[Spaceships] TL 9 Novobisirsk-class Patrol Boat
 

TL 9 Novobisirsk-class Patrol Boat

The Novobisirsk is a Russian desiged patrol boat use to defend trade routes and space stations from various threats. The boat is designed for journeys that last several days to a month. Other small craft are known to use the same or similar hulls.

The craft is not designed with comfort in mind for its small crew, tending to be fairly cramped. Some have called it a "flying tank" due to its squat, blocky design with the topside turret for the main gun.

Front:
[1] Armor, Advanced Metallic Laminate, dDR 10, $600K
[2] Control Room, Comp C7, Comm/Sensor 5, 3 Control Stations, $600K
[3] External Clamp, $30K
[4] Habitat, 1 bunkroom for 4 people, 1 medbay for 1 person with automed, $400K
[5] Weapon, Medium Battery, Fixed Mount, 2 24cm launchers, 10 missiles each, 5 tons cargo space, $1M
[6!] Weapon, Medium Battery, Fixed Mount, Very Rapid Fire, 2 4cm electromag guns, 2000 shots each, 5 tons cargo space, $1M

Middle:
[1] Armor, Advanced Metallic Laminate, dDR 10, $600K
[2] Cargo Hold, 15 tons cargo space
[3!] Weapon, Major Battery, Full-Rotation Turret, 1 control station, 14cm electromag gun, 150 shots, $1.5M
[4] Fuel Tank, 0.5 mps HEDM chem, $100K
[5] Fuel Tank, 0.5 mps HEDM chem, $100K
[6] Fuel Tank, 0.5 mps HEDM chem, $100K
[core] Fuel Tank, 0.5 mps HEDM chem, $100K

Rear:
[1] Armor, Advanced Metallic Laminate, dDR 10, $600K
[2] Defensive ECM, $3M
[3] Engine Room, 1 workstation, $100K
[4] Reaction Engine, HEDM Chemical, 2G Accel, $600K
[5] Reaction Engine, HEDM Chemical, 2G Accel, $600K
[6] Fuel Tank, 0.5 mps HEDM chem, $100K
[core] Reactor, Fusion, 2 PP, $3M

Features:
Stealth Hull, $1M

ST/HP: 500
HT: 13
Hnd/SR: -1/5
Move: 4G/2.5 mps
SM: +7
LWt: 300 t
DR: 100
Occ: 5SV (with accomodations for 4)
Load: 25.5 t
Cost: $15,130,000

Re: [Spaceships] TL 9 Novobisirsk-class Patrol Boat
 

Is it streamlined or not?

Is the armour hardened? I'm guessing the armour isn't hardened, but it probably should be, given that it is a military craft.

And finally, what is the external clamp for?

Re: [Spaceships] TL 9 Novobisirsk-class Patrol Boat
 

Note HEDM engines are 1.5x cost from the table footnote.

This is a burn endurance of 102 seconds. I guess it depends on its exact role whether this is practical? 2.5 mps would only get you a one way journey from low earth orbit to geostationary orbit - not very far in space terms.

Re: [Spaceships] TL 9 Novobisirsk-class Patrol Boat
 

It's not streamlined. In the description, it's explicitly blocky.

The armor isn't hardened, although you're right it should be. A price increase due to hardening the armor won't hurt the design much at this point, I don't think.

The external clamp is to allow it to dock with space stations and larger ships without having to land in hangar bays. Other models could possibly replace it with more habitat or fuel space.

Re: [Spaceships] TL 9 Novobisirsk-class Patrol Boat
 

*sheepish look* I need to read fine print more. PDFs make me go crosseyed, so I must've missed that part.

I see it operating from space stations and larger ships in a kind of "escort" deal. It is a "hard science" ship, so short, single-digit second burns for course correction are going to essentially be the norm.

Re: [Spaceships] TL 9 Novobisirsk-class Patrol Boat
 

Your launchers do 6d6 * 6 dHP (average 120 dHP) times relative velocity, your quick-firing gun does 6d6 dHP(average 21 dHP) times relative velocity at a hideous rate of fire, and your turreted main gun does 3d6 * 7 (average 73.5 dHP). But your armour dDR is only 10. What you have here is not a heavily-armoured flying main battle tank, but an orbital weapons platform no more heavily armoured than a civilian shuttle.

Move the control room to the core, it'll be safer.

What's this for? Replace it with armour.

I'd do without the medbay. This is a short-mission vehicle with only four crew. It no more needs a sickbay than a tank does. If someone gets sick, put him in his bunk. Replace the sickbay with steerage cargo and stock it with ammunition.
The cargo space is for ammunition, I take it? 15 spare missiles?

I'd be tempted to move this to the central hull and put it in a turret so that it can be used for point defence against missile from unexpected directions.

Cargo space for what? You've got 150 shots for your big gun, but you only have drive endurance for 100 seconds. Your 4-gee drive and long-range main weapon mean that you will be fighting in standard combat scale with three-minute turns. You don't have drive endurance for even one turn. Which means that either you're going to be destroyed in the first turn because of your weak armour, or destroy your enemy in the first turn with all your huge guns, or that you'll be a sitting duck from the second turn onwards, taking 'controlled drift' actions and getting hammered again and again from 'advantaged' condition. You don't need 15 tons of spare ammo. And you sure as held can't deliver commercial cargoes economically.

