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[Ukrainian Ranger]

My problem with heat missiles is that they will start developing countermeasures and I'd prefer to get land weapon that useful both against their infantry and their dropships.

What are their disadvantages in ground combat?

1) Lack of mobility
2) Laser is direct fire weapon
3) Laser effectiveness fall down with range
4) No armored vehicles

This means that we need mobile indirect fire weapon. Something like

This time it is a vote

Spoiler: PLZ-025 (click to show/hide)

Unarmored tracked 155mm self propelled howitzer capable to use standard 155mm shells used by PLA. Unlike other 155mm howitzer, this one has its own radar and targeting computer to attack descending dropships acting as an anti-aircraft gun using new kind of 155mm HEAT round with a warhead similar to HX-1. Has a powerful smoke generator attached.
 

Next turn we will need infantry to handle close combat, but now I want to bring God of War into the game.


10ebboe10
Is it bad luck that our airforce and submarine never entered combat?

[10ebbor10]

Yup. Both happened to be patrolling Japan.

[Ukrainian Ranger]

I just released that 155mm shell (~50kg) is way, way, way smaller than 1ton+ HX-1 missile and Heat warhead will give us little chance to penetrate their dropships. And it is not that easy to hit reliably. I think that even dedicated anti-aircraft artillery is not a way to go...

[coleslaw35]

Then what shall we do? We're in a bad situation. Our ground troops get slaughtered and our planes are too weak.

[Baffler]

The battle report mentions that the one dropship we destroyed was hit directly by one of our SAM missiles, as opposed to them exploding just before contact and (failing to) destroy their target with shrapnel. Could we reprogram the HX-1's to explode on contact as a revision? We can't produce them very fast so it's probably not a long term solution, but it'll be something.

As far as design goes, we really do need to improve our ground capability. The 155mm artillery unit might not actually be a bad idea. The aliens are tough, but not so tough that they can't get shot or blown up. Their drop pods tend telegraph their landing well in advance, if we could shell those positions from the get-go we might have a chance. Another option is an infantry weapon or emplacement (though the way they demolished base buildings with heavy lasers makes me wary of a stationary emplacement) which fires airburst rounds. If we go the small arms route, a sort of squad automatic weapon replacement would probably be the way to go.

[Ukrainian Ranger]

You misinterpreted the update. HX-1 are programmed to hit. It is regular missiles that explode to hit with their shrapnel. Direct hit will not change anything for them. They are designed to deal with thin skinned aircrafts.

I prefer to boost our air defence further. What can we do design a unit that will be useful both as fire support and AA gun?

For 155mm gun: There are tactical nukes but I don't want to use them that early in the war. There are heat, but 50kg warhead is not that big to be sure that we will get a penetration and it is not that easy to hit. HESH has a similar problem.

[Baffler]

Oh, I see. We just need to keep making HX-1's I guess.

If we want to follow up with the 155mm gun we could just give it straight up AP or APCR. The APCR will have more accuracy because of higher muzzle velocity (which also means a higher service ceiling), and would be more able to penetrate armor than a similarly sized round with an explosive component. A shell that big doesn't even need to explode at the end to severely wreck anything inside of its target if it can penetrate, and the missile hit suggests that they're not very well insulated from the inside. For ground support it's just a matter of changing out the shells, or firing on the now stationary target with APCR.

These would ideally be on a self propelled carriage to avoid counter fire.

[TopHat]

Well, I've just found something rather interesting. It may have its problems but this is ten years later, so we may be better prepared for this than we realized. (It's also mentioned on Wikipedia, so it must be true!)

As for our exciting opportunity, mention that our brand-new missiles worked perfectly, that the People's Republic of China and the EPA have the honour of bringing down the first alien dropship, and that the only reason the attack was not completely defeated was due to a lack of availability of said missiles. Perhaps if more production capacity was available to the EPA, things would have turned out very different(ly?)...

And for our design, I think our best bet is to take out the dropships on the ground, especially as the invaders will probably be developing countermeasures against our HX-1 this turn. As such, this is my proposal:

Spoiler: "The Rat" (click to show/hide)

A fairly small tracked or wheeled vehicle driven by remote control, designed to deliver its payload (namely, as much high explosive as will fit) into a landed dropship and detonate. Control mechanisms and other necessary systems should take up as little space as is practical without unduly increasing the (preferably relatively low, compared to a dropship at least) cost or impacting on performance. If possible, an electric powerplant is used to minimise noise as the Rat rapidly approaches its target. A row of smoke grenades or canisters line the top, to screen the Rat from defensive fire. (preferably deployed either immediately following planetfall [hidden near probable landing sites?] or when the troops carried inside the dropship are already engaged with human ground forces)

It's essentially an updated version of the Nazi German tracked mines, but seems to me more immediately useful than an artillery piece which will probably be seen and knocked out from the air. Thoughts?

