[Marcov]

Eishtmo just expanded my argument.

The Hecate's advantages are all nice, in theory, until you realize that space is tiny in FreeSpace, because subspace; and ships rapidly and routinely get vectored to their origins, because subspace tracking; and that makes a carrier that can't defend itself a problem - as we see twice in FreeSpace 2, where the best the Hecate can do is run.

Actually, with tons of fighters and bombers that wouldn't be a problem. A Ravana begins attacking the Aquitaine? Have it do an intrasystem jump - and let the bombers handle it!

In a particular mission it says multiple Shivan fighters disabled the Aquitaine. But they were able to handle it pretty quickly - with fighters.

A carrier CAN defend itself - that's why there's over a hundred fighters and bombers within those fighterbays. Although beam cannons could take down capships quite faster than bombers, Shivans always were the superior in beam weaponry - but they couldn't take down bombers that easily.

[General Battuta]

Eishtmo just expanded my argument.

The Hecate's advantages are all nice, in theory, until you realize that space is tiny in FreeSpace, because subspace; and ships rapidly and routinely get vectored to their origins, because subspace tracking; and that makes a carrier that can't defend itself a problem - as we see twice in FreeSpace 2, where the best the Hecate can do is run.

Actually, with tons of fighters and bombers that wouldn't be a problem. A Ravana begins attacking the Aquitaine? Have it do an intrasystem jump - and let the bombers handle it!

Funny how that never worked.

In a particular mission it says multiple Shivan fighters disabled the Aquitaine. But they were able to handle it pretty quickly - with fighters.

Nope, it actually explicitly says the exact opposite!

Admiral Petrarch reports that his gunners destroyed the Urobach and all but one of the fighter wings

The Aquitaine's fighters and bombers did nothing! A single cruiser and a fighter group was able to disable the Aquitaine and it was the ship's own guns that repelled them.

[Marcov]

Not until the god-foresaken Alpha wing came into action.

You'd have to forgive Volition for doing some crazy stuff. That only makes the game excitingly playable - for example, making FS fighters slower than a WWII fighter plane.

[NGTM-1R]

I'm bringing us back to the Hecate topic, and I think a lot of you are missing a key fact regarding it:

Space is big.  Really, REALLY big.

A dedicated carrier is actually in no more danger than any other class of ship simply because you have to FIND the damn thing first, and even within the confines of a single star system, that's a lot of space to search through.  With subspace drives, a carrier, even if found, can frequently simply jump out of the area and be safe, leaving it's fighters and bombers to handle the enemy ships. 

Simple recon. We're fighting the Shivans, remember, we don't really know what they can do, but we do know they can probably blanket the system in fighters for recon duty if they have to. And they demonstrated an ability to locate targets regardless of whatever countermeasures were taken in the Great War, considering you were forced to escort ships carrying top-secret projects delving into antimatter weaponry that would have been well-hidden.

We have no idea how they do it, still, but the Shivans have proved consistently able to both track through subspace and to locate ships that do not make subspace transits even while they are in the system.

See also the many, many "no stealth in space" threads in GD as they pertain to conventional starships (we'll excuse the stealth fighters as Unanticipated Future Tech) and the shield prototypes mission for FS1, where the Shivans made precision jumps to assault the convoy without even having had an asset on the field to guess its course to the node.

[Timerlane]

Nope, it actually explicitly says the exact opposite!

Admiral Petrarch reports that his gunners destroyed the Urobach and all but one of the fighter wings

The Aquitaine's fighters and bombers did nothing! A single cruiser and a fighter group was able to disable the Aquitaine and it was the ship's own guns that repelled them.

In the same briefing we hear that the Aquitaine's single fighterbay was damaged, rendering its "primary" function useless(the same thing happened to the Colossus later, though, of course there was no way fighters or bombers could have saved it from the attacking Sath in such a short amount of time).

"It was cheaper that way" is the only thing that really makes sense(though why a destroyer would need wings and fins of that size is a real question, unless it was meant to also work in atmosphere?). I think a dedicated carrier really needs to either have two (or more) bays, taking a cue from the Vasudans(logically, meaning: faster launch/recovery, and redundancy in case of battle damage), and/or perhaps be a corvette-sized(and armored) vessel, capable of staying mobile and able to keep up with escorting conventional corvettes.

