Imperial fleet tanker

[fractalsponge]

A fleet auxiliary to go with my bellator. My light star destroyer (Procursator) is in scale for the last one.

http://fractalsponge.net/tanker/3.jpg
http://fractalsponge.net/tanker/4.jpg
http://fractalsponge.net/tanker/5.jpg
http://fractalsponge.net/tanker/6.jpg

[777]

Dude - you are FREAKIN' me out with these!! How great are they!! You're like the REL of cgi!

[Griffworks]

Whoa! That things' frakkin' huge! :eek:

Nicely done, sir! Love the detail.

[thunderbearr]

No, Man. REL's the fractalsponge of Styrene!

That Star Destroyer freaked me out then I noticed it was yer smaller one.

BTW, do you take requests? In, say, .stl form?

Rob

[fractalsponge]

I was just talking to someone about stl - not so easy, and I have very little experience with the kind of techniques necessary for it unfortunately.

And today's work - greebling flat areas is occasionally fun. I did actually scale down from the original renders (now 75% the size)

http://fractalsponge.net/tanker/7.jpg
http://fractalsponge.net/tanker/8.jpg

[fractalsponge]

The Rel of cgi - that's a high standard to try for.

Anyways, this morning's additions:
http://fractalsponge.net/tanker/9.jpg

[Kuhn Global]

:eek::eek::eek::eek:

Ansel... my friend! I am barely catching up with my breathing from your last project! LOLOLOLOL... You are FANTASTIC! And this design is OUTSTANDING!!! :D

[fractalsponge]

http://fractalsponge.net/tanker/10_small.jpg (http://fractalsponge.net/tanker/10.jpg)

http://fractalsponge.net/tanker/scale_small.jpg (http://fractalsponge.net/tanker/scale.jpg)

[RKW]

Love that last shot with them all together, really puts into perspective the sizes of everything.

BTW, are you deliberately trying to blind me with the brightness of your renders?

[thunderbearr]

Pretty much you do a ship in cgi, save it as an .stl file, send it to me, I send it to my guy who does the 3D printing.

this stuff you do is freakin' a-damn-mazing!

[Padawan v 2.5]

I like this sort of stuff. The cargo haulers, troop transports, oilers, repair ships, ammo carriers, hospital ships, etc. The stuff every fleet would have to possess to operate, but never see on screen because they aren't sexy enough.

That being said, I think it's way too big to be an effective oiler. Look at our USN collier ships, they are no bigger than a Cruiser.

http://www.navy.mil/navydata/fact_display.asp?cid=4400&tid=600&ct=4

That thing is an enormous target that would require tons of protection. It would likely be ponderously slow, and there couldn't possibly be that many of them made. Ships would have to travel to it to refuel and rearm instead of the other way around. Better to have five of them each a fifth as big, me thinks. Cool ship, my only input is scale it down.

P@T

[fractalsponge]

I like this sort of stuff. The cargo haulers, troop transports, oilers, repair ships, ammo carriers, hospital ships, etc. The stuff every fleet would have to possess to operate, but never see on screen because they aren't sexy enough.

That being said, I think it's way too big to be an effective oiler. Look at our USN collier ships, they are no bigger than a Cruiser.

http://www.navy.mil/navydata/fact_display.asp?cid=4400&tid=600&ct=4

That thing is an enormous target that would require tons of protection. It would likely be ponderously slow, and there couldn't possibly be that many of them made. Ships would have to travel to it to refuel and rearm instead of the other way around. Better to have five of them each a fifth as big, me thinks. Cool ship, my only input is scale it down.

P@T

Well, that's actually 4 times the displacement of a normal destroyer. Look at the AOE-style ships in service and you get something that can go as high as half the displacement of a supercarrier.

http://www.usswisconsin.org/Pictures/1980-90%20pic/479%20DN-SN-91-09310.jpg

Not small, those. Besides, this thing will have to fuel up to what, an executor-sized ship :P

[Padawan v 2.5]

I had related to a Cruiser, not a Destroyer. And your comparison to a super-carrier is exactly right, it would make sense for it to be about half the size of an Imperial SD, because that's the largest ship it will need to do an unrep for in nearly all situations. IIRC, there were no more than five Super SD's built, but hundreds of standard SD's, and thousands of smaller cruisers and frigates spread out over more than half a galaxy. You would want to spend your resources building as many tankers as you could to service these vessels wherever they are instead of concentrating on a handful of behemoths that would become more like fuel stations that ships had to leave their stations to go find.

Further, I would expect a ship as vast as a SSD would have the internal volume to give it enough endurance to hardly ever need an unrep from a ship like this. If one ever did, then several of the smaller tankers could convene on it and do the same job. Maybe I'm putting too much thought into this, but I still think it's too big from a logistical and strategic standpoint. Okay, now I know I'm putting too much thought into this.

