We do have improved tech, which I believe is of sufficient caliber. The hexsand plate, which is basically improved BS plate, which IIRC is basically smaller warship plate. We also have the sharkmist plate (I'm totally calling the infantry armor "sharksuit"), which is cheaply repairable.
Just on that, I can see two unusual tactics: First, we can make capital ships capable of taking much more of a beating. It doesn't matter if their weapons can't kill lots of UWM ships quickly, because they can withstand a lot of hits. Plus, the major part of these ships is their armor, so it'll be easier to swap their weapons out for improved types later.
Second, we can make lighter guerilla ships, which operate alongside stealthy "miner" ships. Since the sharkmist armor can self-repair, these ships could quickly engage and disengage, and then mine an asteroid to replenish their armor.
See, the problem with creating "armor" ships is that, in principle, there is no defending against a battleship gauss slug with any amount of conventional armor. "Kinetic Kill Vehicle" fully applies, because it moves at a decent fraction of c, is the size of a large vehicle, and is almost guaranteed to kill you. The only hope in that regard is for ablative kinetic-absorption armor, the effectiveness of which against attacks of that scale we've yet to test.
The self-repair armor is going to be very good for smaller strikecraft though - being too fast and too small to target for the big guns, they'll only have to deal with PD, and the higher initial cost of the armor is going to be easily offset by the lessened maintenance costs of repairing laser gashes.
Longterm, I agree on the E/KW, although it might be better to go with pure kinetic weapons for our first run. Since UWM ships are specialized for dealing with both, using just one will reduce their armor's effectiveness. Since it would only be the first run, they wouldn't have time to adapt their armor, and if they did, our second run would be even more effective since it would use both E&K. That's just an idea though.
I disagree with the specialists...
If you want to go for killing power, then you have to go full kinetic, especially if you want to do it with current tech. There is no armor that protects against kinetics well enough. Yet. The reason I want to have a mix of kinetics and energy weapons (hopefully advanced energy weapons, not mere lasers), is exactly long-term. Gauss ammunition is not exactly hard to come by, but any fleet fighting away from supply bases is going to run out eventually, plus energy weapons are easier to aim (marginally, at the distances and target speeds/sizes involved) and are generally more flexible.
For the latter I specifically want "barrier ships". Ship-to-ship weapons being what they are, they are very hard to defend against, so I'd like to develop some options for cost- and energy-effective defense, especially against kinetic weapons. I have a number of ideas in that regard, but Anton's "secretive inventor" nature is going to get in the way of getting all of those rapidly developed.
See, purely on it's own, this is fine. Barrier ships are an interesting idea, and would be great to have.
But you're using it to justify not using traditional methods, and waiting. This is a very bad idea. From our knowledge of automanipulators, they are almost always more expensive than mundane alternatives, and making an outright barrier that can span areas relevant to space battles is going to be extraordinarily expensive; it's unlikely to work, and therefore doesn't work as a justification for anything.
I'm not using barrier ships as justification for waiting. I know that we won't have them at least until we can dissect and make new manipulators, and waiting that long probably won't do. I'm using our low production capacity as justification for waiting, bizarrely. We can build things besides warships for the moment, and I'd like even the first batch of our ships to have
some tech advantage. Which means focusing on and making new warship designs in VR, and Anton's been locked away in a secret lab working on a prototype that may or may not work for the past week, so he's going to get to making those ships first thing after testing. Deal?
Also, I understand that you're playing your character, but being secretive is only going to hurt us. If your projects work, then they can render other people's work pointless, or make people have to seriously re-adjust their ideas to fit with it, with no warning. If your projects fail, then nobody can help you fix flaws, and good ideas can go to waste. Also, it makes it look like you're doing nothing and being unhelpful.
Well, see above.
See, the problem I have is that I have nothing but vague ideas to work off. For instance, my idea of making barrier ships is basically looking into space-warping manipulators and active threat detection systems to maybe replicate the LDA "shields" from Edge of Chaos. I've no idea if any part of that is going to work, so I need to make an action asking for specifics, preferably at a time when we're actually equipped to act on receiving a positive answer, which means waiting for the space magic facility. If I ask the questions now, I might forget to ask them later, and since PW doesn't have any of this set in stone, by the time we actually get to act on the answers, the answers may have retroactively changed due to reasons, and any plans we made will be rendered useless. By not asking the questions I prevent the plans from being prematurely formed, thus avoiding the hassle of having to deal with it until we actually
can deal with it.
Until I have an actual positive answer on the viability of something vital to a plan I want to have, I'd rather not have the plan known. (yes, I'm basically invoking
Unspoken Plan Guarantee Best part about unspoken plans is that nobody notices when they fail, and everyone is pleasantly (or unpleasantly, if it's the enemy) surprised when they succeed.) And while that means that I basically have nothing to show for it, and Anton is acting all cryptic while seemingly doing nothing at all, that's not quite the case. Not entirely, at least, and not entirely intentionally. He'll get to publicly helping the war effort as soon as he thinks he has something that can make a difference.
Primarily a "workhorse strikeforce" supported by specialists.
What does this mean, exactly? Lots of bog standard skirmish ships, like we fought in M12, supported by "barrier" ships?