[Dilmah G]

The thing about two fighter bays is the logistics involved in transporting fighters and bombers from one bay to the other. You could assume from the Psamtik mainhall that the thing runs in 0-G, and the ship's guts are designed with that in mind (more or less compartmentalised and out of the way), and so moving a Serapis from one bay to the other is a matter of navigating the sled you see in the mainhall.

Whereas in a Terran vessel, that could be assumed to run at something close to 1-G, transporting a fighter is a bit harder since the fighterbay is a fairly localised area of the ship, with the rest of it being built up much in the same way as it would've been had it been designed to sail on water.

In other words, it might be a little hard carting a Herc II through the briefing room to the other fighterbay.

[Timerlane]

While technically not 'multiple' bays, I might point to BP's Titan for a possible example. It's technically one huge fighter bay, but spans the width of the front of the ship, allowing fighters to enter and depart from both sides, and is big enough and has somewhat compartmentalized multiple entrances(6), so as to make it fairly difficult(I'd think) to completely shut down from all but a very deliberate and massive attack.

[Hades]

While technically not 'multiple' bays, I might point to BP's Titan for a possible example. It's technically one huge fighter bay, but spans the width of the front of the ship, allowing fighters to enter and depart from both sides, and is big enough and has somewhat compartmentalized multiple entrances(6), so as to make it fairly difficult(I'd think) to completely shut down from all but a very deliberate and massive attack.

It's actually not 'BP's' Titan, it's a public asset made by Stratcomm, same as the Raynor, Chimera, Bellophron, and the Hyperion cruiser, but yeah

[Scotty]

Funny how that never worked.

Unless I'm missing an off-screen occurance of this, I'm fairly sure that's more due to the engine ship limit during retail than any real inability for the tactic to work.

The Aquitaine's fighters and bombers did nothing! A single cruiser and a fighter group was able to disable the Aquitaine and it was the ship's own guns that repelled them.

Wouldn't this actually support the argument that the Hecate can take care of and defend itself when need be?

[Dilmah G]

Well, the fact that it was disabled by a small group of fighters and a cruiser (considering this is a destroyer we're talking about) would make me think otherwise.

[Kosh]

Well, the fact that it was disabled by a small group of fighters and a cruiser (considering this is a destroyer we're talking about) would make me think otherwise.

Which is odd given that it has multiple engine subsystems, not like an Orion which is comparitively much easier to disable. They must have knocked out its fighterbay first.

This is other problem with using destroyers as carriers, it's just too easy to knock out their fighterbays. The most we've seen on a canon destroyer is two. Now compare that to Inferno's Warlock. 

[Dilmah G]

Well ideally they should've had fighters on CAP that would've responded to the Shivan threat immediately and worked in a combined arms method with the Aquitaine's gunners to neutralise the threat, or at least keep it within bounds until help arrived. I wouldn't be surprised if it was some kind of lucky shot/jump that neutralised the Aquitaine's fighter bay.

You could work with a different concept of having one fighterbay with multiple exits, say, one that spanned an entire three or four decks of a ship and had about 4-8 exits. Not only would you be able to launch fighters faster, but you wouldn't be so dependent on your one exit. Only thing is, you may need more staff to man the bay and taking up 3 or 4 decks means another 3 or 4 that need to be added.

[TrashMan]

Ah, yes, I recognize this one! The aliens are overwhelming in their technological might, but it's lucky we have plucky, manly fighter pilots to go out there and overcome their droningly simpleminded fighters with derring-do!

Sorry for the snark, it sounds like awesome fun but I'm not totally comfortable with some of these directions in terms of maintaining the mood around the Shivans.

Meh. Nothing from FS2 gave the impression shivans had better pilots. NOTHING.

The GTVA was outnumbered and outgunned. If they were outclassed in the pilot department to boot, then the GTVA couldn't have held out as long as it did.

[General Battuta]

Ah, yes, I recognize this one! The aliens are overwhelming in their technological might, but it's lucky we have plucky, manly fighter pilots to go out there and overcome their droningly simpleminded fighters with derring-do!

Sorry for the snark, it sounds like awesome fun but I'm not totally comfortable with some of these directions in terms of maintaining the mood around the Shivans.

Meh. Nothing from FS2 gave the impression shivans had better pilots. NOTHING.

The GTVA was outnumbered and outgunned. If they were outclassed in the pilot department to boot, then the GTVA couldn't have held out as long as it did.

