by. Then take the first offline to recharge and bring the second online. Repeat for third. This would be one way how they do it.

Chris Bradshaw
Chris Bradshaw
5 years ago
Reply to  Fractalsponge

The rebel fleet served a pretty similar purpose to the High Seas Fleet by forcing the Empire into a reactive strategic position. The mechanics of hyperspace travel make this posture far more successful.

The Alliance would present the Imperials with a sufficient critical mass of fishtanks, which would then compel the Imperials into concentrating their own fleet assets to protect vital worlds, commerce lanes, and industrial sites instead of dispersing to every settlement. The Rebel fleet-in-being would then allow lighter Rebel assets to strike at the worlds left behind by Imperial concentration, and gain a massive propaganda victory by declaring that the Empire had abandoned them. Pretty nifty.

Chris Bradshaw
Chris Bradshaw
5 years ago
Reply to  Fractalsponge

Eh. The Germans forced the British to maintain a distant blockade instead of a close one and forced the British to invest far more resources into superdreadnoughts to counter the High Seas Fleet. They also allowed German surface commerce raiders to do a lot more damage by not permitting the Grand Fleet to disperse to chase them down. Perhaps they even helped the Ottomans to hold Gallipoli by preventing the British from detaching squadrons of modern battleships to attack Istanbul. Plus, they beat up the Russian Baltic Fleet off the coast of Riga and supported land operations with reasonable effectiveness. Not the worst investment.

Chris Bradshaw
Chris Bradshaw
5 years ago
Reply to  Fractalsponge

Well if we’re just going to throw hypotheticals out there, without the HSF, Jackie Fisher might have been able to put the Baltic Project into action and land a combined Anglo-Russian army only 100 miles from Berlin. Without the threat of the HSF, British monitors with 18-inch guns would have slowly reduced German shore batteries and allowed bombardments of Bremen, Kiel, Wilhelmshaven and Hamburg along with the U-Boat pens. Without the HSF, the British would have been able to reduce their own ludicrous naval expenses and put another field army into the B.E.F. Without the HSF, the army would have still violated Belgian neutrality and drawn the Brits in.

Even with another German field army on the books, the limit to the German advance at the Marne wasn’t total national manpower. It was the ability to reinforce, resupply, and coordinate the existing formations at the end of a long and non-motorized supply chain on torn-up and narrow roads. The westernmost German field army was operating 100 kilometers away from the nearest German railhead, requiring resupply by starving horses which were dying by the hour, while the French defenders were less than 10 miles from their own railhead.

Admittedly, the mutiny was pretty devastating, but by 1918 the war was lost and Germany was a tinderbox. The spark that brought social collapse would have come from somewhere else if not the fleet.

Chris Bradshaw
Chris Bradshaw
5 years ago
Reply to  Fractalsponge

I think you discount the value of bombardments. Sure, the Scarborough raid was strategically meaningless, but it was conducted by a handful of battle-cruisers attacking a tertiary target for only a bit longer than an hour. Had three battle squadrons of the Grand Fleet been able to anchor off the coast of Wilhelmshaven and stay there for days, the devastation would be total.

In the closing days of WW2, small numbers of Allied battleships were able to bombard Japan with near impunity. In only a couple of attacks, several steel works, aluminum plants, railway yards, and aircraft factories were destroyed, resulting in months of lost production and a massive morale shock to the Japanese people. Perhaps not as decisive as the firebombing of Tokyo or the atomic bomb, but the bombardments were a notable contribution to Japanese surrender. They were similarly devastating off of Korea, Vietnam, and Beirut. There’s a reason why Congress wanted to retain the Iowas into the 21st century: land targets within range of battleship guns tend to stop existing.

The U-boats were more effective commerce raiders pound-for-pound, but their hypothetical success would be worthless if they were forced to stay in the North Sea and protect their bases, or if they departed and their bases and shipyards were shot up by the Grand Fleet’s battleships. Without battleships to contest the Heligoland Bight, British mine-layers could deny the very entrances to the Elbe and the Weser, preventing any submarines from even leaving the Reich.

