Shiptype Suggestion: Pocket Battleship

[Felix von Lüchow]

Greetings! It is I, Felix, once more coming with suggestions. This time, I've prepared a small presentation related to a problem that is much bemoaned, but nobody seems to want to act on: the lackluster diversity in ship types and holes in the settler ship lineup. There are a number of suggestions I have for new ship types, both buildable and credit ships. For the sake of brevity, I'm only going to present one ship in this post, the Pocket Battleship.

The term "pocket battleship", was coined a few years before WW2, and was used by some in the British press to refer to the Kriegsmarine's Deutschland-class heavy cruisers due to their disproportionate armament of six 11-inch guns. However, for ingame purposes I would use the term to describe what is basically a downscaled (STNE) Iowa-class, as I believe the jump in cost and combat power from the Bandari-class to the Iowa-class is simply too great to justify in any believable way. As such, I have come up with a pair of ship types to fill the role of the pocket battleship.


As the Rei'Kon-class is a generally strong combat ship on its own, I had decided to create a pocket battleship based on it. Sacrifing all fighter-carrying capacity and half of its cargo bay, the Rei'Kon Type B uses the freed up space to heavily increase hull strength, armour, and shielding while also mounting more phasers, disruptors, and even a quartet of comparatively weak antiproton cannons.

https://i.imgur.com/JAv52RN.png
Rei´Kon Type B
(Pocket Battleship)

Slots: 13
Crew: 100 (100)
Limit: ##
Limit-Group: ##

Hull: 1200
Armor: 7
Shields: 1000

EPS: 1200
Main Energy: 2400
Reactor: 300 {}
Core Capacity: 20000
Flight Range: 50
Deflector: 400
Deflector/Tick: 40
Cargo Bay: 1000
Beam Capacity: 20

Disruptor: 10x 18|18
Antiproton Cannon: 4x 120|120 80%
Phaser: 10x 8|8 -85%
EMP Torpedo: 6x 28|0|28
Photon Torpedo: 6x 10|10
Plasma Torpedo: 6x 24|24
Quantum Torpedo: 6x 28|28
Polaron Torpedo: 6x 0|10
Nemesis Torpedo: 6x 30|0
Evasion 5%

Solar panels
System Blockade
LRS Range 5
13 Required Hangar Slots
6 Energy Travel Cost
600 Torpedo Capacity



With the Rei'Kon Type B's stats set up, and a sprite assembled I looked to the Amaterasu-class heavy carrier for the settler version's sprite as it too is a 15-slot warship. I decided to give this ship a slightly different layout of weapons, to seperate it from its credit competitor.

https://i.imgur.com/EQqki7m.png
Cormorant-class
(Pocket Battleship)

Slots: 15
Crew: 120 (100)

Hull: 1000
Armor: 6
Shields: 1000

EPS: 1000
Main Energy: 2000
Reactor: 250 {}
Core Capacity: 18000
Flight Range: 45
Deflector: 400
Deflector/Tick: 40
Cargo Bay: 800
Beam Capacity: 10

Pulse Phaser: 8x 24|24 15%
Antiproton Cannon: 2x 180|180 90%
Phaser: 8x 8|8 -85%
EMP Torpedo: 8x 28|0|28
Photon Torpedo: 8x 10|10
Plasma Torpedo: 8x 24|24
Quantum Torpedo: 8x 28|28
Polaron Torpedo: 8x 0|10
Nemesis Torpedo: 8x 30|0
Evasion -30%

System Blockade
LRS Range 3
15 Required Hangar Slots
9 Energy Travel Cost
400 Torpedo Capacity


If need be, I can easily translate any of my suggestions into German, as I'm a native speaker.

[Jarok]

Hey, I really like the idea of a smaller battleship - but it shouldn't have to be an allrounder, I'd like an AA focused cruiser, based on the Rei'kon more - development in navies' (in human history) were often need-based - and at the moment are the fighter bombers a bit to strong in comparison to big ships, so based on historic evidence (especially the U.S.A against Japan) I'd say something like this would make more sense (no numbers given):

- high accuracy beam weapons (for example 15 weapon slots available)
- one big gun (cost: 15 weapon slots)
- a few side guns (disruptor) (4 weapon slots or so - big gun is not used and the beam weapon gets some use)
- Torpedo's are high cost munition, having a lot of them makes sense, but being able to throw them around is not realistic, or practical in war scenarios - historically a pocket battleship did not have many torpedo tubes and even those (edit:// with torpedo tubes) were rare in comparison, because the ship itself wasn't agile enough to use them effectively.

The specializition is important in my opinion, to always have a 'big' allrounder is like playing a druid in world of warcaft classic - it's balanced, but there's no real defense against one thing, or use against something big in crisis scenarios. Ressources are generally limited, especially if you're loosing a war, so I think development in new ships should reflect that.

Just my two cents
Khoal