[wgemini]

To me, a destroyer is the center of a fleet, much like a modern aircraft carrier. It usually stay behind the front line, command the fleet, provide fighter cover, only provide fire support if necessary. The fighters and bombers are the offensive weapons, not the beam cannons. The Ravana does not fit the profile. It's designed to attack right in front, tear enemy line open, so the rest of the fleet can break through. Something has to cover its ass, or it's toasted. I doubt it was ever the flagship of a Shivan fleet.

So you want to re-write the definition of what a destroyer is to suit yourself? The game is quite clear on the point that the Ravana is a destroyer. It is simply one that has a good offensive potential too. That's it.

Furthermore we frequently see destroyers doing front line combat. Look at the assult on the Ravana, the various node blockades etc. Destroyers were always up there on the front lines kicking arse. The Hecate is actually the only destroyer we don't see doing this. If you're forming your opinions of what a destroyer is based on the Hecate you've chosen the wrong destroyer.

There's no such thing as a battleship in the game. The game classifies anything bigger than a Corvette, yet smaller than a super destroyer, a destroyer. If calling it a battle destroyer make you feel better, than be my guest.

And what did we get from destroyers in the front line? They usually get destroyed or barely being saved by alpha 1. Orion by itself is a pretty powerful destroyer in term of firepower. The GTVA apparently favours the Hecates more since it's more balanced.
 

Battleship and destroyers are never going to be too different. They share the same platform, which means they have similar constraints. They just have different emphasis. Battleships emphasize raw fire power, destroyers emphasize fighter cover,  balanced fire support, communication and command infrastructure. A battleship is simply a specialized destroyer. That's why I don't see battleships act alone. They are only the vanguards of the fleet.

I agree with you on the idea that there will be front line and rear line destroyers (compare Orion and Hecate if you need an example of that) but for ****s sake stop calling a destroyer a battleship. The game is quite clear on the name of the class and on a thread like this it just serves to confuse everyone.

Ok, ok. Battle destroyer than. Orion is more of a battle destroyer than a carrier destroyer. But it's a legacy, so it's not well designed to be either.

Destroyers are not battleships with a fighter bay. Battleships are destroyers without proper fighter coverage and command infrastructure, but far more front firepower.

Only in your mind. We are not subservient to your made up definitions. Especially when they contradict the game.

You are simply being argumentative here. We are not talking about FS2, we are talking about new ship classes in future FS games. The beauty of FS series game is that it's fully customizable. I can create a sailboat that does not have a reactor but sails on solar wind if I want.

The Ravana is a Shivan battleship, maybe they have the technology to put more stuff into its limited hull. Still, we see that it's very vulnerable acting alone.

The Ravana singlehandedly took out the GTD Delacroix and damaged the rest of the battle group (presumably including the Aquitane which after all probably was part of the battle group). In fact if the player flies badly the Ravana takes out the Champion, the Khenmu, the Heisenberg, the Yakiba, and the Somtus as well. So it's obvious that the Ravana can handle itself.
 You're making the assumption that the Ravana doesn't carry a lot of fighters but you have no evidence whatsoever for that claim. We faced fighters from the Ravana in the two missions before Slaying Ravana and you're completely failing to count the number of fighters seen in that mission as well as the fairly large number that must have been used up kicking the **** out of the fleet. I really doubt that the Ravana is a low in fighters as you seem to believe.

What can I say, the Shivans are better ship builders than the Terran. If their worst destroyer can stand up against puny Terran/Visudan battle group. The missions are designed to create an urgency for the players. Almost all missions having unrealistic odds against the players. Try pit the Ravana against a Terran fleet in FRED2, see how it was flanked and destroyed easily.

I don't really have time to go back and check, but I don't think the mission states explicitly that those fighters are from the Ravana's fighter bay. If they are, than the Ravana carries infinite number of fighters since I believe one wing of them will spawn forever. The compaign is funny that way, it is more for fun than for real. Doesn't mean that you can't create another compaign that give the user a better odd, but more difficult tasks. For example, have to keep all team members alive to win a mission.

Because the extra spaces are need for more powerful reactors and armors.

I don't buy it. When you double the size of a ship you don't simply double its internal volume. You quadruple it. You'd have plenty of space left over even with the bigger reactors and armour.

So what, I will have backup reactors. More beams. Make it more powerful and harder to destroy. My point is that it needs to sacrifice something to get more fire power and armor.

What's the use of fighter bay if the destroyers can provide fighter cover for the fleet? I do not support the argument that others are making that Battleship can act alone. They can't. They can never provide enough fighter coverage to survive an onslaught of bombers. One battleship has no hope against one destroyer. However, 2 battleship plus 1 destroyer with crusier escorts can kill a destroyer with cruiser escorts faster and with less casualties than 3 destroyers. (Assuming bombers are more expensive to build than fixing battleship's hull and subsystems).

I don't buy that either. The three destroyers can launch fighters and bombers three times as fast. That's a much larger effect that you make it out to be. Hell use the maxim effect I've mentioned before and the fighters could probably do it without the destroyers even getting scratched.

No, the destroyers will not be scratched, but a large number of the bombers and fighters will be destroyed. They may not cost much, but the pilots are invaluable. You are suggesting putting their life in danger unnecessarily.

BTW, please do not say that battleship or any other ships can jump in, shoot, then jump out before anybody could react. If so, we will just have a bunch of ships, shifting in and out of subspace, never firing a shot. I think it takes at least 30 minutes to calculate a intrasystem jump. Any thing faster than that would be dangerous since you could jump right into a sun (say 10% chances). It's fine for suicide missions, but no captain would do it on a regular basis. You can not do the calculation up front either since there are too many variables.

Whilst you're telling people what to do how about I suggest not quadruple posting? The edit button is there for a reason and as you can see I've managed to respond to all your posts in one single post.

Anyway while I disagree with mini-jumps too the comment about it taking 30 minutes to calculate an intrasystem is complete bull. Go play Kings Gambit again as it seem to be a requirement for this discussion for lots of other reasons anyway.

I am sorry, but I am not telling people what to do. I am asking them with reasons. I am not a moderator here. I have no right to tell people what to do. I can only beg them. Also, I was replying to different people. Not much point relying 4 different people in 1 post.

Kings Gambit did not prove anything. First of all, they are not doing two intra system jumpings. Inter-system jumping is a lot more deterministic since the worm hole is already there. Secondly, it's a suicide mission in the first place. The NTF ships were just trying to run the blockade. They don't really care if they lose 10% of their ship. They will jump at the first chance and then regroup later.

[karajorma]

During that point in time the battleship is engaging enemy heavy assets in the area. You need beam emitters for an effective blockade, bombs just don't deliever the damage as reliably and rapidly as beams. Beam cannon mean capital craft, and capital craft are what a battleship is meant to engage.

When it's just destroyers vs destroyers I'll conceed your point that the best thing to do is to get up close and make them eat beam fire as soon as they enter the system but you're claiming that the BB can soak up damage far better than the destroyer and that it can dish out the hurt far better than destroyers can.  The defending side are aware of this fact and you won't even let me change tactics to deal with it? Doesn't that strike you as hideously unfair? Why would the defenders play to the strengths of their enemy?

Any sensible commander would draw his capships out of range of the node arm his bombers and fighters with a mixture of Helios, trebs and maxim cannons. The treb strike would denude the BB of as much anti fighter as possible clearing a path for the bombers to deliver the hurt (preferably against the engines)

To insist that the defending side would have to use the same techniques they used against a ship equal in power to them makes no sense at all.

This becomes more important when you consider the velocity of a ship exiting subspace appears to be related to its mass; a battleship, which has much less empty space inside then a destroyer, and hence greater mass, will exit subspace faster; one would be able to send in a follow-on ship more quickly. (It is also possible it would be notably faster then a destroyer. If the Colossus can get up to 25m/s then surely the GTVA can build a battleship-type able to do so as well.)

Wait a second. All four GTVA destroyers have a top speed of 15m/s. Even the Hecate which is designed to run away from the enemy. You've admitted that the BB is more massive than the destroyer and yet for some reason you think its's going to be faster? Now you're falling into Trashman's pitfall of giving the destroyer enormous advantages that you aren't giving to the other side.

The Colossus is that fast cause

a) More money was spent on it. It was flagship of the GTVA fleet and they gave it only the best.
b) It's skimped on other things. Most notably the size of it's hanger. It's 3 times larger than a destroyer yet only carries 180 fighters and bombers (60 x fighter or bomber wings of 3 ships as shown in the cutscene) rather than the 450 it would carry if we're talking about a linear scale up from the Hecate.

Personally I reckon that a) is a much larger factor than b)

You're standing here trying to pretend a battleship has absolutely no use; we both know, and we both have acknowledged (I'll dig out the topic if you insist.), that's not true.

Who says I'm saying that the BB has no use? If 20 BBs suddenly fell out of the sky I have no doubt that the GTVA would use them. What I'm saying is something completely different.  I'm saying that they aren't economically viable. Same as the Aeolus. They quite simply cost too much to be worth producing when there is another class (The Deimos in the class of the Aeolus and the destroyer in the case of the BB) which is a more sensible way to spend your money.

They are uniquely suited to the role of breaching a hostile blockade, in much the same manner as the Colossus was. They can deliever massive firepower instantly and with 100% reliablity against an enemy capital craft, unlike multiple bomber wings.

Yes but is that worth the money? Remember it takes years to build a BB or destroyer and only minutes to kill it. Is that really worth it when compared against the price of a bomber? You're talking about using the BB to soak up damage. So the GTVA is going to lose a lot of them if it uses them that way.

They are also not viable replacements for the destroyer type, but I have never argued that they were.

No one said that you did. No one said that Trashman did. Stop bringing it up as an argument cause it really isn't.

There's no such thing as a battleship in the game. The game classifies anything bigger than a Corvette, yet smaller than a super destroyer, a destroyer.

Exactly. Which is why you shouldn't be calling the ravana a battleship. The game very clearly states that it isn't. You've invented the battleship class, and then shoved the Ravana in there to make some point about battleships being good. However the Ravana is, was and forever shall be a destroyer which means that far from participating in this discussion you're mearly arguing the merits of different destroyer classes and muddying the waters by trying to make out that some of them are destroyers.

The fact that the Ravana can carry a full complement of fighters and still attack on the front lines is a testiment to how powerful the destroyer class actually is. It shows why the battleship class which other on this thread are arguing in favour of, is actually largely pointless.

You are simply being argumentative here. We are not talking about FS2, we are talking about new ship classes in future FS games. The beauty of FS series game is that it's fully customizable. I can create a sailboat that does not have a reactor but sails on solar wind if I want.

And if you make that ship 5m long and call it a super juggernaut I'm going to call you on it.

What can I say, the Shivans are better ship builders than the Terran. If their worst destroyer can stand up against puny Terran/Visudan battle group. The missions are designed to create an urgency for the players. Almost all missions having unrealistic odds against the players. Try pit the Ravana against a Terran fleet in FRED2, see how it was flanked and destroyed easily.

Try including all the fighters you'd need to do that and you'd crash it. FRED2 experiments aren't worth much in this kind of discussion because whichever way you stack them I can come along and stack them another way. Who says that the Ravana went toe to toe with the entire battlegroup at one time? More likely it softened up the battlegroup with fighters and bombers. That probably explains why it had so few left of either by the time it came to Slaying Ravana.

I don't really have time to go back and check, but I don't think the mission states explicitly that those fighters are from the Ravana's fighter bay.

The Shivan warship we encountered has been designated the SD Ravana. Allied forces have been deployed to engage this vessel.

Given the number of Shivan fighters our wings have encountered, we knew an enemy destroyer had to be lurking somewhere within the nebula. Our impaired visibility and diminished sensor range made locating their base of operations difficult. Command hoped our offensive against the two Shivan cruisers would lure the destroyer from its hiding place.

Now it's possible that command was wrong about the source of the fighters but somehow I doubt it. There probably is another destroyer somewhere out there but when the player returns to the nebula some 6 missions later it's not to find a very heavy shivan presence.

If they are, than the Ravana carries infinite number of fighters since I believe one wing of them will spawn forever. The compaign is funny that way, it is more for fun than for real. Doesn't mean that you can't create another compaign that give the user a better odd, but more difficult tasks. For example, have to keep all team members alive to win a mission.

Which is why arguing based on what you can do in FRED is pointless and no one is doing it. Far better is to argue 's intent based on the storyline as that is a truer picture of the way they saw the universe

So what, I will have backup reactors. More beams. Make it more powerful and harder to destroy. My point is that it needs to sacrifice something to get more fire power and armor.

No one disputes that you can have more beams on a BB than a destroyer. What those of us who think they're economically unsound say is that for reasons of money, time and the resulting power of the ship you end up with they aren't worth it. Once again look at the Colossus before you try deciding on what you can put inside a BB. It's nowhere near as much as you may have claimed.

No, the destroyers will not be scratched, but a large number of the bombers and fighters will be destroyed. They may not cost much, but the pilots are invaluable. You are suggesting putting their life in danger unnecessarily.

You're advocating sticking the entire BB in the line of fire which it can't return and you're having a go at me over lost pilots? You're talking about losing at least 10,000 people. And on top of that I don't even think you're going to lose that many bomber pilots at all. Once the AAAf beams are down the bombers can launch without even having to receive any heavy fire from the BB.

I am sorry, but I am not telling people what to do. I am asking them with reasons. I am not a moderator here. I have no right to tell people what to do. I can only beg them. Also, I was replying to different people. Not much point relying 4 different people in 1 post.

Yes their is. Multiple posting is frowned upon here. Trashman has already been warned by an admin for doing it.

Kings Gambit did not prove anything. First of all, they are not doing two intra system jumpings. Inter-system jumping is a lot more deterministic since the worm hole is already there. Secondly, it's a suicide mission in the first place. The NTF ships were just trying to run the blockade. They don't really care if they lose 10% of their ship. They will jump at the first chance and then regroup later.

There are a large number of other examples in the game of ships jumping out in less than half an hour. In fact I can't see any supporting evidence for it taking that long. You've made the extrodinary claim, you find the proof.

[NGTM-1R]

When it's just destroyers vs destroyers I'll conceed your point that the best thing to do is to get up close and make them eat beam fire as soon as they enter the system but you're claiming that the BB can soak up damage far better than the destroyer and that it can dish out the hurt far better than destroyers can.  The defending side are aware of this fact and you won't even let me change tactics to deal with it? Doesn't that strike you as hideously unfair? Why would the defenders play to the strengths of their enemy?

Any sensible commander would draw his capships out of range of the node arm his bombers and fighters with a mixture of Helios, trebs and maxim cannons. The treb strike would denude the BB of as much anti fighter as possible clearing a path for the bombers to deliver the hurt (preferably against the engines)

To insist that the defending side would have to use the same techniques they used against a ship equal in power to them makes no sense at all.

Actually it does. There are good reasons for setting up a blockade the way one sees it in The King's Gambit, reasons which a battleship would be better equipped to deal with, yet does not obivate. If you can put enough firepower on the enemy to either render their ship useless as a fighting platform or destroy it outright in those first few seconds, you've won the battle almost before it starts. That is exactly how the blockade seen in The King's Gambit is designed to operate. The defender is set and ready, knows where the attacker will appear, and merely has to point their guns in that direction and wait. An attacker has to drop from subspace, locate his enemy, and then attack them. The defender can start shooting the moment subspace opens. A node blockade is very nearly the only way in space warfare as Freespace practices it to gain the advantage of a free salvo. This confers both a physical advantage, that of unreplied damage on the enemy, and a pyschological one, the initiative. No one adapts well to having been hit in the face the moment the round started.

So, assume you have a blockade as you describe. Congradulations, you have bought yourself relative safety if the first ship through the node is a battleship. You have also given the enemy room to manuver and time to accomplish that manuvering in. This is something you will rather regret if your conditional that a battleship will always lead (and it will not; tactical evolution begets more of the same) should prove false and the first ship through turns out to be a destroyer, who you have now given the opportunity to launch fighters. Or worse yet, you could get a number of cruisers, possibly even two or three corvettes, which you have given both the time to arrive and to deploy before you can alter your plans to combat the decidely different threat they pose. You have also squandered any advantage you could possibly have gained via the deployment of fixed defenses, as these can now be safely bypassed.

In fact, if what you are proposing were effective at all, why wasn't The King's Gambit blockade set up that way? A battleship is merely the antiship function of a destroyer writ large. The same fundemental tactics that would defeat a battleship's antifighter defenses and render it helpless as you describe would be even more effective against a destroyer, yet more so against a cruiser or corvette. Why were they not adopted?

Wait a second. All four GTVA destroyers have a top speed of 15m/s. Even the Hecate which is designed to run away from the enemy. You've admitted that the BB is more massive than the destroyer and yet for some reason you think its's going to be faster? Now you're falling into Trashman's pitfall of giving the destroyer enormous advantages that you aren't giving to the other side.

Actually not. The point about subspace entry and exit stands (Go build a mission where several cruisers and an Orion warp in, entry points along a straight line. The Orion's exit speed is much higher, and it travels much further from the line before stopping.), and as an antiship platform, manuverablity and speed would be more desirable traits for it to have then in a hybrid one...and that it lacks integral fightercover, and so would be in even MORE trouble then a Hecate if caught flat-footed.
 
(Speaking of the Hecate, from whence comes this idea it was designed to run away? The very figure you cite militates heavily against it. The conclusion that it was intended for a rear-area role is easily enough reached, but the conclusion it was designed to run away seems totally unwarranted from available evidence. Rather it seems far more likely the GTVA assumed it would be safer then it actually turned out to be.)

Who says I'm saying that the BB has no use? If 20 BBs suddenly fell out of the sky I have no doubt that the GTVA would use them. What I'm saying is something completely different.  I'm saying that they aren't economically viable. Same as the Aeolus. They quite simply cost too much to be worth producing when there is another class (The Deimos in the class of the Aeolus and the destroyer in the case of the BB) which is a more sensible way to spend your money.

I'll grant that you haven't said it explictly, however as you've concluded against it in every post you've made in this thread (and in most posts in previous threads on the subject), actually stating it would be rather redundant. It's already implicit, after all.

There is truth to the argument that multirole ships are more economically viable. There is also truth to the adage "Jack of all trades, master of none." Some degree of specialization is a necessity.

More to the point, specialization is probably where the GTVA will head now, because if they are to ever have any hope against the Shivans it is now clearly through superior quality, not superior quantity. The Shivan force of FS1 was small, no more then a few destroyers in size. Had that been the size of the FS2 Shivan force the GTVA would have been able to bury (almost literally) it beneath an avalanche of ships, and we would have had a very short game. The GTVA's plans for a second war with the Shivans seem, based on their rapid response and application of considerable combat power (despite the ongoing NTF Rebellion) seem to have been predicated on doing just that. They could afford to not specialize, as numerical superiority would cover the shortcomings of not doing so.

But there are eighty Sathanas juggernauts out there somewhere, presumably backed up by a suitable number of combatant and auxilary craft. There is no hope for the foreseeable future of building a fleet that can defeat them if that fleet resembles the current GTVA fleet roster. The easiest way for one to gain an advantage over a generalist, then, is to do one thing and do it well. Offensive action against the Shivans is not doomed to failure. The Nebular Campaign proved the Shivans do not defend very well. Offense also has the obvious advantage of keeping the battle out of the GTVA (and a Sathanas fleet can't nuke your star if it isn't in your system). And for offense, a battleship will serve well. (Particularly given the known Shivan focus on the taking and holding of subspace nodes.)

The GTVA will also need defenders at some point as well, ships that can hold the line against a juggernaut assault. These craft will need to be survivable and able to deliever the heavy, beam-based (Helios has no supercap tag...) firepower to defeat a juggernaut in a quick and decisive manner. (Because you have 80 of them to kill, maybe more, and attrition will be a losing game.) A battleship can fill this role too.

Cost is a factor, of course. But in another sense it very much isn't. When it comes to preventing racial annihilation, cost is no object. The GTVA spared no expense in the construction of the Colossus not because it was their flagship, but because it was their best hope. It assumed the role of flagship by default.

[aldo_14]

This sounds like mission designer hyperbole to me...considering there is no way that Iota, carrying civilian refugees and being cast adrift empty after the Psamtik recovered them, could have that kind of influence.

Yeah, I'm not citing it as an actual causal thing but more an oddity that makes it harder to judge.

This is a conclusion unsupported by evidence. The actions of the NTF ships in The King's Gambit and The Scilian Defense (and previously) should not be taken to represent the tactics used for assaulting a node blockade, because the NTF wasn't doing that. As you say, they were running the blockades. No attempt was made to take and hold any of the nodes. No attempt was made to establish a supply chain. They had the sole purpose of getting through the Knossos.


Ah. This is where the problem comes. The only successful invasion breaches of blockades that occurred in FS2 were things Alpha 1 wasn't present for: the NTF's breaching of the Sirius-Epsilon Pegausi blockade, and the GTVA Colossus' breach of the NTF blockade going the opposite way. (It isn't known whether the NTF made a serious, or even any, attempt to blockade Regulus against the Colossus. They may well not have.) In both cases they came to stay, and logistics would demand they seize and hold the node. Jumping further insystem (where, as The Scilian Defense illustrates, they can be attacked by previously uncommited, and therefore undamaged, defense units before they can recover) does not gain them anything that it does not also give the enemy.

Thus a true assault would be fought at the node, to smash or drive off the defenders and secure the attacker's lines of supply. Someone has to lead it, and for this role, a battleship type of craft would be ideal. A destroyer could serve the purpose (and probably did, for the NTF), but this has risks that make it less attractive: primarily the possible loss of the destroyer, and all those fightercraft you're fighting to get into the battle, also the problems posed by conducting flight ops under heavy fire.

I would say it's pretty obvious that the way to attack a node blockade is not to engage at the node but to jump to rally and then re-engage from that position; it means the attacking side has control of the time and method of attack, which is exactly what they sacrifice if they resolve to break the blockade at the node end.  It transforms the defender from having a clear FOF at the node, to having to redeploy to either hunt down escapees, or to defend against an attack that can now come from anywhere.  Whilst it's true that the enemy will itself have assets to defend against that, the point still remains that it can no longer just focus defensive efforts on one position; either it moves forces from the node to hunt down the enemy (weakening the blockade), or has to prepare from flanking attacks from deep in-system.   I think - I'm not sure - the example of the NTD Repulse also shows it's neither possible nor easy to precision target a destroyer and just jump in to destroy it, otherwise the GTVA wouldn't need to launch an attack simply to draw it in. (and you repeat this tactic with a battleship; but for the same reasons they didn't attack with the Colossus initially, you'd need a destroyer for launching the initial decoy attack with fighters and bombers; at which point you have to question whether those bombers are not as powerful as a battleships main guns, and I'd say they are)

And the arguement against the battleship in that scenario is not just that it has a vastly reduced effective range to even a single bomber wing, but also that a corvette and cruiser force can be easily as effective (and has a greater chance of at least one ship bursting through); that's what I was referring to previously; the ability for even those smaller ships to evade destruction at a blockade.

NB: why on Earth is there an 'invest in Quebec' advert being popped up here?

[AlphaOne]

Well from I have read so far the main objection gainst the BB is the fact that it would cost a LOT of money and it does not have the firepower projection of the destroyers(fighters/bommbers) . This is quite true. But this ship wasnt designed to do that. A BB is designed to provide raw firepower from its beams against enemy warships while I REPEAT a dedicated carrier sends in wave after wave of bommbers and fighters to take care of the enemyes out of range. Oh and sa so not to forget I do believe that a BB with 3-5 AAAf beams and at least 8 missile launchers and at least 8 flack guns can defend itself in an adequate manner against enemy bommber runs and lets not forget that I said that it should have a small fighterbay 20 or 30 interceptors.

You can try and attack that thing with 50 bommbers at once and I do believe that lets say 25 interceptors can take them down quite fast and easy.

And another thing why would a ship that is at a max of 4 km long(I prefered the 3.5km long version) take some 10 years to build??? Also I am sure that if the GTVA wanted to reconstruct the C they would take at best 10 to 15 years max if not even less time with less costs then the original. Why?? Simpli because the C was the first ship of its class so everithing had to be designed tested then posibly redesigned and retested and so on and so on..which we all know that is a very time consuming operation and very money draining thing.

Also while specialized ships mai be the way to ge in the future remember that you risk falling into the other extreme of ships that are too specialized and when facing different situations you risk losing the battle because you dont have the adequate ship for the job.

And as not to be screamed at because the BB class doesnt exist in FS then I will use Battle Destroyer . The original ideea waas to have 6 or 8 of these Battle destroyers built over an area of lets say 20 to 40 years along with the smaller dreadnoughts (I dont have another ship class designation for this so..fell free to help) and dedicated escort carriers and fleetcarriers not to mention the specialized corvettes and the friggates and new class of destoyers like the 2 km long one very advanced tech weaponry and so on. This way you have a pack of detroyers (lets call them S1 class for now) that altough are almost equal size to the standard destroyers they tend to have a superior firepower bot in terms of fighter/bommbers but also in terms of main weaponry as well as beeing faster more manouverable and with some stealth features included. Oki now i'm gooing off fishing but you get mi point.

Imagine a fleet of lets say 1 BB 2 Dr. 3 or 4 destroyers (classical ones) some 2 or 3 figgates 4 or 5 crovettes and say 8 cruisers ! Not this is a fleet ment to dish out damage. Also you could replace the 3 or 4 destroyers with two fleet carrier (over 450 spacecrafts total) or 2-3 escort carriers total of 300 to 350 spacecrafts.

[copiae]

An idea i had a while ago for an unconventional battleship design was a ship consisting of three big interconnected orbs in a equilateral triangular shape, with the outer surface of the orbs having many beam/flak turrets. The whole structure also rotated around its center axis, so every point in 3D space near the battleship would theoretically have the same beam/flak coverage.

Unfortunately, this type of ship would never work in FS2, because the physics engine doesnt seem to account for inertia... 

[karajorma]

Actually it does. There are good reasons for setting up a blockade the way one sees it in The King's Gambit

Yes they were. But notice the explaination I gave at the start of my post that this was a strategy for dealing with the appearance of 3 capships through the node at the same time? Did you further notice that I said I don't believe that was the way things work in the FS2 universe? Did you not notice that I said that if the ships have to jump in one at a time the defenders are always going to win?

The fact is that if the capships are going to jump in one at a time the King's Gambit deployment is a good one regardless of whether you are dealing with BBs or Destroyers.. If you notice the cases where I've mentioned using a Stand Off deployment have all centred around situations which I feel are unrealistic (3 capships exit at once, Single destroyer vs single Trashman Uber Battleship).
 When dealing with a realistic battleship I'd be fully in favour of the destroyers getting in there and mixing it up because I do not feel that a BB has a huge advantage over a destroyer unless the designers are willing to take an enormous hit in its top speed and manouverability (Something which so far you and Trashman have completely refused to do).

The point about subspace entry and exit stands

Did I ever disagree with it? Nope. Thought not.

But actually here's a question. Is the speed a ship leaves subspace a function of it's mass or of the size of the hole in subspace it needs to make in order to break through to realspace (i.e the ships size)? I've got no idea but it's definately worth considering before you claim that a battleship will travel further. If the size of the hole is the factor that causes it to be spat out further then maybe the BB and destroyer would travel about the same distance.

as an antiship platform, manuverablity and speed would be more desirable traits for it to have then in a hybrid one...and that it lacks integral fightercover, and so would be in even MORE trouble then a Hecate if caught flat-footed.

Just because it would be a desirable trait doesn't mean that it automatically gets it as if by magic. Having 20 uber cannons of death would be a desirable trait on a Hecate. Doesn't mean that it gets them. Given that you have already stated that it weighs more than a destroyer it should be pretty obvious that destroyer class engines aren't going to push it at the top speed of a Hecate. You want to move faster than a destroyer you either have to weigh less than a destroyer or pay through the nose in terms of space or money for more powerful engines. What are you willing to give up on the BB to have those engines?
 

(Speaking of the Hecate, from whence comes this idea it was designed to run away? The very figure you cite militates heavily against it. The conclusion that it was intended for a rear-area role is easily enough reached, but the conclusion it was designed to run away seems totally unwarranted from available evidence. Rather it seems far more likely the GTVA assumed it would be safer then it actually turned out to be.)

I was taking the piss out of the Hecate for being useless at anti-cap. Ignore the comment

More to the point, specialization is probably where the GTVA will head now, because if they are to ever have any hope against the Shivans it is now clearly through superior quality, not superior quantity. The Shivan force of FS1 was small, no more then a few destroyers in size. Had that been the size of the FS2 Shivan force the GTVA would have been able to bury (almost literally) it beneath an avalanche of ships, and we would have had a very short game. The GTVA's plans for a second war with the Shivans seem, based on their rapid response and application of considerable combat power (despite the ongoing NTF Rebellion) seem to have been predicated on doing just that. They could afford to not specialize, as numerical superiority would cover the shortcomings of not doing so.

But there are eighty Sathanas juggernauts out there somewhere, presumably backed up by a suitable number of combatant and auxilary craft. There is no hope for the foreseeable future of building a fleet that can defeat them if that fleet resembles the current GTVA fleet roster. The easiest way for one to gain an advantage over a generalist, then, is to do one thing and do it well. Offensive action against the Shivans is not doomed to failure. The Nebular Campaign proved the Shivans do not defend very well. Offense also has the obvious advantage of keeping the battle out of the GTVA (and a Sathanas fleet can't nuke your star if it isn't in your system). And for offense, a battleship will serve well. (Particularly given the known Shivan focus on the taking and holding of subspace nodes.)

I'm sorry but i don't buy that at all. I don't see how offensive action by smashing through Shivan held nodes is going to do anything apart from bringing a fleet of Sathanases down on the GTVA all the faster. The battleship is completely ****ed when dealing with the Sathanas. It can't beat it in a one on one battle and it can't launch bombers which can strip it of it weapon either.

The GTVA are ****ed if they ever meet the sathanas fleet again. I fail to see why you imagine having BBs is going to help anyone in the slightest. I'm going to give this entire argument a cause I really don't have the faintest clue what you're on about.

Cost is a factor, of course. But in another sense it very much isn't. When it comes to preventing racial annihilation, cost is no object. The GTVA spared no expense in the construction of the Colossus not because it was their flagship, but because it was their best hope. It assumed the role of flagship by default.

But we're assuming that the Destroyer has been made cost effective too. So what happens if we start using the most expensive technology on that too? Again you're making a one sided argument. The el-cheapo destroyer is obsolete so therefore the only choice is the big expensive BB. Where's the big expensive destroyer in your argument?

[TrashMan]

The Iceni is actually the most top of the range ship in FS2. I've always attributed that to the fact that the Iceni was Bosch's command and he spared no expense on it. I've always further thought that command wouldn't build Iceni class frigates for the GTVA because they were quite simply too expensive like the Aeolus.
 I've always said that you can't simply scale up the Iceni because the resulting ship would also be too expensive. That results in destroyers using cheaper heatsinks and engines etc that can't take the strain as well.
 On the other hand you say that it's possible to scale up the Iceni and cost be damned. I don't believe it but fine. Lets see where that argument takes us. Lets start scaling up.

The Iceni does pack a fair bit of power into its hull. So a BB using Iceni tech would be quite formidible. More than a match for the humble Orion or Hecate. But wait. We seem to have fallen into your favourite pitfall yet again. Where is the destroyer based on Iceni tech? Cause the Hecate sure as **** isn't it. Yep. It's gotten missed out again and you're pitting an uber BB (although this time based on canon info at least) against a bog standard destroyer.

Once you scale up the destroyer too using the same rules you used for the BB you end up in the same situation. The BB has only a little bit more power than the equivalent destroyer. Nowhere near enough to make it as superior to the destroyer as you claim.

The cost of the Iceni is unknown, so it really makes no sense to pull that argument.

And no matter how much you scale up a destroyer, it still has al least a third of it's internal volume devoted to fighter/bomber deployment and repair. And that volume on a BB would go to armor/rector/weapons.

I mean what you are proposing is far more redicolous than anythin I have. You're practicly proposing a uber ship that has EVERYTHING - speed, armor, firepower, fightercapacity. Where are it's weakneses?

Not just power for the weapon though, is it?  It's power for moving the turret, linking it to the hull and ship systems, etc.  In any case, the two have the same reactor power.  90 and 90.  Look at the tables. 

Note; all beams have the same power consumption of 0.3 (in turn the same as terran turrets), so it's a lifetime issue; not to mention the AAAf has a faster refire rate, so it will have fired several times in the time it takes to refire a 'main' beam.

We both know that those table entries are not used and are something that was dropped. Not to mention that they make no sense either.
It can't be lifetime issues either, as the BGreen deos LOADS and LOAD more damage than a AAF and stay on for several seconds while the AAF fires 3 times in a half-second peroid.

Firstly, the Iceni and Hecate would only fight 1-on-1 if the Hecate completely screwed up - otherwise it'd be fighters plus the Hecate, and it'd be a short fight.  That's why destroyers are the kings of Freespace capships.

And why aren't Kaysers mounted on capships already, then, if it's so easy?  Need I point out that all the Terran Turrets - despite having greater damage - use a tenth of the energy of a Kayser?  That kind of implies switching them would kill the reactors, given the Colossus vs the Sathanas (and yes, it does ask the question why the reactors are so pish; probably because it's calculated on the same linear scale as fighters or something).

And didn't it occur to you that the Iceni is allso a lot smaller. Scale it up to destroyer size and the table turns..Sure the fighters/bomber woul probably destroy it - but not before it waxes the Heacte.

As for turret power - look above.

They don't.  Cite evidence they do.

I meant - they have and do now, in RL. Tak a look at the blueprints of varios naval warships, and you'll see that ammo placement varries greatly on them.
If they can place BB grade armor on all of them, why don't they?
Liek I said - speed, design and cost issues.

How many times in FS2 does the Aquitane have to RTB for repairs?

Get's trashed 2 times during the campaign. The return to base for repairs is nowehre mentioned but it does get badly damaged in both missions.

A destroyer would of course run, but a destroyer has a ranged point defence of fighter patrols to prevent that happening.  A BS has nothing - any substantial attack will overwhelm what scant fighters it can commit, and open it up to long range bombing.  FS1 and 2 pretty clearly show that the only effective bomber defense is escort fighters; even the Sathanas was ultimately killed by them.  With the trebuchet, it's even easier to strip down a capship ready for the kill.

We've seen  3 fighter wings fighting off hundereds of enemy fighters/bombers (but of course, they didn't all come at once). So how do you know that 24 interceptors + the BB's heavy PDS couldn't hold back what a destroyer thrws at them?

then again, against 150 bombers ALL attacking at once, no ship stands a chance..fightercover or not. The only recourse is to run before the bombs reach you and try to thin their numbers.

Firstly, another assumption as to the numbers of inter-system drives.  Secondly, another massive assumption that BS' can quickly destroy a destroyer - based on your hypothetical uberbeams with no reactor requirements, I presume.  Of course, in any blockade the defender will have the advantage; although you've not cited any advantage for a BS class not more than adequately covered by a few corvettes and cruiser (or even RBCs).  So it'd be a bit of a waste of resources for any BS class when you have cheaper alternatives.

No assumptions
The DD and 2 BB can filed 150+50 spacecraft. You're telling me you're sending mroe than 200 ombers with inter-system drives? Even if you are, don't forget that hte capships are parked right next to the node - their PDS turrets will join the fight, thus making it highly unlikely that you'll overpower/swarm the defense.

And secondly - it's no assumption. Take a Orion and time how long it take for it to destroy another destroyer. With one full broadside it will bring the other DD to 30%.

Even if the BB is only 30% more powerfull it will take the nemy destroyer in one salvo in 90% cases. Surely no ship jumping in can survive long enough to re-charge the jump drives or launch enough fighters with TWO BB's and 1 DD shooting.

Again, you're assuming that a BS can somehow inflict damage at a greater rate than a bomber wing from a destroyer.  Simple logic - the amount of mountable turrets on any ship is limited to a certain feasible limit (as can be determined by looking at GTVA ships), and those turrets have neither the range nor power (based on FS2 weaponry) to reach or destroy vessel launching bomber wings before said bombers can intercept and destroy the vessel.  The BS' only advantage over the destroyer is thus likely to be short range firepower, the sort of thing the destroyers' tactical operations are designed to negate.

Erm..since we're talking about a defense scenario then the enemy WILL be within fire range as it clears the node..

Plasma turrets - don't exist.  It's purely hypothetical technology you've invented to support your ideas. If you want treb launchers, you need to handle ammunition storage issues.

Aren't THT's plasma-based? Those slow blobs don't look like lasers to me...

Name me one good reason why crippled - not disabled - Shivan vessels hang around to be destroyed?  Why doesn't the Repulse flee the Colossus?  It's pretty obvious it's not simply a case of flicking a switch for a destroyer to jump.

Oh, it takes 65 seconds for an Orion (Uhuru) to recharge and jump, 60 seconds for an Aeolus (Liberty), 90 for a Deimos (Pax), and 70 for a Leviathan (Liberty).  that's from the Kings Gambit, where it is explicitly stated the NTF ships are only staying long enough to re-energize their drives and jump to a rally point

Right. It does tak at least a minute to re-energize jump drives ona ship. However, we don't know if ship that havn't jumped in recently allready have their jump-drives charged or if all ships must first charge them (as tehy cannot stay in the cgarged state).
However, given the swift departure of the Sobek when hte Sath cleared the portal, I'd say if you're prepared, you can jump out allmost immediately.

the shivans on the other had are strange. They never do seem to place much value on survival. They nevr withdew, even when loosing badly..

2 excludes this; it's a contradiction.  If we allow rapid escapes, we remove effective ambushes.

Not really.. The question is how rapid (how long it takes to escape) and how much damage you can deal in that short time window.

Likewise for the BS; it can be engaged at will by bombers.  If it moves to attack, then that would mean the destroyer can just jump away.  Not to mention the assumption bombers will always jump directly to-and-from their base... if we assume what you say is true and they can be tracked back, they'll do the opposite and stage jumps ahead of enemy capships.

And thus we have a sweet merry-go-round. The only limitation is the drive re-charge.
However, the destroyer is in a worse position if ambushed - the BB can do more damage to it before it jumps out than vice-versa.

See previously quoted in-mission comments.  The Colossus had to shut down other systems to maintain fire.

As I said before Inconclusive for reasons stated above.

Except you can't just invent technology improvements and stay 'in' the universe.  Because the Hecate is just as new as the Deimos.

I'm not inventing anything. Mass/size and speed are connected but that connection isn't linear.
A Deimos has more mass than a Fenris yet it's faster.
A Hecate has mor mass tha a Deimos but it's slower.

And exactly when each ship enetered service is nowhere mentioned, nor how many Hecatesor Deimoses are out there.

Yeah, well... That's quite canon, isn't it? Meaning the Command screwing things up... I think that fight would be like this in FS2:

§Briefing§

Alpha Wing, you're out for a standard patrol. Your loadout has been optimized for this kind of mission (**** yeah...). You'll be relieved by Epsilon Wing. Questions?

...

§Mission§

-5 mins of patrolling and wingmen hitting the Hecate

Command: We're detecting a huge subspace rupture! It's the 3xScaled Iceni class Battleship, NTBB Kompressor! Defend us, Pilots!
Command: Our fighter bays are malfunctioning! It'll take 20 minutes to get anything to your support! Do your job, Alpha! Destroy the beam turrets of that battle ship!
Command: Our Beam cannons have been sabotaged! We cant return the fire! Destroy the battleship with your dual Subachs, pilots!

Freespace canon: Anything can happen, and it usually does. Superior ships are being destroyed by inferior, beam cannons are useless when you need them, fighter bays cannot be used when mission balance demands and it fits the campaign; Colossus doesn't realize that the Sathanas doesn't have anything to give back and melts its heat sinks for no reason other than story-telling related ones....

:LOL: Never has a truer thing been said!

[TrashMan]

The fact is that if the capships are going to jump in one at a time the King's Gambit deployment is a good one regardless of whether you are dealing with BBs or Destroyers.. If you notice the cases where I've mentioned using a Stand Off deployment have all centred around situations which I feel are unrealistic (3 capships exit at once, Single destroyer vs single Trashman Uber Battleship).

Stop it with the Uberness allready and calling in "mine" like I invented th term battleship and am somehow slanering the holy FS universe wit hthe very concept. There is on uberness - get it allready

When dealing with a realistic battleship I'd be fully in favour of the destroyers getting in there and mixing it up because I do not feel that a BB has a huge advantage over a destroyer unless the designers are willing to take an enormous hit in its top speed and manouverability (Something which so far you and Trashman have completely refused to do).

Speed and manuverability of a ship is a result of many interacting factors. It's not jsut as simple as - hey, it's a BB so it HAS to be this fast/slow, or hey, it's a DD so it has to be THIS fast.
After all, neither all the BB's or all carriers in WW2 had the same speeds - there was much variation between them in many factors, not only speed. In fact, the Iowa BB was faster than any carrier (albeir, somewhat smaller too).

I'm sorry but i don't buy that at all. I don't see how offensive action by smashing through Shivan held nodes is going to do anything apart from bringing a fleet of Sathanases down on the GTVA all the faster. The battleship is completely ****ed when dealing with the Sathanas. It can't beat it in a one on one battle and it can't launch bombers which can strip it of it weapon either.

But it can - attack from the rear! Or directly fro the side at close-range. I had a Deioms destroy it that way, since the Sath can put enough distance to turn adn fact it:D
And one-on-one? A BBwouldn't the ubership of doom - hell the Sath tre Colli apart who was roughly the same size. They are not in the same weight category so a more fair battle would be 2 BB's against a Sath.

On more thing - cost is purely a speculation. We hav NO IDEA how much things cost in FS universe.
Hell, you might conclud that fighters cost a friggin lot, since a 2km destroyer carries a farely small number of them compared to it's size and the bigegst battles we've sene involved a few wings.

[aldo_14]

The cost of the Iceni is unknown, so it really makes no sense to pull that argument.

And no matter how much you scale up a destroyer, it still has al least a third of it's internal volume devoted to fighter/bomber deployment and repair. And that volume on a BB would go to armor/rector/weapons.

I mean what you are proposing is far more redicolous than anythin I have. You're practicly proposing a uber ship that has EVERYTHING - speed, armor, firepower, fightercapacity. Where are it's weakneses?

AFAIK you've still not posted anything to support that fighterbay space definition.  Also, all Kara is proposing is using the same upgrades to weaponry, reactors, armour etc that you're applying for your BS class, in order to fairly compare; if you're hypothesising a new battleship class with new armour, new turret types (plasma), it's only fair we compare a ship built using those to a destroyer (or, indeed corvette/cruiser groups) built using them.

We both know that those table entries are not used and are something that was dropped. Not to mention that they make no sense either.
It can't be lifetime issues either, as the BGreen deos LOADS and LOAD more damage than a AAF and stay on for several seconds while the AAF fires 3 times in a half-second peroid.

The no sense part is your opinion, surely.  You've just pointed out the difference in lifetime there; a singular fire from a BGreen will take up xx time, but during xx time you will have an AAAf beam using a cumulative energy from it's yy fires.  Additionally, the AAAf beams all (IIRC) have a shorter warmup period, allowing more individual firing actions over a set period of time.  Less power, yes, but faster firing.  Classic tradeoff.

And didn't it occur to you that the Iceni is allso a lot smaller. Scale it up to destroyer size and the table turns..Sure the fighters/bomber woul probably destroy it - but not before it waxes the Heacte.

As for turret power - look above.

You're assuming it's even possible to linearly scale up the capacity of a ship; a simple comparison between (say) the Deimos and Hecate or the Sobek and Hatshepsut (or cruiser-to-carrier, i.e. Mentu to Sobek) shows armour is not linearly related to size.  Also, again assuming the Hecate wouldn't just retreat in that sort of hypothesised mismatch and leave it's bombers there; all it has to survive is, what, a minute or 2?

I meant - they have and do now, in RL. Tak a look at the blueprints of varios naval warships, and you'll see that ammo placement varries greatly on them.
If they can place BB grade armor on all of them, why don't they?
Liek I said - speed, design and cost issues.

We can't exactly cite RL issues if you want to support a battleship class, because the BS class is proven and shown to be completely obselete as a naval warfare vessel in RL (granted, it still has uses as a mobile artillery battery, but IMO that's not really got an analogue in space combat).

Get's trashed 2 times during the campaign. The return to base for repairs is nowehre mentioned but it does get badly damaged in both missions.

So, it never RTBs.

We've seen  3 fighter wings fighting off hundereds of enemy fighters/bombers (but of course, they didn't all come at once). So how do you know that 24 interceptors + the BB's heavy PDS couldn't hold back what a destroyer thrws at them?

then again, against 150 bombers ALL attacking at once, no ship stands a chance..fightercover or not. The only recourse is to run before the bombs reach you and try to thin their numbers.

