[TrashMan]

Epic Fail..

Last time I checked Torpedo Boats didn't have the armor equalent of a battleship, nor was their firepower that great. You needed to use them in greater numbers (name one instance when a single torpedo boat sank a battleship)

When you show me a destroyer that has battleship-grade armor AND carrier one of those tripple barreled 406mm turrets, then we can talk.

The Lilith fires a beam that's bigger than the whole ship, let alone that turret.

[AlphaOne]

@Ghostavo : Mass has nothing to do with the shivan abilaty to blow up a star. Hell we dont even know if that is what they wanted we just know it happened. Also if they were indeed intent on blowing Capella then we should remember the fact that they used some sort of wierd high powered subspace thing that eventualy made the Capella sun become unstable and blow up. Also we must not forget that there was a game refference that says that the field was geeting strionger and stronger as time passed by.

As for the Terran Mara yeah its ingame in one of the briefings i believe.

@IceFire: Agreed on your asesment of the torpedoboat however one has to remember a moder day destroyer carries more firepower then a WW2 battleship.

Also the fact that torpedo boats could not be countered by the larger vessels was not because they could not shoot or because they were too weak. In fact one of the main reasons is beacause they were too powerfull . The main guns were so powerfull and large shooting them at such a small target in such a short range became almost imposible. Why do i say this? Because torpedo boats normaly have to get pretty close in order to be efective.

Also ww2 era torpedo tech was very primitive and was not considered such a great threat. It wasnt until much later that torpedoes were recognized as a powerfull weapon against capship of the line. Most kills were scored against civilian ships. And most kills via torpedoes were not done by torpedo-boats but by torpedo-planes or dive-bombers altough sometimes at very high casualties.


I can not dispute the Lilith's firepower since its in game but the sheer armor and beam-damage it can do it off the scale of every other shivan cruiser of corvette for that matter.

That is why we believe it just doesnt fit the pattern of the shivan ships. Its just ubercruiser of doom.

And no not everithing has to be neat and tidy but also it must not be this out of place either.

Anyway on a personal note if i were GTVA Command i would copy that Lilith capture one and reverse engenier one whatever work and stop building destroyers corvettes and other warships just Lilith and some support carriers . Then lunch them all and see them turn the jugg fleet to dust.

[Ghostavo]

@Ghostavo : Mass has nothing to do with the shivan abilaty to blow up a star. Hell we dont even know if that is what they wanted we just know it happened. Also if they were indeed intent on blowing Capella then we should remember the fact that they used some sort of wierd high powered subspace thing that eventualy made the Capella sun become unstable and blow up. Also we must not forget that there was a game refference that says that the field was geeting strionger and stronger as time passed by.

Mass doesn't have anything to do with the Lilith's ability to blow up other ships too, it uses some sort of weird high powered beam cannon thing that eventually blows ships up. See the parallel?

As for the Terran Mara yeah its ingame in one of the briefings i believe.

I don't dispute that, but the argument goes both ways. If you want to acknowledge the Terran Mara's abilities, you cannot ignore the Lilith's abilities.

I can not dispute the Lilith's firepower since its in game but the sheer armor and beam-damage it can do it off the scale of every other shivan cruiser of corvette for that matter.

That is why we believe it just doesnt fit the pattern of the shivan ships. Its just ubercruiser of doom.

Again, the Sathanas reference, it has an ability that's unbelievebly beyond anything displayed in the game, and no other ship or group of ships has anything even close to an effect of that magnitude. Same argument, different target.

[TrashMan]

Also the fact that torpedo boats could not be countered by the larger vessels was not because they could not shoot or because they were too weak. In fact one of the main reasons is beacause they were too powerfull . The main guns were so powerfull and large shooting them at such a small target in such a short range became almost imposible. Why do i say this? Because torpedo boats normaly have to get pretty close in order to be efective.

And that's why battelships had a large number of secondary armaments - to engage smaller, faster ships with them.

Agreed on your asesment of the torpedoboat however one has to remember a moder day destroyer carries more firepower then a WW2 battleship.

ERm...no. No it doesn't.

[Wanderer]

Starting to go way of topic but....


Just a couple of notes... Originally - at least according to pre-WW2 era naval manual of Kriegsmarine that i have stated that torpedo boats (note - not motor torpedo boats) were a great threat to capital ships - apparently referring to Jutland type engagement - and there fore the battleships needed screening force of torpedo boat destroyers (ie. ships designed to destroy torpedo boats) to destroy them. Eventually these (both torpedo boats and torpedo boat destroyers) merged to create the 'modern' WW2 era destroyer. So torpedoes.. starting even from the early ramming torpedoes were considered to be significant threat to capital ships.

