Building a TL10^ battleship?

[Belial666]

After seeing "The Winter Soldier" I got the urge to use an Ultratech battleship in a game somewhere. There aren't any planetary battleships as vehicles that I've seen in Ultratech and there isn't a battleship in High Tech either so to build one we'll need to improvise.


Size:
Bigger is better; more than supercarrier sized. Say, 1500 feet long, 300 ft wide. Unless I miss my guess, that's SM +15, right? If the ship is roughly as dense as water, it should mass 2,5 megatons. However, some systems (i.e. armor and weapons) would be far denser than that.



Power:
Lots. We're going to have a bazillion stuff with lots of power requirement so spending $60 million to get 300 semi-portable fusion reactors would be worth it. I would get bigger reactors but there aren't any described in Ultratech. I'm assuming that bigger versions will have about the same power/mass and power/weight ratio. I.e. a reactor weighing 15 tons and costing $60 million would produce and weigh the same as 3 reactors of 5 tons costing $20 million each, which would cost the same as the 300 semi-portable reactors described in ultra-tech.
It is possible -even highly probable- that 15 tons worth of reactor for a SM +15 ship is tiny and not nearly enough. GURPS spaceships has a fusion reactor module for this SM costing $30 billion, which would be a reactor array weighing 7500 tons - much closer to the ship's required output IMHO.



Propulsion:
Contragravity will give a decent speed for such a massive vehicle and allow it to fly. As with power generators, there aren't any large ones we got stats for. Actually, the only capacity/weight ratio given is for the contragrav belt; 300lbs for a 20lb belt that gives a move of 10/40. I am assuming again that capacity/weight and capacity/cost ratio remains the same as we get to larger contragravity generators (if we doesn't, we got no stats to work with). So to lift out a SM +15 battleship and have lots of redundancy left, we'd need $720 billion in contragrav. That's a lot. On the other hand, it isn't that much considering that our ultra-battleship is 2 whole tech levels above and 25 times the volume of a RL supercarrier and RL supercarriers cost five to ten billion. So, a contragravity plant costing $720 billion and weighing 600.000 tons. This also gives the ship an ST score of 77.000.



Armor:
The DR and HP of armor is a function of thickness and material. How much armor you can have is a function of how much mass you can put into it. The ship has a surface of about 100.000 square yards. Assuming we have 4,5 million tons to play with, that comes to 45 tons per square yard -or 10 square feet- of surface. This kind of mass dedicated to armor assumes that main armor thickness is about 10% of ship thickness
If that armor were steel alloy, it would be 18 feet thick, have DR 10800 and HP, and have a cost of $9 billion.
If that armor were titanium, it would be 30 feet thick, have DR 18000 and HP and have a cost of $27 billion.
If that armor were TL10 metal-matrix composite, it would be 38 feet thick, have DR 67500 and 22800 HP, and have a cost of $100 billion.
Thus we're choosing the last option, just in case someone is using mini-nukes against the ship.



Computers:
The ship is going to have a LOT of weapons and defenses, not to mention whole arrays of contragravity modules and fusion generators as well as sensors, internal systems and other stuff that needs computer control. Many defenses -such as point defense lasers- are only as good as the system that targets them so we need something as good as possible to run them.
Thus Megacomputer (genius, hardened, high-capacity, quantum) as the main unit. That's a complexity 13 computer that can run 50% more programs, can deal with complicated problems very fast, has a memory of 1.000.000 petabytes, weighs 80 tons and has a cost of $150 billion. It can run one volitional AI of IQ 20 plus 1.000 non-volitional AIs of IQ 16 plus 10.000 dedicated AIs of IQ 16. This should be enough to run pretty much anything on the ship. However, in the interest of redundancy, the peripheral AIs should be run on 10 Macroframes (genius, hardened, quantum) instead for another $75 billion, with the main computer used to run various additional programs to help the A.I. do its work.
Estimation on the cost of the programs themselves as well as peripheral electronics, terminals and the like shouldn't exceed $10 billion.



