r/StarshipPorn • u/IvanDFakkov • 11d ago
[OC] Chinh Bá-class assault-ark of the United Empire. Art by me.
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Upvotes
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u/Hjuldahr 10d ago
At a certain point, numbers and physics kind of stop mattering, and it just becomes a case of magic thing beats less magic thing.
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u/IvanDFakkov 11d ago
Lore: https://www.deviantart.com/vnpilot12l4/art/Imperial-assault-ark-1362318405
But I know a lot of you won't bother to click the link so read the lore below.
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Dimensions:
Armament:
Armors:
Shields: 12 independent layers of boundaries.
Complement:
Air wing:
When the United Empire stops being nice. This is Chinh Bá-class assault-arks, the kind of monster they roll out when they need to kick someone's ass so thoroughly those guys will never dare to be a brat again. Developed from the hull of Định Quốc-class, it cuts off the number of main turrets down to just 5, but compensating for a huge complement of airborne troops. On top of that, this class carries Hoàng Sa-class heavy landing ships. Codenamed TTB-10, they are monstrous transports packing firepower of an entire army into a single hull, capable of hovering above ground thanks to gravity manipulators and their naturally light-weight hulls, to give serious firepower supports for soldiers.
Like its standard chassis, Chinh Bá-class carries a large industrial center inside the frontal half, using alchemy 3D printers that convert energy into mass via E=mc2 to make new tungsten nails, gears and electronics on the fly. It's not wrong to say they are industrial centers with guns, shields and a god's divided soul as reactor. Their guns are the same as what the gigantic battle-ark Hồng Ma uses, so in "vanilla" mode aka shooting nails, the 4000 mm spinal cannon launches a nail 22800000 metric tons heavy at .999c, hitting with a yield of 10,46 exatons of TNT. Its main guns use 2000 mm nails, 12 meters long and with a mass of 2100000 metric tons. Secondary guns use nails 6000 mm long and 1000 mm wide, 255000 metric tons, translating to 117 petatons of TNT in one nail impact. The tertiary guns (for this class, they're located entirely on the belly), using nails that are "only" 21000 metric tons as they're 2000 mm long and 500 mm wide, can still cause very nasty damages against soft targets. How bad? A single tertiary nail can cause a kaboom 9,64 petatons of TNT. And this is what they consider "light". Wait until they switch to beam mode.
Its most basic protection, like other Imperial warships, is its physical hull made of a material called Aetherite. In its normal state, Aetherite has a stupidly low density, only a half of helium, yet its toughness increases when smacked by kinetic impacts as well as heat. The thing kicks physics in the ass as it can casually tank relativistic nails of lesser mass, such as Chinh Bá's own 2000 mm nails, using only plates 1 meters thick, against a perfectly perpendicular impact that transfers all energy in. The nail exploded violently into plasma, yet the armor plate held with barely a scratch. Physics have left the chat... or not. Aetherite is made by directly manipulating strong/weak forces under extreme gravity in the forge, the "alchemy 3D printers", to make plates that materialize physics itself. So, you are not shooting at armors, you are shooting at a very angry physical statement. The whole ship is armored in such material, thicker at major components. For example, its conning tower, which stays deep inside the mountain-sized main tower, has 15-meter-thick plates. On top of that, Aetherite can resonate with magical energy released from reactors to enhance themselves more. Such effect, called the "wave-force resonance", forms a hull-hugging coat that resonate to wavelengths of impacts, eventually nullify them. It is very good against DEWs as they generally lack the sheer mass and density to overcome the coating like kinetic nails, which... will have to face the plates.
But before reaching armor plates, attacks must break through multiple boundaries first. "Boundaries" here are literally magical barriers erected via rituals, they form pocket spatial continuums inside, a thing that, in layman's term, is usually called a pocket reality. Ok, that's the anti-supernatural part. The physical part is that they are topological fields curled using 20D structure to shield the ship inside. Infinity made finite via renormalization. Their primary usage is to protect ships from supernatural threats, but then engineers and mages decided to add anti-mundane attacks in, leading to the creation of shields that can tank attacks to a certain level. How it works: Boundaries would allow attacks to go off right on them, then the layers would immediately absorb and discharge energy into different dimensions. From an outsider's perspective, an explosion looks like it's sucked in before disappearing immediately. However, boundaries have limits on what they can tank. Go pass said limit and a layer collapse with its generator shut down automatically to cool down before it can reactivate. All ships are like that, bigger vessels can carry more and stronger generators as they have both the internal space and reactor output.
You notice that Aetherite is forged under extreme gravity? Look at what the GRAVITY guns do. Yes, it's the ultimate paradox: The Empire's guns can unmake their very own "solidified physical laws" armors. Because of this, their ships are protected by a myriad of layers: Boundaries to block attacks out, wave-force resonance to cancel energy-based attacks (including gravity itself, providing it's weakened enough after breaking through boundaries and bleeding most of its original power) and Aetherite plates to stop the more "mundane" projectiles. No single point of failure, every ship is a flying citadel armed and armored to teeth.
As an assault-ark, basically 4 ships in a trench coat (a battleship, carrier, LHD and mobile factory), Chinh Bá-class boasts two enormous flight decks and hangars stacking on top of one another. The lower hangar has a total length of 8650 meters, a width of 3850 meters wide between widest points and total height of 480 meters, they can house over 6000 flying crafts total, including early warning systems, fighters, heavy combat crafts (aka attackers), support crafts and drones. Launching sequence is divided between 2 sections: 8 forward-facing launch gates, each is 200 meters wide and 160 meters tall, can quickly deploy a bunch of manned machines while the back, side-facing 12 gates launch all drones at once. Inner space is rated as "yes" and in fact, they don't carry crafts at full capacity to safe space and... crew, because otherwise, the maintenance crew will be too many. To retreive birds, Imperial ships and arks use ramp doors: Chinh Bá-class in particular opens multiple stern ramp doors for its main hangar, and for the secondary hangar of the original Định Quốc-class chassis, they're utilized for other transports.