Some ideas are so simple and intriguing you can't resist playing with them. So it was with Robert Cole's Battle Disk proposal on the SFB Discussion Boards. Robert's Battle Disk was a flying megaphaser wing, set in a disk shape. The edges of the disk would pull out to reveal the megaphasers. The megaphasers couldn't be damaged with the wings folded.
OK, so as we're discussing this thing, the idea for a carrier version pops into my head and this was the result. With the wings open, the fighter bays are simply open to space and fighters launch and land as if off of a balcony. The fighter bays have no doors. The disk launches and lands only when the wings are open. The admin shuttle bay does have a hatch.
I gave it a full squadron of fighters, which Robert thought was too much for a MC 1/3 unit (he has a point). If I were to do a 1.1 variant, I'd pull 4 fighter boxes and add a tractor to each wing bay which only work when the wings are open. Robert did his own carrier (the "VD") and plenty of other variants, which can be found here..
When we were choosing ships for FOG4, Blue team had Tholians on their side and in the range we wanted, we either had to spend more than we really wanted on a CW or settle for a DD (which we eventually did). it occurred to me that the Tholians really needed a unit that cost about 100 BPV. So I made one and posted it on the SFB Discussion Boards. A whole lot of conversation later, this was the result.
I deliberately broke with Tholian design convention by placing the heavy weapons in the nose and the phasers in the hardpoints to the sides. It was intended to fight primarily in deep space where heavy weapons would need better arcs than they often got at the hardpoints.
The Tholian backstory contains a lot of "don'ts" for a prospective designer. Everything is based on the automated hull forge which makes PC bits. The hull can only be pierced so much to put in hardpoints for weapons mounts. Took me a while to get it all down. I eventually adopted the hull shape from Jeremy Gray's DW (which I didn't know existed until I had posted several revisions to my version) and just filled it a little differently.
I proposed this in a letter to the ADB years ago. The Feds replaced two of the DD's photons with drone racks and F-torps, so why not phasers?
Yeah, it's an obvious alternative.
8 P-1s on a DD hull is damn scary (and effective) by anyone's measure.
