Has anyone encountered a 5/8 600,000 ton or less warship With an optimized weapon suit comprized of Capital , Sub Capital , and Standard heavy weapon bays ? It occurs to me that with a slight reduction of Capital Armament it can have about the same medium and possibly more short range hitting power with more overall armor .
This is a known issue with the rules as written - capital scale weaponry is lavishly tonnage inefficient. A NL/55 does 55 damage and weights 700 tons. 70 bog-standard IS PPCs deal 700 damage (though at
slightly less significantly less range, and requiring more heat sinks).
Once clantech comes into the picture (particularly CERPPCs w/Capacitors and CERLL), the situation only grows worse. A CERPPC w/Capacitor weighs those same 7 Tons as the IS PPC, but deals twice the damage at greater range. These ranges are still short, but once warships start carrying clan Lamellor and maxing their armor to SI, surviving to close the range and use those 'anti-fighter' armaments to demolish other warships is quite doable. As a side effect, a broadside of, say, 200 of those Capacitor-Driven CERPPCs will do Very Bad Things to enemy fighters.
Now, the other parts of your proposal - Subcaps and 5/8, are somewhat more complex questions. Subcaps effectively sit between Naval and Standard Scale Weapons in terms of range and efficiency - for a light, fast ship like you describe, they might be a good way to get some reach.
Cornerposting as always helps. By putting your capital grade weaponry on FL/FR/AL/AR, segregated from all close in weapons, you avoid paying the (punitive and frankly silly) fire control tax for having >20 weapons per facing. You'll still have close to 360* coverage by capital fire (baring nose and aft hexrows), and if you manage to end up with someone in those hexrows - have a friend shoot them, or perform an ECHO. As a side effect, this puts your mass intensive heavy weapons in the broader 'better' mounts.
F/A/BS get your point defense and anti-fighter armament. These arcs do give 360* coverage, and your massive inefficency due to fire control weight stays firmly situated on your (to scale) super-light standard weapons. Hundreds of mounts per facing is easily doable, and they dont fall behind capital weapons for damage-to-ton until you go well beyond 500-700 mounts per facing. You may also consider putting capital missile launchers (if you have any) on these same arcs - as long as you keep the total mounts down to 200 or less, capital launchers arent badly penalized by the fire control cost (due to the fact that most of their mass requirement is in ammo, not launcher, and ammo mass doesnt get fed into the fire control mass calculation).
5/8 is a somewhat more difficult prospect. The KF-Drive and other very minimal housekeeping tonnage consumes about 50% of the ships mass. Every point of safe thrust is another 6% - so a 5/8 ship has spent 80% of its total mass on FTL and Manuver Drives, leaving 20% of its mass for SI and mission tonnage. A 'balanced' 10/10 Split gives 100 SI and a 50KT weapons fit (this is not very much, by capital standards) - and this is before one allocates tonnage for cargo bays! Any significant Cargo fit will drive those already low numbers down even further - and the 10% Cargo Holds that the Star League preferred will wreck her as a warship, leaving you with 50SI and a 25KT weapons suite.
Id recommend, if you really want to go 5/8, that you leave cargo handling to either cargo dropships riding on dropcollars or to dedicated cargo 'warships'. (Dropcollars are more flexible, and require less total capital ships, but are punitively more expensive.
Capital class cargo ships are a cheaper solution, but require more yard space)
Slower ships can afford cargo storage onboard, because that percentage slice comes out of a larger pie. Fast ships (and for me 'fast' starts at 4/6) really cannot.
As far as armament - a mix of a few Class 55 Naval Lasers (to allow it to leverage its agility by HOPEFULLY outranging other warships, or at least forcing them to engage only with their longest range weapons) and large batteries of close ranged weapons (tech level allowing, the CERPPC w/Capacitor is king here, IMHO), seem ideal. You should be able to cram on enough CERPPCs to maintain a credible close range threat, even against your better armed and armored cousins.
That said, a 5/8 design has little buisness engaging in stand up fights with a 4/6 or 3/5 warship. Its useful mental shorthand to think of the Capital Ship design space to be something like Standard Tech Assault Mech design. That 6% per thrust point means that, essentially:
A 1/2 Ship has 44% 'Stuff'. (Armor, Structure, Fighters, whatever). 1/2 is bad, because your limited to 60 SI. 60 SI is bad.
A 2/3 ship has 38% 'Stuff'. 2/3 can be okay. A limitation of 90 SI stings, some, but you can put huge warloads, cargo bays, fighter stowage, etc on such a vessel. Heck, you can do all three at once.
A 3/5 ship has 32% 'stuff'. 3/5 is the baseline warship, from which you deviate at your peril. 3/5 allows 150 SI, which balances with a 15% warload an a few % of cargo (rest carried on colliers or dropships) for an ideal pure warship. Or you can cut SI and Guns a bit and carry your cargo internally.
A 4/6 is 26% 'Stuff'. Mass fraction for doing the job once you get there is starting to drop rapidly at this point. Thats 130 SI and 13% guns, for a ship thats gonna be 'worth' about 3/4th as much in a fight. On the flip side, you get 1/3 more safe thrust, so I can go either way, and whats your greater priority? 4/6 works for the fast-wing battlecruiser-analogs that can still throw a punch with the battleships.
5/8, as illustrated above, is 20% stuff. You end up with less than half the combat power of a similar sized 3/5 ship. This is you FAST cruisers, your armed scouts, your raiders.
Beyond here, it gets strange.
6/9 is 14%. Your gonna need 2 to fight on par with even the 5/8 ship above, and the big gunboats will wreck them in job lots. Im not sure what Id use 6/9 for, to be honest. 9 Overthrust is 4.5 Gs, and you just DONT want to put that on humans for a long time. Given that untrained humans apparently can take 6Gs for 10 minutes while retaining full cognitive ability, I cannot image 4.5 Gs would be tolerated for more than 30 minutes - were getting into drive ranges that you cant USE, not for long, at least.
7/11 leaves an 8% mass war package. Thats, on a 500KT ship, 40 SI, and 20KT in armament. I suppose such a ship could be useful for running down and murdering dropships and jumpships in job lots. 20KT in armament is still going to leave you with room for a whole lot of ERPPCs, but no real capital scale weaponry and she will come apart if she comes within range of a 'real warships' guns.
8/12: 2% 'stuff'. Perhaps a compact core scout, with no meaningful armament, an impressive sensor array, and the ability to run away from ANYTHING? Maybe its a tug? Or put collars on it and have a very, very expensive jumpship that need never fear being intercepted and destroyed by... well, pretty much anything. Even assault droppers almost never go this fast. Id consider budgeting for a robotic control system so you can actually use that thrust.
That said, anything Id go 8/12 for, Id probably go 7/11 instead and quadruple my useable mass. No matter how we slice it, we have left the 'warship' design space far behind by this point, and wandered into cloud cuckoo land. 8/12 is the outlier - nothing faster in a warship is possible, as 9 thrust consumes 54% mass, incompatible with a compact core.