The Russian lack of a modern battle line forced them to rely on submarines, torpedo boats, shore batteries and destroyers to hold their coast, and when faced with German combined arms anchored around a dozen dreadnoughts, the Russian coastal defenses collapsed. Battleships escorted by destroyers and sufficient minesweepers proved more than capable of reducing any coastal defense prior to air power, as long as they were handled competently.

From 2018 we can call the HSF stupid in hindsight, but with the information available at the day, it was not unreasonable. Tirpitz even got the endorsement of Bismarck himself to buy into the plan. How could they have possibly expected something like Room 40 to grant the ability for the British to read all their supposedly encrypted naval communication?

Chris Bradshaw
Chris Bradshaw
5 years ago
Reply to  Fractalsponge

Dakar as an example for the failure of naval firepower to breach coastal defenses is pretty meaningless when De Gaulle planned the whole operation expecting the Vichy side to surrender immediately, and then canceled futher amphibious landings because he didn’t want to shed the blood of Frenchmen fighting other French folks. The actual naval battle went generally in favor of the Allied Fleet despite the presence of the ludicrously well armored and armed shore battery Richelieu.

The Dardanelles campaign failed not because battleships couldn’t suppress the channel forts, but because they didn’t bring along enough military minesweepers with naval crews instead of civilian trawlers. Churchill, Keyes, and De Robeck wanted to press the attack, but Fisher and the Admiralty Board denied his request for lack of additional ships…. because they couldn’t be withdrawn from the North Sea due to the threat of the High Seas Fleet. Ambassador Morgenthau even reported that Ottoman and German command felt like they could only hold out for a few hours if the attack resumed on the 19th of March, and preparations were being made to abandon the city. Had a breach been made in the outer defenses, there would be nothing between the Entente fleet and Constantinople except for the Goeben, and we all know what the Queen Elizabeth would have done to her.

The Orkney barrage was ineffective, but it was mediocre because the density of mines per square kilometer was absurdly low. Mines laid right outside the U-Boat bases would be a different story had there been no German surface fleet to contest the minelaying operations. The U-boats were okay at commerce raiding, but they lead to disasters like the Lusitania that brought in the US. You said that the blockade was the thing that broke Germany’s ability to make war, and the HSF was the only thing that the Kaiser had with a chance to smash that blockade.

I’ll say it again: SIGINT at Room 40 allowed Britain to win the naval war. Had Alastair Denniston not decrypted every German naval command, including those for the Dogger Bank and Jutland sorties, (+the Zimmerman telegram), Von Pohl’s strategy of using qualitatively superior and concentrated German ships to pick off detached British fleet elements was a viable one. Sure, there was plenty of risk, but the potential for reward would be even greater.

If the Germans got a couple of decent engagements, the blockade would have been broken wide open to massive German advantage. We only remember the naval theater as indecisive because one side was reading the other side’s notes through the fog of war, and had near perfect information to not engage without a massive advantage.

Saying that the Germans shouldn’t have built battleships because the other side had a few more is like saying that Guderian shouldn’t have pushed to build panzers because the British/French had more. A smaller, well-handled force with a good doctrine always has a chance to prevail… unless the enemy has an insurmountable intelligence advantage.

Chris Bradshaw
Chris Bradshaw
5 years ago
Reply to  Fractalsponge

I’d agree with your first point if the British didn’t try to do that exact thing. Fisher had the Courageous class built specifically for the purpose of supporting an amphibious landing on Germany’s Baltic coast to open up a new front. The only thing that stopped that from happening was Britain’s inability to knock out the HSF.

Sure, the Germans eventually lost in the west, but they lost not because their armies were encircled and destroyed, but because they started facing an overwhelming manpower disparity once Americans started arriving in force. You can blame the submarine force and its inherent indiscretion for that.

The Germans never ended up with Dreadnought parity, but from a political standpoint, there was reason to believe that the Liberal party in Parliament would hold off on further construction. The British came damn close to canceling several classes of dreadnoughts for budgetary reasons stemming from ideological deadlock. Even David Lloyd George and Churchill opposed certain naval construction, with the controversy and horse-trading surrounding the People’s Budget of 1909. The Germans had a decent reason to believe that their less egalitarian political process would allow them to commit to a longer-term program of naval construction.

