[Spaceships] Please look over my ship designs

[RogerBW]

I have a bunch of ship designs up at https://tekeli.li/wives-and-sweethearts/ on which I'd appreciate comments. I'm trying to keep the superscience mild: TL11, antimatter plasma torches are the latest shiny space drive, and FTL is via naturally-occurring gates that don't require ship systems, usually not all that far outside the system's habitable zone.

I've tested some of them against each other, but I'd appreciate thoughts on design philosophies - for example the "point defence ring" tertiary battery of rapid-firing weapons seems to be vital if you don't have shields.

(I haven't worked up costs.)

[Kale]

What sort of antimatter economy have you come up with to support shipping? I wanted to keep antimatter fairly rare in mine so even antimatter boosted drives were extremely expensive to fuel. Most ships used fusion torch or rocket drives with straight hydrogen fuel.
Antimatter lets you cram a lot of boom into a small package, so it leads to some interesting setting issues. At least fusion reactors and drives quit cold. Of course you can handwave this by assuming really good safeties on antimatter-using equipment, but you know at some point the PCs are going to try something...
P.S. Saw your blurb on antimatter, and the station locations make sense as does hijacking ships for their antimatter. This seems absurdly dangerous though if containment technology is not really reliable! Also, if the antimatter is worth more than the ship, refueling seems like a very expensive proposition.

[RogerBW]

Production at solar-powered factories. I found it necessary to have dV in the 100mps+ range in order to get useful travel times, particularly for multi-system trips (enter the system at a jump point, cross it to get to the next jump point). Fusion rockets look tempting, but the low thrust means it doesn't matter how much dV you have, you don't have time to use it.

It's a setting assumption that getting a boom rather than a prolonged fizzle out of antimatter takes work. (The energy release tends to push the reacting surfaces apart. This is the best current theory I could find while working on Meltdown and Fallout.)

[Kale]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

It's a setting assumption that getting a boom rather than a prolonged fizzle out of antimatter takes work. (The energy release tends to push the reacting surfaces apart. This is the best current theory I could find while working on Meltdown and Fallout.)

So the end effect is it is very bad for the ship it happens on, but the blast wouldn't really expand into the surroundings very far? I also suspect radiation would be pretty bad onboard any ship this happened on, but I think it would be a moot point for all but the smallest releases of antimatter.

[weby]

The iron duke seems to have broken stat list:
both the tonnage and armor are wrong.

Further it does not seem to be a battleship in idea, being almost unarmored like the destroyers. I would expect something called a battleship to devote a lot more of the mass to armor.

The Dymka seems somewhat strange in armament, with so many major batteries and no spinal battery.

Overall most of your designs seem kind of low armored and yet with low ECM, making them easy to hit and damage with comparable weapons. They seem to be designed for that anti piracy patrol, with little thought given to fighting warships.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by weby

The iron duke seems to have broken stat list:
both the tonnage and armor are wrong.

Further it does not seem to be a battleship in idea, being almost unarmored like the destroyers. I would expect something called a battleship to devote a lot more of the mass to armor.

The Dymka seems somewhat strange in armament, with so many major batteries and no spinal battery.

Overall most of your designs seem kind of low armored and yet with low ECM, making them easy to hit and damage with comparable weapons. They seem to be designed for that anti piracy patrol, with little thought given to fighting warships.

Thanks for this - stats should be fixed. Spinal batteries can be pretty marginal at times, though worth considering. I'll give some thought to up-armouring, but in a peer war antimatter warheads will vaporise any conceivable armour, so a heavy point defence is the only viable countermeasure. My design philosophy is more Cold War than WWII, except that carriers aren't really viable - but post-antimatter battleships are definitely less heavily armoured than the ones that were built in the old days.

(Specifically on the Dymka - replacing three 3d×10 weapons with one 4d×10 weapon is only really helpful if your target can be significantly more damaged by the 4d×10 weapon, i.e. has armour in the dDR 180-240 sort of range, and the Dymka is mostly meant to jump smaller ships. The range brackets are the same. There's probably an antiparticle variant too, though that really puts its trust in the stealth hull.)