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[Flying Dice]

Steps:
1. Have offworld colony.
2. Place down seed of infrastructure if it is not 0.00 cost.
3. Place down seed of colonists sufficiently smaller than the capacity of the infrastructure such that they can grow for a decade or so without any more.
4. Wait.
4a. Subsidize the civilian lines. That helps them get ships out sooner.

But yeah, you only need ~400-500 infrastructure of your own at most for any given colony. Or none if you're like me and do a sooper-dooper terraforming fleet and colonize in its wake.

Gauss fighters are meant to be used at zero range, where accuracy is nearly perfect.

Not for Gauss. They get reduced accuracy for small size (and a full accuracy gauss is much larger than a railgun), and that low accuracy carries over even at point blank range.

Only if you subscribe to the school of thought that maintains that two 50% accuracy gauss cannons are better than one 100% accuracy gauss cannon in the same tonnage. I'd posit that using reduced size+accuracy gauss cannons on fighters is, as the vernacular goes, doin' it wrong.

[Bremen]

Only if you subscribe to the school of thought that maintains that two 50% accuracy gauss cannons are better than one 100% accuracy gauss cannon in the same tonnage. I'd posit that using reduced size+accuracy gauss cannons on fighters is, as the vernacular goes, doin' it wrong.

There may be slight advantages to two 50% guns; as previously mentioned, fighter skill bonus can raise that over 50%, as can crew training, while an accuracy of over 100% accomplishes nothing. But you're not going to get a huge bonus out of it; averaged across several dozen fighters, you might be looking at the equivalent of 60% accuracy or less. It's still going to do considerably less damage than a railgun for about the same weight. And unless your fighters are faster than the opponent's missiles that accuracy is going to bite them in a point defense role.

Plus, if you want really small gauss fighters, you're probably looking at 33% accuracy or lower. IMHO the only real advantage of gauss fighters is the Zap Brannigan strategy of giving your opponent more targets than they can swat out of space, which has never worked well for me.

[Gentlefish]

Spoiler: I dunno, I find the Zap Tactics... (click to show/hide)

[Flying Dice]

Only if you subscribe to the school of thought that maintains that two 50% accuracy gauss cannons are better than one 100% accuracy gauss cannon in the same tonnage. I'd posit that using reduced size+accuracy gauss cannons on fighters is, as the vernacular goes, doin' it wrong.

There may be slight advantages to two 50% guns; as previously mentioned, fighter skill bonus can raise that over 50%, as can crew training, while an accuracy of over 100% accomplishes nothing. But you're not going to get a huge bonus out of it; averaged across several dozen fighters, you might be looking at the equivalent of 60% accuracy or less. It's still going to do considerably less damage than a railgun for about the same weight. And unless your fighters are faster than the opponent's missiles that accuracy is going to bite them in a point defense role.

Plus, if you want really small gauss fighters, you're probably looking at 33% accuracy or lower. IMHO the only real advantage of gauss fighters is the Zap Brannigan strategy of giving your opponent more targets than they can swat out of space, which has never worked well for me.

That's actually the main reasoning for me. I don't use many gauss fighters, but I when I do I'm usually at the point where they can pace enemy missiles. That said, I mostly use missile fighters, with laser fighters for cleanup.

[Bremen]

Interesting; I've never used laser fighters. It seemed like they wouldn't get much use from a laser's main benefits (range and concentrated damage) since smaller lasers can't blow through armor like heavy capital ship ones. Whereas the disadvantages of railguns (lower range, spread out damage, and inability to turret) aren't really problems for fighters, but the advantages of higher damage and rapid fire are really nice.

[Flying Dice]

I mostly use them because I tend to favor the laser track for my non-missile research, so that's usually the tech that's ready to go -- put plainly, it's faster and easier to just slap on some reduced-size lasers than it is to go back and work up the railgun trees. And as I said, they're a cleanup force for fragging cripples, so combat effectiveness is less of a concern. The typical ratio for me would be one 500t heavy laser fighter per 8-fighter squadron of 250t missile fighters; my usual light carrier complement is a wing of two of those squadrons, a pair of heavy fighters for cleanup, and a pair of scout fighters to extend my carrier/CIC ships' range. Once I get the tech the scout fighters tend to become my jump fighters for checking potentially hostile points.

[Micro102]

Question about fire controls. Say I have 4 (the same) lasers. If I add 2 (the same) fire controls, will they target and shoot 2 different targets? Or do I need one fire control for the ship's turning speed and one for a turret platform? The reason I ask this is because the weapons will use the ship speed to determine turn rate, simulating the ship turning toward the target, right? So I'm thinking that there is a limitation so a ship cannot turn in 2 different directions at the same time for 2 different targets.

[Bremen]

Two (or more) fire controls can be aimed at different targets, even if neither is turreted. I guess it is kind of weird when you put it like that, but since each round is 5 seconds maybe the ship has time to pivot and fire on both.

I've taken this to somewhat hilarious lengths with my early game flak frigates, which are nothing but a dozen or so hull mounted 10cm railguns and several fire controls that fire a huge number of inaccurate projectiles at incoming missiles.

[Micro102]

Cool, thanks. Now I have another question. Military jump ships can only jump military ships and the same with commercial. Do I need to make my military jump ship a military ship? Or can I keep it commercial and still have it ferry military ships?

[gimlet]

I'm 99.99% sure you can't put a military jump engine on a commercial ship, so it'd have to be military.

[Micro102]

I'm 99.99% sure you can't put a military jump engine on a commercial ship, so it'd have to be military.

*Puts military jump engine on ship*
*ship still says commercial*
*stares at gimlet*

[gimlet]

Damn I coulda made my jump tanker/tenders commercial.  Although thinking about it I dunno what exactly that would save 'cause the big commercial engines wouldn't really be practical, hmm off to design....
(and that's why I said 99.99%, I realized I had never actually tried it)

Anyway, mine have military jump engines, and can jump both kinds of survey ships so at least military ships can jump both types...

[Micro102]

I'm mainly worried about the contradiction of "military jump drives can only jump military ships" > military jump drive on commercial ship > can't jump itself.

[Sheb]

Nah, it's the other way around: commercial drives can only do commercial ships, military drives can do both. Like shipyards.

[Bremen]

I believe that military jump engines can jump ships with commercial engines, but not the other way around. I'm not 100% sure on that, though, and I believe the 6.0 engine update changed a lot of that as well.