07.437.M39

We’ve spent the last 9 months enjoying our stay at Accatran. A few exchanges back and forth with the shipwrights asking about my preferences on a few of the finer choices. The hulls have already begun being constructed. Doesn’t look like anything much yet.

The majority of the hulks have been tugged into the system. The salvage fleet is reportedly on the way back with the last remaining hulks.

The Magi shipwrights being so willing to entertain ‘reasonable’ ideas for the Slaughter-Class that we brought in has had me thinking without fear I’ll be lobotomized for it.

Thus most of my ‘productive’ time outside the bedroom has been spent planning out which ork system to farm next. As well as playing around with ship hulls trying to come up with a ‘long range’ patrol vessel.

The frigates have the performance but are lacking in endurance. They’re intended as escorts. This forces them to stay on short-safe routes or to as the name implies escort transports or other vessels they can resupply from.

What if the Imperium had a ship that had frigate performance. Acceleration, speed, firepower, maneuverability, cost, etc yet had the endurance to go on long range patrols? I can see a lot of uses for such a vessel. It could be used as a substitute in a role that a lot of light cruisers are used for. Yet with a higher combat efficiency and ~2.5x less mass.

I’ve been looking at the base hull cost of clippers, cruisers, raiders and frigates trying to find the right hull to use as a starting point for the job. Eliminating anything that doesn’t meet a minimum speed threshold.

All of the raiders are pretty much eliminated by default. They’re simply too small for the type of ship role I’m envisioning.

Trying to do it with a frigate doesn’t work. They’re pretty much all designed with the Imperial Navy in mind. High crew requirement. Cramped spaces. They’re ½ the size of a Clipper. There’s not much room to work with.

I’ve narrowed it down to the Orion Star Clipper and Dauntless Light Cruiser hulls sort of do it but they’re both missing the ‘it’ factor.

The dauntless sort of meets the minimum speed cut off. I’d really prefer it to be able to reach speeds 15-40% faster to increase the safety margin. It would also need a weapon layout rework.

Keeping with 3 weapon batteries and going to 2 dorsal 1 keel would go a long way towards justifying the material cost. 20 megatonnes. Although it wouldn’t really free up light cruisers, just make it better at a role.

The Orion for sure meets the speed requirements. Its default weapon placement is also acceptable. The problem it has is that it’s been designed as a transport. So while it’s twice the length of a tempest frigate it actually has ~5% less space allocated for components. The rest is made up of cargo holds.

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If it were possible to utilize the space and power for components instead? From a purely volume and power that’s available on that hull size you could afford to run some more powerful components assuming they fit.

Could it accept some of the smaller light cruiser and cruiser plasma drives? Those produce significantly more power.

Assuming they fit I would try to install triple or quad void shields. That would go a long way to mitigating survivability concerns due to their anemic amount of armor.

Once again strictly from a volume and power requirement I don’t see why they shouldn’t. From what I can see the largest restriction for the use of the better void shields isn’t so much size as it is power requirements. Oh and cost. Penny pinching fucks.

Where using the clipper as a base for the role is a real advantage is the material cost. 8 megatonnes. If the cargo hold space can be utilized for components and it can accept a more powerful plasma drive the clipper is my pick.

I drew up quite a few variants using both hulls as a base before presenting them to father and Magos Delta.

I’m not a shipwright, an architect or an artist by any stretch. It’s mostly just a list of proposed changes. Questions if it’s possible and then additional changes if it is. Repeated for each iteration.

As much as I would love to cram the largest plasma drive and as many laser batteries as possible onto the smallest fastest hull achievable.

I keep my delusions of grandeur restrained. Proposing an ultra fast, long range patrol ship with 8 laser batteries and quad void shields will likely not lead me anywhere good. Status quo is a thing. Don’t rock the boat…..for now.

They see the merit in the concept and green light me bringing it up with the Magi shipwrights. Father even went so far as to say that if some of these concepts based on the clipper are viable that commissioning 12-16 of them wouldn’t be out of the question.

I’m smart though so I pester talk to the junior Magos (Theta-Nu-4. Theta) assigned to us first.

The guy is quite helpful. He is able to make a much better approximation of what is and isn’t possible. Yea no strapping a full on cruiser plasma drive to a clipper. He’s confident that light cruiser drives will fit with little to no modification.

He didn’t do it right then but was confident that the cargo hold could be entirely repurposed. It would be a more significant interior reword and take some time. A lot of things would need to move and shift around to properly utilize the space.

Most of the clipper ideas are still on the table. After seeing what was still available option wise depending on the final result we’d be interested in commissioning some. He even asked before running the suggestion through his superiors for review. No stealing knowledge I guess.

It was only a couple weeks later that Father, Magos Delta, Magos Theta and I were in a hololith meeting with the Lead Magos Shipwright I’d met previously.

The ‘simple’ changes were sort of a big deal. Who would have guessed?

Putting in the simplest of light cruiser plasma drives and utilizing the cargo hold would result in 55% more power and 15% more space available for components. The more expensive plasma drive option would increase it to 25% more space. More space could also be gained if we were willing to reduce working and crew space. I wasn’t.

The fun part is that if the interior were to be reworked anyway they could indeed be made to fit quad void shields. Doing so wouldn’t even take up all the increased power and space either.

I want them for our dynasty. Father wants them for our dynasty. In the presented configuration they would be ~10% slower than my current configuration. Still plenty fast and it would have significantly more shields.

Downside to this clipper variant is that it’s not a simple component swap. Even if we had all the clipper hulls it wouldn’t reduce lead time. The entire interior needs to be rebuilt. It’s actually faster to build a new one than to modify an existing one. Father put in an order for 16 “Starr-Class Heavy Frigates”. Building in 4 batches of 4 hulls. It’s projected to take 4 years per build cycle.

With the rework the clippers could in the future be utilized for some types of cargo. It would be highly compartmentalized instead of a single main hold but it would still be doable. This just increases the viability of the variant as far as we’re concerned.

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