Well, here’s my take on the Lancer.
I begrudge it its traditional “Frigate” rating – after all it’s not even 2/3 the volume of a Vigil. But anyway. I tried to keep the traditional design cues, but tweaked the profile line to make it look less like a sex toy. The gun positions are provisional, but there are supposed to be 20 of them (only could ever find 18 on the old schematics, so improvised the last two). Mix of quadruple close-in defense lasers and paired light turbolaser/long-barrel laser cannon – make it more a useful small warship than just an antifighter platform.
I am curious how the combined LTL/Long Laser turret works? Does it have two fire modes? One for LTL and another for the Laser? Or does it just fire them one after the other? Would that not be counter-intuitive, since I presume the energy/power for each barrel is different and therefore if you miss with the LTL but hit with the Laser it could throw off your estimated damage done to the target? (If I am explaining myself correctly)
I personally think it gives the gunner 2 different weapons. A rapid-fire laser cannon and a more powerfull, altough slower firing, LTL. To me it makes sense they have separate fire buttons on the same joystick, say LMB and RMB on a computer mouse.
Looks great! Knowing you, you might even add a few torpedo tubes before you’re done (that’s a good thing.)
It might be a good idea for an anti-fighter specialist ship like this to sport a few fighter scale concussion missile launchers, like the Arquitens did.
Looks way, way better than the original. Good work.
This will probably be admitted to the headcanon when it’s done.
I’ve always enjoyed your work and its even inspired me to work on one of my own (though not as detailed as yours). I was wandering how you went about getting the greeble texture for the basic surfaces of your ships the greeble always seams to layout perfectly.
Wasn’t there a large sensor dish midship or am I thinking of a wrong class? Either way, interesting ship to work on!
Midship, one up and one down.
It looks good so far, though I’d probably say this is more of a Lancer Mk 2, since it has added turbolasers to give it a more rounded armament, though it really isn’t needed since we have the Carrak Class which already fills the role that this redesign is aiming for and does it better lol.
With all that being said though I never did like the model used for the original Lancer Class so I do look forward to seeing this redesign of the model, I have not seen a model of yours that has disappointed yet.
Carrack is a totally different scale – it’s like 10x the volume and armed with medium turbolasers instead of LTL. Lancer is really more like a medium corvette, and Carracks are basically light frigates.
They are actually pretty close to the same size, only having about a 100 meter difference in terms of length.
As for the armament the Carrak has 2 different weapon configurations. The first one has 20 ion cannons and 10 flak lasers, the other has 20 laser cannons and 10 heavy turbolasers. As well as having 5 tractor beam projectors for each configuration.
The Carrak Class also possess starfighters on external racks. And the Carrack’s top speed can match that of X-Wings.
100m is a big deal when we’re talking 250 vs 350m. Carrack is also proportionately a lot wider. Proportional scaling would already get you to close to 3x volume, and a Carrack is probably ~2-2.5x wider proportionately, so it’s on the order of 7x volume. That’s a huge difference in size. Imagine the difference between a 10,000 ton ship and a 70,000 ton ship…
The original Lancer always struck me as a prototype or test-bed ship that somehow made it into the production phase. It was slow, with crap endurance and a one-trick-bantha experimental weapon system with glitchy fire control (although the game stats never reflected this, even though it was explicitly stated in the description). An upgunned production version makes perfect sense, especially if enough Type 1 Lancers lost gunnery duels to smaller ships equipped with heavier guns.
Yep, those are the problems it seems – slow, short range weapons and no serious capability against anything bigger than maybe a sloop/ultralight corvette. Endurance I’m not sure is particularly credible – there’s plenty of volume after all, and fuel tanks seem small in SW. Say maybe the original examples used largely civilian COTS stuff for propulsion to reduce cost and get the platform produced quickly, but had heavy military components like armor so it wasn’t balanced well. Replace that stuff with military grade energy density, then do the LTL armament upgrade, and this would also fix the acceleration issue… Read more »
Wasn’t the original Lancer a dedicated anti-fighter platform rushed into production by the Empire to specifically counter Rebel Fighter hyperspace raids? It’s speed wouldn’t be an issue if its primary role is to shield similarly slow freighters from fighter attacks as a convoy escort and the twenty Quad-Lasers were absolutely deadly against even shielded fighters.
