Götterdämmerung muss fliegen
Dwarfing even the gigantic Siegfried class battleships , the Götterdämmerung was the primary space superdreadnaught of the Fourth Reich. The name Götterdämmerung means "Twilight of the Gods" and is the German name for Ragnarok, the end of the world in nordic mythology.
Overview
It's construction began in 1978. The vessel is approximately the size of a large city. It's main propulsion system consisted of a hydrogen fusion reactor, which produces steam for a massive rotary steam engine, which also functioned as a gyroscope to keep the vessel steady, built into the top of the hull, just above the reactor. Mechanical power was transferred from the steam engine to the vessel's electrogravity engines, generator rooms, landing gear mechanisms and rector exhaust thrust vectoring systems, among others, through a large number of cogwheels and worm gears. It features multiple exposed cogwheels and worm gears spread all over the ship. Apart from its anti-gravity propulsion it also has two main reactors on its rear. The center of the vessel presents a set of rotating pistons That powers a giant gyro. The bridge of the ship sits at the front of the ship.
Exposed components of its propulsion system were heavily armoured, and in some cases built out of armour plate, as shown when the rotary engine/gyro assembly sustained at least 6 small nuclear warheads from 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 somewhat violent launch (Ploughing straight up through the concrete roof which had been built above it to protect the spacecraft from space debis during the construction phase. Secondary armament includes a number of automatic cannons, guns and possibly wire guided missiles.
Nuclear helium fusion plant
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.
Gyro stabilizing
The immense size and un-natural 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 closes 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.
Secondary armament
The Götterdämmerung features an immense amount of armaments, competing with some nations 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 system are 402 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.
35 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 Siegefried class warship.
The dorsal and ventral sides of the vessel each featured 33 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 antigrav 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 much 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 defence 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
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 Technologie's 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 1meter and 28mm. In the end, the armor plate had a density of about 200.000 tons/cm3.
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 aplied 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 space ships 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 catasrophic 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 armour, spalling and the earthquake-like effects of the explosions caused internal damage to the structure that would take the surviving inhabitants decades to repair.