P@T

[Padawan v 2.5]

I really enjoy David Weber's Honor Harrington novels, and that universe is very detailed in technology, politics, strategy, and tactics. He pours thought into not only the design of ships, but how their design would affect their use on the battlefield. So I've found myself thinking about sci-fi in those terms.

Think about a historical example in the Paris guns and the other monster guns Germany produced in the first and second World Wars. They were easily the largest and most powerful single guns of the period, but they were also huge targets that required enormous crews and resources to construct, operate, and defend. Their only real advantage was the terror they produced on the population of a city under bombardment. However, their usefulness was so curtailed by limited mobility and the tremendous amount of material support they needed to operate that most military historians believe it would have made more strategic sense to invest the money, material, and manpower into dozens more dive bombers or smaller field guns that could move freely and engage many targets at once. Bigger eventually becomes its own liability.

P@T

[fractalsponge]

Well since we're having a geek fest, let me weigh in further :)

There are over twelve executor-class in the various SW sources, as well as numerous intermediate-sized ships between star destroyer and star dreadnaught. Those ships will need proportionally sized logistics.

Vulnerability:
You generally don't unrep in combat, so vulnerability is determined basically what kind of security you have around your fleet when any spoiling attack on replenishment can potentially occur. Without escort, the fleet train, large or small, is equally screwed in the face of real warships.

So, consider this ship, meant to refuel large concentrations of fleet vessels, or single, very large ships like the Executor - you're always going to have a fleet around it.

Mobility:
Considering the speed of FTL drive, how big and slow something like this is at sublight is irrelevant; you're always going to have the more maneuverable ship come into dock, even in real life, and that is always going to be the warship that needs fuel. But that said, mobile logistics (in the FTL strategic sense), no matter how large, are still important - you can have ships travel less far off station to refuel.

Capacity is an interesting question - a Venator from EP3 burns 40,000 tons of fuel per second at peak output - even considering the fuel must be ultra-dense, how long would you suppose that will last? By the same calculation, the Bellator burns 3.3 million tons at peak output, per second. A ship might have plenty of hotel load, but full power burn (say, in battle) is something else entirely.

In any event, it seems rather odd to have a ship that can refuel one ship, once, does it not? What happens when your star destroyer squadron needs refueling? And there are a lot of them; standard OOB is 24 per sector, and there are many sectors. You'd have to duplicate the crews, drive mechanisms, and other non-cargo bearing portions of the ship if you build an equivalent fleet of small ships. Plus the hassle of maneuvering a shoal of smaller ships to dock.

[Padawan v 2.5]

I guess my problem is envisioning this as "the" fleet oiler class. I can see your points as far as using this to unrep massed fleets of many ships, as in preparation for an offensive like Hoth. Or for unrep on a large fleet on permanent station defending a strategically important outpost, say Endor.

But these are very limited situations, so I can only envision the need for a very small number of these things. Most of the time you aren't going to have all your capital ships concentrated into a battle fleet, they are going to be spread out on patrols and garrisoning systems in ones and twos. Especially since your main adversary is using small scale hit-and-run tactics more akin to the Spanish fighting against privateers than the sort of large scale fleet engagements of the U.S. and Japan. With a foe like that, you want your ships to be as spread out as possible to deny them operating territory and increase your chances of actually catching them.

So since most of the time you are only going to be servicing a max of a couple ships at once, why spend the energy to schlep enough fuel around to top off a fleet? If your car runs out of gas, does it make more sense to bring back a 5 gallon jug, or a whole tanker truck? And again, since your ships are really spread out over a huge theater, it's just going to make more sense to have more smaller, faster ships to run around attending to as many systems simultaneously as possible. The job will get done much more quickly.

P@T

[fractalsponge]

Well of course - I doubt you'd use this thing to refuel frigates and the like on a normal basis, very much like you probably don't need an AOE to refuel a coast guard cutter. I imagine you'd have smaller ships do the day-to-day refueling of destroyers and smaller, and have a few of these in support of the really big guns, kind of like the USN has only 4 AOEs now, but many oilers and stores ships, etc.

But there are obviously very large fleets out there, so that's what this is for. Of course, given the capacity, you can also use it also as a more mobile fuel dump, topping off smaller ships in a protected area closer to theater that will then go and refuel the ships in the line, similar to the T-AKE and T-AO now topping off AOE/Rs (not the size bit for this analogy, but the function).

[Padawan v 2.5]

It should also be mentioned that this design would scale up and down pretty well. If it was designed to be somewhat modular from the onset, you could easily manufacture multiple size classes from common components, from single tank, to twin, to the back half of this, etc.

P@T

[rider]

You're work is absolutely beautiful. Awesome detailing. :eek::cool: