[Mobius]

The bombers were targetting the Bastion. Should they have been attacking the cruisers themselves, they would have been toast. The Aeolus just does not have enough AAA to destroy a load of bombs coming its way.

Who goes down first? The Bastion or the cruiser escort wing?

All GVTA Orions have been retrofitted with the latest anti-warship beam weapons, as well as flak and AAA turrets for dealing with fighters and bombers.

Ah. Well if anything that simply proves that you can't trust the techroom article at all then.

Yeah, we shouldn't trust those tech descriptions. The Terrans come first!

[Snail]

All GVTA Orions have been retrofitted with the latest anti-warship beam weapons, as well as flak and AAA turrets for dealing with fighters and bombers.

ORLY?

Remember, the tech descriptions are usually only there to make it sound cool.

[WeatherOp]

The Lilith blows the **** out of the Aeolus until its beam gets disabled.

Umm, the Lilith does that to anything it can fire it's LRed on.

[TrashMan]

I never heard that the "normal" Orion complement was 8 squadrons...

AFAIK, it's 10 squadrons..Bastion is no exception ot the rule, that's the standard count.

A squadron consists of 12 fighters (see Collie cutscene)

The Orion is said to accomodate 24 fighter and bomber wings (see FS2 Tech data)

A wing is 4 fighters (see Collie cutscene)

24 * 4 = 96 total fighters and bombers in an orion

96 / 12 = 8 total combat squadrons in an orion

Haven't I said this before?

Where do you get the 24 wings number from? It ain't in no tech room I've seen...


Wiki edited with following:

Fighter compeltement: 96-120 (estimate)

[Mustang19]

FS2 tech description:

The Orion's cavernous hanger bays easily accommodate more than two dozen fighter or bomber wings.

Any time you're curious about a tech description, just look on the Wiki, it has most of them there.

[TrashMan]

easily accommodate more than two dozen fighter or bomber wings.

[Snail]

Well I wouldn't like to say that they carry more than the Hecate (150) or that would make the other destroyer a ****ing mistake.

[Mustang19]

There are plenty of reasons why you could want an inferior design. I get the impression that after the loss of Earth and its industrial capacity, the GTVA lost acess to a lot of special raw materials, industrial capacity, etc. and started producing lower-quality clones of its old weapons and equipment. The Prometheus R is the most obvious example of this. If you look at the FS2 weapon stats, you'll see that they're just the FS1 stats toned down a bit. The only new weapon, really, is the Maxim, and maybe the Trebuchet since it's such an improvement over the Phoenix.

So the Hecate may be larger than the Orion, but maybe it uses less miniturization (I know), less crew, less logistics footprint, or whatever. Or, the Hecate actually has decent AAAf/Flak defenses and the Orion doesn't. Think of your own excuse.

[Snail]

As some people have said, the Hecate actually has a lot of blind spots because of its design. It needs more turrets to cover a larger surface area.

[Mustang19]

Pirahnas FTW 

[Woolie Wool]

We know that the cost of one Orion is superior to the cost of paying its crew for 3 years.

Assuming the average crewman makes $30,000 per year by today's money, that's just short of $1 billion, or about a fourth the cost of a modern aircraft carrier.

[Topgun]

There are plenty of reasons why you could want an inferior design. I get the impression that after the loss of Earth and its industrial capacity, the GTVA lost acess to a lot of special raw materials, industrial capacity, etc. and started producing lower-quality clones of its old weapons and equipment. The Prometheus R is the most obvious example of this. If you look at the FS2 weapon stats, you'll see that they're just the FS1 stats toned down a bit. The only new weapon, really, is the Maxim, and maybe the Trebuchet since it's such an improvement over the Phoenix.

So the Hecate may be larger than the Orion, but maybe it uses less miniturization (I know), less crew, less logistics footprint, or whatever. Or, the Hecate actually has decent AAAf/Flak defenses and the Orion doesn't. Think of your own excuse.

The Kaiser!!!! the Kaiser!!!!

[Hades]

All GVTA Orions have been retrofitted with the latest anti-warship beam weapons, as well as flak and AAA turrets for dealing with fighters and bombers.

ORLY?

Remember, the tech descriptions are usually only there to make it sound cool.

I remember the cover of the Freespace box.It has a moloc fighting a demios and the demois had 2 more turrets on each side.Then the top color was silver.They just made it like that to make it look cool.

[Grizzly]

Create a mission, wich changes a friendly aelous into a hostile one in 60 seconds.

Start the missino and fly formation with the aeolus, watch it go traitor and eliminating the only witness...


By the way, the fs2 demo description has a nice discription of it to... (MEAN!).

I plan a campaign of an aeulos with Vsmall beams, Making it... quiet deadly.

[Vasudan Commander]

IMO, it's hull strength, and the strength and exposure of its turrets, are a significant weakness. Guess thats the trade-off to its firepower.

[Mustang19]

I always thought of the Deimos as a more capable "air defense" ship. Pirahnas are IMO the best ship defenses if you aren't letting your ships just use normal fighter weapons like MS and Kayser. Infyrnos are actually extremely effective against bombers, if crap against anything else except with lucky hits (I've taken down a wing of 3 manticores with a well-placed Cluster Bomb in FS1).

You can argue that the Deimos isn't as cost-effective as the Aeolus, but I find it hard to make cost comparisons in FreeSpace.

[Fozzy]

http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Talk:GTC_Aeolus

Don't you think that people tend to overrate the Aeolus? It has as many anti-fighter beams as a Fenris (2), half as many as a Leviathan (4), and if you go into FRED and make a mission as I mentioned in the Talk page, the Aeolus can be killed by only one wing of bombers. This contrasts with the page's claim that "at full strength Aeoli can fight off ~ 12 bomber wings and survive".

IMO, this article needs to be really cleaned up. The Aeolus is OK for picking off individual fighters or for providing air defense for a more important ship, but on its own it doesn't fair well, and is hardly "The biggest, baddest, and meanest cruiser EVER", particularly when compared to the Lilith or even Leviathan.

yer but it looks soooooooo pretty

[Rico]

Ive already tested this since my mate loves the Aeolus (to the point that his nick name is Aeolus  ). In combat an Aeolus VS a Leviathan they had a 50/50 chance of winning. We determined that the Aeolus packed a slightly higher punch with its 2 main cannons and flacks then the Leviathans main cannon etc, but the leviathan could outsurvive the Aeolus, as long as it didnt turn the turret away.

Moral of the story, Aeolus sucks against anything larger then a bomber, and even then there are better craft out there (especially considering the costs) 

[Snail]

The common misconception is that the Aeolus has weaker armor than the Levy. This is wrong. The Aeolus has more 3000 HP than the Levy.

[Mustang19]

Yes, I was pretty misinformed when I started this thread. The Aeolus has the most big-beam firepower of any cruiser (which isn't saying a whole lot, 2 SGreens vs Levi's 1 ).

On the Leviathan's side, however, the Fusion mortar really helps out- the Leviathan actually has slightly more firepower because the FM has a better damage/second than SGreen. So I think that the Aeolus and Leviathan were intentionally pretty evenly balanced. In actual combat missions, though, it really depends on relative positioning; the Levi is defenseless everywhere except from below, and the Aeolus needs its target in front or above it to bring both SGreens to bear.