Weapons:
A typical WW2 battleship had 9-12 main guns, 24-36 secondary guns and as many as 140 tertiary guns, primarily in an AA role. It also was much smaller than this ultra-battleship and only mounted weapons on one side.
Tertiary batteries: Each "broadside" for the ship should have four "decks" of tertiary batteries, with each gun spaced every 10 yards or so. That makes it 500 guns per broadside. The ship's "top" and "bottom", having no or few heavy weapons, should have three times as many, or 1500 guns each. Tertiary batteries would be tank-sized weapons; 75% would be laser cannons for long-range antiaircraft and antimissile defense and 25% would be blaster cannons for medium-range antiaircraft and antimissile defense. Tertiary battery turrets would only have about 2 feet of armor and thus a DR of only 3600, which would make them easy to destroy with long-range energy fire. 4.000 guns with $2 million per gun and another $1 million for the turrets and ancillary systems would cost $12 billion and weigh 40 kilotons.
Secondary batteries: Broadsides and top only would have ten medium-size weapons each. Medium-size meaning 10x the dimensions of tertiary batteries. These would be three blaster cannon mounts 10x the dimensions of the tertiary arrays and two equally large 400mm railguns. They are for engaging mid to long range targets, such as smaller ships, space stations and perform orbital bombardment, especially since 400mm railguns can fire 10-megaton fusion warheads. Pricing and weight are calculated as 1000x that of normal weapons; $3 billion and 10 kilotons per gun+turret, $45 billion and 150 kilotons total. Each fusion warhead would cost $2 million, which means the ship could have several thousand.
Primary battery: I have no idea what to put in the primary batteries, which would be in the ship's bow and stern. Probably an energy weapon so it can't be intercepted but can one big enough to damage really heavy armor be found?

Missiles:
By TL10, things like vertical launch systems are no longer required to launch a missile - you simply drop the missile from a gunport, its contragrav stabilizes it and then its rocket engine fires, taking it towards the target at velocities probably exceeding Mach 10. Missiles that can be fired from the ship's railguns at higher speeds and increased total range are also an option. However, a ship with adequate point-defense should be able to destroy incoming missiles very fast. The battleship's own tertiary batteries can fire two dozen times each in the time it takes a missile to cross their engagement envelope at Mach 10, and at least 500 of them will be facing an incoming swarm at any given time, meaning 5000 shots - shots which are fired by very smart A.I.s that can think much faster than humans. Unless 1000+ missiles are fired at once against a heavily defended target there is nonexistent probability of success.

[jbalsle]

Originally Posted by Belial666

After seeing "The Winter Soldier" I got the urge to use an Ultratech battleship in a game somewhere. There aren't any planetary battleships as vehicles that I've seen in Ultratech and there isn't a battleship in High Tech either so to build one we'll need to improvise.

First, before we start digging into this, what is the nature of the setting? Just knowing you have TL10^ tech doesn't tell you anything about the setting? What do they need astro-battleships for? Is there a cold-war in space between two equivalent powers? Is the war hot? Why do they need a BB instead of cruisers or destroyers, or even unmanned combat drones of some kind?

Also, what's the technology _like_? TL10 can encompass the earliest era of Star Trek, centering on the NX-01's flight. It can also encompass Transhuman Space as well. Not knowing what the nature of the setting is calls into question all of the following assumptions of size and armaments.

Size:
Bigger is better; more than supercarrier sized. Say, 1500 feet long, 300 ft wide.

The problem with big is that it's expensive, and if your opponent fields lots of autonomous kill vehicles, that expense can kill you fast.

What are the enemy ships like? Are we talking World War I style slogs between massive battleships lobbing huge volleys of firepower at each other? And what about fighters? Fighters killed the Battleship for the most part in World War II, and modern doctrines favor carriers and cruisers over battleships.

Power:
Lots...

If you are concerned about watts, you need to join that line over there waiting for GURPS Vehicle Design. I hear they've been waiting there for the past 10 years. Good luck! :D

For the most part, in Spaceships, you simply count up the power requirements, and then make sure you have enough reactor space to supply that power. If you can't fit that much on, you either remove powered systems, or you make due with insufficient power and only power certain systems each turn.

Propulsion:
Contragravity will give a decent speed for such a massive vehicle and allow it to fly.