While the German Naval Laws certainly didn’t help Anglo-German relations, the damage was done mostly by unforced diplomatic errors committed by Wilhelm at Tangier, Algeciras, and Agadir. How could Tirpitz or Bismarck have predicted that kind of folly?

With the food resources and freed-up manpower they secured in the east after Brest-Litovsk, had the Germans not antagonized the US into joining the war, it seems eminently likely that they would have been able to turn the Western Front stalemate into a negotiated peace settlement without major concessions. The ability of the High Seas Fleet to neutralize the Grand Fleet was precisely what the Germans needed to kickstart such negotiations. To make that happen, perhaps the Germans should have continued to focus on building dreadnoughts up to 1914 instead of redirecting output to incredibly politically counterproductive U-Boats.

Chris Bradshaw
Chris Bradshaw
5 years ago
Reply to  Fractalsponge

No one is proposing that the HSF would enable an invasion of Britain itself, but it did serve two critical purposes: limiting the actions of the Grand Fleet, and bringing the Entente to the negotiating table if tactical victories could be scored. Sure, sufficient investment into coastal torpedo boats, defensive submarines, minefields, and shore batteries could maybe prevent the Grand Fleet from leveling Kiel, but static defenses couldn’t hold the Grand Fleet in the North Sea the way the HSF could, even from their harbors. If the British had the complete freedom of movement, they could have committed far more modern ships to the Dardanelles operation, which came perilously close to success and subsequent Ottoman collapse.

In terms of sustained investment, the German economy by PPP was larger than the British one by 1910 and through 1913. The majority of British colonies were fiscal liabilities in that they required more expense to maintain and secure than they generated in tax revenue. While the Germans did maintain a larger land army, they absolutely could stay within a competitive distance of Britain in regards to naval spending. The French ships spent the whole war staring down Austria in the Mediterranean, while the Russians were trapped in the Baltic, wholly unable to coordinate with their allies or contribute to any North Sea showdown. While the HSF didn’t help Anglo-German relations, Britain entering the war was guaranteed once pickelhaubes were sighting at Liège, regardless of how few or many dreadnoughts were built.

The submarines were decent commerce raiders once the war began, but when I said unproductive, I meant in a political sense by hardening the will of the British people and directly bringing the United States into the war through unrestricted slaughter of the American merchant marine.

Had the Germans not suffered farcical levels of counterintelligence failure, the technical details suggest that if the British were operating under the same fog of war, the HSF would have come ahead in hypothetical engagements due to a fairly significant qualitative advantage stemming not from their own marginally superior armor belts, but rather awful British AP shells, inter-squadron communication, turret roof armor, and ammunition flash protection.

By 1918 most of these issues had been fixed, but sufficient German aggression in the early war combined with not giving away their naval codes could result in a series of engagements that would attrit down the British numerical advantage. Forcing the Grand Fleet into a defensive stance would then allow German battlecruisers to potentially escort small numbers of convoys carrying critical materials from the Western Hemisphere. That very panic you mentioned about invasion in Britain would conversely encourage diplomatic talks, especially given the non-ideological nature of the war.

After total victory on the Eastern Front, the Germans could then turn Western Front continental stalemate and naval parity into a negotiated peace to largely pre-war boundaries with some minor concessions like restored Belgian independence, and Qingdao changing hands. The annexed lands in Poland and the Baltics would make the war a net-positive for Germany, with the HSF as a key element in avoiding defeat and ensuring victory. Churchill aptly described Jellicoe as the only man in the world who could have lost the war in an afternoon, and that might have transpired if he wasn’t reading Scheer’s notes.

Shaun
Shaun
5 years ago
Reply to  Chris Bradshaw

Y’all are NERDS.

Daib
Daib
5 years ago
Reply to  Shaun

This is a comment section for a fan interpretation of a hypothetical reconfiguration of a fictional spaceship. What the hell do you expect?

gorkmalork
gorkmalork
5 years ago
Reply to  Fractalsponge

I find myself headscratching WRT the shield-redundancy approach’s effectiveness in pitched exchanges with a peer-or-heavier opponent. Seems like energy-weapon speed would have a nasty chance of exploiting that generator-swap window, and what happens if bleedthrough happens to cook one or more of your shield *projectors*? Might give MCs a bit more breathing room in long-range duels or forming up for lightspeed retreats, *or* keep big carrier craft alive long enough for the latter, but I dunno about extra generators constituting a decisive or disproportionate slugging-match advantage.

