Supercarrier help

[Jhorriga]

I've been worldbuilding a sci fi universe. I've come up with a hangar configuration for a supercarrier(more like a carrier battleship hybrid) but I'm not sure on it. Basically there is a maintinence hangar, a launch bay, and a landing bay. I don't really know if it's themost sensible though. One big hangar like on the invisible hand? Or various hangars? Any ideas/suggestions?

Edited January 18, 2018 by Jhorriga

[magnemoe]

An maintenance hangar, else you hang the parasite crafts outside or in un-pressurized areas if you want to have them under armor / shields. 
No need for launch or landing facility you dock KSP or ISS style (arm grab parasite and pull it under armor. 

Says parasite as it would rather be missile torpedo boats style parasites rather than fighter jet sized ones. Bonus is that an crew of 3-8 would give crew interaction.
You need carriers as the good engines are heavy, anything from orion nuclear pulse engine to faster than light, but you don't want to risk the big ships. An MTB sized parasite could run for months on it own an fighter would be limited to a couple of days. 

[radonek]

Miliary tends to prefer sturdines over functional excelence for obvious reasons. So if it came to three bays, first logical requirement would be to have them usable or at least configurable to any purpose.  Crew may keep it in some prefered configuration most of the time, but ther ewill be a way to handle emergencies.

Or one can go completely other way, drop the idea of "carrier" which IMO does not make much sense outside of  drones and torpedoes and have it as "moving drydock" in which case bigger the main bay, bigger ships it can service.

[Scotius]

I advice against putting all your eggs in one hangar If the crew will try to refuel\rearm\repair small crafts at the same time and place where they will launch or land... there will be mishaps. Also, during battle one good shot will be enough to completely cripple the operations, kill a good chunk of ground crew... and carry a big risk of setting off the ordnance strewn around the hangar. Japanese Navy experienced this during the Battle of Midway. Painfully.

[Jhorriga]

Ok. I'm thinking of a landing hangar in the rear with 4 "runways" (like the ones on the ship in COD infinite warfare) That have electromagnetic elements that pull in the craft when they land if necessary. 

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, Jhorriga said:

Ok. I'm thinking of a landing hangar in the rear with 4 "runways" (like the ones on the ship in COD infinite warfare) That have electromagnetic elements that pull in the craft when they land if necessary. 

Problem is that the dV gain of any catapult system who launch humans can be ignored compared to even primitive engines, catapults on aircraft carriers get plane up to 300 km/h or 83 m/s. 
you only need to get clear of carrier to fire up the fighter engines. 

[radonek]

yeah, catapults are nonsense and even downright harmful if not aimed at desired burn vector. And captain of the big ship will be much more interrested in minimizing crossection and thermal signature then shaving a little bit of dV. (Unless catapult in question is big and loaded with projectiles, i.e. long range kinetic weapon. But then you have dreadnaught instead of carrier.)

No, launch is not a problem, you just have your drones/torpedoes/fighters/whatever hung on hull parasite style, ready to detach. Retrieval will be much more fun. Undamaged ones may simply head back to outside clamps, but ones in need of servicing/repair may pose a real challenge. Damaged thruster systems, leaking fuels, live nuclear ordnance… For instance, crew of carriers in CotDE must have excessive amount of fun handling all those drones using fluorine as oxydizer.

[DDE]

6 hours ago, Jhorriga said:

Ok. I'm thinking of a landing hangar in the rear with 4 "runways" (like the ones on the ship in COD infinite warfare) That have electromagnetic elements that pull in the craft when they land if necessary. 

*homicidal rage*

For a spacecraft that's already performed rendezvous and approach it's trivial to perform a KSP-style docking or be berthed in by a robot arm. I'd suggest straight-out avoiding naval carrier analogies, have a tiny maintenance hangar, and keep all of the craft externally docked with little to no armour protection. At most, a semi-enclosed, non-pressurized takeoff and landing deck.

Otherwise, the Space Police is going to come for you and CONCORDokken your ass.

