Deus [ex Machina] : Titan Hybrid Carrier

[Edymnion]

Welp, been working on a new titan lately, and its finally coming along enough to show off a bit.





Goal I'm shooting for is a double hybrid, hopefully I can pull it off. I say double hybrid as I am attempting to build it as a both a hybrid armor/shield tank, and as a gunboat/carrier combination.



Build strategy at the moment is standard armor outer hull, layer of thrusters, another layer of standard armor hull, another layer of thrusters, layer of shield capacitors, probably another layer of thrusters... basically making an onion of armor and less than critical systems to protect said critical systems in the core of the ship.

Also trying to make the important systems more distributed than I have in the past. The long arms in there are secondary reactor lines surrounded by capacitors, and the box in the middle is a primary reactor encased in advanced armor. Also has some shield generators and capacitors in the reactor to make it solid, as well as to keep a hardened set of emergency shields/power. Will need docked reactors, planning on coating each of those in advanced armor and giving them their own shields as well. Ideally I'd like to have this thing capable of hanging in fully active right up to the point it overheats. No single must have area that can take the entire ship down on a lucky shot, and enough alternate routes for things like the single large capacitor bank that its highly unlikely even a gaping hole in the side will be able to dramatically sever power reserves. And anything deemed mission critical (such as primary weapon arrays) will be individually encased in advanced armor.

Advanced is too heavy for my tastes to make primary hull out of, so I'm basically reserving it for point hardening.



So far I've installed the small and mid-range turrets on the front half, along with an ungodly number of PDTs. The larger cannons are combination Cannon/Overdrive and Cannon/Cannon/Stop, while the smaller ones on the sides of the neck are just Cannon/Overdrive. The missile turrets are 4 Missile/Cannon/Explosive arrays per turret (with their own individual computer setups to save on power), and are self powered (unlike the cannons) due to the energy requirements for them.

Planning on having the BFG turrets be Missile/Beam and Missile/Pulse set to Target:Focus, while if you noticed the spiked collar bit going on around the ship's neck those are where a massive 50+ array logic'ed heatseeker system is going in. Not exactly something a carrier is going to want to use when it means blowing your own fleet out of the sky, but it should do well either in case of going up against another drone carrier (logic fire them all to send 500+ heatseekers at a time out to sweep up) or as a weapon of last resort (screw it, everything in a 2 sector radius has to die RIGHT NOW!)



The two small secondary bays in the nose hold 4 of my 200 mass drone fighters each (armed with Cannon/Overdrive and Missile/Cannon/Ion), but I'm planning on putting two large primary bays out on either side that should hopefully hold a dozen standard fighters and two or three heavy fighters/small light cruisers each.

Primary tactic is essentially to use this titan as battlefield control. Oppressive amounts of PDTs (I believe there are currently over 30 on just the front half of the ship so far) means nobody but me gets to use missiles, while my fighters and turrets spray out massive amounts of rapid dumbfire to hopefully overwhelm the other guy's point defense so the BFG nukes can find their marks. All the while the machine gun stop turrets are pinning things to the sky long enough for the overdrive cannons to punch corridor size holes in them, or the missile turrets to pound them.

And who knows, probably toss a couple of heavy cruisers in the fleet that don't dock just for giggles.

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Turret lag is going to be terrible on this thing, I know that going in. But I'm building the ship I want to have and hoping that it won't be made completely obsolete by the time optimizations come through to make it work the way it should.

Should have plenty of extra space in there for enough general purpose empty rooms that staffing it with crew when they come out won't be an issue... I hope...

Still debating on equipping it with mining drones or not. Mining drones can't salvage overheating ships at the moment, but surely they will some day. I'd hate to warp in, blow everybody up, and then have to sit there and watch everything vanish from overheating and waste those delicious blocks.

 

[kiddan]

Looks cool and, being a hybrid, it should (hopefully) work very well too! Mining drones would probably be a good investment, if they don't come at a great cost why not invest in a possible future feature?

One thing though, isn't it less efficient to have those power capacitors in tubes like that instead of flat planes?

 

[terra mining corp.]

incredible build Edymnion,hope I never meet on the field of valor! there would be nubecube chunks everywhere!:D

 

[Edymnion]

One thing though, isn't it less efficient to have those power capacitors in tubes like that instead of flat planes?

Power capacitors multiply based on total number of blocks in a single group. Long as its all contiguous, it doesn't matter what shape they are in. Single massive blocks in once centralized place are a single point of failure for a missile strike to vaporize large amounts of your power capacity. I'm hoping with this build with the tubes surrounding the secondary reactor lines that cross link the capacitors in multiple points, that the ship can take a massive break in multiple points without doing any serious damage to my reserves. Long as one pathway remains viable, the entire power network stays up.

 

[AtraUnam]

"I say double hybrid as I am attempting to build it as a both a hybrid armor/shield tank, and as a gunboat/carrier combination."
something something Chimera convention.

 

[Madman198237]

Interesting idea.....the drones better be really darn good, because standard armor is asking to get wrecked. It can't absorb the sort of hits you'll be taking from cannon or beam fire.

That or the shields had better be able to take on a gamma ray burster and survive. Because if they can't, you're toast.

 

[Edymnion]

Interesting idea.....the drones better be really darn good, because standard armor is asking to get wrecked. It can't absorb the sort of hits you'll be taking from cannon or beam fire.

That or the shields had better be able to take on a gamma ray burster and survive. Because if they can't, you're toast.

I prefer shield tanks to armor tanks, honestly, so yeah its going to be heavy on shields. I just don't want it to be pure wet tissue paper when the shields go down. And I can always go back and replace with advanced armor in the future if I really need to.

Got the mining drones installed, and glad I did them. For one, they make for great hull decoration:



And there is something just so oddly satisfying about watching the drone slide into a perfectly shaped slot.

 

[ltmauve]

Wait, aren't you supposed to use shield capacitors as system armor? Because once the shields are down, they don't do anything for the next ten seconds, whereas thrusters are still useful for initiating a GTFO maneuver.

Though I do like the power lines idea.

 

[StarWars1981]

The more spread out your systems are, the better off you are.
And yeah, I agree with ltmauve, shields are less useful than thrusters at that point.
And standard is waaaaayy too light for that ship, it'll never deflect the tiniest amount of damage from the weapons a Titan will face.
Plus you're not getting THAT thing going anywhere fast. Sorry, just too big. But you know that :P .
However, it is less expensive, which is a bonus, although if you're operating on that scale ... I'd take the extra survivability any day.

Nice looking setup, and I love the mining drones. Just don't let one undock prematurely ... that would be a problem.
While working with Madman on a cruiser, he was building a turret. I come back from something to the message that "Hey, I'm in another sector and flying away at 250m/s. Come get me please."
I DON'T NEED A JUMPDRIVE, I'VE GOT THE CLIPDRIVE!

 

[AtraUnam]

I disagree about the armor being too soft. a thick layer of standard armor is overall better than a thinner layer of advanced armor.

 

[Madman198237]

ONLY if you're concerned with weight, not space, and only expecting to get hit with missiles with limited spread damage (I.E., no explosive effect), which would mean that the damage is wasted on a cheaper piece of armor (Assuming the alpha block is the only one that can be destroyed, but the missile can destroy any block that it hits).

However, at the size of a titan, forget the weight, if you can build a titan then you ought to be able to build it out of advanced armor, and you should certainly do it to increase survivability.