Design Monologue 8: Spaceships and Other Cool Shit

Do determine what space ships ought to exist, we must ask what they are for.

In the early days of the Homeworlds, space ships were essentially a desperate attempt to catch up with the technology of Earth, with the hope of possibly reestablishing contact or even a jumpgate (or other FTL link) with the home planet.

In time, the Homeworlds came to rely on space craft, much as Earth did in 2088, for various industrial and scientific purposes, to varying degrees. The Abelites were the most voracious explorers at first--understandably so, given the less-than-optimal state of their Homeworld.

By contrast, the Korrunites were slow to rediscover space exploration, for obvious reasons. First, their colony ship was unable to stay in orbit like the other two, and second, their first attempt at a civilization contiguous with the previous one failed miserably.

The first Homeworlds spacecraft were simple exploration vessels, much like those used by Earth in the 20th and early 21st century. These were shortly followed increasingly massive industrial ships, built in space and never intended to reenter an atmosphere. Smaller, more maneuverable ships, were favored by pirates and those who combatted them; these ships were typically the size of modern-day fighters or frigates.

With the rise of industry in space came the possibility of piracy and other dangers, and the need for armed space craft. The Korrunites took to this concept with alacrity, as it expanded the ways in which clans could vie for dominance and compete for resources. This gave them expertise and materiel vital to their invasion of the other Homeworlds.

After the Korrunite invasion, all three Homeworlds began to maintain a standing military presence in space. These early fleets were intended to do battle with other fleets, and, to lesser extent, effect invasions of ground and space installations.

This generation of space craft saw an ever-spiraling arms race, with fleets of destroyers topped by cruisers, then topped again by battleships, then topped by massive dreadnaughts. The relatively low population of the Homeworlds (compared to, say, Earth in 2088) meant that there was ever greater pressure to automate the menial tasks on ships, rather than staff a fleet of dreadnaughts with thousands, or even tens of thousands of crewmen.

It is notable that, throughout this period, the Koruunites favored smaller craft, even as they attempted (with little success) to match the titanic warships being produced by the other Homeworlds. This is probably due to two things: their lack of expertise in robotics and automation, and the tendency of each clan to finance, build, and crew their own vessels, which offered a much smaller population pool for any given class of ship.

Ultimately, this proved greatly advantageous in the Earthgate war, as the massive, automated dreadnaughts were nigh-useless against ultra-fast drones capable of hijacking any automated system they could possibly transmit data to. The war the dreadnaughts were meant for never happened; the Earthgate war redefined the scope of military vessels.

The Foundation Fleet features a trimmed-down, sleeker approach to space craft. There are three primary branches of the fleet, each with a very different mission, and thus a very different approach.

One branch is meant for open warfare, particularly with drones, but ready for any threat its designers could imagine. The basic unit in this fleet is the carrier, a capital ship (though built as efficient and compact as possible) capable of projecting great power over great distance by launching small craft. Carriers typically travel in a group of supporting craft, including frigates, destroyers, and cruisers, which fill in the gaps in the carrier's mission objective coverage, and serve the primary purpose of improving the strength and breadth of the carrier's defense.

A second branch is meant to police Foundation territory. In this branch, massive installations, essentially mobile space stations, cover a wide area by means of a large fleet of air/space craft. These small craft, typically fighter or frigate sized, keep an eye on the movement of people and goods, and stand ready to put down local dangers or assist citizens in need.

A third branch, that operates under tight secrecy, is meant to perform stealth operations. These range from applications as pedestrian as anti-drone patrols (where stealth is key to catching them before they hide themselves) to covert surveillance and power projection in the DMZ and Rogue States. Vessels built for this purpose are medium size (usually in the same class as a destroyer or cruiser), with a strong emphasis on stealth. Like today's submarines, they are built for extended, independent operation under continuous concealment and radio silence. With the technology and methods used by such ships and their captains, the Foundation can spy on or interfere with DMZ and Rogue State authorities with relative impunity; on the rare occasions where they are caught doing this, the political fallout is usually quite fevered, if brief.

Thus, today's space craft come in a wide variety of flavors.

Ships of War

Whether for open warfare or police action, military ships have an undeniable air of power and authority. The Foundation's ships are built with the best technology, materials, and craftsmanship in all of known civilization, and they make no attempt to hide it (on the contrary, they make every attempt to flaunt it).

Such craft can usually be classified according to this quasi-official system:

Small Craft

This includes fighters, small bombers, and shuttles. Typically, such craft are short-range (suborbital, orbital, planetary, or interplanetary); that is, they are not capable of long, independent missions, usually for lack of fuel or crew provisions. Most ships in this class do not use fusion engines, and only those with the latest (and most expensive) technology have artificial gravity of any kind.

