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Old 10-19-2019, 07:18 AM   #1
ericthered
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Default Spaceship Weapons and Gravity Layout

I'm laying out a super-science battleship for a damage control scenario, which gets more into the nitty-gritty of the ship than many other activities, and I could use some advice on how to lay the ship out.

The ship will be using artificial gravity. This is generated by grav-disks that apply either an attractive or a repulsive force to each side in a symmetric cylinder centered on the disk. Stacking a disk on each level requires changing the direction of gravity each time you pass a plate, which seems undesirable (likely at least 6 decks, if not more).

I'm thinking the ship should be long and thin so that it can present a minimal profile to opponents. I'm tentatively sticking the engines (super-science boosted reaction engines) on the other side of the minimal profile. I'm unsure if I should orient the gravity down towards the engines, so the ship is built like a rocket or sky scraper, or if I should pick a long side of the ship to be "down", and orient the thing like a naval ship.

The rocket orientation makes thrust and artificial gravity stress in the same direction, but gives a single point of failure for artificial gravity. It makes it easier to put gravity over the whole ship, but I'm not sure if that is a good thing or not. Conversely, the naval orientation looses gravity in chunks, rather than all at once, but doesn't line up with the thrust and is likely to result in corners of microgravity. Microgravity in the ship is considered a bad thing: most the crew is only passably trained for it, and when the gravity gets turned off all sorts of things come loose on a lived in ship. Does anyone have idea on how to arrange backup gravity systems? The assumption is if the gravity is out its because the grav-disk generating it has been hit, so a nearby backup isn't an option.

I'm trying to figure out the layout of the guns. My two initial ideas are putting the main turrets all on one long side of the ship, sloped towards the front. This is to allow the ship to concentrate fire in one direction. The other option is to slope all of the sides towards the front and place the main turrets all the way around the ship. Point defense guns will need to be fairly evenly distributed around the ship, though putting extra in the same direction as the main turrets is likely a good idea. I'm also unsure if there is is a benefit to orienting turrets in a specific direction with regards to gravity.

The ship has shields, so armor layout isn't as important as it might be, though structural integrity and relative compactness is still nice. And the ship will still be getting hit.

What am I missing? How would you lay out the ship? Thanks for the advice!
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