A Siloship In Orbit Around Earth

Children of a Dead Earth is a hard science fiction space warfare simulator. It heavily, HEAVILY, emphasizes realistic physics and customization. It is set in the relatively near future after a cataclysm made Earth uninhabitable and humanity has been colonizing the solar system.

The Siloship is a medium sized Republic of the Free People capitol ship built around a large payload of nuclear missiles. Its primary purpose is long range (100 to >100,000 km) missile attacks against enemies within the same sphere of influence as the Siloship. While it does have some railguns, these are not anywhere near enough firepower to go toe to toe against dedicated close range ships without inflicting heavy damage with nukes from range first.

Internal layout.

Weapon layout.

Meta Information

Generally speaking most relevant info on a non-purely text based page (like this one) will be on the left side. This one (and every other module/missile page) is color coded to show where the information is. In general, red is weapon related, blue is maneuverability, and green is armor/defenses.

NOTE: If you don't know some specific term used in the RT, it might be defined in here (if it isn't in here then please tell me).

NOTE: In this RT there are a few sections about the material properties of the various armors the Siloship uses. If you don't know what stuff like "Young's modulus" or "Poisson's Ratio" means then look in this for the definitions.

Ship handling

Armor/defenses/durability/endurance

Armor

Flare Launcher

• *The launcher's full launch rate will never be used in practice. Flares are normally deployed in small groups of 5-10 as enemy missiles are within 10 seconds of intercepting the Siloship.

Weapons

The Siloship's primary weapons are its Devastator and Striker nuclear missiles.

Its secondary armament, the 11mm railguns, is would mostly be used for point defense against missiles and drones.

Missiles

The Siloship carries two types of missiles, Devastator and Striker Missiles.

Both use fission warheads though the Devastator is far more powerful than the Striker.

The missiles are guided by the Siloship's crew until they get within a ~10-50 kilometers of the target. After that they switch to heat seeking and will try to hit the largest heat source they can see.

These are usually deployed in pods of 10 or more missiles (depending on target). This is to so they can overwhelm the point defense of their target while also not firing so many missiles egregious numbers of them will be wasted due to the nuclear detonations mission killing nearby friendly missiles. These missiles are extremely safe in that it is extremely difficult to set them off without using the detonator. This of course has the downside that it is possible they can and will damage each other preventing the every missile in the pod from detonating on the target.

13 MW 11mm Autofire Railgun

The Siloship's railgun is a hypervelocity weapon. Without getting too bogged down in the physics of what that means, the rounds instead of behaving like a solid object when they hit a target they violently explode more like a high explosive.

The Siloship has a total of eight turrets but only one can fire continuously at any given moment due to the fact the railgun takes 13 MW of power and the Siloship's power plant can only supply 13.5 MW of power.

If the large aft radiators are damaged sufficiently the Siloship's power plant will be unable to function. If that occurs then the Siloship will be unable to fire any of it's railguns.

Usage on WWW and Usual Combat Strategy

Usual Method of Battle (WIP)

The Siloship will always open up with waves of missiles. The exact mix and number of Devastator and Striker missiles would be dependent on the Captain. One limitation they can not get around is these missiles will mission kill each other up if they detonate too close together effectively wasting missiles (this is not as much of a problem for the Strikers but it is a problem for the Devastators). So the Captain will try to fire waves which are sufficiently large that they can saturate their opponent's point defense but small enough there isn't a lot of missiles wasted from destroying each other.

Only after the Siloship's magazines are empty, or it knows it's opponent is mostly disabled, would it even think about closing with it's target to enter gun range.

Missile Usage

After launch missiles have three phases they go through, the Boost Phase, Midcourse Phase and Terminal Phase.

In the Boost Phase the missile accelerates generally using around 50-70% of it's Delta-V (so in the case of a Striker Missile that would be 540-758 m/s). The idea with this is to get a high relative velocity and a low time to intercept so the target has less time to dodge or deploy longer ranged counter measures.

In Midcourse Phase the missile coasts unpowered towards the target. Remember CoaDE missiles only have around a dozen seconds of fuel. They can't burn constantly unless it is fired ~14 seconds away from intercept (when accounting for the missile's acceleration).

In the Terminal Phase the Missile makes any final corrections to it's trajectory trying to get as close to the target as possible. CoaDE missiles will detonate on closest approach. While that could be directly in contact with the target it does not need to be. If the missile misses by a few dozen meters it will detonate as it passes by.

Using the Siloship on WWW

IT DOES NOT DO WELL IN STRONG GRAVITY WELLS. Of the planets in the solar system, the only two planets (sorry Pluto) it can even achieve positive lift on are Mercury and Mars. Even with those planet's weaker gravity it would need to launch with near empty fuel tanks to get enough TWR. So it would lack the delta-v needed to reach orbit (meaning it's lift off is shortly followed by a uncontrolled descent and unplanned disassembly). Even just sticking them in LEO greatly limits it's ability to maneuver around.

The ship was never designed to attack a planet with a greater gravity well or atmosphere thicker than Mars. If you want a Siloship to attack a surface target (which is one of it's intended functions) is best for it to be put on objects like Luna, Ganymede or Ceres something along those lines.

The Siloship is best put against space based opponents or things on atmosphere-less small celestial bodies. Of course keep in mind while it's firepower does let it hit somewhat out of it's weight class, it still is on the lower end of SF ships so don't throw anything too fancy at it.

Although due to the massive inconsistency in many softer SF settings ( Examples, 1, 2), a lot of these settings have ships can actually be decently matched against the Siloship as long as you specify in the prompt to use low end feats.

If you have any questions feel free to ask.