If I remember correctly, its purpose was to defend Star Destroyers against fighter attacks (back when ImpStars were thought of as point defenceless). According to the lore, most admirals didn’t bother with them as they were too slow to keep up with the ImpStars they were supposed to be escorting. This left them relegated to convoy escort duty and defence of static facilities, where they were vulnerable to light warship (corvette scale) attacks due to their pathetic shielding and their quadlasers being of very limited effectiveness against proper warship shields.
Funny thing as in flight simulator games like X-Wing Alliance you get to see rather often an ImpStar accompanied by 2 Lancers, one on each flank of the SD. Since you’re always flying a fighter in those the Lancers are actually a bigger threat than the Star Destroyer as while it has more than 60 weapon emplacements they rarely can even hit you. The Lancer on the other hand greets you with a storm of rapid fire anti-fighter lasers which eats even B-Wing shields for breakfast.
The endurance was probably a typo; the 1E of the game didn’t give ships a Consumables rating at all, but the 2E Lancer had a rating of 1 week (compared to 1 year for the Nebulon B and 6 years for an Imperator), which was ridiculously low. Of course, it’s not as if WEG applied some sort of scientific formula to come up with those numbers in the first place. It’s also possible that the Lancer was based on an existing ship, as in, the experimental weapons system was mounted on a hull already in production as opposed to designing… Read more »
Empire at War weirdly took a lot of personal freedom creating new ship classes for roles that already had several ship classes available which were even already used in older video games. They invented the Tartan despite both the Carrack and Lancer being already available or a weird looking Assault Frigate Mk II when the regular Assault Frigate was already there and so on. EaW also had several ships, especially the VicStar and ImpStar, very undergunned and the most potential out of that game is pulled via several fantastic mods available for it. The base game is borderline crap in… Read more »
While the Carrack did have an anti-starfighter armament, I wouldn’t class it as an anti-starfighter platform. While it had the same number of gun mounts, they were all single-barrel, not quad, and they lacked the highly accurate (yet glitchy) fire control systems of the Lancer. Its best fit (at least as far as the naval missions described in the Imperial Sourcebook) is a pursuit platform; it had the speed to keep up with pretty much every Rebel ship but the A-Wing, along with the toughness and firepower to stand up for itself. It’s more the predecessor of Fractal’s Fulgor-Class.
Yea, the Carrack is a sort of multi-role versatile small scrapper, if somewhat old as already the Judicial Forces of the Republic used it before the Clone Wars. If I recall correctly the main advantage of the Carrack beyond its speed was that it has very good life support systems and tough armor for its size, allowing it to defeat nearly everything that is in the same length-class as itself by outlasting it. I read somewhere that up to three Carracks can seriously threaten a Dreadnaught-class but that may just be fanwank.
It’s conceivable, if you go by the original stats (which, honestly, are somewhat suspect). Carracks were originally called light cruisers, but their only cap-ship armament was equal to that of the main batteries on a Dreadnaught-class heavy cruiser. Three of them stacking their fire could very easily have overcome its damage-absorption limits, especially if they wolf-packed it and came at it from multiple directions.
If it helps at all, I conceived of the Velox as an OT Carrack replacement. I really doubt 3 Carracks would win against a Dreadnaught. ~10 Dreadnaughts being competitive firepower wise against an ISD plausible; there’s absolutely no way 30 Carracks would be enough for that job. Pick one scaling paradigm. I think a Carrack can take a main gun hit from an ISDII (or my HTL armed Dreadnaught) and keep fighting, but a second hit in rapid succession wrecks it. A purely (and purely dumb) linear size scaling says that ok, maybe ISD = 3 Dreadnaught = 9 Carrack.… Read more »
Actually, the Velox fits very neatly into the Imperial Navy’s Recon Line mission. “Reconnaissance ships are usually light cruisers [Carrack or equivalent] modified for even greater sublight speed, trading in about half of their laser cannon for a full complement of sensors with greater range and sensitivity than the Imperial average.” – Imperial Sourcebook, 2nd. Ed., pg. 103 While the recon-modified light cruiser was never given official stats, I just used the Carrack as a baseline, with the modifications described above. The Velox would likely be a replacement for the modified Carrack. And I agree with you on scaling purely… Read more »
Having the Empire develop a replacement would be logical since the Carrack is a pre-Clone Wars design just like the Dreadnaught and the Vindicator was originally developed to replace that one. Personally I’ve always found to be some of the scaling of the SW ships to be weird not only in fandom but also in official media like the Clone Wars where narrative muddling comes in. Like in one episode a Venator struggles against two Munificents yet in another one Venator can easily destroy three of them while crippling a fourth. Going by reactor volume like you do seems to… Read more »
How a ship is handled by its crew is as important, if not more so than its scale. A small ship well handled by an expert crew may very well beat a larger ship with a poor quality crew. Add to this tactical circumstances – in example, was the Venator struggling against two munificent so caught off guard? Everything in battle does not just boil down to raw power and armament, and there are many examples of this in the history of naval warfare.
It’s certainly /a/ factor, but that elite crew also has to have the right tools to work with. Victory in battle is absolutely the result of a combination of factors, but by no means is crew quality the most decisive. “Quantity has a quality all its own,” after all, and there are plenty of examples of that throughout history, as well.
There are plenty of other factors that could impact a Munificent versus Venator duel. Since Munificent frigates should all be running the same tactical OS, and Venator clone crews are literally identical down to the chromosome, variance in crew quality (Jedi commanders excepted) should actually be the least meaningful variable. My go-to fudge factor for seemingly mismatched engagements is fuel. In the scene where a Venator is struggling against a pair of CIS Munificents, perhaps the Republic destroyer has burnt off most of its fuel reserves over the course of a multi-hour engagement and is desperately husbanding what little reactant… Read more »
Speaking of EAW, have you tried the Remake Mod? It’s fantastic, if a bit unstable (because it stretches the engine to its absolute limits.) The best part about it is it uses a huge number of Fractalsponge’s designs (the customs corvette, the Vigil corvette, the Procursator, the Allegiance, the Bellator, and maybe one or two I’m forgetting.) Great mod.
I haven’t installed it since I use the disk version of Forces of Corruption (new patches are exclusive for the Steam variant unfortunately) but I know the mod itself from dozens of Youtube videos, including a very impressive rendition of the Battle of Coruscant from Ep III: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z305r7VGnUU&t=1s
Awakening of the Rebellion and Thrawn’s Revenge also use plenty of Fractalships. The Bellator and Allegiance are in damn near everything these days, but no one has implemented a Legator yet.
Yeah I see your point when you put it that way. I guess it just doesn’t seem as much on paper the 100m difference but if we put them side by side then the difference would be much more visible. What about the Tartan-class then? It has exactly the same size 250 meters and has the exact same armament of 20 quad laser cannons, I’m not sure on it’s speed though, since it’s not stated, though it is stated to possess powerful engines that it let keep up with fighters and fight them directly and I think it has between… Read more »
The Tartan was basically a bad copy of the Lancer by the design team. It even looks like they just took a Lancer and turned it upside down to make the Tartan.
You know, I never noticed that, but I can no longer un-see it. Ugh, thanks a lot 😛
McNeill The Tartan actually came first according to the wiki and it’s associated source material. Fractalsponge In regards to the venator, double firepower, thing it’s talking about the main guns have an much faster recharge rate which enables the guns to fire faster when the reactor is pumping more energy then normal into the weapon systems, that and it supposedly condenses more energy into each bolt fired as opposed to firing a bolt from the main guns when the reactor isn’t diverting most of it’s power to them, at least that is what the wiki hints at but doesn’t say… Read more »
@Evan – The Lancer dates all the way back to 1989 when WEG first introduced it in their Imperial Sourcebook. The Tartan only came about because of the Empire at War computer game in 2006, where it was retconned to precede the Lancer. In real life, the Tartan is a badly disguised copy of the Lancer.