And also... A motor torpedo boat is whole different thing than a torpedo boat.

[Akalabeth Angel]

     I know people are gonna say "waah, it's the lucifer. It doesn't count" but I'll post it anyway. The Lucifer is rare, and so is the Lilith.

Weapon damage per second: ((Beam Damage*5.5)Lifetime) / (LifeTime+FireWait+WarmUp+Cooldown)

LRed Damage per second: 1074
SRed Damage per second: 133
Shivan Super Laser per second: 1500

Ravana Destroyer
Width: 1442
Height: 1468
Length: 2346

Lucifer Super Destroyer
Width: 1254
Height: 845
Length: 2777

   In dimensions, the Ravana and Lucifer are comparable. The Lucifer, though longer tends to be narrower especially in the aft section.

Hitpoints:
Ravana: 100,000
Lucifer: 800,000

   The Lucifer has 800% the hitpoints of the Ravana, compare this to 375% hitpoints of a Lilith compared to a Cain.

Speed:
Ravana: 20 m/s
Lucifer: 15 m/s

   Ravana is 33% faster than the Lucifer.

Main Anti-ship Beam Damage per second:
Ravana: 2414  ((1074)2)+((133)2))
Lucifer: 3000 ((1500)2))

   Lucifer has the advantage with 124% of the beams of a Ravana.


Secondary Armaments:
Ravana:
   5 Flak Cannon
   2 Shivan AAA
 17 Shivan Turret
  1 Fighter Killer

Lucifer:
 11 Shivan Turret
   2 Fighter Killer
   2 Shivan Cluster Bomb

The Lucifer also has a shield system which proved impenetrable to all weapons of the period.


   What's my point?
      Despite only marginal increase in beam firepower, and less secondary defensive capabilities the Lucifer has hull armour which far outclasses the Ravana and due to its shields one must assume it has a power requirement far above the Ravana and yet the size of the two ships is roughly the same. So if the Shivans can create an incredibly advanced ship at the Destroyer scale, I'm pretty damn sure they can create a somewhat advanced ship at the Cruiser scale.

      And yeah, one might say "oh, the Lucifer doesn't have 800k hitpoints, you only have to kill the reactors to take it out. Well that's honestly irrelevant, because achilles heel aside the Lucifer's hull can still take that much damage AFTER you manage to circumvent its otherwise impenetrable shields.

[IceFire]

Epic Fail..

Last time I checked Torpedo Boats didn't have the armor equalent of a battleship, nor was their firepower that great. You needed to use them in greater numbers (name one instance when a single torpedo boat sank a battleship)

When you show me a destroyer that has battleship-grade armor AND carrier one of those tripple barreled 406mm turrets, then we can talk.

The Lilith fires a beam that's bigger than the whole ship, let alone that turret.

Epic fail for you sorry.  The armor doesn't mean anything so you've missed the point.  Apparently nobody understand analogies.

[TrashMan]

No, it means a lot. It is you who brought in this analogy and when it doesn't work, you simply ignore bits that don't?


As far as the Lucy goes it was one of the kind and I think the high HP were initaly meant to make it feel indestructable.. Maybe before [V] made it invulnerable.
IMHO, the Lucy's hull stats on paper don't make sense, but they had to be that high or else the player could destroy the Lucy without blowing it's reactors.
The Harbringer was way powerful a bomb..upping the HP on the subsystems would do no good.. They could have just made a different bomb for the last mission, but there's no telling what craft an loadout the player might choose, so that wouldn't work. I blame techincal limitations and deadlines for some things in FS1 and 2 that felt incomplete...

[Droid803]

yes, lets give the Lucifer 10 HP. Everyone will fear it now!
While we're at it, let's strip the Lilith of its LRED and give an SGreen.
Now the shivans are balanced! [/sarcasm]

[NGTM-1R]

Fine, you want a better analogy?

HMS Abercrombie. Monitor of WW2, carried a single twin 15" gun turret forward, was a light cruiser in nearly every other respect. (And I mean a European or Japanese light cruiser, not one of the monsters like the Brooklyn the US turned out since they designated cruisers on gun size and not ship size.) Abercrombie never engaged an enemy ship larger than an MTB, but she was one of a number of prewar design studies conducted by many nations in the concept of a cruiser packing battleship guns, and much thought was given to the proper employment of such a ship.

The general consensus was that employing such a vessel against a genuine capital ship not previously badly damaged would be tantamount to suicide, but she would be a valuable asset in a cruiser vs. cruiser battle or for bombardments, bringing the weapons of a battleship in a lighter, faster package. The problem was that such a ship would be difficult to provide protection similar to her cruiser brethern (only the Germans managed it with their panzerschiffes, but they made the only truly serious attempt), and being armed like a battleship, somebody somewhere was going to be tempted to use it like one.

