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I don't really think this thread is the place to talk about it, but the damage caused by a missile isn't determined by its size. If you had a top-level tech size five missile with 4.9 tons devoted to warhead, you could probably crack it with just one though..

I, being one of the people that was to work with Sheb, would rather enjoy being a capitalist version of southern Africa. I can't say I know much about the culture or even all that much about their history, but I'm sure it'll be fun to give it a try!

Well that went.. not quite as well as I had hoped. But that's what I get for being quiet so much. I'm glad to see that people are coming around to cutting off the jump point research and focusing on engines, but I still wish we hadn't shown that we were heavily into FACs yet. To be honest I'm sort of disappointed that we fired at the enemy. They know we have Mesons, they know we have FACs, so they sort of know all our capabilities. I suppose we could try designing a fast 20KT attack ship to replace our carriers, since we don't have a huge need of a carrier in a single-system war. It's not like our FACs run out of fuel halfway to Mercury. Sure it'd be useful for extended patrols; but since the bulk of our fleet is FACs I doubt we'll be sending them off too much anyway. Earlier I was a strong proponent of interdiction, but that was mainly to try and deny the enemy the ability to expand. or at least limit their options..

But in terms of actual fights, the enemies range advantage against us is a frightening thing. It doesn't matter if we close on them if they always blast half our forces out of space before we can even start thinking about plinking at their crew quarters. (And causing glorious secondary explosions)  But luckily for my Engines Are Always Awesome campaign, engines are awesome at helping us close even faster and mitigate our losses.

Sooo.. My opinion is as thus: Research engines, maybe even some of that +speed/+explodey modulation, and keep pumping out the FACs. We'll probably want to avoid actually upgrading the FACs once we upgrade them though, and just keep pumping out the newer version.

Also to add to the orders: Once you finish researching Ion engine tech... Research actual ion engine designs and upgrade our ship designs! And if retooling is required, Start retooling immediately after laying down the next series of ships to be built. That way we can keep building one last line of older models while upgrading.

Quote from: Daltesh on August 11, 2011, 02:06:05 am

But I also think it might be wise to station at least a small surprise at a jump point, so that we will both know when they start surveying jump points, and so we can set them back just a bit while we research it ourselves, should it come to that.

The problem is that we don't know where that is, and we don't have any way of monitoring the entire inner Lagrange ring.

Doh. I meant put some armed scouts on a Survey Point.

Our carrier has absolutely no weapons, and the ships we have that can attack in close range like that already have a small sensor. The carriers one appears almost entirely needless to me since it can't actually make use of it in any way. There are a few scenarios in which it could make use of it, mostly revolving around it being isolated, but even then the use would be minimal and extra armor would by far be preferable. Besides, getting the failure rate down to 330 would, what, double its effective lifespan? That's good for a ship that we might want to sail around for long periods of time.

To sum it up: I say we leave the armor since we don't want our most expensive and prized ships to be made out of tinfoil, and remove the sensor since it can't actually be put to effective use. (No weapons, and it carries a Mersin which has that same exact sensor anyway.)

Edit: By this I mean future versions of the carrier should have the modifications. They're probably light enough that we don't need to retool our shipyard, but not vital enough that we need to refit the old one. It would just do well staying around titan to take advantage of the maintenance facilities.

With little size, and maybe some ECM, couldn't they be treated like little missile, that don't get detected until it's too late ?
I mean, if a salvo of 10 little missile can get through their CWIS (eg), shouldn't a cloud of 20 mines make some real damage ?
(haven't played for a while, and didn't use mines...)

I suppose if we used small enough buoys they could detect the enemy and deploy their sub-munitions before being detected themselves.. Yeah, I take it back, being detected isn't a very big factor for mines.
If we had box launchers it could be an interesting fall back strategy. Put perhaps one or two on every gunboat just to fill out the space, maybe even not bothering to put fire controls on them, and just have the gunboats unload their mines if they need to disengage. IIRC it would play hell with the enemies fire control systems if it's a ton of small groups of missiles rather than a few large ones. And it would certainly discourage them from trying to follow. But as it stands, I don't think they're very applicable to our current situation.

As a sidenote I haven't bothered to play with mines before, but even without fire controls the 'Msl Launch' command in the Task Groups window should work. Aside from that I'm really just guessing on their effectiveness.

It's probably for the best that I'm not in this game. I've played Aurora singleplayer on and off for ages, so I'd likely just try to do things that would be horribly inefficient but amusing, just for the sake of doing them. Like spending ten times my GDP on building 50,000 ton military ships, or investing in shields early on, or relocating my entire population to a nebula-10 with nothing but one planet that happens to have a temperature of -50 after fully terraforming it.

We aren't defenseless. We have two PDCs with 20 cannons each. Granted the belt of armor is meaningless without missiles, and it wouldn't take much to outrange them, and their cannons are outdated, and.. Yeah okay maybe we are a little bit bit defenseless. I'm not saying 'Let's go try and destroy mercury!' I'm saying 'Let's research some better engines!' followed closely by 'Let's poke them in the head for a bit.' Not only would it be amusing, but if we win it could give us plenty of advantages. Not to mention we are really going to want to have a look at the enemies capabilities before our first major battle, that's just a given.