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[Ozyton]

Yes, in reality a ship designer would probably notice something like that within the many years the ship is being built, but the player has to manage much more than just ship design so they're much more likely to forget or not notice a mistake like that. Slapping them on afterwards isn't really cheating so much in this case.

It's like a similar case I heard of where a guy built a warship and sent them out, only to realize when they got to the battle he hadn't designated the ship to be loaded with missiles despite having built them beforehand.

[iceball3]

True, though in this particular case, it's a trivial refit, but considering how much my tech has advanced and the dubious usefulness of these vessels against what I'm planning to face them off with, it's well possible that I'll just scrap them and make a new design.

[MarcAFK]

NX-01 Enterprise was just about to make history by being the first human designed and built vessel to exit the solar system under warp power.
Someone noticed the spatial torpedo bay was mysteriously empty. "I'm sure we're not going to need those during our 3 year journey".
"Er, cargo transporters are a thing right? Yeah that's how they mysteriously appeared. Oh actually weren't we supposed to have shields too? Whatever, they can be installed when we get back."
It would be a damn shame if some malignant alien force added 500 tons of shields to the ship in the middle of its journey, then mysteriously resized the jump engine, and modified every other system in the ship to make up for the increased tonnage. Strange how the 2 slipways of Utopia Columbia shipyard back home also became 24000 tons, and the NX-02 Columbia and NX-03 Challenger also modified to the new design. Aliens eh?

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

SO!

What's a good close-range, heavy-hitting weapon? I'm thinking either plasma carronades, railguns, or missiles. Unsure about railguns.

[LoSboccacc]

carronades or lasers. carronades will give loads of alpha damage but laser aren't that far behind in substained damage per ton, especially of comparable RP level

[Flying Dice]

Lasers. Remember that their damage scales in inverse proportion to range.

The problem with carronades is that they're too short-ranged, it's a pain in the ass to get them close enough to shoot in almost any situation, save for ambushing on a JP. IIRC their damage profile is inferior to similar tonnages of laser in most cases (basically everything except super-thick armor), since they crater instead of punching through. They're not bad in their range, they're just not that good overall.

Missiles are, of course, viable, given that their "close range" can be measured in tens of millions of kilometers while still diverting a bunch of tonnage to WH strength. And yeah, you can make nasty short-ranged missiles. It's just that against enemy missile ships you're generally sacrificing the principle advantage of missiles (range) and eating fire, so why not go all the way and make it a beam ship instead? The obvious exception to that is fighters, those love beefy short-ranged missiles.

Railguns are much better out at their maximum ranges, as they don't have damage dropoff the way lasers do, but have inferior damage models and worse maximum damage. That's why there's any debate at all re: which are better overall.

So yeah. Big lasers, get close, punch holes in armor and shred the insides. Carronades work too if you can build beefy and fast enough to get to their range without sacrificing damage, or if you can set up JP ambushes. Basically yes vs other E/KW ships, no vs missile ships for them.

[coleslaw35]

What's a viable missile size and strength for fighters with box launchers? How many launchers should I have on a missile fighter?

[Flying Dice]

As always, it depends. On your tech levels. On the sizes of the missile and fighter. On what you want them to do.

Generally I either make my fighter missiles the same size as my ASMs with MSP shifted from range to WH (for interoperability in emergencies--my fighters can use standard ASMs at short range and my missile boats can make suicide runs with fighter missiles if that's all that I have), or I make my fighter missiles larger, dumping the excess into both WH and speed. For a 250t fighter I'd typically use four size-4 box launchers, but this'll vary with the efficiency of your other techs and what the exact specifications you're going for are.

[MarcAFK]

I like to put size 2 missiles into my fighters for maximum salvo size.

[Alastar]

Regarding heavy beam hitters:

Carronades have the same damage, range and power requirement as infrared lasers of the same size. Main differences:

- twice as expensive to build
- the weapons themselves are much more expensive to research
- lack most design options
- much shallowe damage profile
+ 2 free focal sizes
+ need less crew

On the whole, i don't like them. They are about as good as purpose-built lasers for short-ranged, slow-firing heavy hitters... but lasers have more choice in implementation and investing in the line is useful for other requirements (long-range artillery, area defence, fighter weaponry).

Railguns lose out big on armour penetration and shock damage, limiting the impact of the first salvo. For sustained damage, large railguns aren't too good either, because they're throttled by capacitor tech.
Fast-firing ones can be a decent half measure though: good missile defence, adequate in a brawl

Dedicated close-range missiles are possible, if they impact within 5s they are only engaged by CIWS afaik. I'd give them enough fuel to comfortably outrange beam weapons though, use would depend on what the enemy has.

Many options, but I'd start with lasers.

*

Regarding missile fighters:
I like one box launcher per fighter, size 6+.
Very small fighters are hard to spot, and the enemy may be limited by how many salvos they can engage rather than the number of missiles.

Note that with box launchers, we don't care about firing rate, eliminating the main drawback of single large launchers. A size 16 launcher will happily fire canister shot with a 5x Size 3 or 3x Size 5 payload, if that's what we need... but of course, we can also deploy large buoys, mines and missiles.

[Flying Dice]

One follow-up note: if you're dealing with a persistent enemy with no ability to repair armor and limited inter-system mobility (read: Precursors) that you likely won't be able to beat in one go, suicide runs with carronade-armed FACs and corvettes can help trim back their armor so that during the real engagement your kill-shots are more likely to do critical damage sooner. As long as you have enough that at least a few manage to get shots off, that's permanent armor damage done to tough targets for relatively low cost.

Of course, where that would really be useful is with Invaders, but with their shields and speed it's pointless. Just spam meson FACs instead. :V

[coleslaw35]

How difficult really are precursors and invaders? I understand that their tech is usually pretty far past your own, but how easy/hard are they to counter exactly? I don't encounter them for some reason, so I'm not exactly sure how difficult they are.

[Alastar]

Precursors are not overwhelmingly strong. A beam duel may be awkward because they tend to field particle beams along decent electronic warfare. Their ASMs aren't too spectacular and they tend to run out of ammo eventually, allowing you to wear them down. Mind their planetary defences, the orbital bases are often good for an annoying number of AMMs.

Invaders are... challenging. They show up in numbers eventually, they hit hard, and they have unique tech that makes wearing them down considerably harder.

[coleslaw35]

and they have unique tech that makes wearing them down considerably harder.

Unique tech?

[MarcAFK]

They used to have Special weapons, but now they basically just have overpowered normal stuff.
I miss plasma torpedos.