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[Girlinhat]

Also not sure if you're aware, but you can put a buoy as the second stage of a drone, and fire the drone at a waypoint.  When it arrives, it will deploy the buoy, allowing for remote deployment of landmines or sensor drops, and even JP surveys if you can do it just right.

Hyperdrive will rend your enemy in seven different ways by simple speed.  If you can lure the enemy out of hyper range, then any ships armed with hyper engines will absolutely destroy any without.  Hyper-capable fighters can go faster than light, good luck trying to get your gauss to hit something at that speed!  I think some meson armed hyperfighters would be fairly destructive to anything they fought, or even plasma carronades since you can get in very close and do bomber strikes.  Some thermal signature reduction and hit-and-run becomes extremely deadly to anything outside of hyper.  Could even mount a very small powerplant to make single attack runs and then fall back for the long recharge, to cut back on hull space.  Alternatively .25 size lasers could pack some deep penetration at zero range.

[Areyar]

weaponfire should be banned at hyperspeed!

[forsaken1111]

weaponfire should be banned at hyperspeed!

Nah, there are very very few cases where it would matter.

[Sheb]

Plus it makes hyperspeed worthwhile.

[forsaken1111]

Plus it makes hyperspeed worthwhile.

Almost... It's still a pretty big pain in the ass for something you'll use maybe once in a decade.

[Sheb]

Yeah, actually I only use hyperspeed variant when:
a) I got a large empire with spare shipyards to produce them.
b) I got a system I really want.

I'm more and more thinking of using hyper-capable fighters though. No shipyard needed, and having a carrier with fighter survey ship would be really cool.

[MarcAFK]

No idea who that author is, or what those books are...

But I'm starting to want to read them! They sound pretty interesting.

Just for the benefit of anyone who hasn't read through this whole thread yet, or otherwise doesn't know, david webber wrote some of the fiction/backstory for one of the versions of Starfire which Aurora is loosely based on.
The space combat scenes are rather good if you can stand all the political stuff that the books tend to be overloaded with.
Also, telepathic treecats <3 .

[Flying Dice]

No idea who that author is, or what those books are...

But I'm starting to want to read them! They sound pretty interesting.

Just for the benefit of anyone who hasn't read through this whole thread yet, or otherwise doesn't know, david webber wrote some of the fiction/backstory for one of the versions of Starfire which Aurora is loosely based on.
The space combat scenes are rather good if you can stand all the political stuff that the books tend to be overloaded with.
Also, telepathic treecats <3 .

Actually, I prefer the Honorverse over his Starfire novels because the FTL system is much more interesting than the Starfire/Aurora one, but then the politics for the most part are expressed as "almost everyone but the military centrist-royalists who admire Honor are insane or misguided or evil", rather than "liberals are evil corporate pawns". It was especially jarring to have to read the portrayal of Hauptman in Honor Among Enemies; it almost felt like I was reading a suefic for a while there. Except for Haven, of course, who are his token misinterpretation of 'Arch-Conservative vision of Socialism presented as reality'. I suppose the Greysons shouldn't have surprised me, either, as the religious anatagonists are always portrayed as a bunch of ignorant, misguided good people being mislead by a few evil individuals, just waiting for Weber's gloriously multicultural, tolerant-yet-badass, near-infallible heroine to save them from themselves. (Seriously, I think the only instance where this isn't the case when dealing with religion is in Heretic, because there really aren't any central hero/ine characters, just, well, naval officers. And the evil, liberal, corporate dogs who keep butting their stupid heads in, making decisions that would feel right for suefic antagonists.)


Ugh, it makes me snarky to think about this. Time to go nuke something.

[forsaken1111]

Yeah, actually I only use hyperspeed variant when:
a) I got a large empire with spare shipyards to produce them.
b) I got a system I really want.

Yeah I pretty much only do it when B is true, and even then it is a small subset of my fleet which is built for that specific purpose (and then obsoleted so the f'kin civvies don't build hyper-capable colony ships which they don't know how to use.  )

Hyperspeed fighters sound great in theory but they're gonna burn through their fuel like madmen and you can only use them outside the hyperfield limit. Not sure if it would be worth the investment unless you have some way of ensuring you always fight outside the hyper radius.

[Sheb]

The investment won't be terrible: no shipyard to retool, and fighter don't cost much anyway.

Do hyper-capable engine burn through fuel quicker than non-hyper capable ones?

[forsaken1111]

The investment won't be terrible: no shipyard to retool, and fighter don't cost much anyway.

Do hyper-capable engine burn through fuel quicker than non-hyper capable ones?

Quite a bit faster, yes. I'm not at home right now so I can't check but I believe it is like double fuel usage while hyper'ing at the first level of technology, with the lower end being 50% more fuel use.

[Flying Dice]

So basically to make them practical you just need to get a decent bit of fuel efficiency tech. As I'm usually at 0.5 usage by the time I get fighter engines, this shouldn't be an issue for me.

[Areyar]

I only see the use for hyper engines when there are colonies in doublestar systems.

edit: for free reading, goto the Starfire wikipage and under the fiction chapter, you should find the Stars at War I & II omnibus as PDF file.
More recent fiction is only available online for a few sample chapters.

[forsaken1111]

I only see the use for hyper engines when there are colonies in doublestar systems.

Yeah I usually have a shipping fleet with hyper-engines in those systems and their only job is to service the colony, and I will have a depot near the jump point where I put things to be shipped out there.

So basically to make them practical you just need to get a decent bit of fuel efficiency tech. As I'm usually at 0.5 usage by the time I get fighter engines, this shouldn't be an issue for me.

That makes them practical if inefficient as far as fuel consumption goes, yes. You still need a way to ensure you always fight outside the hyperfield limit else that extra mass is useless.

[Sheb]

Well, you just need specialised Hyperfighter wings. And a few Hypersurveyors. It's not great hassle to have a few hypersurveyor in every of your survey carrier.