Shipbucket

Inspired by the fantastic ship designs here, I made an effort to apply Shipbucket's attention to the finest detail on some personal work on Juniorgeneral called "the Metaverse," a collaboration of different empires all collected into one AU, in particular the naval ships of my personal empire, Scetoria. (The scale is 1 pixel per meter.) Here's the first ship and a bit of back story:





The Empire of Scetoria is a power to be reckoned with in the Metaverse, and a major reason why is the power of her navy. As opposed to the other human empires of the Metaverse, whose ships focused on tough armor and powerful broadsides, the Imperial Scetorian Navy came to focus on long-range sensors and devastating missile salvos. After generations of research and development the Imperial Navy has formed into a force capable of taking on any opponent, with missile barrages capable of crippling an enemy from beyond the range of even their most powerful sensors. Scetorian captains can also fight in close using their Magnetic Accelerator Cannon, the massive coilgun aligned down the ship's prow. Though often viewed as a weapon of last resort, the MAC is the space-borne equivalent of a shotgun firing a deer slug, and many a ship has used its MAC to deadly effect in battle.

Without question, the pride of the Imperial Navy is the Victory Class battleship. The very first design to incorporate the now standard "three-tier" hull design, a base "cruise" hull with hard-points for attaching external armor plate on vital areas ("turtle") and external missile pods ("barrage"), the Victory Class quickly supplanted and eventually replaced the difficulty-ridden Illustrious Class carrier as the primary capital ship of the Imperial Navy, and served as the model for further Scetorian ship design and development.

184 views, and zero comments.

I'll take the hint.

What do you want us to say?
We can't comment on it's feasibility because we don't know how the Metaverse's internal logic works. (Or doesn't as the case may be)

Apologies in advance for a dumb question but I'm not quite sure what you mean by internal logic; as the different powers or as in the different technologies or something else?

Well, how does your handwavium work?
All alternative universes are based on a series of base assumptions that explains why for instance huge spaceships are the primary way of fighting.
Does anti-gravity exist and what is its limitations. That kind of thing.
Of course a lot of universes doesn't actually make sense even by their own internal logic. (I'm looking at you Gundam)

Thanks for the clarification; I'll try to explain as much as I can.

Well, as the story goes the Metaverse was once part of the outer fringe of a vast Earth-based empire so large it essentially fractured under its own weight leaving the various powers to their own devices. This empire left behind a series of gateways connecting the various systems, meaning that each system had a set number of entrances and bottlenecks. Coupled with a lack of faster-than-light travel, this lead to a general focus (at least among the humans) on large, heavy ships with guns, armor, and strike craft to fight set-piece fleet actions.

As far as most of these base assumptions go I can only really speak for Scetoria as each empire is the work of a different designer and in-context none of the empires is very willing to share secrets with the others. Scetoria's focus on long, narrow ships came out of a war with a power with massive orbital defenses, so her designs came to focus on aligning the main armament along the bow and minimizing a ships target profile from the direct front; missiles became her primary weaponry during a later war with a laser-based alien power in order to engage the enemy ships from beyond laser range to avoid being (literally) melted away.

Scetoria doesn't really have anti-gravity; ships can slowly descend into an atmosphere to about the hight of airline's cruising altitude, but mainly rely on orbital structures or smaller transports to get things to the surface. The smaller transports' engines are somewhat anti-gravity, but the mechanisms inside them do not respond well to bullets, so in combat they rely more on safety in numbers than on armor or the ability to take punishment. Artificial gravity is common in ships, though I'm still working out how exactly it's generated. As Scetoria's navy prefers to fight with missiles from longer range, her ships have comparatively little armor, and thus the hard-points to attach additional armor plate over vital areas as well as external missile pods for more ammunition.

Frankly many of these assumptions are due to early choices I made based on aesthetics that I'm later having to come up with concrete reasons to justify, so I would not be surprised if some (i.e. artificial gravity) don't make much sense. These are all I can think of for now but if there's something I've left out feel free to bring it up.

Nicholas