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[tompliss]

What would be a "safe" amount of lasers to put on a ship for point defense?

1) Think about an amount.
2) add 7.
3) then double it
4) ??????
5) proffit !!!
6) goto 2.

[Jacob/Lee]

Plasma carronades any good?

[Felius]

Plasma carronades any good?

For PDC? I wouldn't say so. I'd say to keep to lasers (and mesons for planets or if the enemy uses armored missiles) for the range advantage. I guess if the tech difference is very big it can be worth it, as long it can be turreted (I'm unsure about that though...), but a quick research should make lasers better pretty fast.

[Akigagak]

What makes a good weapon for gate-guard duty?  A handful of ships that have weapons in places where trivia such as engines should be, whose only purpose is to kill shit that tries to enter my more valuable systems. I'm thinking Lasers are up there as the best, but I'm not knowledgeable enough on this game to know for sure.

I'm either going to make them small enough to fit inside a carrier (or if they can carry ships, a freither), then drop them around the gates, or I'm going to, if I can make it work, build gun-buoys that get shot out and deployed via multi-stage missiles.

Is the second option even doable?

[Felius]

What makes a good weapon for gate-guard duty?  A handful of ships that have weapons in places where trivia such as engines should be, whose only purpose is to kill shit that tries to enter my more valuable systems. I'm thinking Lasers are up there as the best, but I'm not knowledgeable enough on this game to know for sure.

I'm either going to make them small enough to fit inside a carrier (or if they can carry ships, a freither), then drop them around the gates, or I'm going to, if I can make it work, build gun-buoys that get shot out and deployed via multi-stage missiles.

Is the second option even doable?

You can't make gun buoys, no. Only submunission buoys. For gate guard duty, I'd say lasers are far from one of the best weapons. While it's dependent on your research focus, assuming similar tech you'd want either high damage weaponry (aka, plasma cannonade) or mesons, depending on the armor philosophy of the enemy.

[forsaken1111]

The upside of using lasers is they're a fantastic all-around weapon so you only have to focus on a single line of beam weapon research.

[Bremen]

What would be a "safe" amount of lasers to put on a ship for point defense? Assuming the lasers were 5cm, and assuming said missiles were size 1 and came in volleys of 40 or so at 80,000 kilometers a second.

Generally I've found that final defensive fire is the way to go for PD. Means you always get one shot at an incoming salvo.

With final defensive fire range doesn't matter much, so if the missiles don't have ECM or armor it's basically (Tracking speed / Missile Speed) chance to hit. So if you want to stop 40 missiles at 80,000 km/s, and you use turreted lasers with 40,000 km/s tracking, you'd want 80 lasers split between the ships to on average stop 40 missiles. Missile tracking bonus research would help here as well.

What makes a good weapon for gate-guard duty?  A handful of ships that have weapons in places where trivia such as engines should be, whose only purpose is to kill shit that tries to enter my more valuable systems. I'm thinking Lasers are up there as the best, but I'm not knowledgeable enough on this game to know for sure.

I'm either going to make them small enough to fit inside a carrier (or if they can carry ships, a freither), then drop them around the gates, or I'm going to, if I can make it work, build gun-buoys that get shot out and deployed via multi-stage missiles.

Is the second option even doable?

If you're defending against the AI, I've always been partial to Carrier deployed missile pods with long endurance; basically gunboats with no engines or armor and tons of box launchers with short range missiles. The enemy comes through, flush the launchers and hit them before their PD is up. Against a human this might not work, though; they can always turn around and fly right back through the jump point.

[Akigagak]

What makes a good weapon for gate-guard duty?  A handful of ships that have weapons in places where trivia such as engines should be, whose only purpose is to kill shit that tries to enter my more valuable systems. I'm thinking Lasers are up there as the best, but I'm not knowledgeable enough on this game to know for sure.

I'm either going to make them small enough to fit inside a carrier (or if they can carry ships, a freither), then drop them around the gates, or I'm going to, if I can make it work, build gun-buoys that get shot out and deployed via multi-stage missiles.

Is the second option even doable?

You can't make gun buoys, no. Only submunission buoys. For gate guard duty, I'd say lasers are far from one of the best weapons. While it's dependent on your research focus, assuming similar tech you'd want either high damage weaponry (aka, plasma cannonade) or mesons, depending on the armor philosophy of the enemy.

