What is the length on this ship? Are those four ventral cutouts hangar bays?
Also, it kinda looks like a stealth corvette.
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TheIcthala
As you can see on the finished product (link below), those are hangar bays, yes. http://fractalsponge.net/?p=3737
The ship is 880m long and looks a lot less stealth corvette-y when finished.
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caelg
oh, I was not aware this was a w.i.p. lol, sorry.
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The SWTCW Freak
Are there any planes in it (when yes which and how much)
Looks a Bit like the acclamator class
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TheIcthala
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.
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Hello there
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
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.
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CRMcNeill
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.
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Hello there
Thanks for the statement
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CRMcNeill
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?
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Hello there
Yeah I’m new here and too naive so thanks a lot for the suggestion.
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?
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.
In my hypothetical design development, this design was first, and it actually has a lot more volume and a lot more power than an Acclamator. The Acclamator design took this as a starting point, swapped the reactor for something a lot lower powered but a lot cheaper and with a lot higher endurance, and started cutting away a lot of mass in terms of weapons, armor, and protected hull volume. That allowed them to drop a few main engines to maintain performance on a smaller and cheaper powerplant (and to further cut costs for numbers/expendability), and they used the internal… Read more »
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Mr. legends is best canon
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
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MidnightPhoenix
One the droids has less probability of improves and two it takes a lot less space and maintenance for person compared to Droid
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PhantomFury
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… Read more »
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Mr. Legends is best canon
I know about the nebula class sd I meant design was
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Mr. Legends is best canon
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)
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AlexHurlbut
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.
Seems like it makes sense. The key to making it all hold together is that there are tradeoffs in design, otherwise everyone would put the best of everything into the same hull. Want more protection? Great, take away offensive power or acceleration or something else. There’s no free lunch. Going all in on durability means that you are explicitly trading off the ability to better kill other big ships. For a starfighter-centric force like the Rebellion that sorta makes sense – tank while the fighters go…do something. But it’s not going to work all the time, and there are just… Read more »
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Chris Bradshaw
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… Read more »
The High Seas Fleet was a braindead notion, full stop.
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Chris Bradshaw
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.… Read more »
No, a miserable investment. The blockade was massively effective even though distant. The surface raiders were all hunted down without dispersing the Grand Fleet (which was ridiculous overkill to bag a handful of cruisers). Building, manning, and maintaining the HSF, expanding the ports and the Kiel Canal, cost the equivalent of lavish coast defenses that could have done largely the same thing at the fleet, and probably the equivalent of at least another army formation (in manpower alone), as well as upgraded artillery for the army. The Russian Baltic Fleet even pre-Tsushima did not warrant anything like a battleline explicitly… Read more »
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Chris Bradshaw
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… Read more »
The Schlieffen plan working scenarios are very hypothetical true, but the arms race contributed in no small part to the alliance network that enabled a general European war. Coast defenses don’t require giant battlefleets sitting in harbor doing nothing. You know the British anti-invasion plan? Huge masses of destroyers and submarines, not really the battleships. That’s why they had the largest submarine fleet in the world. Yeah you could do bullshit coast bombardments like Hipper’s east coast nonsense but that wasn’t really going to do anything strategic. Monitors managed to knockout not a single heavy coastal gun in Flanders in… Read more »
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Chris Bradshaw
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,… Read more »
The Japan WW2 bombardments were conducted under total naval and aerial superiority against a beaten enemy. Fixed defenses alone are not the end all and be-all true, but it would be a comprehensive system with submarines and torpedo craft. Note that, say, the naval attack against Dakar failed (and don’t give me any BS about it being a half-complete Richelieu that stopped them – effectively she was a floating battery and not a working battleship). The level of superiority the Allies enjoyed over Japan in 1945 or on the beaches in Normandy in 1944 would just not have been the… Read more »
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Chris Bradshaw
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… Read more »
Building the HSF for an actual military purpose would be like the British in 1890 suddenly deciding to build a huge land army to stage it in Denmark to threaten Berlin, because the Germans won’t do anything to contest that. It was based on a fundamentally flawed geostrategic premise. The Germans did NOT achieve strategic naval parity, didn’t get close, and were not going to, and were never going to be a position to attain it once an actual ground war started. Having the chance to win is well and good, but the real question is whether that chance is… Read more »
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Chris Bradshaw
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… Read more »
That’s just the wrong order. The Baltic strategy was an proposal to break the Western stalemate. It’s quite different from trying to use a diplomatically counterproductive and strategically vapid use of resources in peacetime as a way to deter an opponent. There was an entire genre of invasion literature in Britain in the steam era dating from (at least) when the Prince de Joinville was talking about “steam bridges” under Louis Phillipe. There was a long history of massive building programmes in response to even perceived foreign attempts at parity, and large scale agitation for the same in the papers… Read more »
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Chris Bradshaw
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… Read more »
And now I have officially reached the limit of effort I’m willing to expend on responding to this. Nice exchange but I am calling time.
