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 Intelligence 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.

Outside the Union, the concept of the 'System Control Ship' was gaining traction. This was against the backdrop of general sovereignity-seeking on the part of both China and the US and their political committments to enforce the agreed-upon laws of space outside of the main colonized arms. The more thinly-spread nature of these sorts of deployments meant that the intrinsic inefficiencies of all-role ships was less critical than the mission value of having hulls capable of responding to any contingency when substantive reinforcements were potentially too far away to arrive before a crisis had been resolved for good or ill. As a consequence greater emphasis was placed on mobile, deployable assets. Thus, the MacArthurs and the series of Chinese system control ships were built in large numbers.

• Plan view of a MacArthur with an itemized list of onboard craft, weapons and troops as compared to a Drake.

The Sukarno Crisis was another critical factor in extra-Union developments. ASEAN almost split into its constitutent nations and as a result the big powers began to take the idea of a space war against other human nations seriously. Various programs were instituted and by the '30s we began to see the first 'proper' carriers. Longer-term projects to develop new technologies such a particle acceleration weapons were likewise exiting the labs in the '40s. Think-tanks proposed forward-looking changes to fleet organization and operations, such as the USASF's 'Fleet 2170' proposal.

The Chinese had been fighting a running insurgency against exhuman breakaways for a good decade including a few minor skirmishes against rebuilt freighters when a cell operating on Shanxi released the Breakdown virus and completely disrupted space travel. The bulk of spacefleets that weren't irrecoverable out in the Rim found themselves redundant and all those plans for improved generations of ships were summarily scrapped. For the next developments in warship lineages we need to go into the Expanse.

• Gun camera shot of a Minkowskan Sacrament gunship undocking from what can be recognized as a heavily modifed Eta-class jumpfreighter, dated 2174.

The most intensive development during the Breakdown was during the League-Magnate war. The particulars of this drawn-out conflict forced both sides to mostly use very size-limited craft developed as outgrowths of system defense craft. They were delivered into a conflict system by external means and relied on other vessels or groundside stations to provide long-term deployment options. But as spare parts for major components could often be months away at the end of an unreliable logistic trail, these craft were also designed to be rugged and austere.

Economics also played a part. Neither the League nor, as we understand, the Magnates had a substantial high-tech industry at the time and cutting-edge technologies like defensive fields were extravagant expenses that fit poorly when the war economies of either side were struggling to extract sufficient delta dust for bulky 1st gen jump drives until quite late in the war. Weaponry also remained conservative, with more mechanically reliable low-velocity massdrivers and missile barrage systems dominating.

With a legacy fleet poorly suited for long-duration operations the League has also begun to re-evaluate some of its fundamental assumptions. Modern League warships still clearly show these roots, though their size has expanded considerably and modern technologies and expanded fields of operations have begun to allow for a broader range of functional concepts. The Magnates have taken a broadly similar route, though government policies have made it difficult to draw an accurate portrait of the details of their recent shipbuilding strategies.

The other main thrust in Expanse shipbuilding techniques was the ZOCU bloc. Unlike the League and Magnates who were hit by the loss of reliable interstellar transport, the ZOCU states numbered several systems that were primary sources for both delta and theta dust. This gave them an early advantage and while their first Theta drives were kludges, they were sufficient to bring a modicum of political unity and economic interconnectedness to the zone. Bordering various known clusts of feral drones it became imperative for the Zodiac forces to build up some form of defensive fleet. With pro-independence groups having been handed a de facto victory the demands of maintaining sovereignity was also added.

The first major craft to emerge was the Spartacus cruiser. Armed with weapons shamelessly copied from the pair of Drakes trapped in Londenium in '51, they were both a triumph of domestic industry and a clear demonstration of the limits of the same. With an expected role that would require long duration patrols and bootstrapped orbital industry, sacrifices had to be made. The Spartaci were practically militarized transports without the heavy armoring and defensive systems that Earth-built ships had enjoyed since the '20s. Nonetheless they functioned sufficiently well that they set the pattern for succeeding ship classes. The Concord medium cruisers that succeeded them were even more optimized for long duration missiles, adding in a large spin gravity section for crew comfort. Even their vauted Pallada battleships betrayed this heritage with their substantial hangar bay facilities.

• Still picture of Admiral MacKenzie inside the Admirality Building captured mid-sentence in a press conference, just before the ill-fated attack of Force K into the Londenium system in 2185. The caption reads 'The flimsy armed merchantment of these illegal seperatists are hardly a threat to the British Home Fleet.'