Steve Bannon
Steve Bannon
5 years ago
Reply to  gorkmalork

Perhaps less developed Calamari industry isn’t able to produce individual generators as robust as Kuati models, and they are forced to compensate by adding several smaller civilian-grade generators/projectors for every single Imperial generator. That would take up a lot more hull volume and be a maintenance nightmare, but increased redundancy against bleedthrough can’t hurt. Presumably instead of handing off shields at the same instant, there might be a microsecond or two where both sets of generators and projectors are active, which prevents exploitation by dumb luck.

Mon Cals probably spend a lot of time beating up unaware targets and then swiftly retreating when response-force destroyers show up, so redundancy isn’t the worst idea. They were never really designed to stand and fight against an Imperial battle line until stuff like the MC90 shows up Post-Endor.

This High Seas Fleet debate is interesting.

gorkmalork
gorkmalork
5 years ago
Reply to  Steve Bannon

Workable redundancy does seem well & good for raid-and-retreat ops, though cruiser-tonnage designs like Home One strike me as more battle-line oriented. I just have issues when it’s brainbugged to the point where peeps are claiming a Venator-sized MC (or one of the NR destroyer designs) can casually tank the attentions of something like Executor. Seems more prudent to retcon the size & hence power output of such Hero Ships(C) than claim ‘magic super-shields, yo’.

PhantomFury
PhantomFury
5 years ago

Interesting, an Acclamator base!

Arvenski
Arvenski
5 years ago

Now that’s cool.

Dillon
Dillon
5 years ago

Acclimator III?

MidnightPhoenix
MidnightPhoenix
5 years ago
Reply to  Dillon

It’s supposed to be it’s predecessor

Anonymous
5 years ago

Nope Fractal said this ship is a fleet variant as in a warship while the Acclamator was a assault ship which mostly carried ground vehicles.

Sephiroth0812
Sephiroth0812
5 years ago
Reply to  Anonymous

Well, it does look like an Acclamator plundered its bank account to buy beefed up armor and more weapons for itself, although the bridge looks more Venator-esque to me. What’s this baby gonna be called? Adiutor-class Star Frigate? Adiutor means literally “helper” or “Assistant” in latin and would be in line with the usual Republic name theme.

PhantomFury
PhantomFury
5 years ago
Reply to  Anonymous

Acclamator for fleet combat? Sounds like an Acclamator II-class to me. Though given the armaments and thrusters I see, And I’d like to designate it a rapid response cruiser.

Valoren
5 years ago

Is it still around 700m long ?

Anonymous
5 years ago
Reply to  Valoren

Well last time I check the Acclamator is 752 meters in length so this might be the same length.

Valoren
5 years ago
Reply to  Anonymous

Yeah, but we all know the Empire has a strong tendancy to do everything bigger.

Chris Bradshaw
Chris Bradshaw
5 years ago
Reply to  Fractalsponge

If we take the absurd hyperdrive speed numbers at face value for the Acclamator, a razee refit would explain its speed pretty convincingly.

Soren
Soren
5 years ago
Reply to  Fractalsponge

If this has similar dimensions to the Acclamatory, then I’d say the lengh is closer to 800 meters rather than 880.. But then again you’re the designer not me, so if its 880 meters long them so be it~ Its still beautiful~

Daib
Daib
5 years ago
Reply to  Fractalsponge

Can we see your Acclamator model?

MidnightPhoenix
MidnightPhoenix
5 years ago
Reply to  Daib

I’m going to guess that he may put it on at WIP future

gorkmalork
gorkmalork
5 years ago
Reply to  Fractalsponge

Speaking of stripdowns, cornball vs-debate query: how many ‘Assault Frigate’ Dreadnaught conversions would you need to make this thing break a sweat? I’m guessing 4-5, but that might be yet another lowball.