Remove Alpha 1 from that 3 fighter wing statement. In any case,we've seen numerous times a determined combined fighter-and-bomber attack will take down a large capship without adequate fighter cover.  It's self evident; your average bombers holds about, what, 4 Helios (actually more, but assume not all can/will be fired due to attrition or miss)?  So we have 4 Helios per bomber, 16 per wing. Thats' 32,000 damage per wing.  So you need about 10 wings of bombers for a hypothetical 250,000 hitpoint capship (actually, less than 10, but being very conservative here).  That's 40 bombers total; about 2/3 of what I'd say a sensible destroyer complement is.  You can decide how reasonable it is to assume the Helios will be standard weaponry in your hypothetical technology era.  Now, you have 20 fighters up against them; so add 5 or 6 wings of fighters (20-24), and you have space superiority.  And shove another 2 wings for cover/reinforcements and to take down turrets and engines.  That's 32 fighters, 40 bombers.  Wee bit over half a destroyers' complement (150, isn't it?), which is scarcely exceptional for a large scale attack.  And that's assuming the destroyer doesn't move in to attack once the battleship is ground down and disarmed on a flank or so.

Now, the BS can run.  That's about all it can do, though, because it doesn't have an adequate fighter screen to cover itself.  If the attackers are patient enough, they can just take their time pummelling it from Treb range to disarm it; granted, you'd need a lot of ammo, but it's a very low cost strategy in terms of losses.

No assumptions
The DD and 2 BB can filed 150+50 spacecraft. You're telling me you're sending mroe than 200 ombers with inter-system drives? Even if you are, don't forget that hte capships are parked right next to the node - their PDS turrets will join the fight, thus making it highly unlikely that you'll overpower/swarm the defense.

And secondly - it's no assumption. Take a Orion and time how long it take for it to destroy another destroyer. With one full broadside it will bring the other DD to 30%.

Even if the BB is only 30% more powerfull it will take the nemy destroyer in one salvo in 90% cases. Surely no ship jumping in can survive long enough to re-charge the jump drives or launch enough fighters with TWO BB's and 1 DD shooting.

Nope, just the forward screen is inter-system.  I made that pretty clear.  Secondly, have you timed an Orion vs Orion with fighter cover from both?  Finally, if the Orion is that powerful, there's not really any need for a BD, is there?  I mean, you have the sheer firepower there, and the only justification for a more armoured BS is to make up some magic new armour that gives it an exponential increase in hitpoints that is grossly disproportionate to its size.

Erm..since we're talking about a defense scenario then the enemy WILL be within fire range as it clears the node..

Uh...why?  There's a bomber screen - even ignoring Mjolnirs, etc as would be used in reality - for the purpose of close-range interdiction and weakening larger ships to be an easy kill.  Especially given your concept of some close range dueller.

Aren't THT's plasma-based? Those slow blobs don't look like lasers to me...

Oh, so you mean Terran Turrets?

Right. It does tak at least a minute to re-energize jump drives ona ship. However, we don't know if ship that havn't jumped in recently allready have their jump-drives charged or if all ships must first charge them (as tehy cannot stay in the cgarged state).
However, given the swift departure of the Sobek when hte Sath cleared the portal, I'd say if you're prepared, you can jump out allmost immediately.

So the destroyer can retreat once attacked as easily as the BS can?  (except the destroyer is quicker and longer ranged by extension of the fighter/bomber screen)

Not really.. The question is how rapid (how long it takes to escape) and how much damage you can deal in that short time window

Um, yes, it does.  If you can rapidly jump out, then ambushes become impossible as the enemy can always outmaneuver you by just jumping away.

And thus we have a sweet merry-go-round. The only limitation is the drive re-charge.
However, the destroyer is in a worse position if ambushed - the BB can do more damage to it before it jumps out than vice-versa.

Again, that's not as likely as you state; a destroyer can - and probably does - have a fighter and bomber screen patrolling and guarding it (so bang goes the issue of bomber launch time and up goes damage). Also, in order to ambush a ship, the BS needs to have a support force; if the BS shows up, it becomes obvious the area is too dangerous to send in the destroyer to attack (and it seems obvious you can't just track a vessel in-system and jump straight to it, otherwise they wouldn't have to draw the Repulse in); so the BS would now be reliant upon a fighter/bomber support from a destroyer to operate a diversion.  At which point the BS doesn't have much advantage over just sending in that destroyer and the remainder of its bomber wings.

As I said before Inconclusive for reasons stated above.

Inconclusive?   The ship is not under fire atall from the Sath (it's basically test-gunnery), and it states in the messages the heat sinks are overloading and they need to shutdown systems to maintain the fire.

I'm not inventing anything. Mass/size and speed are connected but that connection isn't linear.
A Deimos has more mass than a Fenris yet it's faster.
A Hecate has mor mass tha a Deimos but it's slower.

And exactly when each ship enetered service is nowhere mentioned, nor how many Hecatesor Deimoses are out there.

Numbers of Deimos/Hecate doesn't matter (certainly not for any reason I see).  Both the Hecate and Deimos are described as 'new' - in particular the Deimos has a Vasudan reactor - so we can reasonably assume a rough parallel of technology.  The Fenris/Leviathan, however, are old, so you wouldn't expect them to have a linear match with the new corvette class vessels (it's reasonable to assume no new Fenris/Lev are being built, as the corvettes are designed to replace them according to the tech description; so any upgrades to the vessels to equip beams would be constricted by the original design, not to mention the possibility that adding beams to these old cruisers reduced the power available to the engines).

It will, of course, not be a linear mass-speed connection, as there is the issue of energy.  Just compare the Aeolus (272m, 30mps, 38,000 HP) to the Fenris/Leviathan (former is 20mps and only 8000 HP, latter is 35,000 HP but 10mps) to get an idea of the factor of age and thus technology upon the ships.  The Orion is also indicative of this - although by sacrificing defense turrets rather than speed.  Of course, the Orion may have been upgraded with new reactors or somesuch to allow beam firing; it's hard to judge which is more likely.

EDIT: remind me; what advantage does this BS have over corvette groups using the same technology?

[AlphaOne]

Oki now the reason why the "BattleDestroyer" has such a small fighterbay is to game balance it. I mean come on if that thing could carry lets say 100 spacecrafts you would all say then whats the point this thing is way to powerfull its like "the perfect" ship with no weakness it can deploy a good number of fighters and bommbers can dish out huge damage from its beams can take hit after hit and so on and so on..! Come on you guys were the ones that jumped me and almost ripped mi head of for sugesting somehting similar to this BB but a lot more powerfull it was almost the perfect warship. Now that I've cut off a piece of its arms and legs you state that its useless..???


Make up your mind! And btw. how is this BB more useless then the Hecate class destroyers wich aside from providing fighter/bommber support it is useless as a warship. It cant take in damage , it cant dish out damage in adequate fashion soo......what is its use?? I mean you could have 2 deimos and a dedicated small carrier do the same job. and they would be more versatile at least that is what i believe. They can cover a larger area at the same cost of a destroyer !

Tell me please when your ships  are totaly *****'d up because well lets see.....they engines were disabled and theyr fisghterbays and you have a strong enemy force headed for them and some of theyr beam cannons have been taken out can you wait till you gather a sizebla force to counter that threat?? Or if lets say you have a "battledertoyer " just waiting for some action and you have the means to deply it fast to where the action is how much of an impact would it make.??  
Of course you will say hey this is purely speculative things like this cant happen in FS you cant have an entire fleet disabled like that! Well then I sugest you go play FS again because you can and it happens a lot more often then you might think. At least that is what I remember. You know the whole Aquitane business and the cruiser and god knows how many other ships that are not mentioned to the player.

Just imagine how good a BB would of been guarding one of those subspace portals along with a destoryer and a couple of corvettes! Of course the way the GTVA high command thinks (idiots) they would put these ships right in front of the portal. But imagine the posibilities of a ship that can bring to the battle at least 4 beam cannons at once. Powerfull ones at that. (Bgreens and LRBGReens) add to this the firepower from the bommbers taking off from the destroyer and the firepower from the corvettes..... I see Sath gooing gooing...ups its gone...sure its not enough to destroy an entire fleet but...you get the point.


I'm confused as to the whole ship with bigger mass travels further when exiting subspace? I ahve noticed something like that but i'm not sure what to make of it??!!

Also here is a stupid question: Why did the C burn out most of its reactors when it was nowhere near using all of its beamcannons??? I mean how much power do ypu need to power up those beamcannons?? And if uses that much power then the C was domed from the begining since it couldt take on multiple destroyers at once even if its life depended on it! They would of burnt out the power relays and the reactors the instant ity brought all of its beammcanons online right???

[TrashMan]

AFAIK you've still not posted anything to support that fighterbay space definition. 
Also, all Kara is proposing is using the same upgrades to weaponry, reactors, armour etc that you're applying for your BS class, in order to fairly compare; if you're hypothesising a new battleship class with new armour, new turret types (plasma), it's only fair we compare a ship built using those to a destroyer (or, indeed corvette/cruiser groups) built using them.

http://dj.rogueserv.com/TRASHMAN/Pics/FighterVolume.JPG
For reasons stated a few posts before, this is a very generous definition of fighter space, compared to the mainhalls of hte Galatea.

And no, no NEW armor as I said before. Whatever the Deimos is using only thicker.
And even I did use newer armor, why would the destroyer have that? It's purpose is not a slug-fest. Hell you can put heavy armor on carriers today but no one seems to be doing that, now do they?

The no sense part is your opinion, surely.  You've just pointed out the difference in lifetime there; a singular fire from a BGreen will take up xx time, but during xx time you will have an AAAf beam using a cumulative energy from it's yy fires.  Additionally, the AAAf beams all (IIRC) have a shorter warmup period, allowing more individual firing actions over a set period of time.  Less power, yes, but faster firing.  Classic tradeoff.

The damage/second ratio doesn't come close even in the wildest dreams -  the weapons aren't even in the same size class.
That's like saying a 406mm shell has the same energy requirements as 10 20mm ones!!!

You're assuming it's even possible to linearly scale up the capacity of a ship; a simple comparison between (say) the Deimos and Hecate or the Sobek and Hatshepsut (or cruiser-to-carrier, i.e. Mentu to Sobek) shows armour is not linearly related to size.  Also, again assuming the Hecate wouldn't just retreat in that sort of hypothesised mismatch and leave it's bombers there; all it has to survive is, what, a minute or 2?

A Hecate can't survive against an Orion for a minute, let alone against something with bigger firepower.

We can't exactly cite RL issues if you want to support a battleship class, because the BS class is proven and shown to be completely obselete as a naval warfare vessel in RL (granted, it still has uses as a mobile artillery battery, but IMO that's not really got an analogue in space combat).

This supports differences in armor placement, not a ship class as a whole. And nothing is really an analogy for space combat
Actually, the BB makes far more sense in FS2 then it does in RL as speed and range are not much of a factor in FS2 due to subspace.

So it never RTB's

It's nowhere stated that it does, but if it can repair itself from 14% hull to full without going back to base, so can a BB.

