I fixate on details when it comes to warship design, almost certainly too much. I look at the limited information given by the devs and pair it up with my own limited understanding of physics and engineering, to try to extrapolate out to what I think is a reasonable representation of space warships. To date, I’ve spoken here about my thoughts that, based on the ratios of cost and capability for the various ships, Corvettes are half the size in volume and mass of Destroyers, which are half the size of Cruisers, which are again half the size of Battleships (i.e., Corvettes would be 1/8th the size of Battleships). The other rules that are out there aren’t far off from lining up with that theory, and that helps me wrap my head around ways to suggest improvements to ship design and space combat.
However, I’m also dealing with some conflict regarding the resultant picture of how warships look. If a Corvette is only 1/8th the size of a Battleship, or half as long, half as wide, half as tall, then a Corvette that is, say, 200 meters long would make the corresponding Battleship only 400 meters long. Pick whatever size you want for the first ship, but then work proportionally from there and tell me if you think the other ship looks “right” to you.
What prompted my concern was going back to play the Homeworld games, now that they’re remastered. To me, those ships look more “right”, with sizeable differences between the Corvettes, Frigates (Destroyers), Destroyers (Cruisers), and Battlecruisers (Battleships). They don’t map out exactly, e.g., their Corvettes being not much larger than basically Strike Craft, and the ranges (kilometers) being infinitesimal compared to where I think Stellaris is/should be (hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of kilometers). But there was a weight to their movements that clicked for me, and I wanted to start exploring what a more separated sizing system would look like.
Starting off, I wanted to keep the ratio between sizes at 2 in each direction, meaning 8x for volume and mass. I also chose some baseline sizes that made sense to me, both in paralleling real-world vehicles and staying reasonable with regard to physics and basic engineering. I would ask that you focus more on the ratios than on any particular dimensional value, at least until you’ve read all the way through.
With a Corvette, I started off at 200 meters, mostly because it allowed me to have a few “ship classes” below it and still get relatively round numbers – it also would be about 1/3rd again longer than a US Navy Arleigh-Burke destroyer (155 m). Toward the bottom, I looked at a vanilla M- or G-slot type of missile as being 12.5 meters long – that would make it four orders of magnitude smaller (100, 50, 25, 12.5) than the 200 m Corvette, and about the length of a real-life Harpoon anti-ship missile. Destroyers came in at 400 m/8x the volume, or about 20% longer than a USN Ford nuclear carrier (337 m); Cruisers would be 800 m/64x the volume, or 1/3rd again longer than the Battlestar Galactica (610 m); Battleships would be 1,600 m/512x the volume, or the same as a classic Imperial Star Destroyer.
Filling in the gaps: I thought about hangar craft (vanilla “strike craft”) being more of a range of sizes, keyed to the sizes of hangars appropriate to Destroyer, Cruiser, and Battleship hulls. So I had Strikes (25 m, MiG-25P fighter), Gunships (50 m, B-52 bomber), and Escorts (100 m, Goodyear blimp). As I had a basic missile at 12.5 m, I also looked at smaller (6.25 m, Patriot SAM) and larger (25 m, Minotaur IV launch system) variations.
Titans and Colossi don’t currently follow the typical build rules compared to the four main classes, but I decided to just spec them out at the next two sizes past Battleships. If you feel that these ships should be considerably larger than just the next step or so on this scale, those could move up, but keep that in mind as we continue the discussion.
What happens when you make ships this big? First thing would be looking at acceleration and maneuverability, with the Square-Cube Law being a primary guidance. In vanilla Stellaris, a Corvette is viewed as being barely within a Battleship’s capabilities to keep up with – in this experiment, the Destroyer is that same 8x volume/mass to the Corvette that our vanilla Battleship was. Rather than the relatively small differences between classes for movement, each class would probably accelerate at twice the rate of the class above it or half that of the one below.
That doesn’t mean that that a fleet with much larger ships would be entirely slower than those with smaller ships. I’ve looked at the reality of trying to cross a solar system at small fractions of the speed of light, and even ships with high acceleration will likely coast once they’re above a few percent of the speed of light, due to concerns about running into even static objects in their flight path. So ships with lower acceleration will just need to accelerate longer to get to top speed (and then start their deceleration to zero sooner). I don’t know whether the “top” speed would increase at the same rate and the same time as acceleration when improving thrusters, but that makes enough sense to me for now.
