10 % weight penalty for modular systems on warships

[Korzon77]

Does that sound reasonable? you get a 1000 ton pod that can be swapped in and out and you pay 10% mass penalty for all the onboard power/link ups etc?

[I am Belch II]

I could see it. I always figured that Warships were Omni for all the cargo and space.

[The_Caveman]

I'm not really sure what the purpose of an omni-warship would be.

Their role is defined more by their size and thrust than weapons loadout. And while it's relatively easy to cut ISO-standard size holes in the side of the ship for weapon mounts, it would be much more difficult to make the interior configurable in a way that you could swap out things like fighter bays and docking hardpoints.

Not to mention, your crew requirements change based on weapon loadout, so there's that headache to deal with as well.

[Korzon77]

Well, warships are actually easier to omni than a mech would be-- and you have the advantage of cutting down on your speciality hulls. That's not such a big issue in the star league, but modern warships have to end up wearing lots of different hats.

[Red Pins]

...I lean towards the idea, but I'm a bit leary of it as well.

Its a grand idea, using pre-fab components to produce variants based on a single hull, but a spaceship is hardly an Arleigh Burke-class frigate (?).  Even if you decide each component needs to separately heat or vent to keep passengers and crew comfortable, you still have to have that energy available, the internal structure built-in, etc.

Not to mention that the delicate equilibrium of thrust/mass could be put off.  Imagine, pulling to the left into oncoming traffic, but in a spaceship...

[Korzon77]

My assuumptin is that would be handled much in teh same way Omni-fit outs where you have all sorts of weight differentials between loads are-- the hard work was done at the factory and in the software. 

Essentially, my main limitaitons for them would be that you have to assign them a facing and any mounted weapons must be assigned a facing within on degree of the set facing-- if your pod mounting is in the nose arc, then it's nose/LF/RF rather than anything. As for power, well, we don't see any demand for extra hardware for ships that are heavy in energy vs. NAC, so I'm assuming that largely ship drives are so over powered that they can pretty much power anything you can physically hang on the ship.

[HobbesHurlbut]

Not to mention, your crew requirements change based on weapon loadout, so there's that headache to deal with as well.

That's easily fixed; have quarters allocated for the maximum number of gunners possible on any configuration this WarShip can take. If there are less gunners in a specific configuration, that mean more quarters for the passengers OR more "leg room" for the crew.

[Korzon77]

I'm not certain about that-- the thing is that first you have to have a housing that can accept these modular pods and do it without having to rebuild the ship. That requires a lot more wiggle room than a permanent installation. Then there's the need to have conduits that can handle all sorts of systems, which means some will go unusued.

Pragmatically, I also want to avoid the point where you ask: why isn't everyone making omni-warships.  A 10 percent penalty would make an omniship that depended solely on pods clearly inferior to a specific ship build, which would go far to explain why it's a new concept-- in the days of the star league, it made more sense to build specialized ships. It's only in the present, where don't have hundreds of ships in service, where the need to have specialized capabilities justifies the loss in efficiency.

[theagent]

I don't see the point of a mass penalty, since OmniMechs don't gave one.  Instead, I would recommend a facing limitation: each facing would have a designated amount of pod space available that is explicitly stated.  For example,a WarShip with 120,000 tons of pod space has to state how many tons per arc are available -- even if the default 15,000 tons per arc (Nose, Fore-Left/Right, LBS/RBS, Aft-Left/Right, & Aft).  If you want more pod space in the broadsides, you have to limit other arcs to do so.

The main problem I see is cost. WarShips are already expensive (albeit not quite as bad as the old x100 multiplier they used to have), but adding another 25% on top of that is going to make them even more expensive to build. Unless you have a lot of hulls to use, the greater flexibility of an Omni design will be diminished by the lack of available ships.

[HobbesHurlbut]

The main problem I see is cost. WarShips are already expensive (albeit not quite as bad as the old x100 multiplier they used to have), but adding another 25% on top of that is going to make them even more expensive to build. Unless you have a lot of hulls to use, the greater flexibility of an Omni design will be diminished by the lack of available ships.

Not exactly. Remember that the bottleneck in the WarShip construction for the Inner Sphere houses during early 3000s was the transit engine. If you can build only a few WarShips, you want them to be as versatile as possible to make the best of them.