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Shaun
Y’all are NERDS.
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Daib
This is a comment section for a fan interpretation of a hypothetical reconfiguration of a fictional spaceship. What the hell do you expect?
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gorkmalork
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.
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Steve Bannon
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… Read more »
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gorkmalork
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’.
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.
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Sephiroth0812
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.
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PhantomFury
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.
880m, mostly because of the fantail extension. The core hull largely follows Acclamator dimensions; the idea is that the Acclamator was a razee version of this design.
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Chris Bradshaw
If we take the absurd hyperdrive speed numbers at face value for the Acclamator, a razee refit would explain its speed pretty convincingly.
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Soren
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~
I have an Acclamator model right next to it, and I work in direct scale, so it is 880m right now.
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Daib
Can we see your Acclamator model?
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MidnightPhoenix
I’m going to guess that he may put it on at WIP future
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gorkmalork
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.
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Chris Bradshaw
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… Read more »
I have scaled the full-fat frigate power dramatically upward – it’s more like a third of a Venator/VSD in terms of power now. Which is what you’d expect from ISD power density on a hull this size. I think Acclamators basically have a different reactor altogether, built for endurance rather than output. Certainly I’ve replaced the Acclamator’s 2 primary and 2 secondary engines with 6 full primary engines, an indication of the expectation of increased mass and power requirements to make similar acceleration and the increased reactor yield. I think this fits with the following logic – original ship was… Read more »
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gorkmalork
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).
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cScott
i normally prefer an even number of barrels on weapon systems but i just love that triple barrel TL battery design of yours
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gorkmalork
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?
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Chris Bradshaw
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.
Current version is the same as the axial triple turrets on ISD, so 32-40 teraton range.
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cScott
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
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gorkmalork
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.
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Soren
Hey fractal, what program do you use to make your models?
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Shadowwolf
I think you are an awesome designer, and modeler, I would love to see your take on the TOR Thanatos Frigate aka updated Hammerhead….
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.
Ah, a fresh mental picture of the Comarre Meridian. This fills a much needed spot in the ORBAT, with an interesting hangar configuration.
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RhysT
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!
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.
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gorkmalork
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.
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Zellnotronus
It’s been a while since I’ve seen this hull. I can’t wait to see how it turns out.
What is the length on this ship? Are those four ventral cutouts hangar bays?
Also, it kinda looks like a stealth corvette.
As you can see on the finished product (link below), those are hangar bays, yes.
http://fractalsponge.net/?p=3737
The ship is 880m long and looks a lot less stealth corvette-y when finished.
oh, I was not aware this was a w.i.p. lol, sorry.
Are there any planes in it (when yes which and how much)
Looks a Bit like the acclamator class
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.
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
You must be new here.
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.
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.
Thanks for the statement
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?
Yeah I’m new here and too naive so thanks a lot for the suggestion.
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?
You probably missed it in the giant HSF tangent – the ship is ~880m right now. Not entirely final, but ~1.5e24W is a fair estimate.
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.
In my hypothetical design development, this design was first, and it actually has a lot more volume and a lot more power than an Acclamator. The Acclamator design took this as a starting point, swapped the reactor for something a lot lower powered but a lot cheaper and with a lot higher endurance, and started cutting away a lot of mass in terms of weapons, armor, and protected hull volume. That allowed them to drop a few main engines to maintain performance on a smaller and cheaper powerplant (and to further cut costs for numbers/expendability), and they used the internal… Read more »
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
One the droids has less probability of improves and two it takes a lot less space and maintenance for person compared to Droid
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… Read more »
I know about the nebula class sd I meant design was
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)
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.
Seems like it makes sense. The key to making it all hold together is that there are tradeoffs in design, otherwise everyone would put the best of everything into the same hull. Want more protection? Great, take away offensive power or acceleration or something else. There’s no free lunch. Going all in on durability means that you are explicitly trading off the ability to better kill other big ships. For a starfighter-centric force like the Rebellion that sorta makes sense – tank while the fighters go…do something. But it’s not going to work all the time, and there are just… Read more »
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… Read more »
The High Seas Fleet was a braindead notion, full stop.
