Starship Phoenix

Re UFS Phoenix, warship, a legendary battlecarrier. This page describes the ship-building history, design, specs, etc. For a UFS Phoenix crew list, see Phoenix Crew. For a marine roster see Phoenix Company.
 * see also Fleet or go to Table of Contents



Overview
- "UFS Phoenix is “perhaps the most famous warship of the United Forces First Fleet" (R-1)

- Legendary battle-carrier, legendary assassinated captain (Pantillo), notorious new captain Erik Debogande

- Built of superior tech, a gift from humanity’s triumvirate allies, the advanced Alo species

- Based on deepynine tech: “This ship is stealthy....This ship is deepynine.” ....“How is this ship deepynine?” “Systems function. Bridge function. Deepynine patterns. Deepynine powerplant, several evolutions separated from last recorded deepynine function. Comparable to sard ships that chase you." (DL-29)

- "Phoenix — four times the size of any standard freighter, two-thirds engines and jump-lines, the remainder a cage-like shell for a rotating crew cylinder, while the shell itself bristled with weapons, external pods and combat grapples for attached shuttles and aggressive interceptions. Even at zero-V that armament could shred a big station in minutes, and ships in seconds." (R-7)

- Refit built by Lieutenant Rooke with superior Drysine tecnology after it was crippled at the Battle of Defiance

Note from the Author
From Joel Shepherd Posted on Facebook December 16, 2021

I received a request a while ago from one of the long-suffering people who contribute to the Spiral Wars Wiki site, asking for some more information about ship classes, weapons and space warfare. . . I’ve never really bothered to specify much detail about classes of ships in Spiral Wars, largely because they change so much between different alien races and different technology levels, not to mention different strategic preferences.

So. . .shipping classes are highly irregular in variation between different aliens (including humans), and that it causes Fleet Intelligence many headaches. Also, big marine carriers like Phoenix are simultaneously the backbone of human Fleet forces, yet are also controversial, as some Fleet Admirals say they’re too expensive and commit too many resources in a single ship. Carrier supporters say that this is mostly jealousy, as carrier officers tend to get promoted faster and achieve greater notoriety, precisely because carriers are so important.

Fleet’s biggest concern (and this is Human Fleet we’re talking about) is getting overstretched with too many roles. Not only do they need all the usual classes of warship, they also require big transports, particularly now that they’ve been winning wars and are getting into a colonial era of occupying planets and moving large numbers of people around. Admirals hate getting bogged down on ‘planet business’, because it’s at the bottom of a gravity-well making it hard to manoeuvre, and ties the fates of fleets to those of ground forces (army and colonial administrations) which all Fleet officers will say is the wrong way around. But planet-side forces require transport and resupply, warships to protect those transports, fire-support if it’s an ongoing ground war, etc, etc. Armies are large, fleets are relatively small, so fleets can get overwhelmed with army requirements if they allow it. Fleet hates it, but if the new colonial era of human civilisation is to thrive, they don’t have a choice, because population scale requires lots of occupied planets.

So that’s the big strategic tussle — Fleet versus Army, spacers vs worlders (again).

 As for weapons, long-range space-based weaponry is mostly magnetic, gauss-cannon style. Each round is self-propulsive, meaning it’s like a guided missile, it continues to change course on its way to target, though most only have about twenty seconds of manoeuvring thrust. Exactly how the internal propulsion and guidance in the magnetic rounds survives the thousands of-Gs load at firing, I’ve no idea, but there’s a lot more crazy tech than that in Spiral Wars so .. .

We could get into a laser-versus-velocity argument, but I had to pick one, and I picked velocity — the physics of high-V is a big part of Spiral Wars Faster Than Light tech, and I just like it more. No one really knows which tech would win in reality, but this is the point — it’s not real, it’s just my imagination, and in my imagination lasers don’t measure up on weight, cost, reliability, vulnerability to countermeasures, etc, etc. And at the speeds my ships are going, it only takes a warhead the size of a football to completely destroy a very large ship.