Weapon systems start to get much bigger – what was a huge difference between a Corvette’s S-slot turret and a Battleship’s X-slot, is now the difference between the typical Corvette weapon and the one for a Destroyer. Think about it along the lines of a Destroyer carrying four “M-slot” weapons – those weapons are perfectly suited for shooting at other Destroyers, but are probably too slow relatively to Track the Corvettes below them and too weak to efficiently damage the Cruisers above.
It can instead carry two “L-slot” weapons (or just convert two “M-slots” to one “L-slot”) that are slightly better at hurting the Cruiser class above it, due to the more-than-proportional increase from size to size. But those are less capable of Tracking even their Destroyer peers, so it’s a trade-off. Conversely, it can swap out one of its “M-slot” mounts for two “S-slots” (or all four for 8 “S-slots”), gaining a bit of Tracking chance against Corvettes at the cost of some punch versus Destroyers. Same thing would apply by going to slots higher or lower when looked at from a given class. But where the Destroyer sees a weapon two sizes below its typical mount as being a tiny precision turret for taking on Corvettes relatively well, the Corvette sees the same size weapon as being an “L-slot”, something that’s only moderately useful against Corvettes, but somewhat useful against Destroyers.
Because there are so many slot sizes, we switch to a numeric system:
(Notice that the hangar craft have similar formats for their weapons – I don’t know if I’d necessarily give them customizable loadouts, but it informs how we look at their weapons.)
One big thing to take from this chart is that each ship class only has weapons that are ideal for its own size and at most OK for one class above or below – above because the increase in damage output (or capacity, for utility slots) from slot size changes is greater than 2:1 (and a larger class would be getting tougher faster than the smaller class could produce more for the same cost), below because Tracking becomes untenable beyond a single ship class difference. This is based on the idea that a ship wouldn’t carry more than four standard mounts (e.g., size-13 for a Destroyer) and with trade-offs wouldn’t carry more than 16 of its smallest possible mounts or just one of its largest possible mount.
These weapon size tracking and damage rules apply mostly to the turreted and cannon direct-fire weapons (DFW) on ships, not to missiles, torpedoes, and hangar craft. In a more realistic setting, missiles and torpedoes would have limited stocks on warships, which could all be launched in short order to saturate defenses but then would be useless for the remainder of a battle. Stellaris gets around this by reducing the rate of fire, i.e., increasing Cooldown, to stretch their usefulness out over even months-long battles. We’ll continue doing that here, too, but we’ll also specify missiles as being better at Tracking smaller ships on individual shots (their enforced low RoF/high Cooldown would keep them close to even with DFWs), and torpedoes as being larger with higher burst damage to have a chance against larger warships, but their atrocious RoF/Cooldown would again prevent them from being too effective.
Hangar craft allow the larger warships (Destroyers on up) to have some capability against ship classes more than a size or two smaller. Strikes are available to Destroyers in limited numbers per Hangar mounted, with Cruisers getting Gunships and Battleships getting Escorts in their Hangars. To allow the largest ships to get more of the smaller hangar craft, I’m adding Flight Decks (FD) that carry more of each size to allow for more simultaneous sorties, with Cruisers getting Strike FDs, Battleships getting Gunships, and Titans getting Escorts. Hangars and Flight Decks might only be available in a single slot-size or might be variable with smaller slots having fewer hangar craft per sortie or longer Cooldowns between sorties going out, and larger slots having more or faster.
By switching to ships that have significant differences in size, we also end up with very different costs and build times. A starting Corvette might cost (arbitrary numbers) 100 Alloys to build and have a given Starbase take 30 days to produce it, but a Destroyer would be 800 Alloys and 240 days at the same point. Trying to produce a Cruiser (6.4K, 1920 days) would likely be out the question for an early empire, until they can get their production capability higher – Starbases would certainly get faster at producing all ship classes as tech improves and more docks are built on them, but pared-back long build times would probably still act as a natural limit to large ship proliferation (rather than just a contrived cap).
I don’t know what would happen with fleet composition with these changes. The larger ships are slower and harder to replace, but they’re incredibly durable compared to fleets of smaller ships (although repairs would take significant amounts of time, too). Perhaps main battle fleets will form up, with strong cores of Battleships and maybe a Titan, but also Cruisers and Destroyers as screens to dissuade attacks on the precious assets. More numerous response or patrol fleets would perhaps have Cruisers at their cores and Destroyer/Corvette screens, and Starbases would use Hangar or Flight Deck Escorts to handle anti-piracy duties (rather than considering vanilla snub fighters for interstellar patrols).
There’s a ton of other considerations for a change like this – I’m trying to put the idea out there to percolate and see if there is any interest in this even as just a thought experiment.
