[jkalltheway]

on the flipside of the coin, a warship made to evade combat seems quite redundant... and yet the iceni seems capable in battle as well

[FreeSpaceFreak]

If you want to engage a ship, jump out in front of it so it can't escape. (Feint! Parry! Riposte!) Maneuvering in FS usually takes too long to evade some serious beam volleys.

[Killer Whale]

Then someone creates blockade smashers with intersystem Meson Bombs or something... Meh.

Sathanas = Lots of armour, fast, huge forward firepower, able to jump through a node, available in large quantity's... Sounds like an ideal blocade runner. It can jump through a node, it's armour soaks up pretty much whatever you can throw at it and certainly more then enough for your usual blocade, it fires it's forward beams, which can take out a destroyer straight up. If things get difficult, it can jump back out. If it just wants to get to a node, it's engines will get it there in no-time, you'll have a huge amount of trouble disabling it, and finally, their expendable. Sounds like a blocade smasher to me, oh, and you won't lose it if it's successful, unlike a meson bomb.

[Kie99]

If you've got an enemy, and you know where his home system is, with subspace it'd be fairly easy to defeat that enemy, even in the FS1 era.  All you would need to do would be to slap a ****load of amour an engine, and a subsace drive onto an Orion sized vessel, fill any room left onboard with your most potent nukes, then have it run blockades until it gets to the enemy system, and career into the enemy's planet.  In FS1 this would have been particularly easy, given that Vasuda and Sol are only 3 jumps away from each other.

[General Battuta]

Except there's the whole matter of deterrence - if you do that, so does she.

[Kie99]

Except there's the whole matter of deterrence - if you do that, so does she.

Ah, good point, the ultimate in MAD.  With such a massive threat though, you wouldn't expect war to break out in the first place as each side would be too scared of the others doing exactly that.

[headdie]

here are some assumptions I make about jumping

Nobody has discussed energy.  I would imagine that jumping would take a comparatively high amount of energy (why else would conventional travel be preferred to jumping if no other factors).  If that's the case then more fuel would be used jumping (the game makes several references to ships using deuterium based fusion reactors.) so you then go into fuel supply's on board do civilian craft carry large enough for many jumps also what is the cost of deuterium high/low?  what is the energy demand in system jumping compared to inter system jumps

accuracy of navigation systems/drives, Knossos devices are known to disrupt transit, does gravity (Star Wars), is matter density in real space a factor?

Transit times, System-System transit can take many mins (destruction of Lucifer) many briefings mention arrival times and transit times how long does in system jumps take, does physical distance have an affect.

warm up / cool down times, this is again hinted at but applied inconsistently, if you know your enemy just jumped then you know you can ambush them while the recharge their engines, if your recharge cycle is faster than the enemy then you can still whittle down ships by perusing, a tactic made available with subspace tracking, does length of time in subspace affect this

[wistler]

here are some assumptions I make about jumping

Nobody has discussed energy.  I would imagine that jumping would take a comparatively high amount of energy (why else would conventional travel be preferred to jumping if no other factors).  If that's the case then more fuel would be used jumping (the game makes several references to ships using deuterium based fusion reactors.) so you then go into fuel supply's on board do civilian craft carry large enough for many jumps also what is the cost of deuterium high/low?  what is the energy demand in system jumping compared to inter system jumps

accuracy of navigation systems/drives, Knossos devices are known to disrupt transit, does gravity (Star Wars), is matter density in real space a factor?

Transit times, System-System transit can take many mins (destruction of Lucifer) many briefings mention arrival times and transit times how long does in system jumps take, does physical distance have an affect.

warm up / cool down times, this is again hinted at but applied inconsistently, if you know your enemy just jumped then you know you can ambush them while the recharge their engines, if your recharge cycle is faster than the enemy then you can still whittle down ships by perusing, a tactic made available with subspace tracking, does length of time in subspace affect this

I'd also assume, if i hasn't already been stated, that keeping the subspace engines charged or ready would take a lot of energy to do. That would explain why a lot of ships near death don't just jump away. There's a lot of mention to charging jump engines and such, maybe keeping them charged for a length of time is dangerous, and maybe its a process that requires an exertion of that energy at the end of the process (such as going into subspace).

[NGTM-1R]

The problem is, for the stuff not touched on, the only truly safe assumption is that it doesn't matter or we would have heard about it. Similar the discussion about charging/keeping charged is mainly a fan one; FS2 present two situations where rapid succession jumps are made, the blockade and that of the Iceni a couple missions later.

[wistler]

Similar the discussion about charging/keeping charged is mainly a fan one

As opposed to what other kind of discussion?

[Mongoose]

An in-game one.

[paul1290]

How accurate are the jumpdrives over long distances anyway?

I think the idea of a ship jumping across a system and ending up exactly where it wants to be seems a bit odd.

Perhaps there is a certain degree of error that would be expected of really long in-system jumps.

[Aardwolf]

Well, we know that command was able to 'vector' the course the Belisarius was taking. That means it took a bit of time between when it entered subspace and when it exited, and also means that they could get a good enough estimate about where it was headed.

[Colonol Dekker]

Perhaps although each vortex looks the same, it may emit varying energy / higher frequncy wavelengths dependant on the range of the tunnel its generating? :nerd hypothesis:

[Aardwolf]

So in other words, technobabble for the sake of technobabble?

You are now my enemy.

Just kidding

[Colonol Dekker]

Not technobabble ;-)a vortex would have to be big enough for the ship creating it to pass through, but making it larger would be a waste. But making the subspace tunnels different lengths would emit varying handwavium amounts  . . . . Or some crap.

[Aardwolf]

Well you should have just said it that way the first time

[TrashMan]

Then someone creates blockade smashers with intersystem Meson Bombs or something... Meh.

Sathanas = Lots of armour, fast, huge forward firepower, able to jump through a node, available in large quantity's... Sounds like an ideal blocade runner. It can jump through a node, it's armour soaks up pretty much whatever you can throw at it and certainly more then enough for your usual blocade, it fires it's forward beams, which can take out a destroyer straight up. If things get difficult, it can jump back out. If it just wants to get to a node, it's engines will get it there in no-time, you'll have a huge amount of trouble disabling it, and finally, their expendable. Sounds like a blocade smasher to me, oh, and you won't lose it if it's successful, unlike a meson bomb.

No, a real blockade smasher would be the Collossuss or an Orion. Having all the firepower position forward is limiting.
After all, how do you know the blockading ship will be in front of the node?
Why not one the sides? Or behind, to shoot at your engines the second you jump in?

No, the best blockade runners have weapons spread around.

[wistler]

I also pictured blockade runners being smaller, Cruiser length, like the one of of Star Wars.

[Killer Whale]

In freespace, all blocades IIRC are in front of the node. No-one is on the sides, or behind. Which is really stupid.
wistler: Perhaps sathanases are small.