To stop that from happening, there’s defensive weapon shields — you’ll notice on the bridge there’s two posts, Arms One and Arms Two. Arms One is offensive, Arms Two is defensive, and is responsible for intercepting incoming rounds. The only good thing about them travelling so fast is that the same velocity that makes them deadly will completely destroy them just as easily, but this time with interceptors the size of a grain of sand. So defensive rounds are shorter range, smaller, in higher density, and detonate just short of their target to fill that space with high-V clouds of tiny particles. I’m no physicist, but at substantial portions of the speed of light, I’m pretty sure the resulting explosions would be violent enough to vaporise any incoming round. And at lower-V, defensive rounds will impact directly, without premature detonation.

Then for special occasions, warships like Phoenix have missiles, which are mostly used for short-range engagements, shooting around corners in tight quarters (docked at space stations) or specialty fire missions like intercepting aircraft in atmosphere.

Orbital warships can also engage in ground bombardment, obviously, but this is varying degrees of frowned-upon, depending on who you’re fighting. There was a gentlemen’s agreement between humans and tavalai to do it very infrequently, particularly around heavily populated areas (massed army troops in the open might be irresistible, though).

The most important technology that powers every warship is FTL, because in my world, FTL can be used not just for hyperspace travel, but to trade energy with in exchange for huge, instant changes in velocity. But regular engines matter too, because while you can change V with jump engines, you can’t change direction with them, so if you want to turn around, you’ll have to do a lot of burning and suffering at high-G in real space. All of which keeps power to mass ratios probably the defining aspect of warship design — the complete opposite to a Star Wars or Star Trek-type SF warship, where size allows bigger shields, which encourages greater size in an endless upward spiral, leading to collossal Star Destroyers that dominate the battle space, etc. There are no particle shields in Spiral Wars, it’s a physically impossible technology, allowing a much smaller warship to kill a Star Destroyer with a single high-V round. The Star Destroyer’s defensive batteries would be its only chance of survival, but when you’re that big and that slow, EVERYONE will shoot at you, and your defensive batteries can’t intercept them all.

So an effective warship needs a suitably aggressive power-to-mass ratio that it can move fast and evade, and not just rely on defensive batteries for survival. But while this means that super large warships are out of the question, it also means that super small ones (X-wings, etc) don’t work, because FTL engines require a certain minimum mass, and single-seat fighter plane analogues are well below that minimum. Without FTL engines, anything in space combat is a sitting duck, because although it looks faster, it’s counter-intuitively much slower than the capital ships. Also, even with regular engines, minimum scale is required to reach optimum power-to-mass ratio — the same reason you wouldn’t expect a hatchback to be faster than a sedan, despite being lighter.

General Characteristics
Name: UFS Pheonix

Class: Battlecarrier

Operator: United Forces Fleet

Builder: Unknown Alo Shipyard

Crew: 475+ Spacers and Officers

Marine Detachment: 228 Marines - Phoenix Company

Commanding Officers:

Captain Marinol Pantillo -deceased-

Captain Erik Debogande

Standard Complement: 4x Kestrel M-2673 Assault Shuttles - Designation PH; After the events of Renegade, 1 civilian shuttle replaced one of the Kestrals, designated AT-7

Specifications (Pre-Refit)
Length: Unknown

Beam: Unknown

Height: Unknown

Bridge : "Up A-main corridor and straight into the bridge, a wide, narrow rectangle with rows of seating posts out on either side, and the Captain’s chair in the middle. “Commander on the bridge!” (R-8) If the bridge is damaged  back-up operations are ready in room T-3. (D-29)

Captain’s Quarters/ meeting room: A small room with bed, folding wall-desk, shower. "Captain’s quarters, just off the bridge. From here, the Captain could get to the command chair in ten seconds if he wasn’t otherwise occupied. Sometimes even ten seconds wasn’t enough. The room fit eight, though it was a tight squeeze, like everything on a warship. Erik sat on the folding workdesk, a wall display giving visual feed of Argitori overlaid with status basics — vector-off-system-plane, solar relative velocity, alert status." (R-8)

