In the historical timeline, most Alpha Octant empires derived their heavy war destroyer designs from their pre-existing war destroyer types: the Federation went from the DW to the HDW; the Klingons went from the F5W to the HF5; and so on and so forth.

As an exception to this, the Inter-Stellar Concordium historically derived their heavy destroyer design from the "peacetime construction" destroyer. Mainly because, prior to the onset of the Andromedan invasion, the Concordium saw little need to build "war" designs of their own, aside from the occasional prototype.

Once the Andromedans struck in force, however, things changed rapidly: the war cruiser and war destroyer from Module R9 became regular production warships overnight; while other designs, such as the heavy war cruiser from Module R12, soon followed.

Meanwhile, over in the "Mapsheet P" timelines featured in Module C6, the Concordium found themselves in an Alliance with the Gorns against a Coalition of the Romulans and the "lost empire" Paravians; thus, without the luxury of sitting out the General War, they would likely have been obliged to field such "war" classes (plus any would-be "mission variants" of these hull types) as soon as it was possible to do so.

So, whether it be to replace losses of HDDs and/or HDDXs in the historical timeline, or perhaps to supersede the production of them entirely over in the "Mapsheet P" timelines, I wondered what a heavy war destroyer based on the DW from Module R9 would look like - or, indeed, what a would-be "HDWX" iteration might have to offer.

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For comparison's sake: when going from the CW to the HCW, part of this effort involved replacing the destroyer-type centre warp engine on the CW with a pair of frigate engines - but had to do so while placing these new engines "above", rather than "below", the Z-axis of the hull. This can be seen on the Shapeways ISC HCW miniature. Doing this reduced the "top" phaser-1 arcs from 360* to FX - which was deemed acceptable, as a more aggressive posture was required against the Andromedans (or, inded, against the "Mapsheet P" Romulans and Paravians).

Perhaps a similar setup might be required here: in other words, a "wartime construction" HDW would have four frigate-type engines, yet be obliged to install the two in the centre "above", rather than "below".

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Further, one drawback of the current HDD design is its relatively weak plasma armament, even by the standards of other "big plasma" HDWs. Indeed, the HDDX has "only" two forward-mounted plasma-Ls. (It does also have a pair of side-mounted plasma-L mounts, which operate under the "standard' rules for such mounts on ISC starships.)

So, might a "wartime" HDW and/or HDWX design be provided with a somewhat heavier plasma throw-weight?

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In short, I might argue that a "wartime construction" HDW, derived from the war destroyer in Module R9, could be different enough from the current ISC HDD design to be worth considering - to include a would-be HDWX iteration of such a hull type. Be it to fight the Andromedans historically, and/or to take on the Romulans and Paravians of "Mapsheet P".

Of course, whether or not anyone else agrees on this is another matter...

By Jeff Anderson (Jga) on Sunday, February 09, 2025 - 03:25 pm: Edit

There's a variant on the ISC DD that upgrades both forward Plasma-F to Plasma-G.

IIRC, this variant also loses the Probe launcher in order to get some (more?) APR to power the system.

That's not much of a fig-leaf, but it might justify the HDW to upgrade its forward Plasma-F to Plasma-G, and potentially even justify the HDWX to upgrade its Plasma-L to Plasma-S.

Another thought is that the presence of the APR* on HDWs might give us another fig-leaf for it to NOT be necessary to sacrifice the Probe launcher with this conversion?

My 0.02 Quatloos worth...

By Gary Carney (Nerroth) on Wednesday, February 12, 2025 - 11:52 pm: Edit

For an ISC ship of Size Class 4 to install a type-G plasma torpedo, it tends to either replace both type-Fs at once (as seen with the DDG and FFL), or find the room to replace each type-F on a one-to-one basis (as seen on the DDL).

It is true that both the DDL and FFL each make a few more changes, to include adding more generated power. Although the adjustments to the DDG are more limited.

In the case of the ISC DW, we don't yet know what a would-be "DWL" and/or "DWG" might look like. But, it's worth noting that the CW and HCW add more plasma via the superstructure added "below" the frame of the base DD hull - as could have been seen on their respective Shapeways minis.

So perhaps one could have a DWL go a similar route, in terms of how (or rather, where) any would-be increase in plasma firepower were to be added? As in, to replace both "front prong" plasma-Fs with a single phasma-G (as seen on the FFL), and then add a second plasma-G to the superstructure fitted "beneath" the Z-axis of the hull?

However, there isn't much of a tradition of building HDWs out of "leader" variants of war destroyer hulls. So there's no guarantee that such a setup would carry over here. But, then again, perhaps this might be an exception to that design rule?