[Ukrainian Ranger]

Drone like that is fancy but it is not practical. It's signal can be jammed with little research effort. It is slow. It needs a way to be delivered to the enemy. It will get outdated should they change deployment tactics. I prefer to give our infantry something if we want to avoid creating large targets for their drones.

PS. To have a chance with drones we should revise our fighter. Question is how?

[TopHat]

'slow' depends on how badly we roll As for the ease of countering it, I should probably mention that the drone was never intended for long-term use, merely as an immediately available method of knocking out dropships on the ground and hampering the enemy's ability to evacuate all personnel and equipment from an attack site, hopefully giving the Invaders a nasty shock in the process. It only needs to work once, and thus force the enemy to develop effective countermeasures; be it changing their (currently successful) tactics or, preferably, wasting valuable design and revision slots. The moment the enemy are reacting to us, we have the upper hand. As for delivery, I had hoped that they could be hidden (from the air, at least) around EPA bases near probable landing sites. If worst comes to worst, I'm sure a couple of people could drag one on a sled.

As for the fighter, obvious revisions are fitting them with HX-1 missiles (or specially designed new ones), improving the jet engine, or adding some kind of primitive anti-laser defense.

[Ukrainian Ranger]

HX-1 missile is a heavy SAM with few hundreds of kg warhead. Good luck fitting it on the fighter. Also, HEAT missile will severely decrease chance to hit their drones

As for anti-laser defence... I doubt it will work without a dedicated anti-laser research. Something we should have done instead of getting rather useless information about alien biology.

The moment the enemy are reacting to us, we have the upper hand.

You are assuming that they will not design anything we will need to counter. Furthemore, if enemy designs anything that negates our drone and useful in some other way it means that we got a useless design while enemy got something useful and it is us who wasted a design action.

[evilcherry]

We have been wild blind guessing, anyway, and last turn we have little knowledge on whether they got laser or not.

We need to work on anti-laser armor today, but our best bet on anti-laser armor at this moment is sacrifical armor, or we dust the air enough that scatters away the energy.


I strongly propose to IGNORE their drones for now and focus on getting more examples for examination. ATGMs or Howitzers are the key. Or a dual purpose barrel.

Also, no to APCR. We either do APFSDS, or stick with HEAT/DP/SH.

[Ukrainian Ranger]

After some thinking... I think that we should not ignore drones.

Ground combat is important but we lost the skies to their drones and they will produce more and more of them. We must counter this danger because their drones are plain immune to our weapons.

My new vote

Spoiler: PL-13 (click to show/hide)

Advanced Mach 6.5 or more air to air missile that comes with two types of warhead. One is kinetic energy penetrator and another is a small fragmentation warhead to deal with unarmored targets.

Mach 6 air to air exist already - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-37_(missile)
And humanity built Mach 10 missiles (SAM) back in 1970s - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)

[TopHat]

Oops, it's the sub that can fire it. For some reason I thought it was the fighters. I guess that means improving the PL-12 or developing new ones, if we decide to go down that route. Unfortunately, I doubt we could make anything nearly as effective as that ADMM, let alone relatively cheaply.

As for the drone, it should be such a specialized weapon that I doubt any counter will be very useful as anything else (unless it's simply something like thicker dropship armour). In addition, if it is an upgrade to the dropship, dropships will be that much more expensive for the rest of the game, and if we capture any (damaged) equipment due to an Alien evacuation being disrupted / not enough dropships remaining to carry all their warriors, It'll be well worth it. My 'upper hand' point may have been a bit exaggerated but I would rather the enemy have to counter us (even if we need to counter them) than design something they don't really need to counter (open topped artillery which can just be shot up by drones or ignored, since the Warriors will probably be pretty immune to shrapnel and a 155mm shell won't do much good against the dropships.)

[Ukrainian Ranger]

you highly underestimate killing power of a 155mm shell and armor of their warriors.

Anyway, we need to vote. My first priority is a new surface to air missiles to unobsolete our jets. We can try to revise our current missiles to be faster... but design seems more likely to succeed.

Artillery is somewhat vulnerable to their drones but it is a deadly ground warfare weapon