Gunship

Gunships are one of the most fearsome opponents in COADE. They are manned capships with most of their mass budget invested in weapons and armor.

## Gunship Design

### Propulsion

Propulsion for gunships tends to be non-explosive. Since the gunship's role is to tank enemy gunfire, redundancy in the rockets and the propulsion tanks is a must, no matter what propulsion method is used.

### Armament

Armament for gunships runs the gamut from conventional cannons firing missiles to massive coilguns firing slugs. However, they have both long-range anti-capship weapons and short-range anti-drone/missile weapons to provide complete active defense coverage. If possible, gunships mount decoys to divert incoming missile fire, but as gunships tend to have astronomical power output, decoys for them are difficult to create and launch at a high enough velocity away from the ship.

### Powerplant

Gunships tend to use high amounts of power to feed their massive, power-hungry weapons, and therefore require either extremely high temperature powerplants or very large radiators. Gunships use only nuclear reactors, as RTGs do not produce enough power to be viable for their weaponry without using obscene amounts of them, which has problems with lag and mass.

### Armor

Gunships tend to use heavy-duty, multi-layer armor that consists of countermeasures to lasers, nukes, explosives, shaped charges, spalling, and both low-velocity high-mass and high-velocity low-mass impacts of various origins. The armor of a gunship, therefore, is by far and away the most complex scheme compared to the other types of capship. Some designs opt for a "citadel" arrangement with all the important bits (the bits that aren't fuel, generally) protected with massive amounts of armor, while the fuel and rockets are left hanging in the wind with only anti-nuke armor, a Whipple shield, and a thinner layer of bulk armor to protect them, while other designs make everything fully armored to reduce risk. However, any gunship design should attempt to make use of angled armor whenever possible, as it has been proven time and time again to increase survivability against almost all threats.

#### Layers of capship armor typically consist of:

1. Anti-laser armor: Bulk armor (usually aramid fiber but sometimes silicon or graphite aerogel) to absorb the heat from laser attacks, which are usually the longest-range attack on the tactical scale.
2. Anti-nuke armor: Thin (sub-5mm) layer of titanium carbide that protects the rest of the armor and the ship's internals from nuke flash.
3. Whipple shield: Sub-cm layer of boron (5mm layer of aluminum on stock ships) spaced a meter from the main hull that converts incoming high-velocity impactors (the second most long-range form of attack) into rapidly dissipating clouds of plasma and small fragments.
4. Bulk armor: Reasonably thick layer of reasonably dense, strong material such as maraging steel, VCS, RCC, or boron that hopefully stops incoming penetrators, and plasma/fragments from the Whipple shield, stopping them before they hit the ship's delicate internals. Alternatives to large amounts of bulk armor include ceramic armor (an easy-to-shatter ceramic sandwiched between two plates of steel, which helps dissipate kinetic energy better than an equivalent thickness of steel), and other options which the community is currently researching.
5. Anti-spall layer: Layer of flexible material such as polyethylene or nitrile rubber to dissipate shockwaves from kinetic barrages.

However, with the recent doubling of the available armor slots, even more complex armor schemes can be created, so innovation in this field is ongoing.

Some notes on Cap ship armor by Dwwolf of CDE forums.
Boron as a bulk material is now obsolete...it has been replaced by bulk boron with poor properties and Boron fiber composite...which is good but expensive.

My armor schemes tend fall in the following scheme.

Backstop layer : usually a fibre based or bulk material (basalt,aramid, silk) or bulk UHMWPE. Or Al-foam(mod) foam needs thicker layers.

Bulk performance layer : Usually Amorphous carbon
..couple of cm thick.

High tensile/density layer : usually some high performance steel or Titanium alloy.. Usually 1 cm or so for steel...a bit more for Ti. You can substitute a bulk performance material like A-carbon or diamond here they tend to fall between metals and ceramics in performance.

Optional : 10 to 25 cm of bulk absorbing material like Al-foam or EPS or Ni-micro lattice (the latter is dead expensive though).

Bulk brittle material : to stop plasma and/or whipple shield leakers/fragments. I usually take Boroncarbide, light and thus cheap. One could substitute diamond.

Void : 1 meter.
Optional : stuff whipple shield void with carbon Aerogel ,EPS or Al foam. To better help absorb plasma, whipple shield fragments or leakers. Carbon-gel also helps to transport heat away from the whippleshield.

Whippleshield : thin layer of 1 to 5mm material to break up incoming hypervelocity rounds and fragments.
Al works cheaply, so do the better Al alloys, Magnesium or Titanium alumide. Steels work, so does Osmium ( heavy ).
Less ductile materials are better dead on, for pointy ship shapes. These tend to shatter if hit on the broadside.
Some people like a combo layer of say 2-3mm A-carbon plus 0.5 to 1mm Diamond.

Lower melting point materials or materials prone to shattering by extreme heat flux ( nuke flash ) might like to be flashproofed with a couple cm of Si-gel.

If you want to introduce an armored citadel partial armor layer its usually placed above the bulk performance layer. You can cap the ends of this cylinder by adding radiation shields made of the armor material of your choice there. Preferably 2 or more.