[GoSlash27]

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceNavy

As long as you're going with a "space carrier" analogue, tho'... You have a large internal hangar, well- lit. It is primarily intended as a shirt-sleeve working environment for the repair and routine maintenance of tactical/ support daughter craft. It can be subdivided in an emergency (or during GQ) by internal airtight and fireproof doors to compartmentalize it. Each compartment has it's own reserve bottled air and can be vented to extinguish a fire.

2 large airlocks at each end to transfer tactical/support craft in and out of the hangar.
Tactical/ support craft are attached on the outside, and most routine evolutions are conducted there. Refueling, rearming, etc. There is no need for catapults or runways, but there *is* a need for tight traffic control in the approach to and departure from the carrier itself. It's crowded airspace.

Best,
-Slashy

 

[ARS]

Instead of being a carrier, the space equivalent would be like a battlestar type, aka a hybrid between battleship and carrier. Aerodynamic does not work in space, so hangar and runway becomes useless. During World War II, the honored tradition of building more and more powerful gun-toting battleships came to an abrupt halt when naval artillery became largely supplanted by carriers. It had none of the battleship's armament and durability, but it could project force hundreds of kilometers away, without ever endangering the ship itself — which made most WWII aerial/naval battles decidedly one-sided. Modern warfare may eventually subvert this trend. Currently, major warships that aren't carriers or amphibious assault ships are missile ships, each capable of launching a relative missile massacre, macross-style. As missile technology and remote piloting advance, the aircraft launched by the carrier may become unmanned guided munitions, blurring the line between missiles and attack craft. However, warfare largely dominated by purely automated systems can take away from importance of human characters in a war story. Thus, authors are likely to explain that missile combat didn't take place for various reasons, such as abundance of electronic countermeasures to disrupt missile guidance, point defenses, or electronic warfare potentially compromising the effectiveness of remotely piloted (or automated) craft. Instead, the flagship of the future (IN SPACE) becomes something that encompasses both artillery and piloting tropes: a hybrid carrier/battleship It has the heavy armor and big guns of a battleship, along with the fighters and point defense weapons of a carrier. This makes perfect sense, assuming having fighter mmakes sense, this is because the extremely thin atmosphere and the huge amount of free space means that the range of weapons are enormous, and the lack of gravity means you don't have to waste the entire top on runways and the entire bottom on being underwater.

As a general rule, the Battlestar is portrayed in sci-fi media in one of three ways:

• Type 1: Battleship carrying fighters. This is essentially a capital ship with the primary offensive options being its own big guns, with the fighters to serve as interceptors against incoming enemy strikes or to provide utility and ability for surgical strikes when main cannons are too blunt of an instrument. Example: space battleship yamato
• Type 2: Carrier with extra guns and armor. This ship essentially behaves like a real life aircraft carrier, in that the primary offensive option is its embarked fighter wing, and the guns and armor lean more towards self defense options. Example: battlestar galactica
• Type 3: The ship is not a war vessel per se; rather, it is an exploration or colony craft, armed out of neccessity to have the widest array of available options. Its guns and air wing may very well have applications outside of combat, such as exploration, landing and dealing with the occasional space anomalies. Example: The Sidonia

In real life wet navies, it does not work. Battleships and carriers require very different paradigms; the former are built for taking and dealing out heavy damage, which demands certain armor and armament characteristics, such as compartmentalization to minimize damage spread but also cut into holding space. Fighter landing strips, hangars and the stores for their fuel and munitions would detract from this role, leaving you with a jack of all trade/master of none that cannot fight or tank as well as a pure combatant or service as many fighters as a pure carrier. This didn't stop some attempts from being made. When initially launched in the late 1920s, the USS Lexington and Saratoga had a complement of cruiser-class 8-inch guns. Japan put similar 8-inch guns in casemates on the sides of Akagi andKaga. The reasoning behind the guns was so they could defend themselves if ambushed at night or in bad weather when planes couldn't fly, but they proved to be generally useless - the necessary high speed of carriers was a better defense. Japan also created hybrid Battleship/seaplane carriers out of a couple of old battleships, Ise and Hyuga in the wake of losses at the Battle of Midway. The naysayers turned out to be right: Ise and Hyuga were total failures, and the large guns on the US ships interfered with flight operations if actually used, and they were removed in 1941. The 8-inch casemates were going to be removed from Kaga and Akagi after Midway, but the ships were sunk first. Other experiments never got even this far.

