Quote:SIF surface ships? Well, sea-naval, anyway?
Hm... A quick webdive says CVN-99 Asuka II from Macross Zero was half that, but if the three ships in question were also new-build, the first 100% terran hulls to have been designed around use of the SIF system it would still be workable, I think.
Hmm. And, if these ships are that new then they won't have been primarily designed to fight other naval units - there're plenty of older designs that can handle that.
Which means that, besides allowing justification for the existance of submersible naval vessels too noisy to hide, we have a reason to give the Inflexible four beam guns rather than however many ordinary cannon. Which, y'know, wouldn't be much good at the usual space combat ranges.
Actually, five hundred meters isn't that out of possibility even now - the Nimitz class is just about exactly a third of a kilometer, if I remember the day's researches correctly.
Or, ooh, I have an idea - if each arm takes two ships, we have elbows. ^_^
Quote:Mmm. I had wanted to keep those long clean stretches of hull, and leave the greeblies to the minimum needed to help provide a sense of scale - besides being infinitely easier to model or animate, it'd provide a nice contrast to the relatively awkward and festooned task force bolted on alongside.
Oddly enoguh, I was thinking the sides of the main gun looked like they wanted Star Destroyer type detailing, you know kind of a beltline trench with lots of little gubbins and lights.
Quote:And a third vote for the proposal here. Motion carries?
I'd forgotten your mention of the beam-and-pod ships as being meant to be the new ARMORs - I think the suggestion that the refit subs end up like that is probably worthwhile, though. They wouldn't have provision for spin or blackbox gravity generators, so a ring section where the crew can work out to prevent microgravity health problems would be neccessary, and when you're already adding that much to the structure you might as well stick the overtechnology powerplant and engines out on the end of a shaft, well away from the normally inhabited sections of the ship.
I had been thinking of the gravity generators as something that the EDTO hadn't yet been able to duplicate, actually - among other reasons, because it would give me an excuse to avoid even the question of the 'just like on Earth, only with vacuum!' approach we see represented in most of canon Macross, which is Stupid.
Inertia works, dammit! Orbital mechanics is a reoccuring plot point! Ships don't fly they, accelerate!
*sniffs*
On the other hand, at the same time I'm saying this, there's a large part of my brain explaining to the rest exactly how and why it can be justified to use the really cool idea of making melee weapons the Zentradi's main ship-killing tool. Why, well...
I was sketching out some concepts for the Zentran and Meltran armors, and I noticed that external weapons systems basically required the violation of the 'center of thrust behind center of mass' principle, unless you wanted to start hanging supplementary thrusters off the gun itself.
Incidentally, Zentradi beam guns keep ending up looking like Covenant plasma rifles.
Anyway, I was willing to do that for one or two of them, but I wanted the Zentrans and Meltrans to have distinctively different weapons and armarment styles. If I gave the Meltrans the heavy rifle-type weapon (which did indeed have booster thrusters), then I'd have to leave the Zentran suits (which are heavier and bulkier and slower and actually have something that can pretend to be real armor) with these pistol/wrist blaster things. Which, y'know, are fine in their place, but lack a certain punch.
So, if the entire point of having Zentradi is that their physical power makes them a natural match for war machines, doesn't that mean that they're at least partly intended to fight in close quarters?
So I hung a pair of diver's knives off the Metran suit and started trying to figure out how to balance a sword sheath on the Zentran one in a way that the clumsy thing could actually reach.
And, having just thought of this while I was typing, I might well go back and move the massive fire-support cannon to the Zentran side and leave them two weapons and give the Meltrans a single, more flexible carbine-sized thing.
Because I like the idea of the Terrans and the Zentradi having distinctly different armarment styles, and we know that the EDTO is big on missiles, and slugthrowers are all-too-very-easy to look down on when you've got quantum energy beams to play with.
Ja, -n
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."