Destroying the forward beam cannons should be your main objective as a single blast from both will easily destroy the Temeraire. The Abel also has two smaller beam cannons located on top of it that will do a lot of damage, but not enough to destroy the Temeraire. You also have to bear in mind that the Shivans aren't so stupid as to rely on their large ships to destroy other large ships. That's why they sent bombers out in the first place.
To be fair, if the Abel gets a shot off with its LReds, the rear stinger SReds can still kill it. I always try to disarm them.
This was part of the confusion. The player is told "Kill the forward beam cannons!", but the player can do everything right (according to what he's told) and still lose. Maybe it should say "Kill the forward beam cannons, but try to take out as many secondaries as you can!", just plain "Disarm the Ravana, now!" (which may have the player aiming for the Weapons subsystem) or the Recommendations can say something to that effect if the player fails the mission. Maybe my memory has failed me, but FS2 didn't put me in a situation like this.
Also, I wasn't able to knock out both forward cannons before one of them fired.
You could tell all your bomber squadrons to gank the Abel to bring it down faster.
I did. There's one heck of a delay between when I call Delta and Sanctuary Beta and when the remains of them actually show up, if they have any bombs left.
that's why I said you should not use your trebs until you see the Ravana, when the Ravana enters the field you should burst your way to it and when you are 2.5K away you target the front beams and fire double trebs on them, a single direct shot like that will blow those turrets away.
by the time both front turrets are destoyed you should be right on top of the Ravana, at this point you should target the upper beams and shoot double trebs at them fast fast fast! then when those are destroyed order your bombers to destroy the Ravana and you focus on shooting the fighter escort down.
If you selected the Myrmi then you'll have no trouble at all as it is a fast ship and you'll catch up fast with anything in the field and also you can carry a lot of trebs, not to mention the 4 banks of balors will chew up ANYTHING the shivans can throw at you.
You're a better pilot than I am if you can get that to work. I'm way too far from the Lilith to be able to disable it's cannons without the use of Trebuchets, because I haven't memorized where the Lilith jumps in. At least the Maxim has a 3 km range. I was heavily considering the Morning Star also for this reason, but I doubted it would be effective on a Lilith.
I'll try it in the simulator someday and see if it helps.
I will also freely admit that my targeting skills with primaries aren't all that great, so I wanted cannons with more hull penetrating punch, hence the Prometheus S/Kayser mix.
Anyway, thanks again for all the advice, I'm still playing through Blue Planet (I'm at The Great Preservers), and really enjoying this campaign.
