Comparative Shipbuilding in the Expanse

Part of a series of lectures prepared for the Interbranch Training and Skills Group, Neue Silesian Bureau of Defense and presented by Captain Hans Flaubeck, DSF in 2193.
Translated from the original German by Open Translationsoft release 15.694.1.

Thank you all for coming here again. I'm afraid that today's seminar is going to be a bit drier and more technical than last week's on the basics of space combat. We'll be discussing the various different design ethos used by the major blocs in known space, a bit of history and the ramifications. We'll be starting with the very dawn of what we can properly call a 'space warship' and then the dominant design lineages.

The first 'true' extra-atmospheric warships were built in something of a hurry in the twenty-eighties, when the pervasiveness of feral drones became clear. The Treaty of Shanghai had set up an admitedly creaky framework to avoid competition and the weaponizing of space but subsentient machines don't care about treaties. These early attempts were little more than civilian spacecraft factory-modified to replace cargo bays with railguns and, after the Treaty of Calcutta, chemically-powered nuclear missile silos. By the turn of the century these early experiments had given way to something that vaguelly resembled a modern warship. Iconic of this era is the Canopus system defense ship.

• Hologram of the white-painted hull of the HMS Terror at the Imperial War Museum Orbital Annex, the blue and white shield of Earth visible below and behind it*

Warships of this era existed primarily to keep the spacelanes clear of feral drones. While there was always the possibility of them being used against other nations' assets, a gentlemen's agreement between most of the big powers kept weapons firmly pointed at alien machinery. Despite their sterling service for two decades, the Canopus and similar ships were rendered obselescent by both improving technology and expanding frontiers. In fact, most of these early system defense ships never saw Earth again after being launched, their numbers slowly attrited by mechanical failures, scrappage and the occasional combat loss as they were moved ever deeper into the frontier. Many of them ended up in the Rim - of course it wasn't called that back then, at least not officially - filling the same role they'd been designed for, two hundred lights from Earth.

• Hologram of the HMS Terror replaced by the fleet assembled for the EU's 150th anniversary. Over two hundred warships were present, including the mammoth EUS Hood.*

The ships doing this pushing were the battlewagons built in the twenties through the fourties. Compared to the lumbering system patrollers of the turn of the century, they were larger, faster, tougher and more powerful. Many, such as the American-designed MacArthurs, had integral craft-handling facilities for warcraft. This culminated in the space-carriers that dominated the past half-century of American Naval doctrine and inspired ZOCU warships.

This generation is also where we can start to see meaningful divergence in purpose and organizational composition. For comparison, our arm was relatively linear and most major worlds had a catapult connection. Organization of the fleet at time meant that local defense was primarily the domain of local, national forces and an emphasis was placed upon taking and then holding space. The DSF was tasked solely with frontier and offensive work. As a consequence, two broad design lineages proliferated. The first was essentially a continuation of the system defense ethos of the Canopus and were powerful but short-ranged ships. The epitome of this was the Cambria heavy cruiser. The 'Rocks', as they're known in the fleet, were and remain some of the toughest warships in known space.

By contrast, ships designed for the DSF were much more oriented towards an outwards-facing, offensive stance. They were the 'take' side of the 'take and hold' equation and unlike ships in use down the PACT or Chinese arms, as a whole they were built for little else. With national fleets taking up a substantive chunk of the pan-European budget and a mandate to remove hostile drones or potentially engage in offensive actions against hostile nations, the DSF simply could not afford to invest in multi-role ships like the the MacArthurs. Thus the Drake series of battleships were designed from the keel up to dominate any battle-line engagement they were to join. Of course they had external hardpoints and had a modicum of flexibility and their spaceframe and engineering was the basis for the successful Richelieu long-range battlecruisers, but these were the exceptions, not the rule. By and large, anything not strictly relating to black-sky engagements was pushed onto civilian-grade support craft or onto Lepanto variants.