Again, Spaceships is where it's at. A single Contragrav Lifter occupies 1/20th the total space of the ship (5%), and provides enough thrust to allow the spacecraft to hover. If you need more, you need to provide engine modules, which can provide not only lifting thrust, but also maneuvering as well. An engine module provides a set amount of thrust per space, depending on its technology. If you want something derived from Contragravity, you're looking for a Reactionless Thruster of some kind. Your sAccell with these types of engines will be in the single Gs, I want to say, and you can bump that up by increasing the amount of space to engines. This has a double whammy because bigger engines consume more power, which means bigger reactors, which means less room for other fun stuff like armor, weapons, sensors, and crew spaces.

Armor:
The DR and HP of armor is a function of thickness and material. How much armor you can have is a function of how much mass you can put into it...
Thus we're choosing the last option, just in case someone is using mini-nukes against the ship.

And here-in lies the biggest problem with GURPS. The Realism Angle. Few things in nature can shrug off the raw power of a small nuclear warhead, let alone some of the big ones like the Tsar Bomba or a Starfleet issue Photonic Missile warhead. 'Polarizing the hull' doesn't seem like much of a defense if a nuclear missile will utterly trash it. GURPS tries to solve this problem with 'cosmic defenses', which are detailed in GURPS Space. Let's just say the solution isn't the most elegant solution I've seen.

Computers:
Thus Megacomputer (genius, hardened, high-capacity, quantum) as the main unit. That's a complexity 13 computer that can run 50% more programs, can deal with complicated problems very fast, has a memory of 1.000.000 petabytes, weighs 80 tons and has a cost of $150 billion. It can run one volitional AI of IQ 20 plus 1.000 non-volitional AIs of IQ 16 plus 10.000 dedicated AIs of IQ 16. This should be enough to run pretty much anything on the ship. However, in the interest of redundancy, the peripheral AIs should be run on 10 Macroframes (genius, hardened, quantum) instead for another $75 billion, with the main computer used to run various additional programs to help the A.I. do its work.

These computers are cutting edge, state of the art, and the kind of things that if your enemies capture and salvage them, could advance their information technology by leaps and bounds. I consider 'Genius' to really be a peak into the next TL or two, and really should be restricted to a laboratory. Your better bet is a computer network of more reasonable sized machines, running AIs that are less godlike in intelligence.

Granted, this is a bit 'Cult of Stat Normalization'. To me, an IQ 20 AI is an inhuman super-genius, utterly trashing the likes of Einstein and Hawking in raw intelligence. If you have the ability to build something like this, it should be in a heavily defended research installation deep in your territory and not be wasted on a computer on a warship. Instead, go for a more manageable IQ15 main AI, possibly using 'Xoxing' (copying itself) or SMP (running linked instances of itself) to achieve more than just one thing. For something like that, you only need a Complexity 11 computer, which is much easier to reach at TL10. With an AI or AI crew like this, your ship is itself close to being an AKV, so you might consider going with something smaller than a space-going super-carrier. Alternatively, eliminate the Sapient AI in favor of more Low-Sapient AIs, and employ actual biological crew.

Weapons:
snip batteries

A well thought out mix of DEWs and KEWs.

Note that GURPS Space handles weapons much like this, with a spinal mount consuming 15% of the ship's space (5% fore, 5% amidships, 5% aft), main batteries consuming 5% for one mount, then secondary and tertiary batteries giving multiple mounts per space devoted to them.

Primary battery: I have no idea what to put in the primary batteries, which would be in the ship's bow and stern. Probably an energy weapon so it can't be intercepted but can one big enough to damage really heavy armor be found?

Look at Space again.

Missiles:
By TL10, things like vertical launch systems are no longer required to launch a missile - you simply drop the missile from a gunport, its contragrav stabilizes it and then its rocket engine fires, taking it towards the target at velocities probably exceeding Mach 10. Missiles that can be fired from the ship's railguns at higher speeds and increased total range are also an option. However, a ship with adequate point-defense should be able to destroy incoming missiles very fast. The battleship's own tertiary batteries can fire two dozen times each in the time it takes a missile to cross their engagement envelope at Mach 10, and at least 500 of them will be facing an incoming swarm at any given time, meaning 5000 shots - shots which are fired by very smart A.I.s that can think much faster than humans. Unless 1000+ missiles are fired at once against a heavily defended target there is nonexistent probability of success.

