Nike class

Nike-class specifications

The Nike-class was the Royal Manticoran Navy's latest and most advanced class of battlecruisers at the onset of the Second Haven-Manticore War.

Conception and Development

For some naval theorists, the advent of the multi-drive missile (MDM) and the pod-laying warship meant the obsolescence of the battlecruiser classification. Neither capable of delivering the fire volumes the new missile-intensive combat required nor capable of effectively remaining outside the range of enemy missiles, they also didn't have the endurance and resilience ships of the wall had due to their lighter construction.

One solution offered to keep the battlecruiser as a viable type of warship was to develop hollow-core battlecruisers capable of deploying missile pods in the manner of a pod-laying superdreadnought. This concept led to the RMN's Agamemnon-class, the Grayson Space Navy's Raoul Courvosier-II-class and the Blücher-class of the Imperial Andermani Navy. However, the BC(P), as the variant became known, was not entirely satisfactory due to its limited firing endurance, and putting a hollow core in a battlecruiser also came with a greater cost in the ship's structural integrity than was expected, making it somewhat less durable than had been the case with pod-laying superdreadnoughts. (HH11)

A second alternative was pursued by the Royal Manticoran Navy with what would become known as the Nike-class, with the intention of recasting the battlecruiser as a "generalist" warship capable of withstanding the transformed reality of naval combat.

Considerably larger and more massive than any prior Manticoran battlecruiser design, the Nike-class massed around 2.5 million tons (three times the size of the earlier Reliant-class BCs), enjoying higher acceleration than a Reliant thanks to the improvements in compensator technology. Far more resistant to damage than a pod-laying battlecruiser, this also made the Nikes somewhat more suited to the RMN's traditional doctrine of using battlecruisers for general raiding and space control. It also carried more crew and a larger complement of Marines than the Agamemnons did. (SI2)

Despite being incapable of carrying missile pods internally like their Agamemnon-class contemporaries, and also unable to mount three-staged MDM's, the Nikes were armed with off-bore missile launchers, effectively allowing them to launch a single salvo of missiles from all fifty launchers at once. Their magazine spaces gave them enough ammunition for forty minutes of sustained engagement, whereas an Agamemmnon would expend its missile load in less than half that time.

Authorized for construction by the Janacek Admiralty as a one-off testbed ship, HMS Nike was almost ready for deployment when Manticore resumed its war against the Republic of Haven. For almost a year it was the only ship of its class in service, but the prototype's combat performance convinced the White Haven Admiralty to go ahead with mass production of the Nike-class, with the first new-construction ships entering service around 1921 PD. (HH11)

Technical Specifications

• Crew: 750
• Tonnage: 2,500,000 tons
• Acceleration:
  • Maximum Military Power: 700g
  • Normal Maximum (80% of Military): 540g
• Armament:
  • Magazine: 6,000 Mark 16 MDMs
  • Broadside:
    • 12x graser mounts
    • 25x missile tubes, capable of off-bore firing
      • Mark 16 two-stage missiles
    • 30x countermissile tubes
    • 30x point-defense laser clusters
  • Chase:
    • 4x graser mounts
• Space to carry eighty "flat pack" missile pods limpeted to her hull. (SI2)

Known Ships

• HMS Nike (BC-562) – lead ship of the class
• HMS Artemis
• HMS Daedalus
• HMS Horatius
• HMS Jason
• HMS Penelope
• HMS Perseus
• HMS Rigel
• HMS Romulus
• HMS Theseus
• HMS Truculent

External links

• David Weber's infodump post about the Nike-class