For all that, small craft are the true backbone of the Foundation fleet, serving as the primary tool for most missions of war or peacekeeping. The amount of offensive power that can be fit onto a fighter or bomber is far greater, per unit of mass or volume, than the offensive capability of its mother carrier.

Medium-size Ships

Frigates, destroyers, cruisers, and battlecruisers all fit the bill, in increasing order of size. Some of the larger bombers are frigate-sized, while troop transports are usually frigate or destroyer-sized.

This class of ship is far more numerous than capital class, though far less than small craft. Ships in this size category are typically configured primarily for one or more of the following:

• Screening (search and acquire, target tracking, and other sensor tasks)
• EWAR (electronic warfare, and associated countermeasures)
• Defense (by countering enemy projectiles, missiles, and lasers)
• Counter-stealth (specifically designed to locate and defend against stealth ships)
• "Amphibious" operation (inter-atmospheric missions)

Capital Ships

Carriers, dreadnaughts, and battleships are all considered capital ships. The Foundation fleet has few battleships, and virtually no dreadnaughts, though they maintain constant vigil on the handful of dreadnaughts in the hands of the Rogue States, as well as occasionally cross-training on the mostly moth-balled dreadnaughts built by the Core Worlds (just in case).

Carriers are truly the most important capital ship in the Foundation fleet. These are divided into two main categories: strike carriers and mobile installations (sometimes called "supercarriers").

Strike carriers are small, compact, and lightweight...at least relative to mobile installations. They are built to maneuver at the speed of warfare without slowing down their support ships. A general-purpose strike carrier holds a variety of small craft for performing missions ranging from interception (of enemy small attack craft), air superiority, installation attack, fleet combat, ground attack, air support, and transport. Individual classes of strike carrier are often customized to suit one or more of those purposes above others.

Mobile installations are massive, like floating cities. They are rarely built to anything resembling aerodynamic standards, as they are intended for operation in space only. They are not highly maneuverable; they can move around a system, but would have difficulty engaging in fleet battles. They generally serve as bases for huge fleets of small craft which patrol an entire system, or large sectors of that system. They can be used in times of war as a base for regional defense. Few to none are capable of traversing a jumpgate, making them relatively uncommon in the Inner Colonies and beyond.

Support Ships

The Foundation employs a wide variety of support ships. While not as glamorous as ships of war, support ships are vital not only to the military operations of the Security Forces, but also to their humanitarian missions as well.

Massive, capital-class medical ships can be deployed in hours to remote systems (at least in the Inner Colonies) to battle an outbreak of disease or the effects of a natural disaster. The Foundation maintains a few refugee ships, nearly dreadnaught-sized, capable of rapidly rehabitating entire small colonies in dire circumstances (such as imminent planetary cataclysm or an Earthgate-scale war).

This classification includes industrial and commercial ships repurposed for military use, such as heavily armed freighters and personnel shuttles.

For the purposes of air traffic control and law enforcement, industrial and commercial (as well as personal) vessels are categorized into one of two simple groups. This system dates back to early Homeworlds spaceflight, when most ships were launched from a planetary surface (as it took quite a long time to duplicate jumpgate technology). During this era, Light implied a craft which could take off and land on its own using runways, while Heavy referred to craft that had to be lifted by a launch vehicle (such as a rocket), in whole or in pieces.

Light

Light ships run up to about frigate or destroyer-size, depending on the volume and maneuverability of the ship. Light ships have an easier time in high-traffic areas, such as jumpgates, and also find it easier to finding suitable docking. It is easier to become licensed to pilot light craft than heavy, though there are gradations within the class.

Heavy

Heavy ships start at around cruiser-size and go up from there. Anything that can't dock in a station or use a jumpgate is considered an installation, not a ship. There are some truly massive industrial ships in use, more mobile installations than anything else, which transport enormous amounts of goods or raw materials between points in space.

One can only ponder what visionary designs future builders will dream up for spacecraft. What we do know is that they will be mission-driven; that is, they are built to a purpose, though that purpose may include style (for high-visibility military or luxury personal ships). We know the realities of aerodynamics which govern the design of any ship capable of entering or leaving an atmosphere.

That's right; boldly, Homeworlds assumes no hitherto undiscovered technology for defying the laws of aerodynamics as we know them. Airframes incapable of the stresses of supersonic or hypersonic flight cannot accelerate to those speeds in order to leave an atmosphere, nor could they survive reentry. With the rare exception of certain advanced Abelite ship designs, all ships in the Homeworlds that take off and land on planets look at least something like the aircraft of today.

