Professor Wayne King-Meiouf of the University of ProximaAfter my conference on Dino-Land ended i was lucky enough to meet Ren Galnason who is a fellow academic at Dino Central University who specialised in spaceship technology. We talked about possible future trends in Dino spaceship design.
As you know the Dinos went down a different route decades ago to how most space faring nations went. The Dinos have tended to always go for smaller multi-purpose warships (the Dinomark XT and PTs being the latest developments) as opposed to larger single-purpose warships though of course they have built some over the years though they have tended to be either failures (like the NG) or relatively unsuccessful (RS).
So is this going to continue? The XT and PT arn't going away anytime soon of course but the RS has now ended production and no new larger ship is on the horizon. There is talk from time to time of a ship in the same class as the DDS Panther but this remains talk. The only new tend is for smaller ships indeed, the Dinomark XA is rumoured to be already in service though officially is in "development" and is a fully functional spaceship including worm drive with a crew of 1-3. It is a similar class of ship to the DDS' Nano Fighting Ship concept now in development.
So what of the future shape of the Dino fleet? Well for the foreseeable future it will be mainly PT and XT based. Both types have development projects for future versions going well into the next decade. The RS class may be retired in the 2130s though it could possibly not be replaced by anything. The XA (and similar nano ships) will form an important part of the fleet though Galnason thinks they will remain a niche and doubts they will ever form more than about 10% of the fleet.
Lessons from the ABBO-Bolitic War will feed into the future development of the PT and XT. The Mark 3 PT has been delayed as has been reported already, Galnason told me that the PT/3 will be longer and will add some form of modularized and containerized multi-mission element including special forces, ground attack and Elint. The XT is likely to remain the multi-purpose workhorse but the PT will gain the option of mission specialization. Complimenting both of them a growing fleet of nano warships able to fill in all the gaps.
