NAC Battleaxe Heavy Cruiser and Lancaster Light Cruiser

Battleaxe Heavy Cruiser         Lancaster Light Cruiser

At the beginning of the 22nd century, the NAC was facing a problem of battle doctrine.  Their standard tactic of slowly advancing and reverse-collapsing on an enemy while focusing on their heavier elements, while effective, had considerable disadvantages.  

The first, and most obvious, was that opponents could simply deny the NAC force by not flying into the jaws of the trap, slowing their own battleline sufficiently to exchange long-range fire until the reverse-collapse maneuver had progressed to the point that the outer ships had to either re-align without their capital elements or give way, rendering their forward mounted beams ineffective.  This strategy was proved even more disastrous during the Battle of Sulivan's Rings (2176) when Admiral Soberano attempted to compensate the loss of formation by accelerating his Trafalgar SDN, ending in the disarray of NAC units and the loss of the flagship in one of the most decisive textbook defeats in recent history.

The second disadvantage lay in the savvy use of terrain on the stellar battlefield.  While space is a notably empty place, it is uncommon for battles between major interstellar powers to be fought in a clean vacuum, as deploying a force into an empty area with nothing to defend would be a strategic impasse when the more familiar terrain can be used advantageously by the local force.  With the common knowledge of the NAC's primary battle plans, it became a simple matter for enemy commanders to utilize the spacial landscape to put the NAC battle plan at a disadvantage by forcing their elements to separate.

Further confounding matters was the continued advancement in spaceflight allowing for more "revolutionary" (as the brass put it in the political sense) factions to emerge.  Whether by a highly organized crime syndicates or a more nomadic peoples, it is becoming increasing common for smaller powers to engage in minor attacks and raiding upon the NAC, especially as it began its colony expansion initiatives.  These minor powers had neither the force nor the inclination to engage the NAC in the large capital battles that the NAC preferred and had built its navy around.

With these deficiencies in mind, the military strategists of the NAC recognized the original successes of the NAC battle doctrine, with a heavier capital asset anchoring smaller craft and sought to replicate it at a smaller scale and on a nimbler frame.  The design process was started for a new class of cruiser, scrapping any rehashed designs of the tried-and-true Suffolk and its larger version, the Renown Class battlecruiser (which did eventually lead to the Tiger class strike cruiser).

The result was the Battleaxe Heavy Cruiser.  The massive engine nacelles on this new design dominated the structure of the ship and vied with the traditional spearhead bridge/body as the most prominent features.  In addition to removing the engines from the main structure, it also allowed for the power housing and the beam (known as a Lance) to be separated from the ship's fore section and mounted into the nacelle directly.  Doing this has the benefit of expanding the overall angles at which the Battleaxe can achieve targets, but at the cost of a reduced overlapping area between the weapons.

While the Battleaxe's firepower easily matches or exceeds that of any other nation's cruiser, the space taken up by the engines and weapons leaves less room for the complement of shield defenses the NAC has become known for.  In some cases, one of the two secondary kinetic batteries is swapped for an additional shield projector, but it is generally favored to keep the ability to bully lighter ships with the additional firepower and letting its larger hull take the beating if necessary.

With the preliminary results of the Battleaxe's deployment being overwhelmingly positive as a squadron flagship leading smaller elements, it furthermore excelled at another, unexpected role:  Raiding and counter-raiding.  The requests for Battleaxe class cruisers was already straining the shipyards that were licensed and capable of producing the warship.  Within 4 standard years, those shipyards were inundated with petitions for entire flights of the craft, while some colonies were awaiting the construction of their first to begin.

The Lancaster light cruiser was designed to fill this need, taking into account the feedback and refinements from the first years of the Battleaxe's mass proliferation.  By removing the weapons from the nacelles and back to the bridge/body, as well as the extra armor that was required for the separate housing, the extra of firepower was replaced by an even greater degree of maneuverability.  The main selling point, however, was the greater ability to produce this lighter version.  The cost to produce the Lancaster was only two-thirds that of the Battleaxe, and the less complicated engine structures meant that a great deal more shipyards could produce it.  Soon, the Lancaster light cruiser became a common addition to many interstellar forces of the NAC.

While the Lancaster originally enjoyed a wave of popularity riding on the demand created from the Battleaxe, over the years it became noticeable that the earlier models were being made to sub-military specifications.  The number of orders for this new craft led to manufacturers cutting corners to fill the demand, often resulting in a lower standard of construction.  This did little to tarnish the general reputation of the Lancaster, due to further lowering the expense of producing these ships, many militia forces and sub-system units felt they were receiving compensation for their credits due to their availability.  The later production of Lancasters has gone far to correct many particular deficiencies but the frame is still lighter than that of many other cruisers.

The NAC went through a short period of experimenting with making larger vessels with the same contained-nacelle technology.  Thus far, the necessary power draws on such an endeavor were deemed too inefficient, even with the included power generators, when scaled up.    Continuing to attempt to compact the technology has rendered results, however, in the Omaha class heavy destroyer.  How a giving up a considerable amount of strike capability for increased maneuverability on such a small chassis will be a topic of research for the NAC in the coming decades, as its performance will be benchmarked next to the venerable Tallahachie.

Designer's notes: 

These visually similar models by GZG are both labeled as cruisers, so bridging this into the Astral Action ruleset requires me to test the flexibility of the ship creation matrix.  The difficulty in this first lies in the six ship size categories, appropriately categorized 1-6, which range in nomenclature from Corvette to Dreadnought.  The size category of the ship determines the modifiers applicable when interacting with other ships, based on the size differences.  For construction purposes, however, I've attempted to make the relation between the ship design and the ship size as intuitive of a system as possible.

The quick-and-dirty similarities of making two ships in the same class is that they will have access to the same number of Primary and Secondary slots, as well as the same number of damage track rows.  The easiest way to modify ships, then, becomes a matter of adjusting the number of Primary/Secondary slots used and the number of damage columns given.  Thus, a "heavier" ship of the same size (class) may use more slots or have more damage columns included in the track.  The exact affect this has on a ship's point value and the affect this has in the game has yet be thoroughly playtested, but initial results look promising.

For those curious, the points calculation I'm using for every ship size/class is: 

((Primary x 44) + (Secondary x 22)) x (Damage Columns / 10)

If you've had a chance to think about this for a while, you will realize that a weapon on a corvette has the same points value as a weapon on a battleship, despite being vastly different sizes.  I won't expound on the reasons that this is the case, other than to briefly not that part of the design philosophy of Astral Action is to render all sizes of ship to be necessary and complementary to each other.  As I gain more experience and inevitably make changes to the system, I'll make more specific posts on how these aspects interact.

I don't own any Omaha class heavy destroyers, so I'm not feeling the need to create stats for it, yet.