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[gimlet]

Right - you can check which is allowable in the "DAC/Rank/Info" tab on the Class Design. 

Also at some point I think you'll want at least *slightly* faster freighters - the slow ones are OK for near Earth/Mars operations, but doing things in the outer planets will be sloooow.   I have been using 8 or 10 engines on the early freighters/colony ships - I see Steve's design for Nato used 15!  My feeling is if I can add an engine for 10% of the BP cost and it speeds up the ship by more than 10% that is a very worthwhile tradeoff.   Later on, faster freighters really come in handy for retreiving salvage from distant systems otherwise the wait to get them out there and back can be excruciating...

Fake ED: Dammit ninja'd again!

[RedKing]

Yeah, I've got one system in my current game that's a trinary, with a couple of nice-looking Nitrogen/Oxygen worlds orbiting the main companion star. Which is about 15200 AUs out (roughly a quarter of a light-year). With NO Lagrange points. 

It's going to be years before I can even scout them, cause I'll need to design a hyper-capable scout with a metric buttload of fuel. And knowing my luck, it'll be inhabitated by a advanced race of xenophobes.

Actually, that would be kinda cool. I'd build and position a series of depot ships every 2000 AUs or so, and then a fleet of hyperspeed warships and troop ships...or maybe even hyperfighters...

[FritzPL]

Great. GE Discovery II 001 has just been destroyed by something called 'Kapetyns Star Aliens #whatever' which were found, surprise, in Kapetyns Star. Kinetic weapons shredded the ship to pieces. Fortunately(or not) the ships are 800 ton heavy. Not fortunately, there's about 30 of them, camping on a planet.

I have exactly zero military, and 002 stuck on the other side of JP, which is approx. 120m km from their home planet.

what do

[Zangi]

Don't go into the system anymore, if you do, don't come back until the threat is neutralized.  Expect to lose that scout, get away from the JP leading to your home.
Build military based on camping your end of the JP leading to the aliens.
Figure out if the Kapetyns are Star Swarm or just regular aliens, initiate diplomatic efforts anyways.

[gimlet]

Wheee good times!  Now you do some combination of:
1) Build some Earth-defending PDCs to hold them off while you build up a fleet
2) Build some slow, armored, powerful ships/bases to park on and defend the Sol side of the jump point
- you really at least want to park something there to see if they're coming through
3) Build a bunch of FAC/ftr to defend earth
4) Build up some fast and/or stealthy, high-sensor scouts to learn the characteristics of the enemy
- be careful about leading them to the jump point to Sol, anything going in is expendable
5) Build a fleet you think can take them and go kick some alien ass
- since you know they have a bunch of 800 tonners, make sure you have sensors/fire controls to target this size ship...
6) Keep exploring in other directions if you can

Depends how much you want to RP "what would Earth Command do if this actually happened" and where exactly you think your tech is compared to these guys.  This is the fun part of the game - enjoy   Don't be in a huge rush - it may be 10-20+ years before you can go deal with these guys, maybe longer.  My usual "RP solution" is to use the bunch of size-24 old ICBM PDCs as the nucleus of a missile defense of Earth, with newly designed MIRV'd size-24 missiles + crash-priority built missile defense PDCs and FACS (I usually can't afford fighter tech this early 'cause of the huge research cost) and other small cheap ships.

[EuchreJack]

ships are 800 ton heavy.... about 30 of them...

That sounds like Swarm to me.  The only smoking gun missing is the mysterious sea of "spaceship wrecks".

And if they are indeed Swarm (or regular aliens that use meson cannons), then you can just forget about armor and shields, as mesons cut right through that stuff.

[FritzPL]

Correction; there were 17 of these ships. Whoops.
001's wreck hasn't dissapeared after a hour, by which I assume they aren't the Swarm. Do ships lose fuel if not doing anything?

Also, what does
PDC
FAC/ftr
stand for?

[forsaken1111]

Also, what does
PDC
FAC/ftr
stand for?

PDC: Planetary Defense Center
FAC: Fast Attack Craft
FTR: Fighter

[RedKing]

Great. GE Discovery II 001 has just been destroyed by something called 'Kapetyns Star Aliens #whatever' which were found, surprise, in Kapetyns Star. Kinetic weapons shredded the ship to pieces. Fortunately(or not) the ships are 800 ton heavy. Not fortunately, there's about 30 of them, camping on a planet.

