From the Depths Fleet 2023: Wombat Airship and Redundancy
0Airships are hard, and I want to say right now that I am no kind of expert in From the Depths. Just an avid amateur (sometimes.) However, in my experience what you want to avoid is making things easy for the enemy, and for large airships that means two sometimes incompatible things: remaining as mobile as possible, and limiting single points of failure as much as possible.
A very fast relatively lightweight nimble airship is going to escape getting hit by the enemy more often, but if it gets hit it might be in trouble. A heavily armored airship is less likely to be nimble, but it can survive more. My general rule is the more an airship costs, the more I am going to err on the side of armor and just hope that I can keep it nimble enough. The more something costs, the higher a priority it is to keep a few lucky shots from taking it out.
I started out making an airship using Custom Jet Engines, and I love CJE's. However they are not always the best choice for airships because unless you want to make your airship practically all CJE's or else bury them inside the hull (and that is expensive real estate,) you may run into the problem of the loss of a single vertical CJE dooming your whole airship. This was the problem with my previous prototype, the Brutalis.
I then created the Wombat which uses normal large jet engines and fuel engines, and it is much more survivable. The Brutalis couldn't survive even godly DWG ships because one CRAM in a vertical CJE would doom it. The Wombat on the other hand survived godly Onyx Watch ships and hard Steel Strider ships, and while it is still in testing it is clearly far superior. It has four main guns, each of which is isolated behind heavy armor and spall protection from the other guns, so the loss of one gun won't take out the entire APS weaponry. It has multiple separate fuel engines though lacking separate exhaust piping for each engine it is still going to have problems if the fuel engines get hit. It has two exhaust systems, so a little bit of redundancy there. Because it uses a lot of regular large jet engines, the loss of one or even a few of them won't bring down the ship. It has three missile defense systems: anti-missiles, simple weapons on CIWS, and distraction sticks.
Being a frontal airship, the face of the craft is heavily armored up and the ammo clips of the guns are buried deep within, behind the frontal armor and a separate cooling section for the guns which is also separated from the clips by heavy armor slopes. So in short, and like I say it is still in testing, but it should be very survivable. Not to mention that with its weapon loadout the clock is going to be ticking on the enemy pretty quickly.
The Wombat is not on the workshop yet because I am not finished with it, but when it is brought into the campaign I will upload it to the workshop.
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MY CRAFT ON THE STEAM WORKSHOP:
Deuce Fighter: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2981439884
Slider Frontsider Airship: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2981442588
Platypus2 Airship: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2981446468
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