I designed a ship in my current sandbox game, which is the first ship I'd like to post on the forums. It's the first ship I've designed to look completely unrelated to it's base hull. It does not use KHSM(making it fully metaverse-legal), and in fact uses only 5 extras. It's a Terran medium hull which represents what I imagine us humans to actually make space warships look like when we eventually have to militarize space(against aliens or against ourselves) - water-based ships. Although I actually expect humans to make space warships which resemble submarines, I couldn't put together a decent looking submarine design, so I made the medium hull 'Katana-Class' hunter-killer surveyor instead.

Of course, the ship was designed in 2008, so I'm not going to put it in last year's thread. Feel free to put your more recent ship designs here.




It's a DA ship, which is too bad. If I had TA, with it's rotating parts, the front turret could have actually been made to spin. (:(

Details: The ship design isn't a warship of the line. No, that role would of course be taken by huge hulls. This thing is designed to speed around killing freighters, constructors, starbases, transports, small fighters, flagships, etc. in times of war. Of course, everyone in my present game(at the time when the design was created) was either allied to me, part of my empire(culturally conquered), or allied to me and undergoing a peaceful integration into my empire. In fact, I hadn't yet invaded any planet at all, though I had flipped about 60% of the the galaxy. So far, the Iconians, Korx, Altarians, Yor, Torians and Exploitrons have all fallen in this manner. This leaves only the Drengin and Thalan independent, protected for now by a freak 'native cultural power' event.

But every time an evil empire finally gave in to my culture, their warships would go astray as pirates, with no fleets and no bonuses supporting them. This threatened slow-moving constructors and space miners working in the region, and called for a ship to mop up the pirates. So I upgraded my aging, obsolete, neglected Terran Alliance Flagship, which had eventually given up it's survey duties to smaller, zippier ships and was lying unnoticed in the orbit of Iconia 5. These smaller ships were now outclassed by the Katana and retired to picket duties.

The ol' Flagship already had the anomaly plating, HP-booster techs, and Xinathium required to kill any pirate-ized frigate using the tie-rule exploit, and with a bit of experience and another layer of anomaly plating, it could kill off a pirate battleship using the same exploit.

It's so far done it's anti-pirate duties as expected, and though it will probably never make up for it's upgrade costs, it's already paid off several years worth of maintenance with 1000 bc and 250 bc anomalies. No ships of the Katana class were actually ever built, with only my flagship's upgrading and renaming taking place. The new name was derived from Douglas Adams' Life, The Universe and Everything:

"But while these spaceships, and other great ones come to mind, such as the Galactic Fleet Battleships-the GSS Daring, the GSS Audacity and the GSS Suicidal Insanity-are all spoken of with awe, pride, enthusiasm, affection, admiration, regret, jealousy, resentment, in fact..."