Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Hanzoku]

Mesons can't bombard though, so planets with 1.0 atmosphere are absolutely safe from beam weapon bombardment. Missiles can still get them though.

You can bombard less than 1.0 atmosphere if the weapon's per shot damage is enough. Damage is rounded down, so to hit a planet with 0.90 atm you need a 10 damage weapon. If it was .9001 atm it would completely block all 10 damage because the 0.999 would be rounded down to 0.

If you're looking to mess up the environment for fun and profit, this is entirely true. Mesons do rock for taking care of PDCs is an environmentally-friendly fashion if you'd like to land on the rock and take it yourself - cracking open PDCs with missiles tends to irradiate everything too much.

[SirAaronIII]

Yup, mesons be good for going through armor and shields. Someone said they'd be good for fighters or FACs.

They're not very good for other things, though, and they don't play nice with other weapons.

[Flying Dice]

Mesons are pretty much the only >economical< option against invaders, as the only other option is massive ASM spam, which tends to cost quite a bit.

[LostCosmonaut]

Going to have to agree with this. My plasma carronade equipped defense bases are currently being annihilated as the invaders jumped in 80000 km off the gate, meaning that the carronades didn't do nearly enough damage to blow the shields. Stopped construction of all similar bases, and now have my best EW guy researching meson focusing technologies. Hopefully I'll have a prototype ready within a year or two.

[Bremen]

Bremen, anything outside of the top-tier jump engines are incapable of jumping outside of that range. If they're going through a gate, they don't jump in at a range, they arrive on one specific point making PDCs all the more powerful.

By the time their weapons are back online, you've pumped them full of holes

They're going to be out of range long before their weapons come online. 320,000km range means you get one shot and that's it (and given how Aurora detection works, you likely wont even get the one unless you have a scout on the far side of the point). At point blank range that will probably destroy several ships, but any further out and they'll get out of range with only a few dents.

Then they get to 3 million kilometers or so and start launching missiles at the base.

They will be jumping through gates, and I realize that I'm only going to get one shot. That's the reason there's so much heavy caliber weaponry. If one or two invader ships come through the gate, these things should be able to one shot them. I'll have scouts on the other side of the point, so if I see more ships coming, I'll be able to get my fleet of 30 missile ships in position and hit them with an alpha strike of 1800 strength 24 warheads.

This is why I'm an advocate of using hundreds of fighter-class defense satellites with one weapon: you can seed a circle with a diameter of 5m km or so with them, thick enough that enemy ships will always be in range of several within that circle. This takes advantage of the way the game treats space as an ocean, as you don't have to fill a sphere. If you're using mesons, absolutely everything that makes it to the outside will be crippled, with a load of damaged modules. Just have a few long range missile platforms and a sensor boat sitting a few hundred million km away from the point to pick off anything that looks like it might make it out.

I've been thinking about this, and to have the satellites class as a fighter don't they have to have a fighter engine? So they can move, and are probably as fast as an invader ship. It would mean putting a (tiny) fuel tank on them, but they only need to have a few minutes worth of fuel to chase down any transiting ships. That also means you don't have to micromanage dropping them in a circle around the point.

[LostCosmonaut]

You mean something like this?

Draken class Fighter    240 tons     10 Crew     56.5 BP      TCS 4.8  TH 134  EM 0
27916 km/s     Armour 1-3     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 0     PPV 3
Maint Life 0 Years     MSP 0    AFR 48%    IFR 0.7%    1YR 4    5YR 53    Max Repair 22 MSP

FTR Inertial Confinement Fusion Drive E720 (1)    Power 134.4    Fuel Use 7200%    Signature 134.4    Armour 0    Exp 150%
Fuel Capacity 5,000 Litres    Range 0.5 billion km   (5 hours at full power)

R4.5/C3 Meson Cannon (1)    Range 20,000km     TS: 27916 km/s     Power 3-3     RM 4.5    ROF 5        1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Fire Control S00.2 10-8000 (FTR) (1)    Max Range: 20,000 km   TS: 32000 km/s     50 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Solid-core Anti-matter Power Plant Technology PB-.2/3.2 (1)     Total Power Output 3.2    Armour 0    Exp 5%

This design is classed as a Fighter for production, combat and maintenance purposes

[Bremen]

If you're using them as defense satellites I imagine you'd want to toe the fighter size limit (500 tons I think?). They only need to be fast enough to keep up with the warships coming through, and the enemy weapons wont be online for quite awhile. So you'd mount more/bigger weapons on a larger fighter, and maybe a better fire control. You'd get more damage per BP that way.

Also you'd want a long maintenance life, unless you were planning on sitting a carrier on top of the jump point permanently.

[Sowelu]

That AFR looks pretty brutal, too.  Or do fighters need no maintenance?  I've never used them.

[Bremen]

That AFR looks pretty brutal, too.  Or do fighters need no maintenance?  I've never used them.

Annual failure rate means nothing for carrier/PDC based carriers, since they're only likely to be in flight for a few hours and they're automatically refitted while in a hangar. This is a special case, though, since the plan is to leave them unsupported on top of a warp point for years.

On the positive side, even a tiny amount of engineering capability will give a fighter an enormous endurance.

[Jacob/Lee]

I keep forgetting Steve changed the dev password. That thing was fun to play with.


Anyway, for some reason, an RP tech of 1000 and a scientist with a 40% bonus gets only 245 RP a year. I'm not sure what causes this, the lab is an off-Earth site in another system, that's it.

[Tarran]

I keep forgetting Steve changed the dev password. That thing was fun to play with.

Ask him for it, then, you've got a profile on their forum if I remember correctly.

Anyway, for some reason, an RP tech of 1000 and a scientist with a 40% bonus gets only 245 RP a year. I'm not sure what causes this, the lab is an off-Earth site in another system, that's it.

3 things I can think of:

1: Is it staffed 100%?
2: Are you in bankruptcy?
3: Is there unrest on the planet?

[Jacob/Lee]

He's not going to hand out the password willy-nilly, he said so.

Also, it was probably 1 and 3. I'm moving that lab to Earth, anyway.

[LostCosmonaut]

I plan on having the fighters parked on a carrier sitting outside torpedo range, and then launching them once the invaders show up. Since they'll be sitting on the carrier, they shouldn't need maintenance, and the small size lets me fit more on a carrier.

Also, does anybody have any idea how plasma torpedoes work? I assume they work with missile fire controls, but when I design a ship with only torpedo launchers and missile fire controls, I get an error because the ship has no missile launchers. I know the invaders don't have any special fire control tech, I took apart a bunch of theirs and I got the notification that no new tech was found.

[Bremen]

I plan on having the fighters parked on a carrier sitting outside torpedo range, and then launching them once the invaders show up. Since they'll be sitting on the carrier, they shouldn't need maintenance, and the small size lets me fit more on a carrier.

Also, does anybody have any idea how plasma torpedoes work? I assume they work with missile fire controls, but when I design a ship with only torpedo launchers and missile fire controls, I get an error because the ship has no missile launchers. I know the invaders don't have any special fire control tech, I took apart a bunch of theirs and I got the notification that no new tech was found.

This seems like a bad idea, since it will give the enemy time to restore their systems and begin firing, and mean you won't start at point blank range. But up to you.

[Metalax]

If I remember correctly plasma torpedoes use beam fire controls.