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Battleship, Phalangist Class

This battleship (36 kt, 2 kps dV) is a railgun brawler with exclusively long-range to very long-range (500km+) weapons. Heavily armored, it engages from a frontal aspect from between 200-500 km centered on Bellerophon nanoflak guns and dual-purpose high velocity railguns, with some pdcs and nukes.

Key design principles:
- Overwhelm capital ships with 2 huge flak guns that throw projectiles at 85 kps for 500 km+, and four additional turrets that engage at 275km+. Not overwhelming firepower, but devastating over the time required to close the distance, and even more powerful if an enemy is approaching at high velocity. Nanoflak is too small for PDCs to engage effectively.
- Main vulnerability is the small number of weapon turrets and area-attack nature of the nanoflak guns. These are not precision railguns and are designed to sandblast armor and radiators. A precision design dropping the payload and upping the rate of fire, however, can be easily designed from the base model.
- Designed to have similar surface area to a vanilla gunship.
- Armor is radically sloped against forward aspect attack and includes a maraging steel cap on the nose cone to deflect enemy fire concentration there, but mass limitations on the class provide lower armor on the rear third.
- Uses the power of 2 x 1 GW reactors to power its massive railguns.
- Composite armor based on 3-layer sandwich - high Young's modulus (sapphire), high temperature resistance/elasticity (amorphous carbon), high yield strength (reinforced carbon-carbon), with optimization based on cost and choices made for thicker armor as opposed to higher value thinner armor.
- Inner layer uses spidersilk or boron filament; other features include spacing with separation/aerogel, diamond layer for anti-laser conduction, aluminum or platinum whipple shields, and titanium nitride coating for color.
- Testing vs. workshop, I found that lasers are much less of a threat to weapon systems and ship armor than accurate kinetics, and that nukes are ineffective as antiship rounds except as a coup de grace. I armor my turrets against kinetics and don't bother with antinuke armor.
- Ships exist in defined classes: Frigate (3kt, high DV), Cruiser (6.5kt, medium DV), Battlecruiser (13kt, low DV) and Battleship (36kt, low DV).