I suspect that missiles will take on a new form with AI PD like this on the battlefield. Missiles will morph into what Transhuman Space refers to as an Autonomous Kill Vehicle, a smallish spacecraft equipped with an AI, heavy armor, fast engines, and weapons, including possibly an overloaded reactor as combination power-plant and warhead. These tiny ships have enough armor to resist PD, enough speed to evade the big guns, and can reach out and touch you with ranged weapons, ram you and detonate their reactor like a missile, and also most dangerously, outthink you. Modern day missile these are not...they're MUCH more cunning. This also allows you to deploy AKVs in strategic spots for dealing with SDVs like this, and could lead to what ended up happening in THS -- many of these AKVs went rogue and now lurk in the spacelanes long after the war is over, killing unfortunate innocents. Think of it as today's minefield problem, updated for the 22nd Century, with the mines being smart and capable of hunting you down...

Another option for missiles are Nuclear Pumped X-Ray lasers. These have a one-use laser rod attached to a fusion bomb. When it detonates, it directs a powerful beam of x-radiation at whatever it was pointed at, and is a brutally effective way of bypassing your point-defense.

Both technologies exist in THS. The result of this appears to be smaller spacecraft with fewer crew, and given the tech you've described so far for your ship, would seem to preclude a 500m long spacecraft. So, once again, we're at 'what is this being built to oppose'? And definitely, give a longer look to Spacecraft, or wait for VDS to come out.

[Belial666]

@setting:
The setting is a significantly developed solar system in the early 23rd century. Interstellar flight is far too costly/slow to be practical and developing a new planet takes major resources so various nations focused on the solar system itself over the past 200 or so years;
Earth is separated into two major nations. One is a TL10^ republic with 6 billion people controlling north and south America. Its technological emphasis is contragravity and its industrialization leans towards long-range, slow space flight, organic electronics and artificial intelligence. The other is a TL9 totalitarian state with 30 billion controlling Asia and portions of Africa. Unable to achieve higher tech levels due to its nature and lacking education system, it focuses on increasing the efficiency of its industrialization and being capable of producing TL9 and lower stuff at massive quantities and far lower prices than normal. Europe and much of Africa were leveled with nuclear weapons and orbital bombardment during WWIII. On the plus side, the nuclear winter stopped the huge global warming problems from getting out of hand. Both nations are heavily militarized for obvious reasons but while the TL10^ one could win in an all-out war if it used WMDs, the planet would be gone and there'd be tens of billions of dead.
Luna is a multicorporate TL10 colony of ~10 million humans genetically engineered to handle the low gravity without problems. Several megacorporations were practically evicted from Earth in the Reformation of 2117 due to their illegal activities and overt influence over various nations. They have been developing their industrial infrastructure ever since, mining light metals like Titanium and Lithium from the moon and producing a major portion of the world's electronics, robotics and nanocomposite materials. They are, by treaty, prevented from developing weapons of mass destruction or capital ships. However, there are rumors that they are making the former anyway and that in secret factories deep beneath the surface of the moon they are making armies of robots. Rumors aside, they are influencing other nations against each other.
Mars is a recently developed world through migration. With the use of Orion drives and tens of thousands of fusion bombs, massive amounts of ice containing water, methane and oxygen from Saturn, Jupiter and even Pluto were sent into collision courses with the planet in the decade of 2077-2087 as a concerted effort from many nations to make it habitable. Genetically engineered bacteria were seeded in large quantities after the ice arrived and the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had increased the average temperature above 0. In the following 50 years, Mars was slowly terraformed even as the tensions back on Earth increased. Before the beginning of WWIII, seeing the rising tension and militarizations many European nations practically bankrupted themselves in a race to put as much of their population, technology and culture they could into colonization ships and abandon what they believed would be a doomed Earth. Building literally as many cryo-chambers as it once had cars, Europe put seven hundred million people (two thirds of its population) on slow-moving, Orion-propelled barges that would arrive on Mars a decade later. They missed the beginning of the War and subsequent transformation of Europe into a battleground by only three months. Current Martian population exceeds 3 billion. Martian technology is heavily aimed at genetic modification and improvement, both on people to better adapt them to their environment and on other aspects of biotech from food production and terraforming to growing organic houses to organic nanites that can manage construction in large scale - like spaceships.
Europa Colonized from Mars only a generation after the original colonization fleet arrived from Earth, the mission to Europa used the very same colony ships with minimal modifications. The move was done to resolve cultural conflicts in Mars without the danger of another large-scale war. Current Europan population is a bit under 2 billion. Industry focuses on colonization and terraforming with less of an emphasis to genetic engineering and more to large-scale sealed environments like domed cities. They have been expanding their orbital industry to the other moons of Jupiter.
Smaller Colonies exist all over the system in addition to the major nations. There are as many as 5 billion people living in various moons, asteroids and even deep-space habitats of all kinds.
Recent developments:
The solar system is a powder keg waiting to blow. System wars have been largely avoided due to the slowness of interplanetary flight rather than any organizations keeping the peace; when it takes six months to reach your target and the enemy will see you coming if you are using a heavy enough force to matter, there's not much point starting anything less than total war - and total wars are hideously expensive.
However, there is a substantial amount of piracy in the spaceways, especially with recent developments in stealth where small, low-power ships are concerned. In addition, multiple nations have vessels beyond planetary orbit where there aren't any universally acceptable laws; Panamerican battleships, Eastern Union nuclear-armed starfighters, Martian and Europan cruisers, even uncrewed ships of "no identification". Skirmishes happen and the whole system is holding its breath for when the new War will start.



