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The Götterdämmerung was the primary space superdreadnaught of the Fourth Reich, dwarfing even the gigantic Siegfried class battleships. The name Götterdämmerung meant "Twilight of the Gods" and was the German name for Ragnarok, the end of the world in Nordic mythology.

Overview[]

Construction on the Götterdämmerung began in 1978, and the vessel was approximately the size of a large city. The main propulsion system consisted of a hydrogen fusion reactor, which produced steam to power a massive rotary steam engine, which also functioned as a gyroscope to keep the vessel stable. This rotary steam engine was built into the top of the ship's hull, and was located above the reactor. Mechanical power was transferred from the steam engine to the vessel's electrogravity engines, generator rooms, landing gear mechanisms and reactor exhaust thrust vectoring systems, through a large number of cogwheels and worm gears. It featured multiple exposed cogwheels and worm gears spread all over the ship. Apart from its anti-gravity propulsion, the ship also had two main reactors located to the rear of the ship. The center of the vessel presented a set of rotating pistons which powered a large gyro. The bridge of the ship sat at the front of the ship.

Exposed components of its propulsion system were heavily armored and, in some cases, built out of armor plate, as shown when the rotary engine/gyro assembly sustained 6 direct hits from small nuclear warheads launched by the USS George W. Bush without failing.

It was constructed to carry 'dual ultra-heavy relativistic kinetic nuclear howitzers', mounted on the frontside, with retractable barrels to protect the weapons from being damaged by collisions with space debris, as well as the vessel's violent launch, during which the ship crashed straight through the concrete roof located above the construction facility. Secondary armaments included a number of automatic cannons, guns, ion plasma weapons, and possibly wire guided missiles.

Technology and Specifications[]

Power plant[]

Schematic 5

The Götterdämmerung main power supply comes from a giant nuclear fusion reactor located in the center of the spaceship.

The fusion reactor makes an enormously amount of thermal radiation by fusing helium-3. The same process which takes place in the sun's core to produce the radiation which illuminates and heats the Earth.

The idea behind the fusion reactor comes from Werner Heisenberg, who took the famous relative E=mc2 and reversed the process. In 1944, the first tests were launched at a unknown site in German-held Poland, with an astounding result. The amount of energy made in a second could be compared with the amount of energy made in 10 years from all coal power plants in the world. The amount of useful energy the reactor releases per second is unknown, but the fact that it was enough to lift the Götterdämmerung vertically through a concrete roof is proof enough of its power, moon gravity or not.

The heat made by the fusion is used to heat up water into steam, which powers a huge radial steam engine in the center of the ship. The mechanical energy is delivered from the radial engine to the ship's engine and generator rooms by several large cogwheels and worm gears, many of which are partially or entirely exposed to space. After passing through the boilers, plasma from the reactor is expelled primarily through two exhaust ports in the rear of the ship. However, there are several plasma conduits leading from the boilers to the bottom, and sides of the vessel, where the plasma exhaust is used as a form of reaction-control-system for altering the massive vessel's orientation.

In 2019, the engine was recovered by the United States of America but deemed unnecessary.

Gyroscopic stabilizer[]

The immense size and unnatural weight of the gigantic Götterdämmerung is so immense that it affects its surroundings, But worst of all even in its zero-gravity stage, the Götterdämmerung will seek to the closest possible mass. This makes the whole vehicle unstable, due to the fact that its affected by huge masses like the sun or the moon. To prevent the vehicle from tipping over a huge gyroscope is fitted in the top of the Götterdämmerung to offset the imbalance caused by gravity.

All the data needed to calculate the movement of the gyro is calculated by computers, but no computer the moon Nazis had was strong enough to overcome the complex task.

Armament[]

The Götterdämmerung features an immense number of armaments, competing with some nation's entire armament arsenal. The top hull is heavily guarded by heavy 105mm Zwilling flak guns, mounted in pairs (four guns in total) in large man operated turrets. Those are seen fired against the earth attacking forces. 88 of those turrets are placed on the top hull, and were the only turrets being operative under the battle.