I have exactly zero military, and 002 stuck on the other side of JP, which is approx. 120m km from their home planet.

what do

Grab your ankles and kiss your ass goodbye? 

To echo some of the other sentiments, they're probably Swarm. If the weapons all did 1pt damage, and you didn't get any messages about armor absorbing any of it, that means it was meson cannons. (Actually, you should be able to check the ship designs in Intelligence and see if it was a meson cannon)

Lots of small ships + meson cannons = Star Swarm.

1. Inititiate communication. If the communication is ultimately deemed impossible, that's further evidence that they're Swarm.
2. Are there asteroids in the system? if there's relatively little free resources available, you can "interdict" the system and just avoid it for now. If there's hundreds of asteroids around, then you have a problem. Swarm worker drones will steadily harvest these, from which the queens will build more and more Swarm. You might interdict the system for 20-30 years, only to discover hundreds of them waiting for you.

For the most part, they don't have jump capability. So for God's sake, don't build a jumpgate from the system. The wreck not disappearing quickly doesn't mean anything. Takes a while to scavenge a wreck.

The good news is that they don't *have* a home planet, they may just be harvesting near there. You don't use fuel if you're just sitting in space. You do have a maintenance clock to worry about though if it's military. If it's a commercial vessel, drop your speed to zero (to reduce thermal signature) and you could sit for decades undetected. Alternately, you could try to make for the jump point at reduced speed to lower your thermal signature.

[FritzPL]

Well shit son.
I am dealing with the Swarm.

How to make Waypoints and Sensors in the sidebar work? It's just a gray box for me.

[RedKing]

The other thing to remember with the Swarm is that a failed attack is worse than no attack at all. A failed attack which leaves them with tens of thousands of tons of tasty wreckage is a BAD thing.

Also, because they're biomechanical, you can't damage and cripple them in the same way. A heavily damaged drone will be "streaming fluid" but won't suffer a loss of movement or weapons until completely destroyed. Microwaves are useless. Lasers can do some damage, but you don't want to have to get that close because of those massed meson guns. Best bet is usually saturation waves of missiles. High-resolution, long-range active sensor along with a high-resolution, long-range fire control mated with either a buttload of launchers (Soviet Katyusha style) and multiple FCs, or a smaller battery of rapid-reloading launchers so you can quickly lock and fire on different targets in sequence long before they get near you.

Swarm's a pain because they negate "big gun" designs, they negate armor and shields, and they're fast. And while they require a substantial investment in a fleet to take them on, they leave no wreckage, meaning no tech or minerals as spoils of war.

[Karlito]

won't suffer a loss of movement or weapons until completely destroyed.

Are you sure about that? I'm pretty sure I've crippled Swarm soldiers before. They have an engine component that can be destroyed, just like any other ship.

[FritzPL]

Another alien race, not precursors, nor Swarm this time, fortunately. Trying to communicate tomorrow, I need some sleep.


note - will probably fail, as they destroyed our ship

[Karlito]

I think NPRs are basically always hostile toward military ships that enter their systems. I suppose there's an argument to use commercial jump scouts for that reason.

[RedKing]

I think NPRs are basically always hostile toward military ships that enter their systems. I suppose there's an argument to use commercial jump scouts for that reason.

Not always. I think it depends in part on their Xenophobia and Militancy ratings. I've had some first-contact situations that shadowed my ships all the way back to the jump-point but never opened fire.

won't suffer a loss of movement or weapons until completely destroyed.

Are you sure about that? I'm pretty sure I've crippled Swarm soldiers before. They have an engine component that can be destroyed, just like any other ship.

Not 100% sure, but I've never ever seen a drone fall out of a pack due to stopping movement. They appear to be fully functional right up until death. My thought was that Steve had modified the code where Swarm was concerned (just like the fact that they don't leave wreckage).

Another alien race, not precursors, nor Swarm this time, fortunately. Trying to communicate tomorrow, I need some sleep.


note - will probably fail, as they destroyed our ship

Not at all necessarily. I've had a great number of races where the initial first contact went badly but they still wind up communicating. Diplomacy is a seperate issue. They may not LIKE you, but it may still be physically possible to communicate. Failed communication means they'll be forever an enigma -- no diplomacy or interrogation or espionage, just unceasing warfare.