Remove Alpha 1 from that 3 fighter wing statement. In any case,we've seen numerous times a determined combined fighter-and-bomber attack will take down a large capship without adequate fighter cover.  It's self evident; your average bombers holds about, what, 4 Helios (actually more, but assume not all can/will be fired due to attrition or miss)?  So we have 4 Helios per bomber, 16 per wing. Thats' 32,000 damage per wing.  So you need about 10 wings of bombers for a hypothetical 250,000 hitpoint capship (actually, less than 10, but being very conservative here).  That's 40 bombers total; about 2/3 of what I'd say a sensible destroyer complement is.  You can decide how reasonable it is to assume the Helios will be standard weaponry in your hypothetical technology era.  Now, you have 20 fighters up against them; so add 5 or 6 wings of fighters (20-24), and you have space superiority.  And shove another 2 wings for cover/reinforcements and to take down turrets and engines.  That's 32 fighters, 40 bombers.  Wee bit over half a destroyers' complement (150, isn't it?), which is scarcely exceptional for a large scale attack.  And that's assuming the destroyer doesn't move in to attack once the battleship is ground down and disarmed on a flank or so.

You're forgetting that Helioses are very easily taken down and that's it's the only weapon (along with the Cyclops) that can destroy a BB (remeber the supercap flag). You're assuming all bombs will hit, which tehy will not, especialyl since a BB would have formidalbe PDS (a must since it doesn't have much fights)
And a BB would be a hard target to disarm, since it's turrets woulld be heavyily armed too. Not that it can't be done, but it's just isn't nearly as easy as with a destroyer.

Nope, just the forward screen is inter-system.  I made that pretty clear.  Secondly, have you timed an Orion vs Orion with fighter cover from both?  Finally, if the Orion is that powerful, there's not really any need for a BD, is there?  I mean, you have the sheer firepower there, and the only justification for a more armoured BS is to make up some magic new armour that gives it an exponential increase in hitpoints that is grossly disproportionate to its size.

A destroyer jumping in wouldn't have much fightercover..only some of it's fighters would have IS drives, otehr would have to wait in the hangarbay and he can't launch them immediately anyway.

And there is no magic new armor. Let that go allready. Neither is there a hit point increase disproportionate to it's size. Learn to count.

[qoute]
Uh...why?  There's a bomber screen - even ignoring Mjolnirs, etc as would be used in reality - for the purpose of close-range interdiction and weakening larger ships to be an easy kill.  Especially given your concept of some close range dueller.

Ehm? Why????
Well, since you know the enemy can only come tough the node, then you can allso position your ships next to it, so when the enemy jumps in he WILL be inside weapons rage and can't do anything about it.

Oh, so you mean Terran Turrets

Yeah, just bigger and badder.

So the destroyer can retreat once attacked as easily as the BS can?  (except the destroyer is quicker and longer ranged by extension of the fighter/bomber screen)

Yeah it can. But in those 6 seconds that it takes for a ship to jump out a BB can unleash hell, while the DD can't. Massive damage in the opening barrage - that's what the BB is for. As Sung Tsu said:
"If your first strike is hard eungh, there won't be a need for the second one!"

Again, that's not as likely as you state; a destroyer can - and probably does - have a fighter and bomber screen patrolling and guarding it (so bang goes the issue of bomber launch time and up goes damage).

You forget ->  bomb lock time + bomb travel time >> beam fire and hit time.
During the first 4 seconds of the BB jumping in, the defense bombers hasn't even aquired a lock and the BB has allready it's beams charged up and ready to fire (if it didn't fire alrleady)

Also, in order to ambush a ship, the BS needs to have a support force; if the BS shows up, it becomes obvious the area is too dangerous to send in the destroyer to attack (and it seems obvious you can't just track a vessel in-system and jump straight to it, otherwise they wouldn't have to draw the Repulse in); so the BS would now be reliant upon a fighter/bomber support from a destroyer to operate a diversion.  At which point the BS doesn't have much advantage over just sending in that destroyer and the remainder of its bomber wings.

Ambush implies you know where the enemy is - wether by long range sensors or recon.

Inconclusive?   The ship is not under fire atall from the Sath (it's basically test-gunnery), and it states in the messages the heat sinks are overloading and they need to shutdown systems to maintain the fire.

It got damaged in the fight with the NTF adn the Repulse.
And it's clearly mentioned overloading the power grid. It doesn't matter how powerfull a reactor you have if the power grid can't handle the power.
Think of it this way - part of the energy goes back to the reactor since th wirs can't simply conduct that much, thus causing the reactor to overheat. The same for heatsinks. If you overload stuff, it tends to break down ya know...

[wgemini]

There's no such thing as a battleship in the game. The game classifies anything bigger than a Corvette, yet smaller than a super destroyer, a destroyer. [/quote[

Exactly. Which is why you shouldn't be calling the ravana a battleship. The game very clearly states that it isn't. You've invented the battleship class, and then shoved the Ravana in there to make some point about battleships being good. However the Ravana is, was and forever shall be a destroyer which means that far from participating in this discussion you're mearly arguing the merits of different destroyer classes and muddying the waters by trying to make out that some of them are destroyers.

The fact that the Ravana can carry a full complement of fighters and still attack on the front lines is a testiment to how powerful the destroyer class actually is. It shows why the battleship class which other on this thread are arguing in favour of, is actually largely pointless.

This whole thread is about how to expand FS, not how FS2 works. Basically people are arguing whether a new class of ships would be useful, hence the name of the thread. I used Ravana as an example since it's battleship like. If you insists on arguing on what Ravana is. Then let's create another ship, say Anavar. Exacly looks like Ravana. Remove the fighter bay, upgrade the beam cannons to 2 BFRED and 2 LRED, then can I call it a battleship?

What can I say, the Shivans are better ship builders than the Terran. If their worst destroyer can stand up against puny Terran/Visudan battle group. The missions are designed to create an urgency for the players. Almost all missions having unrealistic odds against the players. Try pit the Ravana against a Terran fleet in FRED2, see how it was flanked and destroyed easily.

Try including all the fighters you'd need to do that and you'd crash it. FRED2 experiments aren't worth much in this kind of discussion because whichever way you stack them I can come along and stack them another way. Who says that the Ravana went toe to toe with the entire battlegroup at one time? More likely it softened up the battlegroup with fighters and bombers. That probably explains why it had so few left of either by the time it came to Slaying Ravana.

Sigh... I would if I could get FRED working on linux and a better machine. Try this. One hecate destroyer, 2 Aeolus escorting. 1 wing of Ursa, 2 wings of Medusa, 2 wings of Herc II, 3 wings of Myrmindon. 1 wings of Perseus. 3 waves. Other side: One Hecate, 2 Aeolus, 2 Anavars. 9 wings of Myrmindon, guarding mode. 3 waves. Two teams start at 9 clicks apart. Alpha 1 sit and watch. I think FS_OPEN will be able to handle it. The point is that the team 2's Myrmindons and Aeolus can hold enemy fighters and bombers at bay, whereas the Anavars can kill the destroyer from a distance, thus force enemy fighters to withdraw.

I don't really have time to go back and check, but I don't think the mission states explicitly that those fighters are from the Ravana's fighter bay.

The Shivan warship we encountered has been designated the SD Ravana. Allied forces have been deployed to engage this vessel.

Given the number of Shivan fighters our wings have encountered, we knew an enemy destroyer had to be lurking somewhere within the nebula. Our impaired visibility and diminished sensor range made locating their base of operations difficult. Command hoped our offensive against the two Shivan cruisers would lure the destroyer from its hiding place.

Now it's possible that command was wrong about the source of the fighters but somehow I doubt it. There probably is another destroyer somewhere out there but when the player returns to the nebula some 6 missions later it's not to find a very heavy shivan presence.

It would not be the first time the GTVA intelligent is wrong, or the last time for that matter. They have the habit of being too optimistic, and withhold information like they just did one mission ago.

If they are, than the Ravana carries infinite number of fighters since I believe one wing of them will spawn forever. The compaign is funny that way, it is more for fun than for real. Doesn't mean that you can't create another compaign that give the user a better odd, but more difficult tasks. For example, have to keep all team members alive to win a mission.

Which is why arguing based on what you can do in FRED is pointless and no one is doing it. Far better is to argue 's intent based on the storyline as that is a truer picture of the way they saw the universe

The the problem is hasn't updated the universe for 6 years. People are getting bored. People are creating new campaigns. Inventing new ships and even new governments. sold their Universe already.

[quote[

So what, I will have backup reactors. More beams. Make it more powerful and harder to destroy. My point is that it needs to sacrifice something to get more fire power and armor.

No one disputes that you can have more beams on a BB than a destroyer. What those of us who think they're economically unsound say is that for reasons of money, time and the resulting power of the ship you end up with they aren't worth it. Once again look at the Colossus before you try deciding on what you can put inside a BB. It's nowhere near as much as you may have claimed.

Huh, which side are you arguing for? It was you who claim that we can have fighters no matter what. I said no, because there's not enough space, we will have to strip the fighter bay to add reactors and new beams. Now you are telling me that "It's nowhere near as much as you may have claimed"? I am confused.

No, the destroyers will not be scratched, but a large number of the bombers and fighters will be destroyed. They may not cost much, but the pilots are invaluable. You are suggesting putting their life in danger unnecessarily.

You're advocating sticking the entire BB in the line of fire which it can't return and you're having a go at me over lost pilots? You're talking about losing at least 10,000 people. And on top of that I don't even think you're going to lose that many bomber pilots at all. Once the AAAf beams are down the bombers can launch without even having to receive any heavy fire from the BB.

I never argueed that sticking the entire BB in the line of fire. That's the problem of replying too many people using the same post, you get confused. I think BBs need to be supported by other ships so that there's minimum risk for themselves. Never leave your warships without fighter cover, that's the proven rule in this game.

I am sorry, but I am not telling people what to do. I am asking them with reasons. I am not a moderator here. I have no right to tell people what to do. I can only beg them. Also, I was replying to different people. Not much point relying 4 different people in 1 post.

Yes their is. Multiple posting is frowned upon here. Trashman has already been warned by an admin for doing it.

Then an admin can warn me and ban my ID. I had to delete half of your note since it had nothing to do with me.

Kings Gambit did not prove anything. First of all, they are not doing two intra system jumpings. Inter-system jumping is a lot more deterministic since the worm hole is already there. Secondly, it's a suicide mission in the first place. The NTF ships were just trying to run the blockade. They don't really care if they lose 10% of their ship. They will jump at the first chance and then regroup later.

There are a large number of other examples in the game of ships jumping out in less than half an hour. In fact I can't see any supporting evidence for it taking that long. You've made the extrodinary claim, you find the proof.

How would you feel that if instead of NTF destroyer jumped in to save their cruisers, all your careful plans were rendered useless by the NTF cruisers jumping out right before it exploded? It's not a claim, it's a suggestion. I am sure you know FS2 inside out, I love your FAQ. I don't care what intended though, is not making FS3 anymore. Delayed jumps make more sense, IMO.

The bottom line is would it be interesting to have battleships in a new campaign? I think it would if it's designed carefully. I do think BBs can only be used in larger battles, which means that it should be used discretely since FS engine is not very good in supporting large battles. In my new campaign, I have a scenario where a NTF Deimos Blade lure away a large part of GTVA destroyer Independent's fighter squadrons and escorting cruisers (which by itself is a lame trap to lure NTF destroyer Rage out). The mission is to keep Blade alive. Then in the second mission, the Rage jumped in on top of 2nd fleet headquater, destroy the Hapless Independent and the base. My problem has always been that the Rage does not have enough firepower (it's short on bombers, that's why a front assault is risky) to destroy the Independent before its fighters are recalled. An additional BB (captured and modified Ravana, no fighter bay) would fit nicely in there.

[aldo_14]

http://dj.rogueserv.com/TRASHMAN/Pics/FighterVolume.JPG
For reasons stated a few posts before, this is a very generous definition of fighter space, compared to the mainhalls of hte Galatea.

