Unmanned Vehicle Design for Star Cruiser

By Bryn Monnery

 

Missiles and Drones are, of course, miniature stutterwarp ships in their own right. As such they are extremely expensive pieces of equipment.

The two tend to be used in conjunction with one another in combat. A vessel will send out drones to detect the enemy at a distance so that it can send its missiles to attack without having to approach the enemy itself.

This means that drones are often targeted during combat. Sometimes this is because they are mistaken for missiles, but more often the enemy simply wants to deprive the missile ship of the information the drones transmit, forcing the ship to close distance itself.

When considering the fact that every time a detonation missile explodes or a regular missile or a drone is destroyed by fire, another small stutterwarp engine is lost, it becomes obvious that such battles are very expensive, even if the main military vessels themselves are never hit.

- Page 78, 2300AD Directors Guide, 2nd edition

Introduction

This article will enable you to design missiles, drones and submunitions launchers for Star Cruiser and 2300AD. Prices may vary, as I take the above paragraph above the prices in Star Cruiser, and can find no relationship between the SC prices and the design.

The method will be to focus on "packages" which are common. The 3 packages are warheads, sensors and drive.

Warhead Packages

The warhead is the business end of any weapon. Warhead data is expressed as number of strikes x damage per strike. Each strike actually represents 6 "shots" of the weapon. The damage output of a 10x2 is thus 1.2Gj, roughly the same as a ton of HE, and can obviously severely damage a ship.

The mass of a detonation warhead is: 0.1 x strikes x damage per strike.

Each tons displaces a cubic meter and costs 1MLv per ton.

In addition the warhead contains a terminal guidance system, massing 0.1 tons, displacing 1 cubic meter and costing MLv0.02.

This gives you a det-warhead package/ submunition.

For non-detonation pacakges, a weapon must be installed (often a x1 laser massing 1 ton and costing MLv0.097). This must be powered, either from the fuel cell or via capacitors. Capacitors mass 0.1 tons per shot per MW output, displace an equal amount and cost 1MLv per ton.

Drive Packages

The drive package is a stutterwarp drive, fuel cell and fuel. Pull them straight off the tables in NAM, although for the stutterwarp, you may like to use the underlying formula.

Sensor Packages

The tricky part of missiles is their passive sensor packages (where applicable). You may either use a NAM sensor for canon campaigns (bear in mind it must be pylon mounted) or may use the more realisitic formulae presented here.

For a spherical scan array, sensor area must be:

5 x (Range)2

With mass/ volume equal to 0.1x Area for fixed arrays and 0.2x Area for folding arrays, and a cost equal to mass.

For missiles, you may restrict the arc, a forward looking sensor has 10% the area and attendant mass and cost.

For sensors, RCS is either area/20 (fixed) or 0 (folding).

Submunition Launchers

These are sometimes found on missiles, the DA-2290 has a 3 shot 5x2 launcher for example. Submunition launchers mass 4.5 x total mass of submunitions carried at the NM TL and 6x total mass of submunitions at the OM.

Volume is equal to mass.

The hull area consumed is equal to 2.5x Volume2/3, RCS is dependent on stealthing, but is area for unstealthly launchers, 0.6 x area for stealthy launchers and area x 0.2 for very stealthy launchers.

Costs for the launcher is 6x Volume1/3 x 1,000 (unstealthy), 15,000 (stealthy) or 100,000 (very stealthy).

Conclusion

With these simple rules, you should be able to design missiles, drones and submunitions launchers which fit the published products, the boxed set and RW data much better.