Where to stick the turrets

[abomination]

Hi guys, I hardly ever post here, I do lurk quite a lot though.

I got bored the other day & started on a set of deck plans for a full on 74,000 ton Battleship. (Told you I was bored).

I've more or less finished it. I'd Jammed in two squadrons of fighters and half a battalion of Marines and was feeling quite pleased with myself until I started to look at weapons. There just isn't enough surface to fit all those turrets.o:

The 1 turret per 100 tons works well when all of those tons are attached to the hull. But with larger ships that's not the case. Has anyone come up with a different rule, or some sort of fudge?

Cheers.

 

[atpollard]

What about a cube stuck on the surface of the ship with a turret mounted on 5 of the six sides?
Five turrets grouped together into a single 'battery' with one gunner to control them all.

 

[Ishmael]

The usual design systems tell us that you get a single hardpoint per 100 dtons. But this seriously shortchanges smaller ships when compared to larger ships.
For example, a 100dton cube ship gets a single hardpoint for its 732 square meter surface area, whereas a 100,000dton cube ship gets a hardpoint per 73 square meters of surface area. A million dton ship gets a hardpoint per 34 square meters.
This has carried over since the beginning with all versions following it except TNE.

I think hardpoints should be related to vol^(2/3) of a ship.
A quick way could be the usual number of hardpoints^(2/3) times 5 ( ignore the sixth side of the cube for the engines/thrusters ). Have a multiplier based on hull configuration.

A 25,000 dton ship might have (250^(2/3))*5 = 198 hardpoints
A 325,000 dton ship might have (3,250^(2/3)*5 = 1,097 hardpoints.

*732 m^2 is the total surface area of a 100 dton cube ship... 6*(100dtons*13.5)^(2/3), but I'd ignore one side of the cube to give room for the engines... let a 100dton cube have 5 hardpoints. Let sensors and radiators and any other external fixtures ( landing gear? scoops? ) take up a hardpoint(s) each too.... perhaps fixed mounts should only count as taking up 1/2 a hardpoint.


I am also beginning to think that the number of hardpoints used will affect aerodynamics in a manner similar to how Striker once handled turrets and hardpoints for aircraft by add to drag a percentage based on 'drag points' per turret/hardpoint used which would make a ship slower in an atmosphere.

.

 

[abomination]

I am also beginning to think that the number of hardpoints used will affect aerodynamics in a manner similar to how Striker handled turrets and hardpoints for aircraft by subtracting a percentage based on 'drag points' per turret/hardpoint used.

Yup, anyway you look at it. It will resemble some sort of mutant hedgehog.

I think I'll just add the 100 & 50 ton bays and hand wave the normal one. You could make them pretty small if you did away with the area for someone to sit, and moved it to a big control room in the ships interior.

 

[samuelvss]

Actually, if you use "trenches" per the Death Star, you can radically increase surface area.

 

[Patron Zero]

Mind I don't generally draft designs of ships in the tonnage stated but I do follow a rule of thumb.

If it's two turrets on a 200 Ton merchant or a multiple mounts on a dedicated battleship, one should consider supportive fire by all direct-able weapons to be job one. Even bringing direct fire from two turrets on a specified target can be quite the advantage in the most minimal of engagements.

All said, batteries bearing is always a good thing.

 

[samuelvss]

I think worst case is, under LBB5/HG2, a 1,000,000 ton ship that is a sphere. That would give you about (someone feel free to check my math) 2.7 square meters per turret. For this, IIRC, only 40% of batteries would bear. Here batteries would be consolidated, the surface area increased (trenches, towers, etc).

 

[Matt123]

IMTU, I've always considered the 1 turret per 100dton to be a guide on the maximum number, not a limitation on where they go. Batteries of 30 lasers could easily be co-located in one or more mounts. I have visions of quad plasma gun mounts lined up in rows of 5 pumping out fiery destruction on the Cylons, um, err Zhodani...

The only difficulty comes about if the Captain decides to take advantage of the ability to re-organise batteries in HG. Although IMO the need or desire to do so would be rare.

 

[phavoc]

Hi guys, I hardly ever post here, I do lurk quite a lot though.

I got bored the other day & started on a set of deck plans for a full on 74,000 ton Battleship. (Told you I was bored).

I've more or less finished it. I'd Jammed in two squadrons of fighters and half a battalion of Marines and was feeling quite pleased with myself until I started to look at weapons. There just isn't enough surface to fit all those turrets.o:

The 1 turret per 100 tons works well when all of those tons are attached to the hull. But with larger ships that's not the case. Has anyone come up with a different rule, or some sort of fudge?