Oh, firstly that doesn't look like a third.  Secondly, that separation (horizontal) is excessively large compared to what is necessary.  Imagine the mainhall as a launch preparation area; the individual fighters there are separated for loading, maintenance.  But the reserve fighters - assuming space is an issue anyways - can be far more tightly packed so long as they can be moved to the prep area/s relatively quickly..

Also - and this may be a trick of perspective - it looks like the further back groups are higher up, so the actual volume box size is skewed.

And no, no NEW armor as I said before. Whatever the Deimos is using only thicker.
And even I did use newer armor, why would the destroyer have that? It's purpose is not a slug-fest. Hell you can put heavy armor on carriers today but no one seems to be doing that, now do they?

And thicker armour reduces internal space.  Although the Deimos armour is specifically designed as not being thicker but as a special type designed for beam-defense, IIRC (compressed molybednum sheathing or something).

The damage/second ratio doesn't come close even in the wildest dreams -  the weapons aren't even in the same size class.
That's like saying a 406mm shell has the same energy requirements as 10 20mm ones!!!

That's because a 406mm shell is a different size and calibre.  You can't possibly compare an energy weapon with an ammunition based explosive shell, they're entirely different paradigms.  IT's be like, I dunno, comparing the total powder explosion force for firing a machine gun at full auto for 30 seconds versus a bolt action rifle for 30 seconds.

A Hecate can't survive against an Orion for a minute, let alone against something with bigger firepower.

What about when it's bombers are deployed and engaging the Orions'- or others- weaponry?  You consistently ignore fighter and bomber deployment for a destroyer - it's principal form of attack and defense(!).

This supports differences in armor placement, not a ship class as a whole. And nothing is really an analogy for space combat
Actually, the BB makes far more sense in FS2 then it does in RL as speed and range are not much of a factor in FS2 due to subspace.

If that were true it'd exist already, in a bastardly-huge form.  Unless you mean the big C, I suppose (worth noting; the Colossus had an achilles heel of supply convoys).  Truth is that for all the benefits of subspace, it doesn't reduce but increase the superiority of a carrier; now it's feasible for that type of vessel to have an offensive range of an entire system or beyond.  So the BS can run, but it can't hide from bombers

You're forgetting that Helioses are very easily taken down and that's it's the only weapon (along with the Cyclops) that can destroy a BB (remeber the supercap flag). You're assuming all bombs will hit, which tehy will not, especialyl since a BB would have formidalbe PDS (a must since it doesn't have much fights)
And a BB would be a hard target to disarm, since it's turrets woulld be heavyily armed too. Not that it can't be done, but it's just isn't nearly as easy as with a destroyer.

Perhaps not as easy, but the point is that you don't need to put your primary fleet capship anywhere near the thing.

I'm not assuming all bombs will hit.  Not only did I over-assume the number strikes-per-ship (also ignoring re-arms), the 40 bomber calculation would result in over 70,000 more damage than assumed; and I don't believe your 250,000 magic armour is even possible, not least on a ship so small.  Moreso, I ignored the effect of fighters (once they'd polished off the small BS fighter escort) which had targeted the hull.  Also, heavily armoured turrets just impact your mass-speed issues.  And possibly the turrets' individual mobility, but I'm not sure on that one.

Plus I sincerely doubt a BS could have 'formidable' PDS and capship-raping firepower (more than the Colossus but half the size!), and magic superstrength armour and super-fast engines (so it's not slow as **** will al that mass) and hyper-powerful reactors.

A destroyer jumping in wouldn't have much fightercover..only some of it's fighters would have IS drives, otehr would have to wait in the hangarbay and he can't launch them immediately anyway.

Again, you're assuming the numbers of IS drives.  And we have the old piggybacking chestnut, although I'm against that one myself.  Or the even nuttier option of bolting half the fighters to the deck, but that's probably not canon (despite the Aquitane-nebula thing).

And there is no magic new armor. Let that go allready. Neither is there a hit point increase disproportionate to it's size. Learn to count.

Look at the hit points for a corvette vs destroyer (I'll remind you - 80,000 to 100,000).  Explain how you can pack another 150,000 points into the same size frame without compromise.

Well, since you know the enemy can only come tough the node, then you can allso position your ships next to it, so when the enemy jumps in he WILL be inside weapons rage and can't do anything about it.

And also within enemy weapon range, which is where ships are most vulnerable.  Given that you know the enemy starting position, you can place low-cost and effective bomber assets and just corral them in with perimeter capships.  Hell, if you can destroy a Hecate in a minute with beams, why in the name of all that is holy would you sit them in beam range, when you have bomber support to strip down the enemy?  Especially with an envisaged BS class designed for close-range attacks.

Yeah, just bigger and badder.

So more energy use?

Yeah it can. But in those 6 seconds that it takes for a ship to jump out a BB can unleash hell, while the DD can't. Massive damage in the opening barrage - that's what the BB is for. As Sung Tsu said:
"If your first strike is hard eungh, there won't be a need for the second one!"

You forget ->  bomb lock time + bomb travel time >> beam fire and hit time.
During the first 4 seconds of the BB jumping in, the defense bombers hasn't even aquired a lock and the BB has allready it's beams charged up and ready to fire (if it didn't fire alrleady)

Don't have the tbls to check, but I'm not sure any significant beam has a warmup time that short.  Plus you'd only get one fire from it.......  and you'd need to maneuver the ship into firing position and target the cannon.  I have no doubt, if it picked the conditions, a BS would win; but how often could it pick it's battlefield, and how useful would it be across an entire system (vs a destroyer; you're looking at similar resources)?

Let's consider actually performing this sort of ambush.  Because, again, I bring back the example of the Repulse - for every effective BS attack, you'd need a supporting force to provide a decoy and you would rely on destroyer support.  Oh, and, again, why is this better and cheaper than a hunter-killer group of corvettes or perhaps a bomber force?

Ambush implies you know where the enemy is - wether by long range sensors or recon.

Which, again, leads to the Repulse.  That mission is evidence the GTVA cannot just 'find' a ship; in any case, intelligence gathered from a recon flight (and how the hell could you scout an entire system with fighters?) would only be of very short term value, as the target could just zip into subspace and be lost once more (very likely if you don't have stealth fighters).  So you need to draw the target out (the GTVA also did that against the Ravana IIRC, although nebula is a nasty area for sensors anyways); draw it out with the BS, and you show the enemy your hand, so you need to use a smaller force, for exactly the same reasons as the GTVA did not use the Colossus until the Repulse had arrived.

It got damaged in the fight with the NTF adn the Repulse.
And it's clearly mentioned overloading the power grid. It doesn't matter how powerfull a reactor you have if the power grid can't handle the power.
Think of it this way - part of the energy goes back to the reactor since th wirs can't simply conduct that much, thus causing the reactor to overheat. The same for heatsinks. If you overload stuff, it tends to break down ya know...

Which again raises the issues of power infrastructure for larger turrets, especially conductivity over a limited space and the resulting heat.

To quote Stratcomm

We're having difficulty stabilizing the power grid, Command. Shutting down non-essential systems.

...

Heat sinks were not made for this kind of abuse, Command! We'll melt down our cannons if we push any harder.

...

Secondary and Tertiary reactors are down! Fire control is on the verge of redline! We're giving it all we got!

So the amount of energy required for that amount of beam fire, is more than the Colossus can or is built to handle - either it's heat sinks, or it's reactors (sounds like secondary and tertiary overloaded).

And IIRc the hull is 100% at the start, the mission text from Feint,Parry, Riposte only mentions 'minor' damage, plus the many preceeding briefs never mention any sort of damage to the Colossus (I have a suspicion the scripting was actually supposed to destroy the Repulse before that collision could occur, not sure).  I'm reasonably sure the Colossus is engaged in numerous actions against NTF warships after the collision, too, so it's not like they wouldn't have picked up and repaired any fire control problems.

[TrashMan]

The fact that the Ravana can carry a full complement of fighters and still attack on the front lines is a testiment to how powerful the destroyer class actually is. It shows why the battleship class which other on this thread are arguing in favour of, is actually largely pointless.

And think just how powrfull it would be if you add more beam cannons and more PDS's?
Pwerfull enough to destroy  a destryer in a single salvo?

No one disputes that you can have more beams on a BB than a destroyer. What those of us who think they're economically unsound say is that for reasons of money, time and the resulting power of the ship you end up with they aren't worth it. Once again look at the Colossus before you try deciding on what you can put inside a BB. It's nowhere near as much as you may have claimed.

Colossus ain't a BB. And it ain't the benchmark for everything either. 1 ship does not a rule make...
And according to FS2, it practicly won the war against NTF by itself.

Multiple posting is frowned upon here. Trashman has already been warned by an admin for doing it.

Yup. When there's so much text to go trough and so much posts, you get lost... It's simply better organized to respon to one person in one post, insted of mixing it all up in one and then getting other people confused.

An additional BB (captured and modified Ravana, no fighter bay) would fit nicely in there.

Don't use shivan ships in the GTVA arsenal.. Capturing a fighter is a whole different deal than capturing a destroyer. No to mention all the shivan on board you have to subdue first

By Aldo_14
Oh, firstly that doesn't look like a third.  Secondly, that separation (horizontal) is excessively large compared to what is necessary.  Imagine the mainhall as a launch preparation area; the individual fighters there are separated for loading, maintenance.  But the reserve fighters - assuming space is an issue anyways - can be far more tightly packed so long as they can be moved to the prep area/s relatively quickly..

Also - and this may be a trick of perspective - it looks like the further back groups are higher up, so the actual volume box size is skewed.

I can make other pics, but I never said it was exactly a third. And if you havn't noticed, I used mostly perseus fighters to fill the bays with (which are the smallest fighters the GTVA uses) and allso put less space between individual fighters than shown in the mainhalls. And allso the two stacks of ships are clsoe than they should be, as they are allmost blocking the fighterbay entrance.

The mainhall I'm refering to is the Galatea - the one that shows a Orions fighterbay with fighters stacked up on those shelvs and an Ursa getting ready to take off and the fightrbay exit onto the launch ramp in the background.

That's because a 406mm shell is a different size and calibre.  You can't possibly compare an energy weapon with an ammunition based explosive shell, they're entirely different paradigms.  IT's be like, I dunno, comparing the total powder explosion force for firing a machine gun at full auto for 30 seconds versus a bolt action rifle for 30 seconds.

My example may stink but saying that a weapon that does 60000 damage in 50 seconds uses less power than a weapon that does maby 1000 in the same time period (3 shots at 40 dmg each every 10 seconds for 50 seconds =  600 dmg so even less) is redicolous.
ONE BGreen has the damage over time ratio of over 50 AAAF's!!!!

What about when it's bombers are deployed and engaging the Orions'- or others- weaponry?  You consistently ignore fighter and bomber deployment for a destroyer - it's principal form of attack and defense(!).

I'm not ignoring it, it's just that you an't destroy it fast enough! The Orion will allready get a salov off before your bombers even aquire lock. Can they take out all of it's anti-cap weapons in 20-25 seconds? Considering the speed of the Cyclops and Helios - highly unlikely.

If that were true it'd exist already, in a bastardly-huge form.  Unless you mean the big C, I suppose (worth noting; the Colossus had an achilles heel of supply convoys).  Truth is that for all the benefits of subspace, it doesn't reduce but increase the superiority of a carrier; now it's feasible for that type of vessel to have an offensive range of an entire system or beyond.  So the BS can run, but it can't hide from bombers

So gunboats, missile corvettes adn any other concievable class has no worth in FS universe, since if they did, the DEV's would have put them tehre in the first place? Your reasoning sometimes astounds me.