That is not to say certain less-aerodynamic designs for a ship are implausible. The Firefly class transport from the eponymous TV show has a rather efficient design, and the rotating pod engines would actually be quite useful for space travel. However, without utilizing unknown future technology, that frame would not hold up under atmospheric flight, or certainly reentry. Even if it did, it would be far less energy-efficient than a more aerodynamic ship.

A design like the Firefly class could easily work with one change; the cargo module would be a descent-capable craft in its own right. It would possess the engines needed to lift it to orbital altitude and velocity, and would dock with the rest of the ship once in orbit. The design wouldn't have to be much less efficient than a one-ship solution, and the benefits of a modular cargo bay could outweight the drawbacks.

Other well-known ship designs that are virtually impossible as aerospace craft (without unknown and dramatically unnecessary future technology):

• Millennium Falcon
• X-Wing (though it's close), Y-Wing (though A-Wing and Jedi Starfighter are ok)
• TIE fighter or other TIE variants
• Any starship from Star Trek, with the possible exception of Defiant
• Viper (though they might be able to get by with those tiny wings through sheer rocket power, but that's really wasteful)
• Raptor (the frame is too fat for hypersonic travel)
• Any ship, whatsoever, from EVE

There are several practical approaches to single-ship aerospace craft.

The easiest is probably what current commercial spaceflight pioneers are attempting: enabling existing airframes to self-propel into suborbital velocity and beyond. The most basic version of this is taking a 747 and strapping a rocket onto it. Of course, that doesn't exactly work, as the rocket would have to be unbelievably large, and thus the 747 couldn't lift it.

The premise is simple enough though: using conventional engines (turbofan, turbojet, ramjet, scramjet, or hybrid thereof), lift an aircraft to high altitude (say, 100,000 ft or so) and hypersonic speed (mach 5+). Then, use rockets to get the rest of the way; it takes far less (orders of magnitude less) thrust to reach escape velocity when you're already doing mach 5 at 100,000 feet. Surprisingly the hard part there isn't the rocket part...it's the hypersonic part.

We currently have no aircraft that can take off on its own and achieve hypersonic flight (that we civilians know of). We only barely understand the principles of hypersonic aerodynamics; they're almost as alien as supersonic aerodynamics were in the subsonic era of flight. Also, a scramjet engine is needed for hypersonic flight, but that kind of engine is useless below hypersonic speed.

What is needed is a practical hybrid engine, either one that can range from conventional to hypersonic flight, or one that can take the whole thing one step further and become a rocket engine. It's not impossible; all of the engines are quite similar, with only a few troubling but essential differences keeping them from being merged. Of course, this is 2008; many research projects, both civilian and military, are underway to create this kind of technology.

The Homeworlds setting assumes this technology was mastered prior to 2088, and became the de facto standard for light aerospace craft. That shouldn't be too radical, as NASA originally told us they'd have it by, oh...2001.

The most basic light aerospace craft would possess a single hybrid air/space engine, probably fueled by hydrogen. In conventional flight mode, the engine would operate much as a turbojet engine, like those used in jet fighters. Hopefully, future technology will yield somewhat quieter operation for civilian craft. As the craft accelerates to supersonic speed and altitude, the engine shifts modes and becomes a scramjet. This is similar to the SR-71 Blackbird, with the benefit of another century of technology.

As the scramjet engine peaks during hypersonic flight (that could be anywhere from mach 5 to mach 11 or beyond), rockets pick up the slack. The engine becomes a combustion chamber, and the rockets push the ship to escape velocity and into orbit. A traditional hydrogen/oxygen rocket would probably be insufficient with a craft that wasn't just a giant fuel carrier, but a more advanced antimatter rocket could probably get the job done.

More advanced designs might offer thrust redirection for VTOL capability, or even use high-powered RCS thrusters, using antimatter rockets otherwise unused in atmospheric flight, to lift off and push forward to minimum velocity for the turbojet engine.

Such a craft would luck much like the jet fighters of today, strongly influenced by future discoveries in hypersonic aerodynamics. Personnel shuttles would probably resemble airliners (though a lot sleeker and faster-looking), while heavy transports would probably look much like heavy airplanes. Boring, isn't it.

Of course, there exists another option entirely: any ship with enough rocket thrust and endurance can simply take off like any other rocket. As long as its airframe can handle it, the aerodynamics become less of an issue, as they only need to minimize drag, not actually provide lift. That being said, this might enable designs like a Viper or Y-Wing to take off from a planet, but wouldn't do much good for the Millennium Falcon or the Enterprise, as their frames just aren't built for aerodynamics.

There could be some sort of repulsor technology that creates a bubble around the ship, giving it a perfect aerodynamic profile. But there isn't.