However, I’m also dealing with some conflict regarding the resultant picture of how warships look. If a Corvette is only 1/8th the size of a Battleship, or half as long, half as wide, half as tall, then a Corvette that is, say, 200 meters long would make the corresponding Battleship only 400 meters long. Pick whatever size you want for the first ship, but then work proportionally from there and tell me if you think the other ship looks “right” to you.
What prompted my concern was going back to play the Homeworld games, now that they’re remastered. To me, those ships look more “right”, with sizeable differences between the Corvettes, Frigates (Destroyers), Destroyers (Cruisers), and Battlecruisers (Battleships). They don’t map out exactly, e.g., their Corvettes being not much larger than basically Strike Craft, and the ranges (kilometers) being infinitesimal compared to where I think Stellaris is/should be (hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of kilometers). But there was a weight to their movements that clicked for me, and I wanted to start exploring what a more separated sizing system would look like.
Starting off, I wanted to keep the ratio between sizes at 2 in each direction, meaning 8x for volume and mass. I also chose some baseline sizes that made sense to me, both in paralleling real-world vehicles and staying reasonable with regard to physics and basic engineering. I would ask that you focus more on the ratios than on any particular dimensional value, at least until you’ve read all the way through.
With a Corvette, I started off at 200 meters, mostly because it allowed me to have a few “ship classes” below it and still get relatively round numbers – it also would be about 1/3rd again longer than a US Navy Arleigh-Burke destroyer (155 m). Toward the bottom, I looked at a vanilla M- or G-slot type of missile as being 12.5 meters long – that would make it four orders of magnitude smaller (100, 50, 25, 12.5) than the 200 m Corvette, and about the length of a real-life Harpoon anti-ship missile. Destroyers came in at 400 m/8x the volume, or about 20% longer than a USN Ford nuclear carrier (337 m); Cruisers would be 800 m/64x the volume, or 1/3rd again longer than the Battlestar Galactica (610 m); Battleships would be 1,600 m/512x the volume, or the same as a classic Imperial Star Destroyer.
Filling in the gaps: I thought about hangar craft (vanilla “strike craft”) being more of a range of sizes, keyed to the sizes of hangars appropriate to Destroyer, Cruiser, and Battleship hulls. So I had Strikes (25 m, MiG-25P fighter), Gunships (50 m, B-52 bomber), and Escorts (100 m, Goodyear blimp). As I had a basic missile at 12.5 m, I also looked at smaller (6.25 m, Patriot SAM) and larger (25 m, Minotaur IV launch system) variations.
Titans and Colossi don’t currently follow the typical build rules compared to the four main classes, but I decided to just spec them out at the next two sizes past Battleships. If you feel that these ships should be considerably larger than just the next step or so on this scale, those could move up, but keep that in mind as we continue the discussion.
Code:
Class Length (m)
Small Missile 6.25
Missile 12.5
Large Missile / Strike 25
Gunship 50
Escort 100
Corvette 200
Destroyer 400
Cruiser 800
Battleship 1,600
Titan 3,200
Colossus 6,400What happens when you make ships this big? First thing would be looking at acceleration and maneuverability, with the Square-Cube Law being a primary guidance. In vanilla Stellaris, a Corvette is viewed as being barely within a Battleship’s capabilities to keep up with – in this experiment, the Destroyer is that same 8x volume/mass to the Corvette that our vanilla Battleship was. Rather than the relatively small differences between classes for movement, each class would probably accelerate at twice the rate of the class above it or half that of the one below.
That doesn’t mean that that a fleet with much larger ships would be entirely slower than those with smaller ships. I’ve looked at the reality of trying to cross a solar system at small fractions of the speed of light, and even ships with high acceleration will likely coast once they’re above a few percent of the speed of light, due to concerns about running into even static objects in their flight path. So ships with lower acceleration will just need to accelerate longer to get to top speed (and then start their deceleration to zero sooner). I don’t know whether the “top” speed would increase at the same rate and the same time as acceleration when improving thrusters, but that makes enough sense to me for now.
Weapon systems start to get much bigger – what was a huge difference between a Corvette’s S-slot turret and a Battleship’s X-slot, is now the difference between the typical Corvette weapon and the one for a Destroyer. Think about it along the lines of a Destroyer carrying four “M-slot” weapons – those weapons are perfectly suited for shooting at other Destroyers, but are probably too slow relatively to Track the Corvettes below them and too weak to efficiently damage the Cruisers above.
