[Fred Brackin]

Your conditions appear to me to greatly favor long-range designs so we'll try that first.

Capital Ship:Cyclops-class Monitor

Unstreamlined SM+10

Front Hull

1-3 Nanocomposite Armor (Hardened) total DR 150 $300M
4 Control Room $20m
5 Enhanced Tactical Array $100m
6 Spinal Battery 10GI UV Laser $150m
(core) Spinal

Center Hull
1-3 Nanocompsite Armor total DR 150 $150m
4 Smaller systems 3 Tertiary Batteries 300 kj VRF UV Lasers $45m
5 Habitat 30 cabins w/total lifesupport $10m
6 Fusion Reactor 2 pp $50m
(core)Spinal

Rear Hull
1-3 Nanocomposite Armr total dDR 150
4 Fusion Reactor 2 pp $50m
5 Fuel 120 mps delta-v $3m
6 Antimatter Plasma Rocket .01 G $50m

Note that only the Front Armor is Hardened.

Then there's 60 bioroids $12m They share cabins. The total life support means no purchasefood is needed. Most of the crew are Gunners for the Teriatiary batteries at 2 guns per battery.

The only consumable required is the fuel which will be 10m. I get $967m for total expenses.

For general comments I will note that this is a brutally simple and spcialized design but you tend to get in these sorts of contests.

The Cyclops can't penetrate its' own armor at any range in Front and beyond 1/2D for the rest of the ship. You could pentrate the Front armor with a Particle Beam but the UV laser outranges that by a facor of 10.

You can of course also penetrate the armor with missiles but you'll need a large number of them to get past the Tertiary batteries of UV lasers.

If you look at the more detailed numbers in Spaceships 3 the Spinal UV also outranges the powered envelope of even 32cm missiles by a lot though a ballistic coasting phase is possible I suppose. You'd lose a lot of that stand-off distance if you went with the shorter ranged Particle beam.

As a final note I do not necessarily sdvocate this design but it's more of an experiment in a given direction.