Topic: Goddard's Lemons- Ships that should've never got off the ground.
This is just thought exercise from my various homebrew settings. Really, just a bit of fun.
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Lockheed-Sukhoi Apex-class destroyer.
While it isn't often that an interstellar nation has to throw its entire space combat doctrine into the furnace, this was precisely the situation that Earth found itself in by the end of the 40th century. Earth's various territorial battles had largely been sieges on a grand scale that were often resolved in the same method: Earth would send in a carrier group, the escorts would defeat any planetary or orbital missile batteries, the carrier would send down fighter craft to destroy any terrestrial fortified positions, and the ships would then force a surrender from space. There was no reason to change a thing which had worked for centuries, until Earth ended up picking a fight with their closest galactic neighbor, the Balthorian empire. While the Terran Unity had acquired its territory in a piecemeal fashion through acquiring the allegiance of various human-colonized worlds, the Balthorians had acquired theirs through the conquest of other interstellar powers.
The first battles, in light of this, went as any outsider might predict. The Balthorians used their superior expertise in warp warfare to jump their heavily-armed and protected dreadnoughts directly into gun range of Earth's crucial but vulnerable fleet ships, brush aside the fire of the smaller defenders, and then annihilate the carrier vessel with a blistering array of powerful weaponry. After seeing that close combat would likely dominate future battles, Earth furiously sought a solution, and began work on their first large vessel built entirely for combat with other large space vessels, and there was enormous pressure to do something- and they did something, all right. Presented with an impossible set of specifications, the only company willing to take the contract for the Destroyer Program was Lockheed-Sukhoi, which had some goodwill due to their development of Earth's still-high performance assault fighter craft.
While L-S was able to deliver the requested mobility profile, the gigantic engines required to make this possible made every other aspect of the design suffer. The ship's defensive arrays fell short of those possessed by the Imperial capital vessels it was meant to engage, largely because the types of reactors required for a ship of this type had to be invented in an impossibly short time frame, and carriers did not require nearly as much power as the proposed Destroyer due to the fact that their weaponry was either defensive or missile-based. the result was that the Apex was powered by clusters of smaller reactors which resulted in fiddly power grids that required constant supervision, and even when running smoothly they caused certain irregularities in the ship's weapon compliment which was compounded by other difficulties. To try to salvage the defensive requirements, the designers reinforced the hull as much as the structure could bear.
The ship's main energy armament was the LX-220 Battle Laser. While the weapon could produce impressive firepower, it was an energy hog that was bolted onto an already underdesigned power grid, which meant that the first attempt to fire it at its on-paper fire rate caused a capacitor explosion which blew the weapon right out of its turret ring. The woes faced by its secondary armament, the PG-60 Defense laser, while not spectacular, were still unpredictable and troubling, as sudden power surges and brownouts would result in vast deficiencies or surpluses in volume of fire. While the dangers of the first were obvious, the nuisance of the second became known when the defense guns had to have extensive repairs done on them after any use that might be described as sustained. The only weapons system that didn't suffer from regular or capricious malfunctions was the MM-140 "Thresher" missile launcher, but that was a low-power system which was largely a tune-up of a system already in extensive use, redesigned to accommodate the very dangerous so-called "Grand slam" warhead. As part of the contract, Lockheed-Sukhoi was allowed to introduce a small hangar bay as well, for three squadrons of fighters.
Fortunately for Lockheed-Sukhoi, the appropriations department was as desperate as they were disappointed, so several of this ships were completed and sent into action with mixed results, with successes attributed mainly to the element of surprise that Earth was fielding such a ship, but later discoveries showed that the vast majority of the Empire's large combatants were "tribute ships", which had their own shortcomings in both crew and design, and presented a less imposing challenge than the sleek, monstrous warships which spearheaded the first few months of the war. Still, it would be years until Earth had a ship capable of contending with the Empire's best.
Earth Apex-class Destroyer (860)
Hull: 18-17-16-15-14-13-12-11-10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1
Engines: 4-4-4-3-3-2-2-1-1
Weapons: 15-14-12-10-9-7-5-4-2
Shields: 4-4-4-3-3-2-2-1-1
LX-220 Battle laser (5-10-15) 1×4+/4/2 (Pr1; Slw)
ABCD ☐☐☐ // (2)
MM-140 heavy missile launcher (MA 12) 2×4+/2/2 (Cts; Dsr)
ACE ☐| BDF ☐ // (1)
PG-60 Defense Laser (2-4-6) *×4+/1/1 (Vlt)
AC ☐☐| BD ☐☐| DE ☐☐| EF ☐☐ // (4)
Equipment: Hyperdrive ☐| Overthrusters ☐ // (1)
Traits: Carrier (3); Ionized Hull
Marines : 5-4-3-2-1
