Next class of Earth starship ,smaller or bigger than 304?and "Nightwalkers" ship

[Rise Of The Phoenix]

How about this.....

Take a DSC-304 and take the flight deck/thruster pods off, maybe take the tabletop off the rear. Then shorten the neck of the ship. take the flight decks out the thruster pods and then re-install the thruster pods vertically, maybe lose a thruster or two.....finally, take the table top and shorten it, before placing it back on the finished ship.

Personally i think that would be a good cruiser.

Not sure about the thrusters thing, maybe we could use an inertialless drive, on the X-301 it got up to about a million MPH if I recall correctly.

Getting rid of none essential parts of the 304's design would be a good idea, keep the same power generation, shield emitters, weapons, maybe have some added missile storage too.
The smaller size would mean added maneuverability, having a smaller ship would probably mean you'd need less power for the shields, if you can still fit all of the 304 tech in you're in business IMO.

I know I would like it to be a battle ship but that is unlikely do the the size and because the 304 works just fine, I mean a 304 can kill a hive in three shots, and can porbably take out a gould mothership in one, what we should be working on is reverse enginering the ori ship buster cannon, and drones and then retrofiting them to are 304s.

Surely Asgard beam weapons do a fine job as the main ship's weapons, we can build those now, as for Drones well if we actually used a smaller engine for the nukes (Death Glider inertialless again , it's gotta be done IMO), use a subspace link for control of the weapons, put a shield and shield modulator on the new design then maybe we wouldn't need to reverse engineer the Ancient's projectiles, Asgard tech can probably make a lot of this possible, by now Humans should be more than capable of filling in any holes.
Smaller missiles would mean more can be stored on the ship.


I'm all for either a gunship, a new tough cruiser or both as all of this stuff would make one hell of a difference to Earth's space combat abilities.

[locutes]

The 304s were designed by incorporating the most advanced tech of the time into the 303s systems were they not. I believe it was quoted (likely by McKay) that the Deadalus (ie. 304s) had the advanced tech built into it from the start rather than being tacked on afterwards as was the case with the Promethius (ie. 303s).

Cue someone posting exact quote.

I the 303 is rebuild that tech CAN be included right from the start.

[thekillman]

yes, we call that a 304

[locutes]

But I mean in the shell of a 303, those are not as large and seem more like a cruiser then a carrier.

If built that way they would be great to escort 304s

[thekillman]

why does everyone want escorts?

[The accidental mistake]

for the same reason navy's have other ships then the aircraft carrier

[thekillman]

its not a carrier alone. it can own anything tossed at us. we only need more power on it and we're done.

[locutes]

At the moment the can indeed, but after time they wont.

We should keep innovating when we still have got the edge. In time other races will try to catch up

[TrueLordOfNetu]

why does everyone want escorts?

Tactical advantage. One type of ship, no matter how powerful will eventually come up against something that rivals itself. Having a number of escort ships to draw fire, take up flanking positions, clear up fighters or perform any number of other strategic tasks will always improve the chance of successful engagement. Also, say you take one of your super powerful battle cruisers into a fight and a suddenly a freak system error takes a key system or two offline. Wouldn't you want someone there to back you up until you fix it?

[Rise Of The Phoenix]

Escorts or smaller ships would undoubtedly take a lot less time to build than a 304 does, not to mention they'd cost a lot less to make, so would be more expendable.
If we had an escort class then our fleet would increase in size much quicker too.

Even upgraded it's doubtful 304 alone could own more than a few Hives a piece, with escorts the odds of victory greatly increase.
Groups of Cruisers or Gunships would make for a great Milky Way or Earth defense force, along with being support craft.

With groups of ships we may actually force some enemies to retreat.

[Commander Thor]

how about
take 1 304
take away APBW arrays and all but 6 missile tubes
make the tabletop bigger and btson side of neck bigger and put heaps more rail gun batteries on it.
302 bays? turn them into horizontal missile launching tubes.

[TrueLordOfNetu]

how about
take 1 304
take away APBW arrays and all but 6 missile tubes
make the tabletop bigger and btson side of neck bigger and put heaps more rail gun batteries on it.
302 bays? turn them into horizontal missile launching tubes.

Good in theory but I can see one potentially fatal flaw. If an enemy manages to get a solid hit on one of your massive missle racks, the chain reaction of the missles exploding would likely vaporise the entire ship. With proper measures to prevent this however that would be a substantial gunship.

[Commander Thor]

yay. i had a good idea. green for you for saying it

[Guest750]

Take a cube add beam weapons, shields and goa'uld interial drive, stick in the fighter bays send the out in battle and have some guys remotely control them.

[TrueLordOfNetu]

Take a cube add beam weapons, shields and goa'uld interial drive, stick in the fighter bays send the out in battle and have some guys remotely control them.

OK, different. What sort of size are we talking here and also, what would you use as a power source considering the high drain tech?