Almost, yes. Not bog standard skirmish ships, but a group of
standardized general-purpose ARM combat ships - "workhorses", with whatever advanced armor and weapons they will have, supported by special-purpose ships. Barrier ships, strikecraft carrier ships, pursuit, electronic warfare and interdiction, boarding and infiltration, repair, artillery, what have you. A "workhorse strikeforce", with specialists. The workhorse ships draw fire and do the heavy fighting, while specialists are designed to excel at their specific task, so would probably hang back during actual combat (unless they're barrier ships), and either do their thing from behind the fleet, or move in as needed when the circumstances allow.
If some of my other ideas pan out, a different kind of specialist ships would be possible, one that could pretty much just waltz right up to the side of any enemy ship and do whatever.
"If some things work the way I think they do, we could have a ship that can go wherever it wants without retaliation."
This is not a useful statement. What ideas? By what function would they do this? Do you mean they're undetectable stealth ships? Can they paralyze enemies? Do they only get one shot before the enemies can shoot back?
See, I've
no idea which it will be. I have plans in mind, but I only know that some things are
theoretically possible, to
some extent. There are simple plans (in concept), involving making phasing ships using tech from Simus's phasesuit. There are more complex plans involving ships that can short-range-teleport themselves for boarding action or attack evasion. Then there's the idea of "Solar Stealth", rendering the enemy blind to the presence of the ship using targeted hallucinations by combining a long-ranged mindfuck gun with a specially made biochemistry overrider to induce a VR-like suggestibility state. Yes, basically shouting "I AM NOT HERE" so loudly that their brains agree despite all evidence to the contrary. A lot of things are possible, but we can't even really research most of those things until we can make new manipulators.
Yes, and I am currently examining telebombs. My guess is that they're too short range to be effective in space battles.
A guess is not good enough. Can they be
made long-ranged enough? It needs research.
I think you missed the question. You're saying we should focus on what falls in our lap. I'm saying we should focus on making what we want fall in our lap. But what do we want? "Better tech"? Yes, but we probably won't be able to improve every aspect of our ships, all at the same time.
Whichever aspect of the ships we
can improve, we should. We want better armor, better weapons, better everything. We can be choosy about what we add once we have things to choose from. Right now I'm looking into improving the weapons, because I have ideas that are actually short-term viable in that direction.
Also, we have to decide what types of ships we're building at this very moment. We can choose what we want them to good at, even without having a great tech advantage. My two suggestions are based on what we will need now: Heavily armored ships, using the hexsand armor, which can stay around as targets long enough for ground defenses to kill the ships. We need these now, to defend Q'baja and possibly Heph. Then there's troop transports, which we need to actually deploy sods anywhere. Since these aren't combat ships, and are mainly armed for orbital bombardment, it doesn't matter if they're outdated- they gain little from better tech.
Hexsand armor is good if we can mass-produce it, though we still don't know how it stands up to spaceship combat. If you want to build something
now, before any testing is done or any new weapons are made, start on a standard gauss-cannon battleship with hexsand armor. Building it should take long enough for some new tech to pop up and get tested.
Either a defense advantage or an offense advantage will work, but in either case (or in combination) it would have to be decisive. One our ship taking out five to ten of theirs of the same weight class without suffering critical damage kind of decisive.
Why? You think the entire UWM fleet will drop on Q'baja immediately upon them severing contact? If so, we'll probably need a ratio of one to one hundred, rather than one to five.
Not the entire fleet, no. But we wasted Heph's defense fleet. Even for UWM commanders it shouldn't be that hard to put two and two together, and once the bureaucratic machine sets off, I'm expecting a fleet of at least thrice to five times that size at minimum - both to deal with Q'baja, and to put the pressure on Hephaestus - to arrive within a few years. Well, sooner now. Our production capacity means that we can expect to be outnumbered three to one by then, and we only have one Hammer.
Regardless, even if our ships are worth about as much as theirs, they're still worth something. If we don't build any ships, then they're worth nothing. Building ships now won't hurt our development of improved ships.
"
Yeah, yeah, alright. Waste of resources if you ask me, but if it makes ye sleep better..."
True, but it'll let us run from that fight. Guerilla tactics.
What I mean is, if we
have to fight a fight. Like if we need to defend something or break the defenses of something. Running from a fight is a great way to keep yourself from harm, true, and might be a way of winning wars in the long run, but not a great way of winning battles.
Also, please don't just say "I have an idea for this" without saying what the idea is. C'mon, man, just let us know. Maybe someone else can develop the idea if you don't have the time/interest.
We can't really do much about these things. Can't investigate manipulators in VR (I mean 'can't', not 'not allowed to'). Can't build new manipulators without the amp factory. Some of them just need time spent working and researching, and Saint already has projects of his own that he's working on. And really, you know most of my projects are so outlandish that only Anton will ever even attempt to work on them. I haven't even gotten to the mechanized flying bear cavalry yet.
Where does the "eight" figure come from? I wrote that we have four armed transports on the wiki, because we had four salvageable ships.
Four armed transports, yes. But Anton is requesting permission to build a batch of eight Scabbard class ships from Simus.
((can we add "The return of Simus's higher brain functions" to the "List of things we're waiting on" to the Wiki?))