Federation Commander

There are three DD's that i wish to touch on here,they are,the HDD;DHD & DDF. Of these three,the one which lacks any real definition is the DDF,which I will look at first.

DDF:- I cannot remember just whose design this was,though I think that it may have been one of Jeremy's creations(SWO Daddy)
This ship follows the premise of all of the fast classes,in that it is more a phaser boat than a missile one. She is armed with just two Photon launchers as her heavy weapons,carries eight Phaser 1's and a drone rack.
The power for this vessel comes from a standard 15pt engine supplemented by a pair of 6pt frigate engines,which along with the impulse deck and APR gives a power curve of 33 pts. Her movement cost was to have been 3/4(SFB) & 3/4(FC). Unfortunately,I have no idea as to what her shields might have been rated at.(#24;#21;#18;#18 )
Operationally,she would just use her standard engine for general cruising purposes,(reduced warp signature),only engaging the two frigate engines when either high speeds or combat was required. In operation,it was discovered that running all three engines together,created a huge Here I Am signature,rather akin to wearing a huge illuminated neon sign above your head.
Like most of the DD upgrades,she suffered from a poor breakdown rating(2-6),this coupled with problems in balancing the warp fields,led to the design project being cancelled and the prototype being scrapped.

In game terms,apart from the lousy turn mode,the only real problem with using this ship would be that ,to reflect the 'here I am' effect,that reinforcements would arrive a turn earlier than the scenario would normally allow.( I named the model Kormoran in honour of the German surface raider of WWII).

Needless to say,research into the fast destroyer changed tack quite dramatically,as this vessel looks nothing like the modern DDF.

We now turn our attention to the two heavyweights of the Destroyer world,the HDD and the slightly lighter DHD.

The HDD,whilst looking great on paper,is nothing more than an NCL in sheeps clothing. Having 31 pwr,she is short only 1 pwr over the NCL; she has 2 extra PH-1's and an extra drone rack;two more batteries and four more hull. The shields are comparable to the NCL's,though she only has two shuttles vs the NCL's four.
It is understandable why this ship didn't enter production,as the NCL was already a successful design and the Feds didn't require a second one.

Her weapons suite is really impressive,with great fire arc coverage all round,with a minimum of four Ph-1's targetting you from any quadrant,up to a maximum of six.In game use,this might be quite a challenge to fly successfully.
I could see power getting more than a little tight at times when trying to reload all her weapons,especially in FC,where we don't have phaser capacitors. Nice as this ship is,it could never be a replacement for the lollipop DD,as the costs for building what is in essence an NCL would have been prohibitive.

The DHD:-

This to my mind is more akin to what an upgraded DD should look like. It suffers from some glaring limitations over the HDD,(power and fire arcs),though it does have a nice touch in that the rear Ph-1's can fire 'cross decks so to speak. Her side Ph-1's have the rather horrible LF/L,RF/R fire arcs which are slightly offset by the rear Ph-1's glorious LS/RR & RS/LR arcs. She has another nice touch,in that she carries a full four shuttles,in two bays as well as two drone racks.
Power wise,she is not as good as the HDD,but we can't have everything, having only 25pwr until the + refit when it rises to 29 pwr. Power will be tight on this ship,though less so than with a standard DD,but don't expect her to run at fleet speeds when reloading though.
Shield wise,these are an improvement over the basic DD and even over what I'd envisaged for the prototype NCL,with the #2 & #6 shields being 22pts each;#1 shield 24pts ;#3,4 & 5 being 20pts.
This ship could easily be used as the new DD,as she is still of a far lower ability than an NCL is,especially when coupled with her atrocious breakdown rating and lack of power. She may have been a little unbalanced,due to her top weight,but she still dots all i's and crosses all the t's as they say.

Let me know what you think lads.

For what it's worth, I created an SSD combining the Heavy Destroyer with the Deckhouse Destroyer. I'll upload it to PhotoBucket later.

I have no idea where your DDF came from. The other two can be found in Captain's Log #33.

I am still contemplating moving this to the Star Fleet Battles topic, as none of these ships have anything to do with Federation Commander.

I don't see there being a problem with running the DHD under FC. I would think that changing the movement ratio from 2/3 to 3/4;drone rack ammo to 2 drones;removing sensor and scanner tracks from the SSD would be enough to change it from SFB to FC.

Ok,so it's not in the historical record as far as FC goes,but as an experimental unit,we could at least try out her viability in combat under FC.

Forgive my ignorance (as i do not have every piece of SFB material on record) but I have never heard of the DHD or HDD. They almost sound like competing designs like the DW, FFB, DWH and CW. Can you give us a little background on the DHD and HDD?

As for the DDF, I thought that was simply the designation for the Plasma Variant Fed Destroyer.

The DHD and HDD were in Captain's Log # 33.

The DDL is the Plasma variant of the DD, but when the book was edited for publication someone mistook the "L" in DDL for "Leader".

Yes, I already know this, but was the HDD and DHD competing designs against the NCL, CS, and CW?

Not really, kinda, yes, no, it's complicated.

There's a chunk of text explaining the DD-variants, in the CapLog issue.

The short version is that they were all design concepts/prototypes for ways to improve the functionality of the "lollipop" DD. None of them really worked out, due to various reasons.

The Prometheus-class CS strike cruiser was unrelated to the DD efforts and was an attempt to make a cheaper CA-type ship. It didn't work out, for production reasons that don't reflect in the games.

Eventually, the Kearsarge-class NCL new light cruiser was developed as the way to supersede the Saladin-class DD and the shipyard was converted to build NCLs. The Saladin-class was always too big for a DD and too underpowered to be a CL/CA. The NCL used its hull more effectively.

The Federation never built a class specifically-identified as a CW "war cruiser" and the NCL filled the role of cheap, wartime production cruiser. They did eventually build some NCLs as uprated CM medium cruisers and quite a few as enlarged NCA new heavy cruisers.

The deckhouse destroyer and the other one both have appallingly bad (2-6) HET numbers in SFB. This reflects the fact that they had serious dynamic balance issues. In FC, I think you'd need to give them no free safe HET like the BBs.