Dr Forbidden, head of DDS ResearchThere are a lot of technology projects currently in development or in early implementation such as worm drives, EA-X, Zip and FIDO-VR which may seem unrelated but in fact i believe they are the jigsaw pieces of the future of space warfare in the late 2120s and beyond.
I firmly believe that the likes of Corkscrew and Coral, great as they are, do not signify the future of space warfare but the Dinomark XA does. If you are not familiar it then the XA is a very small ship that can be crewed by 1-3 crewmen but is a fully capable superluminal warship with offensive firepower, sensors and equipment to do many tasks that currently a larger ship with a crew of over 30 crewmen might be needed to do.
So lets look at this future DDS ship, lets call it Warship 2130, perhaps the Isometric replacement. I think it will be slightly bigger than XA, maybe Coril shuttle sized with a crew of up of 7 though able to be piloted by a sole crewmen (or remotely). The small crew will be augmented by FIDO-VR meaning that personnel located elsewhere can work on the ship virtually. This means that specialised skills can be bought in when and where needed, for example you won't need to carry your own exo-geologist around if you come up to some interesting rocks... you can just get one added to your crew virtually! FIDO-VR means of course that "real" and virtual crew can interact seamlessly, remote crew will use VR immersion to make it feel they are on the Warship 2130, real crew will see a holographic representation of their virtual crewman.
Warship 2130 will be very capable, the Zip cannon will hopefully alleviate the need to carry dozens of TPMs around and coupled with EA-X 2.0 with energy recycling the Zip cannon could be a very powerful weapon indeed. Obviously smaller ships have smaller powerplants though we are working on a new generation of powerplants that can deliver the power of a larger ship now but in a much smaller package. Warship 2130 will also use UCVs, whether its own or from other ships to extend it's abilities and reach.
There will still be a role for larger ships in future but for more specialised roles such as bombing (at least until MRMs and the like can be replaced by beam weapons... or maybe built on the fly), general purpose ships in the fleet will be smaller. We will also make much greater use of static sensor posts and unmanned superluminal assets to perform everyday patrols (something i will touch on again in a future blog post). Wormdrive will make the galaxy "smaller" and thus we will not need to maintain ships everywhere but will be able to scramble them to where they are needed much faster. This again is a reason why larger ships for general purpose tasks will no longer be necessary.
So as you can see Warship 2130 will bring together a number of ongoing projects to create a new class of much smaller yet much more capable spacecraft. I do say 2130 but we will see something a little sooner... i can exclusively reveal DDS Research has received initial gate funding for its equivalent of the Dinomark XA, a small ship which will be equipped with worm drive, Zip and other goodies to help us develop the next generation of DDS warships. Stay tuned.