Oh...let's not forget that the ability to move quickly means that you can run towards a friendly fleet or base OR to turn the tables and chase the carrier (as the BB an now close the distance within seconds). Sure, the fighters/bombers would follow...but for a few seconds the DD would be without those fighters/bombers and those few sedconds can very well be fatal...

Plus I sincerely doubt a BS could have 'formidable' PDS and capship-raping firepower (more than the Colossus but half the size!), and magic superstrength armour and super-fast engines (so it's not slow as **** will al that mass) and hyper-powerful reactors.

What's so "magical" with formidable PDS or anti-cap power? It sacrifices fightrcapacity for that. And you claim it's not a fair trade since fighters are better and BB's are useless. Are you arguing that it should have even MORE firepower or less?

Look at the hit points for a corvette vs destroyer (I'll remind you - 80,000 to 100,000).  Explain how you can pack another 150,000 points into the same size frame without compromise.

Easily. Look at the cruisers -
Fenris - 10 000 HP
Leviathan - 35 000 HP
Aeolus - 35 000 HP

And Aeolus is faster AND has a killer AF defense...

[Janos]

Easily. Look at the cruisers -
Fenris - 10 000 HP
Leviathan - 35 000 HP
Aeolus - 35 000 HP

And Aeolus is faster AND has a killer AF defense...

Yes, and it's also so expensive that only a very limited amount have been manufactured, and it's still just a goddamn cruiser. It's a powerful cruiser, but it's ****ed against a concentrated fighter/bomber/assault fighter assault or a corvette.

*Which kinda reminds me of the fact that a wing of Medusas or even Herc 2's could disable a Shivan destroyer in short amount of time and the rest would be easy, but Command doesn't do such things. WE GO IN FOR THE KILL AND GLORIOUS DEATH IN HAIL OF EVIL SHIVAN GUNFIRE

[NGTM-1R]

Unfortunately, I have to stop making long, well-thought-out posts in this thread, because every time I do HLP goes down.

So I'm just going to point out that Janos, you're the one who compared the GTVA to the Imperium of Man.

[Janos]

Unfortunately, I have to stop making long, well-thought-out posts in this thread, because every time I do HLP goes down.

So I'm just going to point out that Janos, you're the one who compared the GTVA to the Imperium of Man.

There can be no bystanders in the battle for survival. Negotiation is surrender. Kill the Shivan or die trying!

DEATH AND GLORY

It would be actually kinda nice to make a campaign based solely around the aspect that GTVA has become as lunatic and insane as Imperium of Man. It couldn't be serious, though, but I imagine it could have some awesome mass battles.

[aldo_14]

I can make other pics, but I never said it was exactly a third. And if you havn't noticed, I used mostly perseus fighters to fill the bays with (which are the smallest fighters the GTVA uses) and allso put less space between individual fighters than shown in the mainhalls. And allso the two stacks of ships are clsoe than they should be, as they are allmost blocking the fighterbay entrance.

The mainhall I'm refering to is the Galatea - the one that shows a Orions fighterbay with fighters stacked up on those shelvs and an Ursa getting ready to take off and the fightrbay exit onto the launch ramp in the background.

i.e. a launch preparation area.

My example may stink but saying that a weapon that does 60000 damage in 50 seconds uses less power than a weapon that does maby 1000 in the same time period (3 shots at 40 dmg each every 10 seconds for 50 seconds =  600 dmg so even less) is redicolous.
ONE BGreen has the damage over time ratio of over 50 AAAF's!!!!

I didn't say less, I said roughly equivalent, i.e. not 60 times as much or so. Not having the weapons tbl hand, I can't check damage figure.  Albeit, did you consider the miss ratio as well?

I'm not ignoring it, it's just that you an't destroy it fast enough! The Orion will allready get a salov off before your bombers even aquire lock. Can they take out all of it's anti-cap weapons in 20-25 seconds? Considering the speed of the Cyclops and Helios - highly unlikely.

Lasers? (technically, you could launch without lock, but that'd be unlikely in actual combat)  If you want a vis-a-vis comparison, you have to launch the bombers as well, because they are the main firepower of a destroyer.  And do you have the lock/refire time rates for a beam turret?

So gunboats, missile corvettes adn any other concievable class has no worth in FS universe, since if they did, the DEV's would have put them tehre in the first place? Your reasoning sometimes astounds me.

Quite possibly, yes.  Why else would they be omitted? I mean, Volition would have picked the most logical classes to add to the game.  Fighter/bomber power is the most important, so there are destroyers.  Beams are the new main weapon for capship attack, so we have the corvettes.  And the Colossus, because everyone loves a 5km or so long monster ship.

Oh...let's not forget that the ability to move quickly means that you can run towards a friendly fleet or base OR to turn the tables and chase the carrier (as the BB an now close the distance within seconds). Sure, the fighters/bombers would follow...but for a few seconds the DD would be without those fighters/bombers and those few sedconds can very well be fatal...

I'm not sure I understand you.  So what, it can retreat well?  So can anything in FS.  I'm not sure what your point is; in micromaneuvering, the BB would be very slow due to the same weight, etc, things seen in other ships.  Given that the BS' advantage is in close range constricted combat, I would have thought mobility to be it's greatest enemy (it's what did in the battleship in the post-WW2 world)

What's so "magical" with formidable PDS or anti-cap power? It sacrifices fightrcapacity for that. And you claim it's not a fair trade since fighters are better and BB's are useless. Are you arguing that it should have even MORE firepower or less?

Less (than what you suggest).  Firstly, you have all that extra armour; so you lose internal space thickening the hull. Then, you have to speed up the engines to compensate and move the thing, so you need more energy already than for a fighterbay.  So you install another reactor.  Except that reactor needs radiation/damage shielding, so you lose more internal space.  And then you have extra turrets.  Which - assuming your reactor is strong enough - not only do you need extra crew for them along with the reactor (a lot of crew, several times more than for fighters, going by the corvette vs destroyer numbers as well as slightly dodgy naval analogies), you need to have a load of extra conduits to supply them with power.  And then you have heat; you need to find a way to dissipate it out with active cooling, because there's no easy transmission medium to radiate to space (even the Colossus struggled over prolonged firing).  Again, more space and possibly power used up.

By that point, you've probably used up any space gains for the fighterbay.  And we've seen from FS2 that the Colossus is probably the only ship able to sustain any sort of 'dual' turreting; the other ships focus on one or the other.  for the number of turrets that would compensate for the loss of 130 fighters/bombers vis-a-vis a destroyer, I doubt the same size hull would work.  And then you run into cost issues; something so huge, yet not only is it not much better than a mixed force group of cruisers/corvettes, but it's designed to operate at a range it's primary target (destroyers) are designed to avoid.  Because the only justification after all, of a BS is to kill destroyers; anything smaller is easily fighter/bomber fodder in any case. 

Easily. Look at the cruisers -
Fenris - 10 000 HP
Leviathan - 35 000 HP
Aeolus - 35 000 HP

And Aeolus is faster AND has a killer AF defense...

Aeolus is a good few decades newer- like the Deimos and Hecate are.  It's a bit pointless to compare ships seperated by, what, 40 or 50 years of tech?

Didn't I already say that 2 posts before? 

Mentu is, of course, stronger than all of those (60,000), just with a bit **** weaponry.  But if we compare the Mentu, Sobek, we can see again there is not a linear size progression (322m, 60000 vs 608m, 80000 - also 5ms slower).  So we have a size ratio of 1.8 but armour only 1.3 x stronger.  Or the similarly aged Orion + Leviathan (size 253m to 2023m; 7.9x longer  - hp 100000 to 35000; 2.857x stronger).  Or the Deimos vs Hecate (717 to 2174; 3.03x longer and 80,000 to 100,000; 1.25x stronger).   The Colossus does, to be fair, buck this trend.... but then again, it's very much a special case ship, same as the indestructible Lucifer in FS1.

[karajorma]

The cost of the Iceni is unknown, so it really makes no sense to pull that argument.

It can be infered quite easily though. Let me ask you this. If the Iceni wasn't either

a) party to some kind of huge technological leap
b) very expensive

how do you account for the difference between the Iceni and the Deimos. The Deimos is only slightly smaller than the Iceni and yet the Iceni is vastly superior to it. What made the difference between the two?

And no matter how much you scale up a destroyer, it still has al least a third of it's internal volume devoted to fighter/bomber deployment and repair. And that volume on a BB would go to armor/rector/weapons.

I mean what you are proposing is far more redicolous than anythin I have. You're practicly proposing a uber ship that has EVERYTHING - speed, armor, firepower, fightercapacity. Where are it's weakneses?

Cost. Quite simply you could build two or three non-uber destroyers for the cost of one of the uber battleships or uber destroyers. Which is why I wouldn't build one in the first place. But seeing as you are ignoring economics completely and refusing to even accept that they may have an importance then you should be comparing like with like and that mean uber money is no object destroyer vs your loadsamoney BB.
 You can't allow your BBs to be built using the very latest technology and the very latest turrets and then say that it's a great design because it can beat ships that weren't built with that tech.

Speed and manuverability of a ship is a result of many interacting factors. It's not jsut as simple as - hey, it's a BB so it HAS to be this fast/slow, or hey, it's a DD so it has to be THIS fast.
After all, neither all the BB's or all carriers in WW2 had the same speeds - there was much variation between them in many factors, not only speed. In fact, the Iowa BB was faster than any carrier (albeir, somewhat smaller too).

And this variablilty arises from what? Magic? The way the gods felt the day that the ship was launched? Or due to the size and power of the engines compared with the weight of the ship? Big engines >> small engines. Expensive engines >> cheap engines. Heavy ships << light ships. You take all three factors, roll them together and then you end up with the reason why your ship is fast or slow.

On the other hand you've taken the destroyer. Ripped out the hangar bays (which based on your own picture are mostly empty space!) and replaced them with heavy and bulky reactors and heat sinks. You've refused to accept that the BBs engines are more expensive or bigger than those on the destroyer. In fact as far as I can tell they are the same ones as the destroyer. Yet despite that fact you somehow believe that the BB should move at the same speed as the destroyer or faster?

But it can - attack from the rear! Or directly fro the side at close-range. I had a Deioms destroy it that way, since the Sath can put enough distance to turn adn fact it:D
And one-on-one? A BBwouldn't the ubership of doom - hell the Sath tre Colli apart who was roughly the same size. They are not in the same weight category so a more fair battle would be 2 BB's against a Sath.

Since when have the Shivans given a flying **** about fair battles? Are you trying to tell me that an invasion of Shivan space would be successful because the Shivans would try to make it a fair fight? Are you trying to tell me that when storming Shivan nodes the Sathanas Juggernauts would turn their arse to face the BBs so as to give them a sporting chance?

ANY GTVA ship trying to storm Shivan space is ****ed. Plain and simple. Anyone who believes that battleships would pull them out of that one is setting themselves up for an even bigger fall than Command did with their "we will be ready to face the challenge" speech extoling the virtues of the Colossus

Hell, you might conclud that fighters cost a friggin lot, since a 2km destroyer carries a farely small number of them compared to it's size and the bigegst battles we've sene involved a few wings.

Haven't you just spent the last nine pages claiming that a 2km destroyer uses up a significant proportion of its internal space on fighters?