FFS: Battleship Armor!

FF&S/BL Discoveries, Part III

ARMOR RATINGS and the IMPERIAL NAVY SHIP-OF-THE-LINE

I just gained enlightenment on another shift in the rules which
should interest battle fleet naval architects.  This one is related
to starship armor factors on very large ships.

In _Brilliant Lances_, there is a design for a 1000-ton TL15
Imperial Navy DE, the _Chrysanthemum_-class.  It is a close structure
with armor factor 62, which comes out to 2.214 cm of bonded super-
dense armor at a volume cost of about 0.62 % of the ship.  I decided
to scale this percentage for a 500000 d-ton sphere, to see what sort
of armor we might expect to see on a _Tigress_-size battleship.
(It's not quite fair, since the DE loses some mass to configuration,
but that isn't really vital for this argument.)

It turns out that at 0.62 % of ship volume, the _Tigress_-size ship
can carry some 25.087 cm of bonded superdense armor, for an armor
rating of 702.  This is 2.25x the amount of armor needed to stop a
standard TL15 150MJ beam laser dead.

If one is willing to armor an expensive battleship a little better
than a DE, at 1.77 % of ship volume you can have 71.5 cm of bonded
superdense armor plating, and an armor rating of 2002.  This is just
sufficient to stop a TL15 500 kT nuclear detonation x-ray laser dead.

Note that either value is sufficient to stop any of the "pea-shooter"
class PAWS in _Brilliant Lances_.

These armor ratings are very definitely not ridiculous.  If anything,
they may turn out to be conservative.

It looks to me like the lighter weapons are really only useful for
anti-missile fire or to try and scrub the communications and sensory
antennae off a ship.  The only other thing I can think of doing with
them is to try to saturate a big ship's anti-missile defenses and get
a fusion weapon right up next to it.  So I suppose the *really* big
ships like the _Tigress_-types will depend more on what we'd currently
consider very heavy weapons to do any real damage to the enemy line.
I have no idea what sort of power the TNE equivalent to the meson-T
delivers on target, but it is probably massive.  The big ships will
need to depend on heavy bays to back up the main gun, though, since
the turrets and "pea-shooter" spinal mounts on escorts won't do much
good.  I'm not sure if the 100-ton bays can cut it; I haven't checked.

As for the _Chrysanthemum_ in a fleet action, well, I guess it really
is a cheap "tin can".  I suppose it's supposed to be an SDB hunter
and commerce cutter.

  Steve Bonneville
  [email removed]