[IronForge]

Oh but a blowthrough in the reactor section is going to screw you over BAD.
Also, I meant cut out the fighter bays, make a more slimlined agile beam ship.
And carriers are not meant to fight in the front lines. See how the hectate fights. I think the hectate minus the beam guns will be great.

So at the front we have destroyers with none or limited (1-2 wings) fighter bay. At the back we have long range beam ships. And far, far away we have the carriers who just warp in, deploy fighters and warp out. Cram in more flak guns, they can't do crap but they can defend against bombs. Just enough armor to survive one or two hits.

[General Battuta]

It's spelled 'Hecate'.

A hit on a fusion reactor won't actually do anything in real life. Fusion reactors don't explode.

The specialized warship concept is actually used in a few mods, like Inferno and Blue Planet. However, the notion of 'fragile carriers' really doesn't work as they'll be one-shotted in a tragic manner.

Your understanding of Freespace weapons is poor. Flak weapons are very bad against bombs. You want rapid fire blob turrets for that. Furthermore the suggestion that they 'can't do crap' suggests you don't play on difficulties that don't give the player a magical damage buffer.

[IronForge]

Heh thing is, the flak guns on the sath took care of bombs at long range. And at higher difficulties, bombers just spam bombs further away. Thats where they come in. Either force bomber to come really close and eat flak, or tear the bombs up really bad. Thing is, the carrier should deploy further away and fighters warp to destination themselves. You see many missions where we just start off in space? That is how I presume its going to work. Let carriers be carriers, and destroyers should get more firepower. The first few shots of the battle already determines who wins in a cap VS cap battle. The beams should be targeted at the other ship's beam turrets.
And difficulty does not matter, the flaks don't do anything to the enemy fighters either especially if they run once shields are hit. You need AAA beams.

[Scourge of Ages]

Maybe on your carrier, instead of setting it up for a one-beam-kill, armor the carrier and just forego the heavy beams?

That way it can withstand any bomber or sneak attack long enough to escape, deploy fighter cover, or call for help. And without suffering devastating internal damage.

Everybody's happy that way.

On topic, it's hard to realize how big these ships are because you're always flying around in fighters and are unable to see anything to give you a sense of scale. But if you look closely at, say, the HTL Fenris you can see where the bridge is, and estimate scale from that. When you do things like that, it's easier to imagine 300-600 crewmembers living there.

[Narwhal]

Thing is, I'll say again, 5m of armor is going to resist the same amount of damage, no matter how big the sheet is. Its how thick that counts. so you can get a lot more tank outta your metal with smaller, filled up ships than large filled up easter eggs.

That's what warship designers of late XIX / early XXth century thought, until the HMS Dreadnought was produced. And then, it made all the previous ships obsolescent.
Compartimentalisation and smart positioning of the "cells" is as or more effective then pure volume of armor. Also, mixing armor plate of "different" angles allow to direct damage to the place you want (more).

[Scotty]

But seriously. 10,000 crew. What are they doing? Making everything squeaky clean? Growing vegetables? And I also don't see the need for the destroyer to be so... big either...

As previously stated, a Nimitz carrier hold ~5000 crewmen.  An Orion is roughly 100 times the size of a Nimitz.

EDIT:  And I just realized this post is two pages out of date.

[NGTM-1R]

I don't know, I'd imagine that in the future where we have giant spacecraft, we'd have been able to automate quite a bit that is currently operated by people.

They GTVA doesn't seem to make large-scale use of robotics aboard warships for starters, so repairs would have to be carried out by people. This makes sense, because with a total inability to predict type, scale, and location of damage before it happens, asking a computer to orchestrate damage-control or repair efforts is just too much. Only a human or a true AI in a humanoid platform has all the ingredients mental and physical to be an effective repairman or damage control expert, unless you resort to the expedient of simply swapping out modular components wholesale.

Which isn't a practical solution for conducting major repairs to the ship when you're on a budget in room for carrying spare parts. (Because after all, at some point it starts interfering with your ability to fight the enemy.)

[TrashMan]

For an comparrioson,the BB 61 Iowa (276m in length) has a full crew complement of 1600.

Given that FS2 cruisers are roughly the same size, 2000 sounds about right.

[Trivial Psychic]

To solve the problem of the Mentu's limited firepower, perhaps if/when someone Hi-Polies the ship, they could add a button beam turret right between the forward prongs, and make it an optional subsystem, just as was done to the Moloch.

Are you referring to that red eye on the HTL Moloch's front?

That is correct.  A slight change to the tables and addition of subsystem data in the model itself and you have a 3rd beam cannon on that ship... great spot for an SRed.  I'm proposing doing the same for the Mentu... add the submodel but don't activate it (no table entry, no in-model subsystem data) by default so it retains complete compatibility.

[General Battuta]

Heh thing is, the flak guns on the sath took care of bombs at long range.

Inefficiently compared to blob turrets. Flak is bad against bombs.

Thing is, the carrier should deploy further away and fighters warp to destination themselves.

The carrier itself will be attacked and destroyed. Something like Blue Planet's Titan or Inferno's Warlock is a much better design than the eggshell with a hangar you're proposing.

And difficulty does not matter, the flaks don't do anything to the enemy fighters either especially if they run once shields are hit. You need AAA beams.