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.… Read more »
No, a miserable investment. The blockade was massively effective even though distant. The surface raiders were all hunted down without dispersing the Grand Fleet (which was ridiculous overkill to bag a handful of cruisers). Building, manning, and maintaining the HSF, expanding the ports and the Kiel Canal, cost the equivalent of lavish coast defenses that could have done largely the same thing at the fleet, and probably the equivalent of at least another army formation (in manpower alone), as well as upgraded artillery for the army. The Russian Baltic Fleet even pre-Tsushima did not warrant anything like a battleline explicitly… Read more »
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… Read more »
The Schlieffen plan working scenarios are very hypothetical true, but the arms race contributed in no small part to the alliance network that enabled a general European war. Coast defenses don’t require giant battlefleets sitting in harbor doing nothing. You know the British anti-invasion plan? Huge masses of destroyers and submarines, not really the battleships. That’s why they had the largest submarine fleet in the world. Yeah you could do bullshit coast bombardments like Hipper’s east coast nonsense but that wasn’t really going to do anything strategic. Monitors managed to knockout not a single heavy coastal gun in Flanders in… Read more »
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,… Read more »
The Japan WW2 bombardments were conducted under total naval and aerial superiority against a beaten enemy. Fixed defenses alone are not the end all and be-all true, but it would be a comprehensive system with submarines and torpedo craft. Note that, say, the naval attack against Dakar failed (and don’t give me any BS about it being a half-complete Richelieu that stopped them – effectively she was a floating battery and not a working battleship). The level of superiority the Allies enjoyed over Japan in 1945 or on the beaches in Normandy in 1944 would just not have been the… Read more »
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… Read more »
Building the HSF for an actual military purpose would be like the British in 1890 suddenly deciding to build a huge land army to stage it in Denmark to threaten Berlin, because the Germans won’t do anything to contest that. It was based on a fundamentally flawed geostrategic premise. The Germans did NOT achieve strategic naval parity, didn’t get close, and were not going to, and were never going to be a position to attain it once an actual ground war started. Having the chance to win is well and good, but the real question is whether that chance is… Read more »
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… Read more »
That’s just the wrong order. The Baltic strategy was an proposal to break the Western stalemate. It’s quite different from trying to use a diplomatically counterproductive and strategically vapid use of resources in peacetime as a way to deter an opponent. There was an entire genre of invasion literature in Britain in the steam era dating from (at least) when the Prince de Joinville was talking about “steam bridges” under Louis Phillipe. There was a long history of massive building programmes in response to even perceived foreign attempts at parity, and large scale agitation for the same in the papers… Read more »
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… Read more »
And now I have officially reached the limit of effort I’m willing to expend on responding to this. Nice exchange but I am calling time.
Y’all are NERDS.
This is a comment section for a fan interpretation of a hypothetical reconfiguration of a fictional spaceship. What the hell do you expect?
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.
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… Read more »
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’.
Interesting, an Acclamator base!
Now that’s cool.
Acclimator III?
It’s supposed to be it’s predecessor
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.
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.
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.
Is it still around 700m long ?
Well last time I check the Acclamator is 752 meters in length so this might be the same length.
Yeah, but we all know the Empire has a strong tendancy to do everything bigger.
880m, mostly because of the fantail extension. The core hull largely follows Acclamator dimensions; the idea is that the Acclamator was a razee version of this design.
If we take the absurd hyperdrive speed numbers at face value for the Acclamator, a razee refit would explain its speed pretty convincingly.
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~
I have an Acclamator model right next to it, and I work in direct scale, so it is 880m right now.
Can we see your Acclamator model?
I’m going to guess that he may put it on at WIP future
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.
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… Read more »
I have scaled the full-fat frigate power dramatically upward – it’s more like a third of a Venator/VSD in terms of power now. Which is what you’d expect from ISD power density on a hull this size. I think Acclamators basically have a different reactor altogether, built for endurance rather than output. Certainly I’ve replaced the Acclamator’s 2 primary and 2 secondary engines with 6 full primary engines, an indication of the expectation of increased mass and power requirements to make similar acceleration and the increased reactor yield. I think this fits with the following logic – original ship was… Read more »
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).
i normally prefer an even number of barrels on weapon systems but i just love that triple barrel TL battery design of yours
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?
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.
Or Kaitlyn Leeb.
Current version is the same as the axial triple turrets on ISD, so 32-40 teraton range.
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
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.
Hey fractal, what program do you use to make your models?
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
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.
What are the big cutouts?
hangers is my guess, like the Imperial frigate
Ah, a fresh mental picture of the Comarre Meridian. This fills a much needed spot in the ORBAT, with an interesting hangar configuration.
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!
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.
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.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen this hull. I can’t wait to see how it turns out.