Fireship-Class Spacecraft

General Class History

Role: Firefight Equality

The Fireship Class of space vessels is a unique design known only to exist within the Republican Space Force itself. Whilst trials of the Wellington Class spaceships were more than satisfactory, with the design aiming to be the RSFs main offensive craft in space for many years to come, it has been noticed that although the Wellington Class can engage and destroy most Modern and Postmodern spacevessels of its size and design, its ability to engage Future technological vessels is severly lacking. In trials, the Wellington Class was able to only engage an FT craft of its own size for a few minutes before being destroyed. With these results in mind, and with technological restrictions also in mind, the Fireship Class vessel was designed.
The primary, and indeed only, role of the Fireship Class is to come within several hundred metres of an enemy FT vessel, even under the heaviest of fire. The large cache of explosives contained within the structure of the Fireship will then be detonated, triggering an explosion. In theory, this explosion will either destroy the enemy vessel, or cripple it to such an extent that Republican Capital Ships can then close and deliver the coup de grace, eliminating the vessel entirely. At the very least, the detonation may bring down enemy shields and disrupt key systems, allowing Republican Capital Ships to engage the enemy at more an advantage. The Fireship itself is guided by remote sensor link through standard scrambled radio waves that are automatically changed every half-second to avoid interference, and an emergency back-up system using a narrow laserbeam.

Class Details

The Fireship Class is based upon the converted frame of the Saertech, and as such has nearly the same specifications as this Class, with a few external and obviously internal modifications. The fact that the vessels do not require a crew mean that more room can be given to the placing of explosives and extra layers of armour, as well as ensuring that human error does not compromise the mission of the Class.

The Saertech Class vessel is a small design by the Republican Space Force, and is based partly upon existing models of Terran Space Shuttles. A main section roughly rectangular in shape is tapered down with slight and gradual curves to the fore of the body to create an arched shape. Connected to the sides of the main body, approximately two-thirds of the way down, are the two main wings. Curved outwards and aerodynamically designed to reduce shear and friction, these act in concert with two smaller wings in the same position on the top of the main fuselage to control the craft.
The rear of the craft houses the main Ion engines, and the two engine ports, stationed either side of the small reactor. The engine ports are mainly integrated into the main fuselage, although two slim rectangular ports exist at the rear for expelling gases and waste, as well as aiding propulsion. These ports are shielded by a single layer of kevlar-covered titanium for heat absorption and protection. Ion polymers were to be added, but it was believed that the heat generated by the ports would destroy the coating, so none is present.

Since the Fireship Class is essentially a suicide vessel, it has been decided that any offensive weaponry apart from the load it carries would be superflouous. As such, the Missile Cells and Laser Points have been stripped away and filled in, as have the landing struts and wheels; all unnecessary equipment has been stripped from the frame and ultimately replaced with either armour or explosives.

Specifications of Fireship Class

The Saertech Class is twenty-two metres in length, eight metres in height and twelve metres in width. The majority of the craft is taken up by the Cockpit and weapons systems. A small engineering section is partitioned in the rear, and access can be made to the weapon systems, although this is via a series of crawlways and ducts and not recommended when the craft is in motion. However, for the Fireship Class, the weapons systems have been stripped away, as has the majority of the engineering crawlways, as these are needed only in dock to prepare the vessel for engagement. The rest of the interior section of the craft has been stripped clean of equipment to make room for the conventional explosives and five megaton nuclear warheads placed together as the main charge of the vessel.

Decks

Deck One: Cockpit, Engineering Section, Detonation System, Reactor/Engines

Power/Propulsion

One Fission Nuclear Reactor
Two Main Engines - Rear of Craft - One Reactor for both Engines
Reactor used for powering life support and weapons systems
Secondary conventional power source - Solid fuel via secondary fuel systems
Tertiary Emergency Battery Power - Landing/Docking only
Retarding motors - Front of Craft - With sliding covers for protection
Nuclear Thermal Scramjets for atmosphere/stratosphere propulsion

Dimensions

Length: 40 feet
Span: 12 feet
Height: 8 feet

Weapons

Offensive

Two Micro-Tungsten Missile Cells. Thirty Missiles per Cell. Fifty percent armed with fragmentation warheads. Primarily designed to ensure that fighters and smaller crafts do not cause premature detonation of cargo.


Defensive

Four Gatling Point-Defense Hardpoints for KEV defense. Offensive use against enemy fighters as ssecondary roles
PMT 'Chaff' for KEVs and Missiles
Anti-Radar 'Snow', Static for missile-defence

Armour

Mixture of Reinforced Concrete layered with titanium composites and kevlar, ie an armour going like this:

Kevlar/Titanium/Ceramics/Reinforced Concrete/Ceramics/Titanium/Kevlar

Crew

Initial versions of the Fireship-Class will not possess crewmembers and will instead be operated via pre-input guidance data updated constantly via a microburst digital wave from the launching vessel, most likely a Centurion-Class vessel. Secondary systems of pre-programmed but unchangeable coordinates will ensure redundancy for targeting enemy vessel if jamming of primary carrier wave commences, although accuracy will be highly impaired. Essentially in this condition, the vessel will become a large, unguided and dumb bomb set to detonate when motion detectors detect a suitably large mass near them.

Price

Not available to purchase - However, the entire project, spread over the next five years, will cost around $200 Billion USD, mainly due to the cost of the multipel nuclear warheads used for each vessel, and will be built in the newly-built Praetonia-Class Spaceyard above the Republic.

Suicide ships, eh? I'm assuming you're not crazy enough to actually have these piloted by humans? Looks like a pretty good concept, but I will suggest lathering as much armor as possible onto this thing, as it's gonna have a hell of a time getting close enough to blow itself to kingdom come, and we don't want it going off early.

I would go with manymanymany multimegaton thermonuclear shells instead of suicide ships...

Cheaper.

PS: Several minutes? Sounds more like an equal opponent...

Couple of points, which actually go for all your designs, which I like very much!

First of all, no one's going to be using radar to find you. Your engine flares will be MORE than big enough... even with simple optics I can estimate the velocity and mass of the plume, see how fast the plumes source is moving, and estimate youir ship's mass from that, which makes decoys and jamming pretty useless.

Second, nukes are remarkably weak in space... in order to be effective even for point defence, you'll want megaton range weapons, simply because otherwise your counter-missile will need to come within a few meters of the target. Which is unlikely.

Further, given sensor ranges in space, you don't even need very powerful lasers for clearing debris... vaporizing a few milimeters of the object should be sufficient to deflect it nicely.

Your missiles don't need warheads... their velocity will do enough damage, unless you want them to blossom into fragments before impact to improve the chances of a hit. Remember, at 10kps, a kg of metal has as much KE as a kg of TNT has explosive energy.

Thanks for the comments, real kind of you.

Yeah, I guess the chaff etc is redundant, but I keep it on there mainly for sentimental reasons. Plus if it has to go into an atmosphere for some insane reason, they might be marginally effective for a few seconds.

Plus...I just realised I never actually finished this because of essays. I have essays now, but I've got ten minutes. I'll try and finish it now