Space Artillery concept or something

[The Joker]

First of all, I'm just brainstorming so let's just discuss this if you don't have anything better to do at the moment.

New class of ship - Space artillery (silly name, yes).

Think about it; you fire away a projectile in a swarm of incoming enemies and, once it detonates, it does massive damage on wider a spherical area. Of course, one would have to be very precise and skilled in using such weapon.

Kinda like one huge flak cannon. It'd have let's say 2,5 K range and that range is fixed, so it's like - in whichever direction you fire, it detonates on 2,5 K range with blast radius of 0,3 K unless you make a direct hit which would be very hard to achieve, because this class of ship would be hard to maneuver.

So it's more powerful than mortar, it's mounted on a ship size of a gunboat (with let's say -50 reverse trust speed so you can move backward while firing), it's somewhat inaccurate, fires one projectile every 3, 4 seconds but it's kicks ass and it's very valuable if used wise. It'd have defensive capabilities of maybe 4 gunboat turrets but it would, for example, have transport shields along with 500 nanos/batteries. Of course, It'd would be a lot more vulnerable than any heavy gunboat and it'd require protection but in most cases it would be sacrificed.

Think about scenarios in which fighters, which are taking heavy long range fire, have to disable artillery barrage first in order to secure the area for incoming friendlies (example - capital ships). Or even strange scenario in which fleet/group commander orders artillery to fire in the area which is occupied by both hostiles and friendlies, in order to gain the upper hand by gambling/sacrificing his own men. There are endless strategic possibilities.

What do you think? A new class of ship - do we need something like this? Can it be implemented even if it's hypothetically accepted?

Not many people would use it but I think it'd be a fine addition and it'd change the way of fighting in a big way.

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