Plasma carronades are absolutely terrible in ship to ship combat, I can confirm, but damn don't they turn your ground forces into terminators. Pretty much every 'hit' in my damage report is also a kill.
Only found one proper alien race I could throw them at so far though, much sadness. I did find some isolated ground forces and tried invading them for fun, but it turns out forested rift valleys are pretty hard to invade even with rift valley fighting training. Barely ever hit anything.
And a hell of a way to find out that STOs are hidden until they fire on you ^^ Going to try luring raiders in with that trick, holding fire til they are right over the colony, then blasting them with 35cm carronades. I can fit 12 and enough engineers to max fortify them into just one troop transport.
Been reading a little bit about academy commanders too and they seem really important? I had no idea that Tactical gave an accuracy boost and no idea that 0.25 on the Naval specced Admin Command means the navy admin applies part of that accuracy boost to everyone he is commanding. 20% bonuses let admins inherit their traits to their students, so I have ground force academy on mars now (20% ground attack, 20% ground defend) and spacer academies on the moon (20% tactical, crew training and reaction). Might have gone a bit overboard with naval organization, but it makes so much sense now.
The Japan Navy -> Sol Combat Assets -> Active Defence Fleets hierarchy provides an 11% accuracy bonus to ships in that fleet. The Japan Navy -> Science/Jump Gates -> Survey Fleets -> Chiyoda Expedition provides a 32% Survey bonus to that fleet, and also lets me divide all 8 surveyors into individual ships without spamming the fleet organization window. I can just collapse that admin when I am not managing them. Its so nice.
When I get back to it tomorrow, I think I'm going to try putting an STO academy on Pluto, because why not. Tactics 20% for improved STO accuracy, and maybe Production 20% for engineer dig in speed? Does that work? The engineers are in a subordinate ground formation. And should I put non combat on STO units? Someone I read said the non-combat checkbox is a straight nerf to artillery units but J don't actually know what it does