You clearly do not play on Insane. Or use Fury's AI.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

And difficulty does not matter, the flaks don't do anything to the enemy fighters either especially if they run once shields are hit. You need AAA beams.

You clearly do not play on Insane. Or use Fury's AI.

Or played PI...

[IronForge]

I don't touch insane much, but everything hurts in insane. And an AAA in insane is still more deadly than a flak in insane.

And the aim is to strip the carrier of all offensive capabilities, it can only launch fighters and defend itself. Armor shouldn't be as thick, though enough to sustain a few beam hits. It is meant to stay safe, away from the front lines. So we take two orions. Take away the long range weapons on orion 1, put it on the orion 2. Take the fighter bay from orion 2, put it on 1. The defensive capabilities are still the same. But I will even go so far as to suggest stripping some armor off the carrier as it is not going to engage in capship to capship combat and only needs to fend off a few bombers. Cram in some AAAs and flaks/blobs oughta do it.

[Scotty]

But what happens if the carrier is ambushed?  It dies, without much fight at all.  Say goodbye to your fighter escort, the other destroyer will now be destroyed by waves of bombers it can no longer fight effectively.

Overspecializing invites defeat in detail.

[The E]

Yep. Especially in FreeSpace, where there are ships that are heavily optimized for jump ambushing (Lilith, Ravana, Sathanas). A more generalized ship that is capable of defending itself is a much better option than specialized eggshells.

IronForge, you should think a bit about the tactical realities of the FreeSpace universe. Basically, the most valuable tactical asset you have is a ship that has not yet entered battle. As soon as a ship is located, it can be ambushed via subspace. A fragile eggshell ship like the one you are proposing has no real chance of evading, let alone fighting off such an ambush if and when it occurs.

[NGTM-1R]

The most critical and first understanding he needs to absorb is that there are no safe places and no front lines. Every area in the system can be reached by any ship there in a matter of seconds.

You can't hide your carrier from the enemy, at least not for too long, nor can you physically bar the path to it with either obstacles or other warships.

[General Battuta]

I don't touch insane much, but everything hurts in insane. And an AAA in insane is still more deadly than a flak in insane.

Wrong. A flak on insane is more deadly than an AAA in an optimal situation. With Fury AI a flak on insane becomes more deadly than two or three AAAs.

Since you play on difficulties below Insane, you benefit from magical damage resistance and hobbled AI.

[Droid803]

The most critical and first understanding he needs to absorb is that there are no safe places and no front lines. Every area in the system can be reached by any ship there in a matter of seconds.

You can't hide your carrier from the enemy, at least not for too long, nor can you physically bar the path to it with either obstacles or other warships.

You'd have to have it sit one system back, where the "line" would be the jump node (since it is a chokepoint).
Pretty worthless and senseless.

Wrong. A flak on insane is more deadly than an AAA in an optimal situation. With Fury AI a flak on insane becomes more deadly than two or three AAAs.

Since you play on difficulties below Insane, you benefit from magical damage resistance and hobbled AI.

Statistically I find this hard to believe. Here I'm thinking that higher difficulties allow weapons to perform closer to their statistical values due to less fire rate hindrance and accuracy modifier.

AAAs can basically instagib certain fighters on insane though since they punch straight through shields, notably shivan ones with high shield low armor (especially since you don't have this "magical damage resistance").
Flak still has to contend with several hundred odd points of shield.

Look at what the statistics say:
193 combined damage per pulse is more than enough to end Scorpions, Dragons, Astaroths, Manticores, Basilisks, and Aeshmas (as well as the Ulysses, Anubis, Horus) basically instantly. Standard Flaks with their optimal 30shield-30hull dps takes several seconds to even chew through the shields of a Dragon. Much less end it instantly. Killing something in the opening salvo is always preferred as something dead stops shooting you while something at 1% armor can still unload tempests and maxims into whatever its shooting (a result of critical-existence failure model in games, which FS has).

Even assuming that only one of three pulses of an AAA will hit (and even on lower difficulties, more generally do), three AAAs are still far more effective than a single flak dealing absolutely every point of damage to a SF Dragon.

When you take into account that a AAA hit usually fries several subsystems whereas flak has an abysmally low subsystem damage rating further adds to the effectiveness of AAAs. Even if something surivives it is usually left without sensors or weapons (or those systems take crippling damage). At the very least, that is what happens when I get hit by an AAA on insane. If you make it so that they can't shoot you back, its pretty solid plan.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

I thought flak cannons are supposed to even the damage out across the entire target and have a wider area of effect than AAAs.

[TrashMan]

Specialized vs. multi-purpose ships?

Both have prons and cons.

If you have battlefield control (can utilize your ships effectively) specialized ones are better.

If not, general purpose ones may be better.


Destroyers are a battleship/carrier hybrid.
Would a fleet of specilized carrier and battleships be better? That depends.

I can submit to you scenarios where it would be, and scenarios where it wouldn't.

Either way, a TRULY diverse fleet would have both kinds of ships anyway.

[Dilmah G]

Having an entire fleet of "specialized carrier hybrids"... In other words Destroyers, is prohibitively expensive, and takes a massive amount of people to man, when you include the additional squadrons you need to have going to staff its air wing.