If only if it had been as Admiral MacKenzie had so famously mis-uttered. By the time the war went hot, ZOCU had been crash-upgrading their fleets for half a decade with every possible bit of posthuman-derived, foreign-sourced or locally-developed technology they could find, afford or invent, building on the two decades they'd spent catching up with stagnant inner-world military technology. Exceeding it, even. We knew that ZOCU had deployed energy weapons en masse but in error we'd assumed they were functionally the same as our designs. Mirroring is the Intelligence term. Over seven thousand starsailors paid for our error.

• Admiral MacKenzie's haunting words were replaced by a ZOCU Concord cruiser with Londenium markings, leapmissile tubes indicating it was evidently taken in the postwar.

The Concord was and remains the most common large warship in the Zodiac fleet and is an excellent case study of Zodiac shipbuilding practice. Its primary armament are 'mega particle' cannons, coherent-matter beam weapons. These have replaced almost all other direct-fire weapons in the Zodiac arsenal and until the '86 when Zodiac forces began to use leapmissiles en masse, pretty much the only heavy weapon in service. From a naval architect's perspective, they combined the effectiveness of railcannons with most of the accuracy of a particle cannon. Coupled with high-density alpha capacitor banks and cooling systems they can shred an enemy cruiser or shoot down a volley of inbound missiles with equal facility.

Their defenses are equally sophisticated, and Zodiac designs regularly operate shield densities unseen on any Earth-built warship. The advantages of having copious posthuman technology to play with. By contrast, without anything to to reverse-engineer, Zodiac material technology straggles far behind and as a consequence, their armoring is relative light. The emphasis on active defenses also means that structurally Zodiac warships are lightly built as their naval architects were more willing to accept large voids. This circles back to the whole 'militarized transport' ethos, if anyone is taking notes.

That's not to say that the Zodiac engineers were asleep at the wheel. Quite the opposite in fact, as they simply had different priorities.

• The photo of the Concord shifts to a semitransparent engineering model. Various components appeared in color with associated labels.

The biggest was the introduction of modular hangar pods. These cubicles were sized to accept mobile suits or fighters. The innovation here is that each was a structural entity and thus formed a coherent part of the ship without opening up the giant voids that 'true' carriers have to accept. Thus while Zodiac ships weren't designed with the sort of internal cross-bracing that one would see on, say, a Cambria, their ships were substantially more structurally sound than a space carrier. Similar pods on a smaller scale were used on the Ionias for leap missile bays. Supposedly their hangar pod techniques are being analyzed with intent to potentially integrate them in to future warships for the DSF . . .

• Hologram of a stubby cruiser with a distinct lifting body shape and several turrets floating eerily a dozen or so meters above a concrete tarmac.

Technological acquisition during wartime cuts both ways, unfortunately. The Zodiacs have put two of these new Carthage-class assault ships into service, having captured the hulk of a crashed Sofia cruiser on New Mercia. As they already had a theoretical basis in gravity control it didn't take them long to copy the Sofias' gravity-resist system. I understand that the Carthage was actually designed in the early '80s and shelved when they couldn't make the required breakthroughs and then ressurected, explaining the atypically short concept-to-production period.

More generally, Zodiac deep-space combat ships also show a distinct 'kink', with ships built during the war rapidly loosing the spin-gravity section, even if they originally had one. A sensible enough choice to make the most of limited industrial output. More often than not the crews were transgenics as well, reducing the negative impacts of this. Most of these ships have since been placed in the ZOCU cache fleet, and ships equipped with spin sections have been preferentially maintained in active service. All active service ships recieved upgrades for leap missile launchers at some point and its quite clear that they've adopted long-range missile fire as a major part of their doctrine.

• A digitally-enhanced photo of a dark slate grey warship, festooned with antenna and with large missile bay doors open. The soft energized glow of a pseudoreactionless drive casts some illumination on the aft quarter. A Hoplite takes up the bottom-right quarter, blurred from approach speed.

We caught this on a long-range probe running missile trials two months ago, right before the probe was destroyed by the zealous escort you see in the bottom corner. Clearly some sort of Zodiac prototype, and thus perhaps indicative of just where they're taking future developments. No new Sirius-registered warships have officially entered service since 2192, making this an illegal ship. Of course they're running under their allowed maximum and I fully expect that as soon as the politicians raise a stink, the paperwork would show up with suspiciously wet signatures. So we wait and we watch.

Now I'll give you all a short break and then I'll continue on looking at the exciting developments in friendly naval architecture over the past decade and in the near future.