Sounds like a Lilth, yes?

Granted Abercrombie was slightly underarmored for a ship of her size, but as we're dealing with FS where weapons hit a lot more often then they did in the 1940s, and Abercrombie was significantly more sprightly then a true battleship (she handled like a light cruiser, because that's essentially what she was), the parallel is actually quite workable. The Lilth isn't speedy and sprightly but lightly armored because that wouldn't help it much. Instead it's heavily armored but slower than its apparent ability to generate power suggests it should be.

[IceFire]

No, it means a lot. It is you who brought in this analogy and when it doesn't work, you simply ignore bits that don't?

No it doesn't.  The point of the torpedo boat is to negate the need for armor because it was smaller and harder to hit.  Why is the armor important?  I've laid my points out in detail and I had already mentioned that armor was less important for these ships and that their role was to be a smaller package in a "lesser" class that effectively competes with a much larger type of ship.  That was the basic analogy which has been lost.

[blowfish]

(LifeTime+FireWait+WarmUp+Cooldown)

This isn't correct.  I've seen an LRed fire every ~13-14 seconds, but by your logic, it should be more like 20 seconds.

EDIT: The code seems to say that it should be able to fire every [fire wait] seconds.  Tests support this theory.  Beams can fire as often as they want, regardless of their lifetime and warmup/warmdown.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

I don't remember where I read this, but I like it:

The Cain was originally meant for light combat, with mainly fighters involved. This is evidenced by the lack of blob turrets (the main capship-to-capship weapon in FS1) and only one SRed in FS2 (which still makes it slightly more powerful than GTVA cruisers, by the way).
Instead, it carries Shivan Light/Heavy Lasers, which are more of a threat to fighters/bombers than the blobs. It's also quite fast (30mps, as opposed to e.g. the 45 of the Medusa), but it sacrificed some armour for that.

The Lilith was designed for capship combat. It has Shivan Blobs for FS1 anti-capship warfare, and an LRed in FS2. It has more HP's for prolonged battles, but sacrifices some speed for that. It probably has a more powerful reactor, which makes them less used by the Shivies (that doesn't mean it's expensive, they could be unstable or made of rare materials as well).

The ideal would be a combination of the two. Deploy them in wolfpacks, so the Cain can cover the Lilith against fighters/bombers and vice versa. And what do we see in FS1? Indeed - wolfpacks.

[blowfish]

If the Shivans think that a Cain is a good anti-fighter cruiser than I will have to whack them repeatedly with an Aeolus.  Well, I guess its OK in FS1...

[Droid803]

No, the Shivans think the Lamia is a good anti-fighter cruiser. Sadly, it doesn't exist in canon FS2, so the Shivans don't have any anti-fighter cruiser. The Cain is just the unfortunate useless POS a.k.a. hornet fodder cruiser. It is in the same class as the Fenris and Aten. They were ok in FS1, but utterly useless in FS2.

[Akalabeth Angel]

(LifeTime+FireWait+WarmUp+Cooldown)

This isn't correct.  I've seen an LRed fire every ~13-14 seconds, but by your logic, it should be more like 20 seconds.

EDIT: The code seems to say that it should be able to fire every [fire wait] seconds.  Tests support this theory.  Beams can fire as often as they want, regardless of their lifetime and warmup/warmdown.

    I dunno, is the warm-up cooldown included in the fire wait or is it separate from it?

   Waste of time on my part any since predictably, people pulled the "oh, it's one of a kind and I know exactly what the game designers were thinking . . . lalala" cop out as per usual.

[AlphaOne]

So a modern day destroyer cant dish out more firepower then a WW2 battleship now? And where have you been living kind sir? A moder day destroyer can chew up and spit out battleships like im chewing gum right now. Of course it has to have the proper anti-warship missiles for such a task. Go to the wiki and look up the latest destroyer builds.

Also the Lilith is by all intents and purpose a cruiser (YET IT HAS THE ARMOUR OF A CORVETTE) The lilith by all intents and purposes being a said cruiser is not supposed to be able to threaten a destroyer in a very serious manner let alone destroy one.

Why? Because if the Lilith specs are not exaggerated and are not overkill then that must mean that EVERY OTHER SHIP IN FS2 WERE SCREW-UPS. Why? Well according to many of the ppl. here thinking the Ravana should be armed with at least 4 BFReds to start with have 800 k HP  and a fighter complement of 300 crafts.

As for the Sath well leth's not even get there......!


