My wok on my new setting is progressing slowly. And just recently I downloaded Multimedia file viewing and clickable links are available for registered members only!!  You need to or !!
and got the idea to make a complete naval force (or almost as there will be far more ship types I ever can imagine).

There is a few things that needs to be adressed prior to building a navy. First is will this be a big ship or small ship universe? If it is a small ship universe, where will the treshold go?

How large is a naval force based on a empire of X systems?
What about logistics? Starships with Heplar drives will need far more fuel than CT/MT ships. Tankers will be necessary for most operations to be successfull.

With this in mind I have decided to make a tanker force/squadron first. I decided to go for a modular designsystem. Most larger ships use combined droptanks/tank modules. Each tank is 500DT, and a tanker carries 12 such tanks. The tanker ship does also have two fuelskimmers that carries one such tank down to a source for fuel (gas giant or a planet with water) to fill it up. Each tank also contains a fuel purification plant that purifies the fuel in 30 hours.

To service fuel hungry ships they may either change out their own tank module with one from the tanker. A special fuel tug will then carry a tank from the tanker and deliver it to the ship and carry the emtpy tank back.

Or the fuel hungry ship may dock to a fuel boom extending from the tanker ship.

This arrangement has several advantages. Neither the tanker or the battleship doesn't need to skim fuel on their own. Larger ships can save space for other things by not carry a ContraGrav unit. By changing a fuel module, the battleship doesn't need to leave its station. Larger ships will carry more fuel modules, thus not being empty of fuel during a refuel.

There is two disadvantages I can think of designwise. There will be a lottle more space lost to hull material. With fuel modules at 500dt will not be very suiitable for every type of craft. Most crafts with a fuel module will be at least 1000DT large includng the fuel module. A 1000dt craft will be more fuel efficient than a 1500dt craft, which will have a smaller ratio of the hull volume sett off for a fuel tank.

At the moment I have not decided who will have this kind of arrangement for their navy, but when I can get some more designs done I will be able to determine who should have this.

Here is a early version of the fuel tank. This is just the tank. Note the "lip" at the ends of the tank. This is where the fuel tug wil grasp the tank and Ferry it to a starship that needs a replacement tank. I need to include some more details and a texture before it is finished.

I'm wondering if Carrara from DAZ might suite you. They have just released an express version of Carrara 7 which while not free looks like it contains both modelling and rendering tools, and is a lot less than a $1000 even the top end of this product line is less than that.

Some of the range may be worth checking out at
Multimedia file viewing and clickable links are available for registered members only!!  You need to or !!


On their forum most people reccomend that if you use Express do your models in an external program such as Anim8or and import them.

I did my navy sizes for my United Worlds Commonwealth game by using T4s Imperial Squadrons or Pocket Empires (can't remember which at the moment) to work out how many "squadrons" the world could build. I then ruled that a battle squadron would be around 1,000,000 displacement tons and a cruiser squadron 500,000 displacement tons. From memory for Earth in this campaign it gave a fleet size of around 4,000,000 displacement tons. In this I included what Path of Tears would have described as large combatants, ie 1,000 displacement tons and larger. Smaller vessels were just attached as needed since it would take a lot of these to significantly effect the total military tonnage.

Doing this for the other "powers" assured that the relative strengths of each group in terms of tonnage remained constant.