It's worth noting that real life examples of carrier/battleship hybrid largely predate real life examples of dedicated aircraft carriers. Many early experiments in launching and recovering airplanes from warships involved cruisers and battleships, and the first aircraft carrier to launch a wartime air raid, the British HMS Furious, began life as a battlecruiser and went through various design modification where she retained some of her main battery along with a flight deck. They wouldn't settle on the flush-deck carrier design modern viewers would recognize until the postwar period.

In space, however, this model is less silly than it might appear. A trio of points: First, given how planets move through space and the need for at least rudimentary slingshot orbits, trajectories are actually fairly predictable in time and space, therefore, combat is likely to be very short range, though you could send a bunch of missiles hurtling down this space "lane". Although fightercraft are less useful in a traditional role, they can bring weapons (e.g. missiles) closer, in under the target's point-defense range, and at this point in time we can't conceive of a spacecraft that could take a missile and keep fighting, but if we could take the missile out early, the most it could do could be irradiate the ship, and you can armor against that. You can actually make an argument for almost any weapon in space, though for kinetics you'd need a propellant that doesn't need outside air, and be willing to live with the fact that you're putting hyper-lethal debris somewhere, especially immediate if you're fighting in near-orbit. Thirdly, shields could help mitigate some of the carrier's vulnerabilities, especially if physical armor is useless such that pure battleships don't have superior durability after all.

Furthermore, depending on the FTL system used, the carrier strike group system used in real life may not work. In real life, enemy ships have to battle through fighter screens and escorts to get to the lightly-armored carrier, with the fates of Prince of Wales, Repulse demonstrating battleship vulnerability to air attack and Yamato providing object lessons as to the impossibility of uncovered surface elements closing with carriers. However, in a universe where the FTL has a lack of no warp zone, enemy battleships could bypass screening elements to "jump" into close quarters combat and shred carriers with alpha strikes, denying your side most of its strikecraft and thus offensive power, insofar as this is a universe where fighters have useful anti-capital firepower. In such a universe, it would only make sense to armor and upgun carriers to survive these sorts of lightning strikes, thus giving rise to the battlestar concept

Edited January 17, 2018 by ARS

[DDE]

@ARS, it is however, EXTREMELY important to point out that a Battlestar is extremely hampered by any internal hangars. A space "surface combatant", especially if the setting uses armour, needs to be a lean, mean fighting machine without an extra cubic centimeter having to be covered by armour plating.

10 hours ago, GoSlash27 said:

It is primarily intended as a shirt-sleeve working environment for the repair and routine maintenance of tactical/ support daughter craft.

@Jhorriga, there aren't that many reasons why you'd want to have a spacecraft in a shirt-sleeve environment - and quite a few why you wouldn't. For example, because your maneuvering thrusters are likely to be covered in unburnt residue of their toxic, mutagenic, carcinogenic, corrosive fuel...

[DDE]

@Jhorriga

The reasons aircraft carriers look like they look like are:

• gravity and water, which prevent them from having a cylindrical deck
• water and the elements, which require an enclosed deck, although the US often uses deck parks as well
• most aircraft being unable to land at zero relative velocity, requiring a landing strip and sophisticated capture mechanisms
• the large downwash area of aircraft with high mass-flow, low exhaust velocity engines

In space, none of this is really relevant.

Look how VTOL reshapes the use of the flight deck:

Edited January 18, 2018 by DDE

[Jhorriga]

The spacecraft are not supposed to land on the runways (unless the vessel is in atmosphere). They are simply there to guide ships to the hangar. I'm thinking they would be sealed with those blue barriers like in halo and star wars. Keep in mind this is more starwars esc sci fi military.