As for the whole analogy used that the shivans can blow up a star so this and that can ...happen etc etc. I have just one thing to say: Are you for real??? that has got to be the most imature logic thinking i have ever seen.

[TrashMan]

No, it means a lot. It is you who brought in this analogy and when it doesn't work, you simply ignore bits that don't?

No it doesn't.  The point of the torpedo boat is to negate the need for armor because it was smaller and harder to hit.  Why is the armor important?  I've laid my points out in detail and I had already mentioned that armor was less important for these ships and that their role was to be a smaller package in a "lesser" class that effectively competes with a much larger type of ship.  That was the basic analogy which has been lost.

And how does that relate to the Lilith? The Lilith has incredible armor, so it's nothing like a torpedo boat. And if a tropedo boat is not comparable to a Lilith, why did you bring it up in the first place?

Fine, you want a better analogy?

HMS Abercrombie. Monitor of WW2, carried a single twin 15" gun turret forward, was a light cruiser in nearly every other respect. (And I mean a European or Japanese light cruiser, not one of the monsters like the Brooklyn the US turned out since they designated cruisers on gun size and not ship size.) Abercrombie never engaged an enemy ship larger than an MTB, but she was one of a number of prewar design studies conducted by many nations in the concept of a cruiser packing battleship guns, and much thought was given to the proper employment of such a ship.

The general consensus was that employing such a vessel against a genuine capital ship not previously badly damaged would be tantamount to suicide, but she would be a valuable asset in a cruiser vs. cruiser battle or for bombardments, bringing the weapons of a battleship in a lighter, faster package. The problem was that such a ship would be difficult to provide protection similar to her cruiser brethern (only the Germans managed it with their panzerschiffes, but they made the only truly serious attempt), and being armed like a battleship, somebody somewhere was going to be tempted to use it like one.

Sounds like a Lilth, yes?

No, it doesn't. For one it doesn't have the uber-armor like the Lilith has.

A more correct analogy would be a supporting ship class that has the armor of a ship-of-the-line and the same guns such ship use, while at the same time being constructed with methods, materials and limitation used to build the ship-of-the-line. to my knowledge, no such ship exists.

So a modern day destroyer cant dish out more firepower then a WW2 battleship now? And where have you been living kind sir? A moder day destroyer can chew up and spit out battleships like im chewing gum right now. Of course it has to have the proper anti-warship missiles for such a task. Go to the wiki and look up the latest destroyer builds.

No, it can't.
A destroyer tipicly has 1-2 120mm cannon and various misiles. The combined firepower of all the main and secondary guns of a WW2 battleship exceed that of a destroyer.
If you want to get technical, let's compare modernized BB's like the Iowa, who not only retains it's min guns, but also has multiple missile launchers installed and CIWS systems. It carries more missiles and more firepower (figures, it's bigger, has got room for more missiles and guns) than any modern destroyer (but it's expensive as hell).

Alltough such comparisons aren't exactly accurate, since FS ships don't use missiles as main weapons, but rather beam, and unlike missiles they require s***loads of power - thereby firepower is limited by the size, power and cooling of hte reactor.
and if you look up rocketscience you will see that bigger ships can generate more power for various reasons.

[IceFire]

Well I've said my bit and I think I'll leave it at that.  I've laid out my arguments but they seem to have been in vain as they haven't been understood or the bar set is just moved around.  It'd be nice to get past that and move deeper into the discussion but we're still at the same point we were pages ago.

Certainly this isn't going to change the way the tables were done in 1999 but it has been interesting to consider what Volition was thinking at the time.  I'll still submit that this is much more straight forward than its made out to be and that things don't fit into nice cookie cutter alignments but thats where the understanding seems to diverge so...best to leave it as is.

[Ghostavo]

Why? Because if the Lilith specs are not exaggerated and are not overkill then that must mean that EVERY OTHER SHIP IN FS2 WERE SCREW-UPS. Why? Well according to many of the ppl. here thinking the Ravana should be armed with at least 4 BFReds to start with have 800 k HP  and a fighter complement of 300 crafts.

Why can't it all be correct? Why must there be screw ups?

As for the whole analogy used that the shivans can blow up a star so this and that can ...happen etc etc. I have just one thing to say: Are you for real??? that has got to be the most imature logic thinking i have ever seen.

I find amusing you think that is "immature logic" since it's exactly what you are doing, I'm just using reductio ad absurdum. Can't you see it's the same argument you are using? A ship (Sathanas/Lilith) has an ability (blow up stars/ships) on a magnitude that no other ship of it's class has, so you find it "overpowered". It's exactly the same thing. All that changes is the target of the argument and it's ability.