I doubt that many people are contesting the main battery turrets of a Venator being able to equal those on at least an ISD-I in firepower, but that’s about the only thing the Venator has on the ISD-I. The main issues with a Venator vs. ISD-I comparison is that they’ve literally different primary roles and one is the successor of the other. It’s like comparing a WW I battleship to a WW II one. The Venator is primarily a carrier and secondarily a medium destroyer. The ISD is primarily a heavy destroyer and secondarily a carrier, their primary roles are… Read more »
A Tartan is also much bigger, just by virtue of being much wider. That enables more capability if the reactor gets bigger. Directing power to weapons depends on having weapons that can use that power. A Venator has that, but a Lancer doesn’t really. But it’s not really meaningful to say that doing this power transfer doubles firepower – relative to what? It’s an infinite increase from not using any power for weapons at all (i.e. not firing). Maximum firepower just means you’re not using any power for any other major power draw, like engines. If you mean that a… Read more »
An option I played with for a re-write of the Lancer’s game stats was to make it not just a mobile anti-starfighter platform, but to also equip it as a flight control station, so that not only could it defend itself against starfighter attacks, it could help coordinate friendly starfighter operations in its immediate vicinity. The ImpSB’s write-up for the Imperial Navy mentions a Skirmish Line, composed of anywhere from 4-20 light ships (corvettes or frigates) with the primary mission of “harassing larger starships and engaging in coordinated action against enemy starfighters.” The Lancer, Nebulon B and Ton Falk are… Read more »
I always thought WEG’s Skirmish Line meant Carracks. Nebulons and Lancers always seemed like convoy escorts that were too slow and fragile for high-end fleet operations, while Ton-Falks shouldn’t really be at the front of any formation.
Perhaps that’s the Tartan’s tactical niche, as an anti-starfighter CIWS platform like the Lancer, but with a much larger engine bank to provide enough acceleration to stay reasonably safe in a fleet brawl.
Carracks are better suited for the Pursuit Line; they have the speed to stay with fleeing enemy ships until they jump to hyperspace, from which they generate a hyperspace course that is handed off in turn to Recon Lines (either Veloxs or Recon-modified Carracks). They’re likely being phased out in favor of the Fulgors, but would still see active duty in mid- to low-priority sectors. I agree that Nebulons and Lancers (as well as Ton Falks) should be part of a separate Escort Line, yet there is no such thing “officially.” Based on what does exist in the ImpSB, a… Read more »
Surface OOB thread up for discussion, btw: http://fractalsponge.net/?p=3952
Fighter coordination is what I figured the second bridge was for.
Would there be any chance of an AWACS style dish somewhere on the hull to signify that role?
The original version has two large sensor dishes: one top, one bottom.
Another ship from the classical PC games – I’m delighted!
Seems to me that the addition of some capital grade weaponry (making it more well-rounded like you said) would make it ideal for sale to the Planetary Defense Fleets of small, low income systems that can’t afford a proper warship.
looks good!
maybe some ion cannons in the triangle notches on the bow? this is pretty cool already!
This’ll be interesting, I’ll keep a close eye on it. Keep up the good work.
Not every ship has to be well rounded. The way I see it, someone panicked during the clone wars and strapped 20 CIWS modules to a light utility hull after running into a Lucrehulk’s vulture swarm. 30 years later, someone else panicked and brought the thing out of retirement in order to say that they’re doing something after running into a rebel fighter raid.
I think the armament refit is an easy fix though. I really don’t think a light turbolaser draws all that much more power than a quad laser CIWS fit, in the grand scheme of things. If the ship has shielding to survive LTL fire it should basically have the power to drive some fit of LTL. A total swap to LTL would be a bit of a stretch though.
Besides, I’m already accepting overall profile and volume changes in this design. Call it a refit 😀
Lancer-II, eh? It does make sense that by the true post-Endor civil war that they would have gotten an update, even if the origins of the ship are from the video game brainbug that ISDs don’t have any point defense.
I think Disney just re-canonized it as well, even though they made up the Raider for the same niche.
“the video game brainbug that ISDs don’t have any point defense.”
What, does this mean that the canon fact that ISDs have no point defence came from a video game? So this was never something coming from higher canon, like the films? Interesting… Hopefully this can be retconned! Because it makes no sense for a large ship which already carries fighters not to have a few PDL cannons, which would have pretty much no effect on the power draw.
