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Fuzzy Ships |
Due to the threat of physical weapons capable of approaching lightspeed and all the energy such devices could apply to a target, one school of ship architecture came up with what they called the "Fuzzy Ship" designs.
Fuzzy Ships are not intended to deflect or stop incoming physical attacks. Instead, they are intended to provide the minimum resistance to such threats as possible and, via redundancy and careful planning, retain a functioning vessel.
Thus, instead of a single 'hard' hull, a fuzzy ship is often a cluster of multiple pods, or a large 'ball' with minimal physical reinforcement, or even a 'cloud' of self-organizing automata.
As with most combat vessels, such ships do not often apply their own weaponry or active sensors in a combat. Instead, they rely on dispersing many relatively cheap drones which carry active sensors, weapons systems, decoy emitters, and/or other pieces of equipment which tend to attract targeting systems ahead of its own advance - and in some cases, in lieu of its own advance.
The main problem with such 'fuzzy' or 'floppy' architecture deals with the forces imposed by thrust on the systems. Some of these architectures rely on a more standard rigid hull to deliver the combat-capable craft to the destination. Others utilize rotational inertia to maintain separation of vital bits and a reaction engine's exhaust. Yet others utilize reactionless systems - the variety produced over the years by architects and shipwrights of this school run a very wide gamut.
The main difficulty these vessels face in combat is area-effect weapons, such as m-e conversion weapons (everything from the crude nuclear fission weapons through the most arcane GUT warheads). These tend to deliver massive shockwaves across a whole aspect of such devices. As this is the case, many fuzzy ships are heavily outfitted for anti-missile defense systems of various makes and models, depending on the design criteria and available technology.