Armament: armscomp weapon system with viper missiles and railgun

Propulsion: Unknown Reaction Engines: FTL Drive system (faster than light)(DL-10). Phoenix maxed out at about 30 lightyears— more than that was possible but increasingly dangerous ” (DL-11). Engine can withstand 10-Gs, but in dire need “the burn increased to 11-Gs, beyond even Phoenix’s engine parameters, and warning lights flashed...”  (DL-11)

Power: 1x Standard UFF Quantum Charged Atom-smasher. “ Deepynine powerplant, several evolutions separated from last recorded deepynine function. Comparable to sard ships that chase you." (DL-29)

Sensors: Scancomp

Navigation: Navcomp

Armor: Unknown Standard UFF Non-reflective Armor. “Phoenix‘a spine was parallel columns of load-bearing alloy of similar molecular strength to diamond, and its primary armourplate was the same. Nothing stopped high-V rounds, but it provided reasonable protection against medium-V" (DL-10)

Systems and Bridge: Deepynine. This ship is deepynine.....Systems function. Bridge function. Deepynine patterns." (DL-29)

Specifications (Post Refit)
After the culminating events in Defiance, Chief Engineer Rooke rebuilt Phoenix using information and technology stored in the Drysine Data Core. The resulting warship is more advanced:

Length: 400 m

Beam: Unknown

Height: Unknown

Armament: Unknown number of Railgun turrets

Propulsion: 12G+ Capable Reaction Engines

Power: 1x Advanced Drysine Quantum Charged Atom-smasher

Sensors: Unknown Drysine Sensor Array

Armor: Unknown Advanced Drysine Non-reflective Armor

"'he’s seen the grav bombs and our network dominance tech.” The ability to knock out other ships’ computer systems entirely via simple data transmissions, that was. “He’s heard how advanced we are now.” (CV-11)"
 * "Erik noted the new additions as he descended —- the coms dishes, the scanning modules, the rail-gun turrets. New, armored ammunition feeds, snaking along the hull-cage that contained the habitation cylinder. The cylinder had a new paint job too —- just as spookily-black as the last one, but even less reflective.” (CV-2)
 * almost cloaked: “Despite all the floodlights, Phoenix sat dark and impassive, seeming to drink in the glare like a black hole. A shape this big and regular couldn’t be particularly radar-stealthy, but Lieutenant Rooke insisted that the new material would decrease radar reflectivity by another sixty percent. And then there were the stealth counter-measures, which some in Engineering were calling a ‘cloaking field’...” (CV-2)
 * Modified power plant ‘atom-smasher’ is far more advanced than the former model
 * "More concerning for Erik was the distinct probability that this engine, if fired at full power, would kill everyone on Phoenix by sheer G-force alone." ... "“She’s going to be a beast, Captain. I mean, she was already a beast. But if I’m right about the numbers, I think she’ll be doing things even those deepynines can’t match.” “Big engines won’t help us if the crew pass out above 12G,” Erik reminded him." (CV-2)
 * Advanced computers, scan, sensors, and nav systems
 * "Geish and Jiri confidently calling out visible incoming at twice the range possible under the old system" (RS-25)
 * gravity bombs (or quote below may refer to Defiance Grav bombs)

  Fleet Admiral Laura Reiko discussing data core tech for upgraded ships: “It’s not just my opinion. Some of the subsystems are crazy. You saw my briefing on the gravity-bombs...Debogande was clear that the deepynines don’t have those yet. Gravity-tech was all drysine, it looks like they’re the only civilisation ever, that we know of, to have gotten anywhere with that research.” She paused. “I’ve got more of it from the core.”

“More as in useful weapons?” Mozangu pressed.

“Crazy useful,” Reiko agreed. And added, more somberly, “Scary useful. Things that could destroy entire systems.” (RS-1)