ISDs supposedly having no PD weapons is generally on the weird side since both VicStars and Venators are known to have them. The Venator even has a whopping 52 twin-barreled PD turrets spread across its hull to defend itself from CIS droid fighter swarms (and they would also be effective against pesky Rebel fighters) and corvette-size vessels while the VicStar is supposed to have at least twenty emplacements dedicated to PD duty. In terms of hull space and available energy an ImpStar outclasses both a VicStar and a Venator so it should easily be able to mount at least the… Read more »
The “no PD weapons” was a WEG game decision going all the way back to their 1E system. The system was pretty rules-light, and was built primarily around story telling. In the opening stages, their take was that capital ships were just too big for starfighters to take on, so they didn’t need point defenses. In at least one of the early sourcebooks, capital ships didn’t even have stats for hull / shields (i.e. you can’t damage this ship, so why even bother provide a method for you to do so). As far as the Victory, I’m unaware of a… Read more »
The evidence that ISDs have some degree of point defense comes from the films. The very first scene of ANH shows the Devastator beating up the Tantive IV, with many of the shots coming from trench and surface batteries too small to even be modeled, which screams point defense. The same goes for the gun battery that was too lazy to shoot down R2D2’s escape pod. We also spend half of ESB following the Falcon’s hijinks around Death Squadron, and it repeatedly gets hit by the same tiny trench guns. Do those weapons seem like heavy anti-capital ship batteries? They… Read more »
Frankly, the gun batteries from ESB seem more like the LTL equivalent of DP cannon, with the (limited) ability to engage small craft via a barrage pattern to maximize the odds that, out of dozens or hundreds of shots fired, at least /one/ will hit for effect.
And I agree that the films show SDs having some form of anti-starfighter defenses; I’m just pointing out where the idea comes from that they do not.
Many things can be blamed on WEG :).
Oh, no argument here. I definitely think it is, at its core, an excellent gaming system, but there are so many errors that correcting them all would likely render the game unrecognizable. Granted, some steps had to be taken for the sake of ease of gaming, but still…
I do have to give them credit for a remarkably detailed land order-of-battle though. Not many RPG sourcebooks give organizational tables from the line squad all the way up to the Sector Army, even if the Imperial Army is remarkably light on support and logistical personnel.
Common mistake in scifi orders of battle – everything is a line unit, which is just nonsense if you’ve spent any time looking at how military forces are actually organized.
True, but I don’t suppose most RPG players are too interested in lists of medical vehicles, water purification battalions, administrative pay units, and armored recovery walkers. Actually, the last one sounds pretty cool.
I’m actually working on a rewrite of that chapter, with input from some current and ex-military guys on the gaming forum, and borrowing heavily from the old Renegade Legion orders of battle. A lot of the numbers at mid- to high-levels are going to end up being nominal, as the numbers of actual troops in the field almost always vary, due to a variety of reasons (combat loses, transfers, illness or injury, etc). There is a paragraph in that chapter that somewhat explains the light numbers of the support units, specifically, that much of the menial tasks (serving food, the… Read more »
If you are interested, I’d suggest looking at FM 100-2-3 The Soviet Army: Troops, Organization, and Equipment, which you can find as a pdf online. Good example of a regimental-divisional structure. Much more expensive because of a limited print run but excellent material for this as well: Armies of NATO’s Central Front (1985) by David C. Isby and Charles Kamps Jr. NATO armies even back in 1985 were brigade based by and large, but good counterpoint and other examples of how to mix support and line units, and how complex OOBs can be. My main issues with the Imperial Sourcebook’s… Read more »
Thank you so much for that! Exactly what I’ve been looking for. The Red Army always seemed a better template to follow for the Imperial Army than any of the Western models. And I completely agree on the failings of the ImpSB. The organizational chapter would’ve been so much more useful if the vehicles described in the organization chapter bore even a passing resemblance to the ones detailed in the Ground Assault Vehicles chapter. So many ideas that could’ve made great opposition in gaming scenarios, but nobody bothered to tie all the strings together. That book always seemed more like… Read more »
I did. How much time do you have? :p Might want to hash it out over email if you want a detailed version. Note I did the calcs before I had built a lot of these vehicles. So the volume changes a bit but not significantly. Company drop barge became the Chi, repulsorlift vehicles just based on eyeballing WEG vehicles – light vehicle roughly Chariot sized, heavier stuff based on the Hershey’s bar tank series. Plus no idea what repulsorlift artillery really looks like, so estimated a lot. If I did it now, probably just make those Scythe variants. The… Read more »
Email works, or we can take it over to your thread on Star Destroyer, in case others would like to follow along or chime in. I definitely have more questions, but also some thoughts for things like Heavy and Light vehicles and Engineering units. Have you ever played Renegade Legion? Apparently, Renegade Legion began life as FASA’s bid for the SW-RPG license, and when they lost out to WEG, they revamped the system into an original universe. Their system takes a much more rational approach to vehicular warfare and organization, but mashed up with the organizational approach of the Legions… Read more »
Especially since your PCs might be sent out to prevent those walkers from doing their jobs. I wonder how effective old AT-TEs with their main guns replaced with a crane might be at such a job?