DARKSTAR CAMPAIGN UPDATE: DUCHESS ANNABEL’S WAR IS OVER

Okay, now it’s time to start drawing this baby out (PS14, after concept sketches the old fashioned way just to hammer out ideas).

First, we have the 12-gigawatt rail gun turrets.  As naval historians may have guessed, the Scharnhorst’s three triple turrets are inspired by the 11-inch triple turrets of the historical Scharnhorst in WW2.

Then, the smaller 6-gigawatt rail guns, and the 35mm paint defense arrays.

Okay, no more teasing.  Here is the full ship layout.  Again, she looks huge, not quote three-quarters length of an Imperial II class star destroyer in Star Wars.  But in Darkstar, she is a lightweight for a battleship.  They come much, much bigger than this.  The Scharnhorst class is built for speed, the classic “battlecruiser” that can outrun whatever she can’t outshoot.

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A few design features, some “military,” some “game required,” others purely for aesthetics.

First we have the prow.  As you may have seen from other older drawings in this thread, our Prussian ships have that classic WW1-inspired “Kaiser Prow” with the forward-swept bow.  Here, the Scharnhorst has a much more sleek version, but the design concept and influence is still there.  Also note where I’ve tried to give the mass driver batteries the widest possible arcs … fore and aft, port and starboard, ventral and dorsal.  Space combat is in three dimensions, after all.

Next is the stern, where we see her two port engines, more mass driver protection (more on the aft quarters, most enemy commanders like to aim torpedoes at the stern of a ship to get at reactors and engines) , along with maneuvering thrusters to provide lateral movement and turning ability.

Note that in Darkstar, the ion thrust of these engines is managed not through “pipes and nozzles,” but through superconducting containment field magnets.  This allows the thrust to be vented with equally forwards or backwards, so ships can decelerate as easily as they can accelerate (helps with game design/ mechanics when the players apply thrust points in the movement phase).

The round objects you see are the shield generators.  There are six locations for these on most ships, bow, stern, port bow, starboard bow, port quarter, starboard quarter.

The large fin you see (and elsewhere on the ship) are gravity rudders.  By applying a slight bend to the  curved space-time that allows these ships to have artificial gravity, gravitic shielding, and even their limited FTL travel, they can also assist with maneuvering by bending the space they’re actually travelling through, especially important since these ships usually fight battles at 15-30 kps and cruise at 30-100 kps.

Also, this keeps the ships moving and turning in a predominantly “forward” direction, maintaining a bit of a “space opera” feel rather than a strict Newtonian movement system where ships could theoretically move sideways as easily as any other direction.

Top view of the primary forward gun deck, with “Anton” 12GW turret and superfiring 6GW secondary battery turret.  Again, some 40% of the ship’s weapons are mounted on the ventral “underside” of the ship as well, so the ship can semi-plausibly fight in a 3D combat environment.

Note the mass drivers are on large pylons (those are probably about the size of a five-story building) so the guns have the best possible field of fire against enemy fighters, bombers, missiles, or torpedoes no matter which direction from which they might be approaching.

More maneuvering thrusters, more shield projectors (port and starboard bow mountings).

The only thing left now is to see how well this ship does in combat!  😀