[Nibb31]

Why would they need to be guided to a hangar ? What's wrong with a huge grid of docking ports ?

Edited January 18, 2018 by Nibb31

[DDE]

3 hours ago, Nibb31 said:

What's wrong with a huge gride of docking ports ?

4 hours ago, Jhorriga said:

I'm thinking they would be sealed with those blue barriers like in halo and star wars. Keep in mind this is more starwars esc sci fi military.

You're on your own, kid. SW-style means as much magic (poorly disguised as technology) as you wish; the more like WWII carriers in space, the better.

Edited January 18, 2018 by DDE

[GoSlash27]

14 hours ago, DDE said:

there aren't that many reasons why you'd want to have a spacecraft in a shirt-sleeve environment - and quite a few why you wouldn't. For example, because your maneuvering thrusters are likely to be covered in unburnt residue of their toxic, mutagenic, carcinogenic, corrosive fuel...

DDE,

 I didn't mean *literally* shirt-sleeve, I meant "not in a space suit" shirt sleeve. I'm assuming that in his universe things break down and wear out under heavy use, and that maintenance and repairs are difficult to perform in the dark in a space suit.

Best,
-Slashy

[Jhorriga]

Docking ports and parasite fighters would be very vunerable to enemy attacks. Star wars is sci fi fantasy, so it's not exactly aiming to be realistic. 

[GoSlash27]

7 minutes ago, Jhorriga said:

Docking ports and parasite fighters would be very vunerable to enemy attacks.

Jhorriga,

 True, but (taking the carrier analogy) tactical spacecraft have no business cowering in the hangar during the battle. Their job is to be out patrolling, protecting, taking the fight to the enemy. The tactical craft are the weapons and they protect the carrier. Expecting the carrier to protect the tactical craft is a recipe for disaster.

Best,
-Slashy

[DDE]

11 hours ago, Jhorriga said:

Docking ports and parasite fighters would be very vunerable to enemy attacks. Star wars is sci fi fantasy, so it's not exactly aiming to be realistic. 

...which is consistent with the WWII scheme. A deck park, full of plywood aircraft with heavy ordnance and full of avgas, under enemy fire, is an absolute disaster.

[Cassel]

22 hours ago, Nibb31 said:

Why would they need to be guided to a hangar ? What's wrong with a huge grid of docking ports ?

You need spacesuits to make service repairs?

[DDE]

27 minutes ago, Cassel said:

You need spacesuits to make service repairs?

For any practical combat spacecraft? At least.

Plus, that's why I keep saying "tiny pressurized repair hangar".

[GoSlash27]

2 hours ago, Cassel said:

You need spacesuits to make service repairs?

Cassel, you do if what you're repairing isn't in a pressurized hangar. That's why you need one. And not a little one, either. Each tactical spacecraft requires a lot of maintenance hours to stay mission-capable, and if you can't service a large number of craft simultaneously your entire flight schedule would soon grind to a halt.

Best,

-Slashy

[Nibb31]

3 hours ago, Cassel said:

You need spacesuits to make service repairs?

That's what robots are for.

Do you really think this military carrier would need human pilots and service crew ?

Why would you go to the risk and complexity of putting humans in the loop when you have technology advanced enough to build an interplanetary super carrier ?

Edited January 19, 2018 by Nibb31

[DDE]

1 hour ago, Nibb31 said:

Why would you go to the risk and complexity of putting humans in the loop when you have technology advanced enough to build an interplanetary super carrier ?

Shhhhhhh, space opera sci-fi fa...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AxvxP18BhU

SHUT UP!

[Cassel]

3 hours ago, Nibb31 said:

That's what robots are for.

Do you really think this military carrier would need human pilots and service crew ?

Why would you go to the risk and complexity of putting humans in the loop when you have technology advanced enough to build an interplanetary super carrier ?

Because people can't be hacked? Imagine how much would cost service robot that is super secured? Also making repairs and using radio waves makes you "visible" while I guess most of fight in space is going to be stealth like F-35 or even more advanced.