It can instead carry two “L-slot” weapons (or just convert two “M-slots” to one “L-slot”) that are slightly better at hurting the Cruiser class above it, due to the more-than-proportional increase from size to size. But those are less capable of Tracking even their Destroyer peers, so it’s a trade-off. Conversely, it can swap out one of its “M-slot” mounts for two “S-slots” (or all four for 8 “S-slots”), gaining a bit of Tracking chance against Corvettes at the cost of some punch versus Destroyers. Same thing would apply by going to slots higher or lower when looked at from a given class. But where the Destroyer sees a weapon two sizes below its typical mount as being a tiny precision turret for taking on Corvettes relatively well, the Corvette sees the same size weapon as being an “L-slot”, something that’s only moderately useful against Corvettes, but somewhat useful against Destroyers.
Because there are so many slot sizes, we switch to a numeric system:
Code:
Class Weapon Mount Sizes
Strike 1 2 3
Gunship 2 3 4 5 6
Escort 5 6 7 8 9
Corvette 8 9 10 11 12
Destroyer 11 12 13 14 15
Cruiser 14 15 16 17 18
Battleship 17 18 19 20 21
Titan 20 21 22 23 24
Colossus (not applicable?)(Notice that the hangar craft have similar formats for their weapons – I don’t know if I’d necessarily give them customizable loadouts, but it informs how we look at their weapons.)
One big thing to take from this chart is that each ship class only has weapons that are ideal for its own size and at most OK for one class above or below – above because the increase in damage output (or capacity, for utility slots) from slot size changes is greater than 2:1 (and a larger class would be getting tougher faster than the smaller class could produce more for the same cost), below because Tracking becomes untenable beyond a single ship class difference. This is based on the idea that a ship wouldn’t carry more than four standard mounts (e.g., size-13 for a Destroyer) and with trade-offs wouldn’t carry more than 16 of its smallest possible mounts or just one of its largest possible mount.
These weapon size tracking and damage rules apply mostly to the turreted and cannon direct-fire weapons (DFW) on ships, not to missiles, torpedoes, and hangar craft. In a more realistic setting, missiles and torpedoes would have limited stocks on warships, which could all be launched in short order to saturate defenses but then would be useless for the remainder of a battle. Stellaris gets around this by reducing the rate of fire, i.e., increasing Cooldown, to stretch their usefulness out over even months-long battles. We’ll continue doing that here, too, but we’ll also specify missiles as being better at Tracking smaller ships on individual shots (their enforced low RoF/high Cooldown would keep them close to even with DFWs), and torpedoes as being larger with higher burst damage to have a chance against larger warships, but their atrocious RoF/Cooldown would again prevent them from being too effective.
Hangar craft allow the larger warships (Destroyers on up) to have some capability against ship classes more than a size or two smaller. Strikes are available to Destroyers in limited numbers per Hangar mounted, with Cruisers getting Gunships and Battleships getting Escorts in their Hangars. To allow the largest ships to get more of the smaller hangar craft, I’m adding Flight Decks (FD) that carry more of each size to allow for more simultaneous sorties, with Cruisers getting Strike FDs, Battleships getting Gunships, and Titans getting Escorts. Hangars and Flight Decks might only be available in a single slot-size or might be variable with smaller slots having fewer hangar craft per sortie or longer Cooldowns between sorties going out, and larger slots having more or faster.
By switching to ships that have significant differences in size, we also end up with very different costs and build times. A starting Corvette might cost (arbitrary numbers) 100 Alloys to build and have a given Starbase take 30 days to produce it, but a Destroyer would be 800 Alloys and 240 days at the same point. Trying to produce a Cruiser (6.4K, 1920 days) would likely be out the question for an early empire, until they can get their production capability higher – Starbases would certainly get faster at producing all ship classes as tech improves and more docks are built on them, but pared-back long build times would probably still act as a natural limit to large ship proliferation (rather than just a contrived cap).
I don’t know what would happen with fleet composition with these changes. The larger ships are slower and harder to replace, but they’re incredibly durable compared to fleets of smaller ships (although repairs would take significant amounts of time, too). Perhaps main battle fleets will form up, with strong cores of Battleships and maybe a Titan, but also Cruisers and Destroyers as screens to dissuade attacks on the precious assets. More numerous response or patrol fleets would perhaps have Cruisers at their cores and Destroyer/Corvette screens, and Starbases would use Hangar or Flight Deck Escorts to handle anti-piracy duties (rather than considering vanilla snub fighters for interstellar patrols).
There’s a ton of other considerations for a change like this – I’m trying to put the idea out there to percolate and see if there is any interest in this even as just a thought experiment.