Chris Bradshaw
Chris Bradshaw
5 years ago
Reply to  gorkmalork

Depends on whether you think Assault Frigates retain the power output of the Dreadnaught. From the lore it seems like the modification is primarily to reduce the number of crew required, but the art shows them taking on a more skeletal, CIS-like appearance with presumably a different reactor.

Dreadnaught power output is about 8e23, while the Acclamator transport sits at 2e23. Based on that, the Dreadnaught should be able to comfortably beat up an Acclamator, but presumably a combat variant with at least 720tt worth of flank HTL plus MTL could hold its own with a stripped down dread. It would probably come down to crew handling.

gorkmalork
gorkmalork
5 years ago
Reply to  Fractalsponge

So given prior discussion WRT the number of Dreads you’d need to actually dent an Impstar, this frigate boasts enough juice to potentially slug it out with at least two, and may well have a hefty edge in the thrust department. Granted, we have three very different ‘assault frigate’ designs to consider, but none of ’em strike me as especially nimble (and only one seems to add much potential reactor space).

cScott
cScott
5 years ago

i normally prefer an even number of barrels on weapon systems but i just love that triple barrel TL battery design of yours

gorkmalork
gorkmalork
5 years ago
Reply to  cScott

Seconded WRT those triples (70 teraton?), though Fractal’s snazzy ball turrets take the top spot for me. I take it said trips are the heaviest energy weapon this Acc-gunboat has the juice to efficiently wield?

Chris Bradshaw
Chris Bradshaw
5 years ago
Reply to  gorkmalork

They seem like they might be the same guns as the axial battery on the ISD. Triples just look great in general, whether they’re on the Rodney, Iowa, or Imperator.

Shaun
Shaun
5 years ago
Reply to  Chris Bradshaw

Or Kaitlyn Leeb.

cScott
cScott
5 years ago
Reply to  Fractalsponge

In fulfilling its role as a frigate, would it be a pro or a con if you had placed the majority of those triple turrets along the dorsal axial? Just curious to know if it would be beneficial at all (e.g., greater concentrated fire or better firing angles) or would it just make those turrets to exposed to potential Rebel TL fire & starfighter attack

gorkmalork
gorkmalork
5 years ago
Reply to  cScott

Well, better firing arcs seem to entail a great deal of ‘exposure’ as in ‘more open space that your turrets can traverse’. Seems to me you’d usually want to optimize offensive capability so targets jump out or get vaped before they can pound your ship to the point where losing main guns (or other crucial components) is on the table.

Soren
Soren
5 years ago

Hey fractal, what program do you use to make your models?

Shadowwolf
Shadowwolf
5 years ago

I think you are an awesome designer, and modeler, I would love to see your take on the TOR Thanatos Frigate aka updated Hammerhead….

Great Job

Joe Perry King
5 years ago

I have been hoping you would work on this and glad to see it, love the shape of the acclamator and it really can pack some firepower in a small package.

JamesMCGR
JamesMCGR
5 years ago

What are the big cutouts?

Joe Perry King
5 years ago
Reply to  JamesMCGR

hangers is my guess, like the Imperial frigate

Chris Bradshaw
Chris Bradshaw
5 years ago

Ah, a fresh mental picture of the Comarre Meridian. This fills a much needed spot in the ORBAT, with an interesting hangar configuration.

RhysT
RhysT
5 years ago

Excellent. IT LIVES!!!! I’ve been hoping you’d get back to this one! Would it be possible to suggest a name for this things? Maybe it could be the Centax Heavy Frigate which is mentioned in the books but never depicted? Just a thought. Take it for what you will. I like the look of the thing already though!

Anonymous
5 years ago

Nice to see you brought back the heavy frigate Fractal but in the same detail as the Imperator redux that is just even better than I though.

gorkmalork
gorkmalork
5 years ago

Sweet, the Acclamator’s pricklier sibling takes a couple steps closer to launch-and with a familiar hangar layout from some now-Legendized Dark Horse material.

Zellnotronus
Zellnotronus
5 years ago

It’s been a while since I’ve seen this hull. I can’t wait to see how it turns out.