@Using GURPS Space:
With its emphasis on streamlining and simplifying things, many stuff in that book are either confusing or unrealistic. For example, look at the armors of various ships compared with weight values. Ships are considered SM+15 based on outside dimensions/mass and density comes up at less than that of water. However, armor is far denser than water. Specifically, to have credible armor against any kind of real threats you need thick armor. As seen in my Battleship construction above, sufficiently thick armor to be 10% of the ship's diameter in thickness would mass 4,5 megatons for that ship shape. GURPS Spaceships however tells us that such armor "won't fit" even if it demonstrably can, because the book assumes density of water when armor has density 7 times as much and thus takes up much less space than its mass would indicate. Similarly with weapons. We know that SM +11 to +12 vessels for example mounted 16-18 inch guns in 3-4 batteries of 3 guns each. Battleships in WWII for example. But GURPS spaceships says that you need at least SM +15 to mount an 18-inch gun and it will be a single gun per module, not 4 batteries of 3 like the SM +12 Yamato and the proposed Montana class BB design had. Similar discrepancies appear in power generation and other systems.
Thus I am not using GURPS spaceships to design the ship.

Few things in nature can shrug off the raw power of a small nuclear warhead

A 100-kiloton device buried inside soil and earth makes a 100-meter crater. A device that detonates at contact rather than being buried will only make a 20-meter crater. That is in soil and earth and inside the atmosphere. Ten meters of rolled homogenous armor will stop nukes in the 100-kiloton range. Twelve meters of TL10 nanocomposite should stand up to megaton-range bombs at least once. But GURPS overstates the damage dealt by nuclear weapons, at least at point-blank ranges.
Also, 12 meters of armor being hit by a meter-wide shell going at a thousand kilometers/second will survive. That's because kinetic impacts penetrate depending on density and projectile size beyond a certain point, not the missile's kinetic energy. It is why sandbags stop bullets. The same sandbags would stop a relativistic impact from a bullet-sized object too.

Autonomous Kill Vehicle

Against massed point-defense, they will die like normal missiles do. The battleship's "point-defense" is laser cannons that could burn through tank armor and there are a lot of them. If the AKV is big enough to take the hits or fast enough to avoid them, the battleship fires a nuke-armed railgun as point-defense instead. That doesn't have to hit - only get in the AKVs general vicinity and detonate. It will even take out an entire swarm of AKVs while the battleship shrugs it off.
The WWII Battleship was killed because there was not point-defense back then. But load a modern ship with 100 or so AA lasers that can take out missiles and aircraft at 100 kilometers and see how close aircraft get. Each laser array comes at 180 tons with modern tech - devote 18 kilotons to them and you're missile/aircraft proof.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by jbalsle

A well thought out mix of DEWs and KEWs.

Note that GURPS Space handles weapons much like this, with a spinal mount consuming 15% of the ship's space (5% fore, 5% amidships, 5% aft), main batteries consuming 5% for one mount, then secondary and tertiary batteries giving multiple mounts per space devoted to them.