Cheers.

Usually that's not a problem since a ship of that size will be carrying many 50 and 100 ton bays. So the surface area of the ship won't be so cluttered with standard turrets or barbette's.

 

[Patron Zero]

I've had a house rule IMTU campaigns that 'standard' turrets as per the 100 ton rule are capable of offensive fire only, that said smaller DS (defensive symmetry) turrets were available at half ' cost', two per 100 tons.

DS turrets act more like the Phalanx weapon systems on modern-day naval vessels, such attempt to destroy incoming ordnance such as missiles, torpedoes or solid-shot projectiles. The DS armaments are lower powered lasers, Gatling-type auto-cannon or smaller scale missiles themselves, any-all having too limited a range to be used offensively in anything other than a point-blank engagement.

Related to the DS are static-mount ordnance projectors, think of WWII-era PT Boats launching depth charges with ECM capabilities or 'smoke-screen' payloads that act like sandcasters. These sort of fittings provide more economical and efficient measures to a ship operator than investing completely in 'dedicated' offensive-capable turrets.

Mind nothing is better than a six-shooter in a straight-up gunfight but all encounters are not of the High Noon variety so sometimes running away to fight another day is an option not previously considered.

 

[leo knight]

Patron Zero, I like your ideas. I remember trying to make sense of some of the old Supplement 9 ships, and running out of surface area. I wound up glomming the turrets in batteries together into really big guns, one for each battery. What was the smallest cruiser, about 30ktons, with about 200 turrets? Yikes! I even tried that with old Book 2 designs, like the 800 ton 'cruiser', with 2x3 turrets I called "six-packs". I also did 6 barrel gatling style turrets.

 

[abomination]

Thanks for your input.

FWIW Because most of the space is taken up by a seat for the gunner, I decided to make the turrets really small & left them off the deck plan. Then created a seperate control room. All that would then be needed would be a crew to replace consumables (missiles / sand) via a small access panel inside the hull.

 

[Carlobrand]

Let's see:

200,000 dTon dreadnought, potential 2000 hardpoints. Worst case scenario: a sphere.

Volume 2,700,000 cubic meters. Radius therefore ~86.34 meters.
Surface area at 4*pi*r2 is 93,686 square meters: about 47 square meters per hardpoint.

75,000 dTon cruiser, potential 750 hardpoints. Worst case scenario: a sphere.

Volume 1,012,500 cubic meters. Radius therefore ~62.27 meters.
Surface area 48,722 square meters: about 65 square meters per hardpoint.

One dTon is a 3 meter long, 3 meter tall, 1.5 meter wide block. Half that is typically the gunner's position, which can be apart from the gun proper, though this makes missile reload a problem on smaller ships. Anyway, figure a 1.5 meter by 1.5 meter "poke through" for any given one dTon hardpoint: 2.25 square meters.

I'm not seeing a problem with turrets on the surface. Only problem I see is representing them all when transferring a three-dimensional model to two-dimensional graph paper without getting your space eaten up by hallways and such.

You're going to have turrets not only on the edges, but on the "roof" and "basement" that will need to be represented. One thought is to have the "roof" deck and "basement" deck as fuel tanks pebbled with half-dTon turret emplacements that aren't normally accessible, then clump the gunners' positions together in one or two big rooms someplace else inside the ship; the gunners will thank you since they won't die when the turret gets hit, and that reasonably represents the High Guard damage bit about weapons and fuel spaces taking hits instead of internal equipment. Typical deck is 3 meters tall, with roughly a half-meter of that being a machine space handling the grav plates, plumbing, air ducts and so forth. You can assume that this machine space includes crawl spaces for maintenance crew to access those otherwise inaccessible turrets for repairs and servicing; that way you don't lose space trying to make full-size hallways to access them. Then what you have is a "roof" fuel deck with turrets pebbled through it, and below that a crew deck of some sort with a ceiling crawlway so maintenance staff can access the turret from below. Then play around with deck heights a wee bit to give you enough extra to put a similar crawl space beneath the floor of the deck sitting on top of the "basement" fuel deck, so the turrets there can be accessed from above.

Only exception would be missile turrets, which need to be fully accessible to handle the reload issue (and which should properly be adjacent to or near to a cargo bay or missile magazine where you can say the ship is storing its missile reloads).