Lyonesse gunboat - 175t, TRO3026R
Originally posted 26 Jul. 2006. All proposed fan-variants should be posted in the corresponding “FotW Workshop†thread.AFAICT: Lyonesse and (closer to camera) Aquarius.
Apparently, the
Lyonesse is an example of a fairly typical pre-to-early-Star League concept of a surface-to-space (or vice versa) escort craft for DropShips heading to or from orbital facilites and/or WarShips. This makes a certain degree of logical sense - there are few points on a DropShip transit where systems-failure or battle damage carry more potential for disaster than during the atmospheric transition - but as to how it might play out in practice? YMMV. For my own part, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some Star League or House WarShips with good small-craft capacity and little in the way of point-defence ordnance used craft similar to the
Lyonesse (or its cousin the
Aquarius) as picquet ships or very light escorts/screening elements, providing the last-ditch fighter-scale firepower that they themselves lack.
* Trace Coburn gives significant looks to the Aegis CA, Black Lion BC, Texas BB, and McKenna DN.
At a hundred and seventy-five tons and 4/6 thrust, the
Lyonesse isn’t exactly a speed-freak, but considering that most of its ‘principals’ are DropShips or WarShips - few of which can match that same thrust profile, and even fewer exceed it - it’s probably close enough for a government contract. Five tons of fuel is enough for the better part of three days’ strategic burn: more than sufficient for a simple STS escort run. (Indeed, it’s probably more than enough for ‘strategic escort’ missions for ’Ships transiting to/from orbit from/to a jump-point, too: assuming a one-week transit time from the time the ’Ship jumps in, the gunboat can launch immediately and remain out in space to cover the ’Ship for the first two days or so outbound, recover to replenish consumables and rest the crew for the next three or four days, then launch and cover the ’Ship for the last couple of days of their transit to their destination. These are the points of maximum vulnerability on a transit burn, when the ’Ship’s base velocity is lowest and intercept solutions for extended engagements are most easily generated; attacking at any other point on the transit involves vectors which allow only one or two turns of firing, which are hardly an optimum method for ensuring the destruction of the target. This is part of the reason why most combat occurs around jump-points or planets - the termini of transits.)
The
Lyonesse’s armour is staggering by starfighter standards, and pretty solid even by SC measures: an SI of 7 lets one use max-thrust for a goodly while plus stand up to a bit of punishment, and 31.5 tons of standard plating, 165/133/101, renders the ship immune to TACs even from PPCs from all angles, which is probably good enough for the job at hand. This is a ship meant to form a wall-of-steel around their principal and hold off enemy fighters until the principal gets away or the hostiles’ fuel expires; it is by no means meant to run-and-gun with capital ships.
Of course, if gunboats like the
Lyonesse want to have a go at
DropShips, they can dish out a fair bit of hurt under the right circumstances. The
Lyonesse mounts some forty single heat-sinks and a daunting array of ordnance: a nose-mounted LRM-20 with twenty-four salvoes, paired with an SRM-6 with two tons in its own right; each wing mounts five medium lasers, four forward(!) and one wing-aft; and the aft sector houses more lasers, three mediums and a small. Run the numbers and you get a very interesting factoid, folks: as it stands, the
Lyonesse can fire all of its wing-mounted lasers and either all of its tail-guns or all of its nose-guns without running into heat problems, allowing it to either stand off its’ ‘parent’s’ flank and keep blazing away or simply wade into a formation of hostile fighters and start dishing good news. Unfortunately, that’s mostly Short-range firepower, so you have to climb into the other guy’s hip pocket to do real damage, but with a little luck and the right deployment doctrine, a picquet- or screen-line of
Lyonesses can create a ‘line of death’ for hostile fighter squads worthy of respect.
I made an issue of the Mark.VII’s crew-space allocations, which were rather lavish - partly as a consequence of its being a ‘legacy’ design. Not suffering from such a handicap, the
Lyonesse goes almost to the other extreme: built solely for escort operations no longer than two or three days at the outside, the crew appointments and gear-space are almost savagely sparse. The pilot’s space-allocation is a mere two tons, with 1.75 tons allocated to each of the two crew-members and three gunners the design is built for, a full ton of space for food and water (33 days’ worth - still too much, but
maaayyybe excusable), and only 630kg (0.63 tons) set aside for spare parts, tools, and sundry onboard repair kits. All of these are far more reasonable to my eyes: most repairs and maintenance on a small-craft are done in the flight-bay (usually aboard their parent ’Ship), so the half-ton spares allocation is no great failing, and the crew spaces have just enough space for a shared toilet, maybe a low-water shower, and nice soft command-chairs and a sleeping bag for each man - which is all you’ll need on a
Lyonesse before you get to/have to RTB for more fuel and get to spend three or four days sleeping in real bunks. ;)
Does the
Lyonesse have failings? Given her design-role and fluff, about the only one I can see is her lack of hitting power in the Medium-and-longer range brackets - which is partly a function of the OOC (and IC?) desire to distinguish her from the
Aquarius.
You can’t get a full read-out on the Lyonesse’s stats on-line - the above Chaosmarch link offers only the combat-stats - so I’ll post the HM:A version below and put my ‘revised’ version into the first reply, like I did with the Mark.VII. The typos and such are part of the HM:A files, incidentally. (The attached picture came from the Heavy Metal Pro forums, incidentally - the armament layout suggests that that’s the Lyonesse in the back, and the craft in the foreground is the Aquarius.) [VARIANT PROPOSAL(S) REDACTED] All proposed fan-variants - including my own - belong in the corresponding “FotW Workshop†thread: http://www.classicbattletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,6206.0.html Be advised: the attached .txt transcript of the previous run of this thread may contain numerous reader-proposals for variants. I’ll try to change it out for a ‘sanitised’ version of that thread when I can, but I can’t promise it’ll be soon - that’s a lot of ground to cover. ;)