Remodeling this ship using the same hull I had before is a real challenge, but mainly in the aft sections.

New Flight Deck

Originally the Hipper was going to only carry about 4 fighters, then my Space Battleship Yamato style carousel hangar upped that number to 8. Then, not being satisfied being able to carry 8 fighters but not have connectors for any of them to use, I added 2 external docks, technically bringing the ship’s carrying capacity to 10. She’s not quite a light carrier, nor was she meant to be, but meine güte this massive cruiser is getting extremely close to one.

Flight Deck Doors Open

Flight Deck Doors Closed

There are two adjacent connectors per side; the Cosmo Messer F models and onward have the connectors closer to the center of the fuselage. The Hipper’s flight deck is supposed to accommodate all 109s, so … redundant connectors.

Now that I’ve added a flight deck for fighters to wait on standby, or to just refuel like the stern docks, that ups the total capacity to 12. Sort of. 4 can be docked with the ship directly while 8 can magnetically attach to the docks in the carousel section, but there’s also a maintenance area a couple of decks below the flight deck, which I plan to add some welders to for fixing or building Cosmo Messers. With or without a connector in that maintenance section, there’s actually enough room for 13 fighters.

Maintenance Area Access

It’s getting crowded, but the more fighters the Hipper class can carry, the more independently they can operate as a whole, which is nice. For comparison, the Edinburgh class–at least the lead ship–carries much smaller fighters, but still only has room for 4 of them.

Depending on how you view magnetic connectors, there really isn’t a hard limit on what kinds of small ships or how many of them can be ‘carried’ as long as there’s surface area and thruster power for it, but I only count magnetic plate docking for internal docking, or at least ‘common sense’ docking. You shouldn’t have fighters clamped down just anywhere as a standard practice, even if it’s not obstructing anything.

Pesky Main Guns

Another problem I’m having is designing the main guns. They’re going to be twin barrels for a total of 8 guns in 4 turrets, pretty much what you’d expect in a space version of a WWII German Heavy Cruiser. Weaponcore doesn’t play nice with custom turret controllers, though. Occasionally I get them to work, but the only designs that consistently work are those that have only a single elevator hinge/rotor. That’s really difficult to design a multi-barrel turret around and it’s annoying enough that I’ve been putting off committing to a design for almost a month now.

As tempting as it is to just use one of the ‘prefab’ turrets, I don’t want the Hippers using triple barrel turrets. I’ll figure it out eventually but for now it’s one of those minor headaches I’m trying to let my brain tackle in the background.

Closing

The only areas I’m working on currently are the exterior and any areas relating to the fighters, so the ship’s still mostly an empty shell. The plan is to get far enough along with the small craft areas to know how they’ll have to connect to the rest of the ship. From there I can figure out the new floorplan and how the conveyor and vent systems will need to work. After that it’s just filling everything back in. I’m going to make more of the bow section directly accessible for the crew this time around since the previous version had a lot of wasted space.

More on that when I get there.

I took twenty or so minutes to start on the primary changes to the Cosmo Messer E that will upgrade the design to the F version. The main difference is that it no longer has a rocket launcher in the nose. That will be replaced with either an autocannon or some other gun. The F model will have two deployable rocket launchers mounted on the bottom.

If possible, I’m also going to add deployable landing gears, but that wasn’t something I could really hone in on today. I just wanted to take a quick crack at getting its new weapon emplacements sorted. The next time around I’ll see what I can do about the thruster layout and landing gears. There should also be some screenshots by then.