Except that, y'know, if you open up the mission files, the Shivans tend to have better AI classes assigned.

But aside from them having better pilots, nothing gives the impression they have better pilots.

[TrashMan]

The Hecate was designed to counter the Shivan fighter/bomber threat and to deliver the most powerful weapons in the GTVA arsenal:  Bombs.  Harbingers and the like.  THESE are what took down most of the Shivan capital ships in the Great War, including the Lucifer itself.  It makes sense that they would design a ship specifically to perform such tasks, and that is the Hecate.

Carriers are good for power projection IMHO. Easier to patrol and respond to many small things - a perfect vessel for hunting down pirates and generally policing systems.

It also helps that if a bunch of fighters getting killed trying to take down an enemy destroyer, than the losses in personal and material is much, MUCH less than if a beam cannon toting Hatty gets blown to hell in the same engagement.  It's very similar to the change in navel tactics during WWII, from big gun battleships, that could certainly rip through any carrier they ran into, to the carrier, which never even had to get remotely close.  Battleships were too vulnerable to the cheap fighters, and so they disappeared.

Subsapce drives. Charge time. Important elements that need to be taken into account.
The carrier offensive power lies in it's bombers. Bombers take time to launch, to reach their target and lock on, bombs have travel time and can be shot down. Beams have none of those issues.


Consider a battleship ambushing a carrier - the moment it jumps in, it opens beam fire. The Hecate will be hit by at least one full salvo before it can jump out.
In 30 seconds the carrier will receive the full brunt of the battleships power...in that same time, most bombers wouldn't even have target lock - heck, most wouldn't even be in range to being targeting. The carrier is forced to flee damaged (and thus is effectively removed from a fight), if not destroyed....and since the carier used it's jump drives last, the battlesip drives will re-charge first, allowing it to persue again (unless the carrier jumped to a friendly base).
The battleship can retreat as soon as it's jump drives charge again, and the carrier defense wings already "in air" will hardly be able to destroy it in 1 minute. Especially since it would mostly be fighters.


Next, consider a carrier ambushing a battleship. A carrier would launch fighters/bombers and send them after a battleship, staying out of the fight itself. The bombers would have to disable the battleship within 30 seconds to 1 minute MAX or else it will jump out...and if the battleship got the carriers location, we now have the above scenario. If not, it will run away to some safer location (either out of hte system, or in n asteroid belt, or a friendly base)

[headdie]

Ah, yes, I recognize this one! The aliens are overwhelming in their technological might, but it's lucky we have plucky, manly fighter pilots to go out there and overcome their droningly simpleminded fighters with derring-do!

Sorry for the snark, it sounds like awesome fun but I'm not totally comfortable with some of these directions in terms of maintaining the mood around the Shivans.

Meh. Nothing from FS2 gave the impression shivans had better pilots. NOTHING.

The GTVA was outnumbered and outgunned. If they were outclassed in the pilot department to boot, then the GTVA couldn't have held out as long as it did.

Except that, y'know, if you open up the mission files, the Shivans tend to have better AI classes assigned.

But aside from them having better pilots, nothing gives the impression they have better pilots.

but nothing is said in game about shivans being better pilots

[TrashMan]

Except that, y'know, if you open up the mission files, the Shivans tend to have better AI classes assigned.

But aside from them having better pilots, nothing gives the impression they have better pilots.

Gameplay and story segragation?

The number of dead shivans by your hands (and of other GTVA forces)? The fact that no single GTVA pilot mentions shivans piloting prowess anywhere?

[Qent]

Retail AI profiles don't do a good job of establishing pilot skill because it's hard to distinguish their effects from those of just having better ships and guns. While I would consider it canon that Shivans are better pilots, I'd need SEXPs and dialog to really feel it in the campaign. Like WiH lol.

[General Battuta]

Except that, y'know, if you open up the mission files, the Shivans tend to have better AI classes assigned.

But aside from them having better pilots, nothing gives the impression they have better pilots.

Gameplay and story segragation?

The number of dead shivans by your hands (and of other GTVA forces)?

Their guns are bad and you get to restart when you die. They don't.

The fact that no single GTVA pilot mentions shivans piloting prowess anywhere?

They don't talk about piloting prowess period. They do talk a lot about how scary Shivans are.

[headdie]

because they are our technological superiors not that they display any special piloting ability or tactical prowess