Look at Space again.

You mean Spaceships, not Space, don't you?

[Phoenix_Dragon]

Originally Posted by Belial666

For example, look at the armors of various ships compared with weight values. Ships are considered SM+15 based on outside dimensions/mass and density comes up at less than that of water.

GURPS Spaceships build off mass, not length, and SM is more of a helpful notation. 4.5 million tons of armor is 1.5 times the mass of a SM+15 ship. Extrapolating from the tables, a SM+16 ship would be 10 million tons, and a SM+17 would be 30. You would also want to use the armor volume/density rules from Pyramid 34, which effectively reduce the size of the ship, increasing the efficiency of each armor system. At 12 armor systems, you not only reduce the ships SM by one step when targeting it (For example, making a 10 million ton ship only SM+15), you also nearly double the DR of those armor systems (Each armor system for that ship would give 720 dDR, enough to completely ignore a 100kt proximity nuclear detonation; 12 systems spread evenly would provide immunity from a 10 megaton proximity nuclear detonation!).

We know that SM +11 to +12 vessels for example mounted 16-18 inch guns in 3-4 batteries of 3 guns each. Battleships in WWII for example. But GURPS spaceships says that you need at least SM +15 to mount an 18-inch gun and it will be a single gun per module, not 4 batteries of 3 like the SM +12 Yamato and the proposed Montana class BB design had.

Those 16-inch naval guns are not the 40cm conventional guns in Spaceships. They have half the muzzle velocity and lower rate of fire. While the later can be solved by improved loading systems, the former is a huge deal. That's akin to the difference between a 9mm or .45 pistol and a .308 rifle. The difference gets even more extreme if you use electromag guns, which have twice the velocity of conventional guns in Spaceships.

Against massed point-defense, they will die like normal missiles do. The battleship's "point-defense" is laser cannons that could burn through tank armor and there are a lot of them. If the AKV is big enough to take the hits or fast enough to avoid them, the battleship fires a nuke-armed railgun as point-defense instead. That doesn't have to hit - only get in the AKVs general vicinity and detonate. It will even take out an entire swarm of AKVs while the battleship shrugs it off.

I think you're mistaking a kinetic-kill vehicle for something resembling a normal ship. Take a one-yard-wide wedge of that battleship's armor, back it with a powerful engine, and wrap that with a tiny fraction of the amount of armor (A full foot all around would add relatively little weight). Now you've got something that is essentially immune to the laser point defense and proximity nuclear bursts in front of it, can withstand sizable (100kt+) proximity nuclear detonations beside it, can come in at extremely high velocities (The railguns used for point defense fire shells traveling at about mach 10; these kinetic-kill vehicles could come in at tens of times that velocity, if not more), carry enough mass to still be a deadly threat to your mile-long ship even if destroyed, and probably cost less than $10 million each.

That battleship costs somewhere around 1 trillion dollars. Spend just 1% of that on these kinetic-kill vehicles, and you can send a thousand of them at this behemoth.

[Flyndaran]

Style definitely requires emphasizing that ^.

Some kind of weapon/shield that prevents fighters and nukes.

[Rysith]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Style definitely requires emphasizing that ^.

Some kind of weapon/shield that prevents fighters and nukes.

To support the 'bigger is better' aspect of the original post - what about a device/field that allowed a ship to project it's own drive force in opposition to other, nearby drives (likely with radius scaling with drive power).
A larger ship would then be able to trivially immobilize an enormous number of fighters/missiles/smaller craft, possibly from outside their own engagement range, preventing the dominance of carriers and missile boats. However, ships (or fleets) of roughly equal total engine output would be able to enter into massive slugging matches, where holding an opponent still means immobilizing yourself (thus the heavy armor).
The 'standard' fleet battleship would probably resemble a ship of the line in terms of expecting to get into long, protracted slugging matches with their equals and utterly demolish anything smaller[1] (although fairly fast outside of combat, thanks to oversized drives) rather than a more modern battleship, which seems to suit your concept of 'broadside' fairly well.

[1] I'd also suggest one of the many 'adjusting damage for relative size of impact' and 'more HP for large massive things' rules tweaks that are available.