That's a lot of gun. It's only advantage that I can see it that it is long-ranged, which would let you fire with impunity at vehicles with short-ranged weapons. I'd stick it in a fixed mount for long-range accuracy, and put my light weapons in turrets for point defence against attacks from unexpected directions.

You have a total of 2.5 mi./sec. delta-v, which is not enough to reach orbit from the surface, and not enough to run your drives for an entire combat turn. In short, not nearly enough to be good for any purpose.

This vehicle has such short endurance that repairs aren't going to matter, and I think an tactical array or even an enhanced array would improve your combat survival better than having HT13 rather than HT12.

4 gee sounds very impressive, but without enough fuel to reach orbit or to boost for a whole combat turn it isn't really very useful. I strongly recommend swapping out one engine for extra fuel.

In fact, getting brutally cynical about the combat system, 0.5 gee is good enough. You need 5 gee for an acceleration bonus in standard scale with 1-minute turns, and you aren't going to get there. And a single-stage-to-orbital space combat vehicle is impractical without superscience. Get yourself a single NTR engine (0.5 gee at TL9). That'll give you 144 seconds of combat endurance per fuel tank. Six tanks would give you 1037 seconds, or nearly six turns of combat.

Or else, consider a nuclear saltwater rocket, which is only limited superscience.

-6 to be detected. Which goes to offset

• +7 for size
• +1 for time taken in a 1-minute combat turn
• +10 for being in plain sight
• +24 for being silhouetted against space
• +5 when using your HEDM rocket, +6 when powering up your fusion reactor
• +Array level of enemy ship's sensors: +5 for a ship with like yours (SM +7 with civilian sensors), +7 if it has an enhanced array

That's probably a +47 or +49 in combat, a +46/+48 accelerating away, a +45/+47 cruising around, or a +44/+46 accelerating inwards, +41/+43 running cold on auxiliary power.

Now, range is some help. Your maximum combat range is Long, which gives -42. And extreme range gives -48.

Upshot:

1. in actual combat, with your generator running, and at your maximum combat range, you are +5 to be detected by a ship like yours with crummy civilian sensors, +7 by a ship of like size with military sensors. Your enemy's sensor operator probably has a skill of at least 12-, so you get detected right away despite your stealth hull;
2. sneaking around at extreme range, fusion plant shut down, and with engines running (neither pointed right at the enemy nor directly away), you're detected at -3 by civilian sensors and at -1 by military sensors (that's rolling once per minute);
3. running cold at long range range you are detected at -1/+1 (rolling once per minute);
4. running cold at extreme range you are detected on a -7/-5 (rolling once per minute).

The thing is that extreme range is about 100,000 miles and long about 20,000. Ships like this travel at about 2.5 miles per second at most, which means 32,000 seconds to make a detection roll in in the time it takes for a target to cross from detection range for range for you to open fire.

Summary: the stealth hull is no use in combat, and of very little use setting an ambush in open space. Its only benefit is allowing the vessel to lurk, powered down, near distracting objects such as orbital stations, large satellites, small moons etc. Is that work the price?

Too much G and not enough mi./sec.

Best to leave that in spaceship scale rather than convert to personal scale. DR is 10 / 10 / 10.

What's the crew requirement? 3 control-room crew, 1 engine-room crew, and a turret gunner? That means that you have to hot-bunk. Someone is going to sleep in the sick bay, as surely as eggs break.

Re: [Spaceships] TL 9 Novobisirsk-class Patrol Boat
 

What cost? Stealth is dirt-cheap in all the GURPs vehicle design systems I've seen. In the writeup that tbrock originally costed, the total cost of the ship is a little over 15 million dollars, of which 1 million dollars pays for the stealth, so that's around 7% of the ship's total cost, and stealth in no way degrades the ship's performance by adding mass, or making armour less efficient.

At the very least you seem to have proven that stealth is correctly priced, since it is realtively cheap and is of only minor usefulness.

Pedantically, the correct term is dDR.

Writing DR 10 / 10 / 10 would have been wrong.

Re: [Spaceships] TL 9 Novobisirsk-class Patrol Boat
 

Silly me. I think a 7% cost hike is significant.

Indeed. That's what ought to have been recorded.

Re: [Spaceships] TL 9 Novobisirsk-class Patrol Boat
 

People! It's Novosibirsk, not Novobisirks.

Re: [Spaceships] TL 9 Novobisirsk-class Patrol Boat
 

Only in the name of the Russian city.

Re: [Spaceships] TL 9 Novobisirsk-class Patrol Boat
 

The ship is listed as being Russian. They're unlikely to make such a swap.

Re: [Spaceships] TL 9 Novobisirsk-class Patrol Boat
 

Yes, but mum's the word. The interesting novel spelling is in the thread title, where the OP can't change it.

Rationalisations are better than accurate spelling.

Re: [Spaceships] TL 9 Novobisirsk-class Patrol Boat
 

Typo in the original sheet which got transliterated across several generations of it. Things like this have happened before (Eisenhower's first and middle names got swapped when he entered the military, for instance; "Dwight" was his original *middle* name).