Ships From My Books

[Varthikes]

I recently downloaded the Lego Digital Designer, and have been building a number of starships featured in my upcoming book, Final Frontier.

The main ship, EAS Frontier. Mankind's first warp-capable starship, launched in March 2105. Twelve laser cannons, four missile launchers.

[Coalition]

One fun idea for the laser cannons is using an internal lasing rod, with multiple mirrors all around the ship to send the beam out through them. This way you only have a single (powerful) lasing rod, but you can engage enemies all around the ship. If some of the laser turrets are knocked out, the main laser can still fire through the others. It also means that while the laser is firing at one target, the mirror turrets are being aimed at other targets. A fraction of a second change by the mirrors (while the laser is off), and the beam that was going out through the port forward turret is now firing out the Aft dorsal turret.

When I say mirror turrets, I mean similar to the Coude turret on the nose of the airborne laser plane.

The advantage is that you can get the full spinal laser out any turret on the ship (subject to battle damage). The downside is that you are still only firing one beam at a time, so if you are attacked by a swarm like from Star Trek Beyond you are only picking off a line of ships at a time.

[Graham Kennedy]

That is an interesting idea. I've seen it suggested for Trek, the idea that there are "phaser generators" in the ship which can direct phaser energy to any given array. But there's really virtually no support for it in canon, it was mostly just suggested as a way to explain why one or two hits can sometimes knock all the weapons out at once.

That would be the downside for your system, of course; a single hit to the central rod would knock the whole system out. Of course, one could bury the rod at the centre of the ship and protect it very heavily.

Could this be a way to divide up different classes of ship? Perhaps a destroyer has one lasing rod, a cruiser, two, a battleship three, etc?

[Varthikes]

The downside is that you are still only firing one beam at a time, so if you are attacked by a swarm like from Star Trek Beyond you are only picking off a line of ships at a time.

That would be a vulnerability. I like being able to fire on multiple targets at once. A lot of my ships are set up to do that.

Like this next one...

[Varthikes]

EAS Ulysses
Affiliation: Earth Alliance
Launched: 2125
Weapons: 10 laser turrets, 4 lateral laser cannons, 2 light laser cannons (covering the forward launch bay)

This ship not only features in Final Frontier, but also in a 6-book series I have planned called Galactic Odyssey. So, I'll be spending a lot of time with this ship.





Firing missiles



Firing laser cannons