I've only found one NPR, and they're only building armour on their bigger ships. Everything under 9000 tons of theirs usually gets one-shotted by a stray Str3 missile. Their stuff over that can/could soak a surprising amount of damage.

This fight has been dragged out over a long while, the only hostile ships of theirs that enter my territory are weaklings. I think I blew up all of their good stuff during the big two battles at the start, and all they're doing now is scouting and (hopefully) building up. I just can't be bothered to invade someone who are vastly inferior to me in every way, and who live in a near-dead-end system with crap planets.
 
I want to put these weapons up so I can stop caring about them and making orders for their destruction.

If you're defending against the AI, I've always been partial to Carrier deployed missile pods with long endurance; basically gunboats with no engines or armor and tons of box launchers with short range missiles. The enemy comes through, flush the launchers and hit them before their PD is up. Against a human this might not work, though; they can always turn around and fly right back through the jump point.

Yeah, AI. It's a semi-regular stream of crap ships that do little but waste my missiles. I want to put something out there that can stay out there and kill the bastards for the next dozen or so generations of their crew's steadily more inbred families.

[Jacob/Lee]

If a body is close enough, couldn't you build a PDC bristling with launchers and PD with assloads of missiles then dump it on some rock out there?

[Bremen]

What makes a good weapon for gate-guard duty?  A handful of ships that have weapons in places where trivia such as engines should be, whose only purpose is to kill shit that tries to enter my more valuable systems. I'm thinking Lasers are up there as the best, but I'm not knowledgeable enough on this game to know for sure.

I'm either going to make them small enough to fit inside a carrier (or if they can carry ships, a freither), then drop them around the gates, or I'm going to, if I can make it work, build gun-buoys that get shot out and deployed via multi-stage missiles.

Is the second option even doable?

You can't make gun buoys, no. Only submunission buoys. For gate guard duty, I'd say lasers are far from one of the best weapons. While it's dependent on your research focus, assuming similar tech you'd want either high damage weaponry (aka, plasma cannonade) or mesons, depending on the armor philosophy of the enemy.

I've only found one NPR, and they're only building armour on their bigger ships. Everything under 9000 tons of theirs usually gets one-shotted by a stray Str3 missile. Their stuff over that can/could soak a surprising amount of damage.

This fight has been dragged out over a long while, the only hostile ships of theirs that enter my territory are weaklings. I think I blew up all of their good stuff during the big two battles at the start, and all they're doing now is scouting and (hopefully) building up. I just can't be bothered to invade someone who are vastly inferior to me in every way, and who live in a near-dead-end system with crap planets.
 
I want to put these weapons up so I can stop caring about them and making orders for their destruction.

If you're defending against the AI, I've always been partial to Carrier deployed missile pods with long endurance; basically gunboats with no engines or armor and tons of box launchers with short range missiles. The enemy comes through, flush the launchers and hit them before their PD is up. Against a human this might not work, though; they can always turn around and fly right back through the jump point.

Yeah, AI. It's a semi-regular stream of crap ships that do little but waste my missiles. I want to put something out there that can stay out there and kill the bastards for the next dozen or so generations of their crew's steadily more inbred families.

Ah, for efficiency's sake meson FACs might be the best bet; fast enough to chase down enemies but big enough to have the endurance to camp a warp point. If it's just a few ships, a massive laser-armed battlestation could also be fun. However, I'm not sure how well detection works over long time periods; It might be that by the time the game calculates sensor detections the enemy has alreayd jumped through the jump point and moved out of range.

[Jacob/Lee]

So I heard people talking about jump distances, and was wondering if they actually had an effect on jumping, I believe it is the distance between two systems when you jump.

[Bremen]

So I heard people talking about jump distances, and was wondering if they actually had an effect on jumping, I believe it is the distance between two systems when you jump.

All jump points are equal once you get to the point itself; you don't need special jump engines for long distance jumps or anything. The jump distance stat on jump drives instead covers how far away from the jump point you materialize on the far side, which can be useful if there's enemies waiting to take a shot at you.

[Jacob/Lee]

Construction factories require a population to run, correct? I was thinking about making a suggestion and it is entirely based on them requiring a population.

[Felius]

Construction factories require a population to run, correct? I was thinking about making a suggestion and it is entirely based on them requiring a population.

They do, yes.

[Another]

You can also do some construction with engineer battalions. Very slow, costly and inefficient but can assemble that defensive PDC on an asteroid or even construct a useless shipyard there.