Other weapon systems are four-hundred and two mini turrets with 20mm flak guns for close range defense. These turrets were operated by the main targeting computer, in the armament control room. None of those turrets were active, because Dr. Richter never got time to write the fire control program.

Thirty-five Weltramfall missile silos were located around the sides. Again, they were not operational during the attack, but it’s the same system used by the Siegfried class warship.

The dorsal and ventral sides of the vessel each featured thirty three 35mm ion plasma guns mounted in turrets for firing on targets which were heavily armored yet too fast-moving, or not of high enough priority to make the use of the vessel's ultra-heavy relativistic kinetic nuclear howitzers a viable option. One is seen fired on the Statue of Liberty by a Walkyr.

Plans were made to construct seven bomb bays on the underside for carpet bombing cities, but after some consideration, this feature was deemed impractical as the Götterdämmerung's antigravity drives were never designed to carry the weight of the whole craft in the earth's atmosphere, instead it would have to remain in very low orbit using centrifugal force to help the anti-gravity engines maintain the altitude. Since the bombs would had needed ceramic plating on their fuselages and their own cooling system to prevent them from detonating due to the heat generated during their descent, it was decided that the idea would need too many resources in exchange for too little additional firepower.

The bomb bays were redesigned as regular hangars, allowing the craft to carry 50 Haunebu IV type attack transport spacecrafts and 300 Walkyr type space superiority fighters as close-range defense against smaller enemy spacecrafts. The crafts ordered built were however not ready for service when the Götterdämmerung was first launched to protect Schwarze Sonne, and it had to fight alone against the earthlings' space warships.

Armor[]

Gotterdammerung-concept

The titanium is easily seen on the Götterdämmerung

The armor on the Götterdämmerung is a fourth-generation armor layout named Element 228 made by Panzer Technologies lead designer David Hansen in 1964. After the introduction of nuclear weapons in 1945, the German scientists began to research heavy armor capable of receiving hits from heavy nuclear payloads.

In 1949, the first generation of armor was done, being made of Krupp steel, marine armor, and concrete. The first-generation armor could withstand a hit by a 1 megaton nuclear bomb, but to achieve this would require an armor thickness of a bit over 16 meters, which was deemed impractical. A newly formed science group called Panzer Technologie made a 10-meter-thick wall, made of titanium, steel, and tungsten. The wall successfully took a hit from a 10mt nuclear hit. The armor was seen as successful, and applied on the main Nazi moon base, Schwarze Sonne.

In 1961, the Soviet Union tested the largest nuclear bomb ever created the Tsar bomb. Terrified that the Russians would be able to wipe all of the Fourth Reich in a single blow, the scientist group started a new project, to develop an alloy that could withstand a blast at least ten times that of the Tsar bomb. The end result was a 10-meter-thick plate made out of depleted uranium, Titanium reinforced by pure carbon, 100.000.000 karat diamond, and metallic helium. All covered by osmium. After applying, the armor was put under pressure, by hitting it with lasers, reducing its thickness to 1 meter and 28mm. In the end, the armor plate had a density of about 200.000 tons/cm 3.

The new material was named Element 228. The result was that the whole laboratory was ripped apart and sucked into the armor plate, killing all the scientists. After putting the plate into zero gravity, testing began. After 5 months, it was deemed impossible to apply damage to the plates. In 1968 the armor was mass produced to be applied on the Götterdämmerung under the name Hitler's Will. The awesome nature of the new Element type made it impossible to make bolts out of it and was so hard to melt that it was impossible to weld the plates together.

The plates were instead bolted together with steel bolts. When the Götterdämmerung crashed into the moon, none of the armor plates were damaged, but the bolts could not take the huge amount of force applied to them, and they broke, ripping the plates from the hull. The heavy weight of the armor is shown in the movie, where the incoming enemy spaceships are sucked in and crushed by the huge mass of the Götterdämmerung.

Due to economic problems none of those armor plate was applied on the moon base, which proved catastrophic when the base came under nuclear attack from the USS George W. Bush since, although the pure heat and radiation was mostly blocked out by the external armor, spalling and the earthquake-like effects of the explosions caused internal damage to the structure that would take the surviving inhabitants decades to repair.

Trivia[]

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