[Jellyfish]

maybe a larger Trebuchet with more focus towards heavy hull damage

No need to make it larger, but faster. Like, railgun muzzle velocities faster.

[StarSlayer]

I always felt allowing bombers to simply dump their entire payload on one pass would have exponentially increased their effectiveness and survivability.

[General Battuta]

Yep, in addition to the aforementioned drone bomber/high speed long range payload suite we've already implemented, the Tevs are looking at a high-alpha launch system for heavy bombers so they can shoot and skedaddle.

[CT27]

Anyone else think it'd be funny to hear Steele tell bombers to 'skedaddle on out of there y'all'?   

[SaltyWaffles]

Anyone else think it'd be funny to hear Steele tell bombers to 'skedaddle on out of there y'all'?   

"Tell your Admiral we'll have another mutual bomber squadron massacre one day...but not today. Not today. Delta Wing, engage subspace drive. Skedaddle on back to Jupiter."

[-Norbert-]

The Amazon has a power output of 2.0 (equal to a Perseus, I think). I've mounted Morning Stars on them before and they did quite fine. Besides, it couldn't be too difficult to bring up the design and modify it a little with a more powerful/updated reactor. Given their original purpose and the age of the tech used to build them, I'd be very surprised if they weren't quite cheap.

How many times must it be said that tables don't mean that much?  The Amazon was never, ever flown by the player, and it was never armed with anything but training lasers.  The only thing that suggests it has as good (or 1/3 as good) a reactor as the Perseus (a ridiculous assertion, no matter what the tables say) is a line in the tables that Volition never needed to change.

Apart from that designs can be worked over and improved and components of a ship/drone can be replaced.
If the reactor or battery or whatever it runs on isn't good enough, replace it with something better suited.

[redsniper]

maybe a larger Trebuchet with more focus towards heavy hull damage, while keeping a high rate of fire, good range, and good speed

What's that? A missile that's good at everything would be good to have? You don't say!

[Aesaar]

Apart from that designs can be worked over and improved and components of a ship/drone can be replaced.
If the reactor or battery or whatever it runs on isn't good enough, replace it with something better suited.

Why bother?  Amazons were never meant for combat, and converting them to be combat ships is probably way too much trouble than it's worth.  Converting old mothballed strikecraft like the Medusa and Zeus to drones would probably be both easier and more effective.  I'm pretty sure that's what the team's actually doing.

[The E]

The point is, amazons were designed to be cheap to build, somewhat maneuverable, and able to carry an avionics package plus a little painting laser to simulate a weapon, as well as to blow up rather quickly under fire.

In order to make them combat effective, you'd have to add armor (increasing weight, necessitating bigger engines), shields (same), enough room to store a worthwhile weapons load (same, again), a more advanced avionics pack that can deal with real battlefield conditions without shorting out. In the end, you'd have a design that was an Amazon in name only; Considering the large amounts of old bomber spaceframes the GTVA has laying around in mothballs, converting them to drones by fitting a more advanced autopilot is probably cheaper.

That does not mean that there aren't going to be purpose-built drones at some point, but for now, the GTVA has decided to use up the reserves they do have instead.

[SaltyWaffles]

maybe a larger Trebuchet with more focus towards heavy hull damage, while keeping a high rate of fire, good range, and good speed

What's that? A missile that's good at everything would be good to have? You don't say!

Great job on essentially reading only the first half of a sentence and completely missing the point. The missile I was describing would A) not work as an anti-fighter or anti-bomber weapon, B) be significantly larger, more in the realm of a Cyclops or Helios than a Trebuchet--meaning that only bombers could use it, and they couldn't carry that many of them at a time, C) you can shoot it down and target it with the B key, unlike the Trebuchet, and capship turrets will target and try to intercept it as well, D) not be as effective against shields (if at all), and E) not be as maneuverable; it would take major maneuvers for even corvettes to dodge one, but it could potentially be done--but don't expect it to reliably hit specific turrets/subsystems if the target isn't sitting still.

So, good at everything? Not even remotely close. Hell, you can't even use it against targets smaller than a cruiser, and it's very feasible to shoot down by fighters or warship point defenses, with a pretty big advanced warning about the type, direction, and range of such an attack.

[Scotty]

Please cut out the abusive debate tactics, please.  Your post was utterly and completely devoid of downsides for this hypothetical Trebuchet+5 aside from being able to be shot down.  There was no mention of reduced maneuverability, reduced shield damage, increased weapon size, or reduced compatibility.  Your post only called for a Trebuchet that did more hull damage, still fired quickly, had good range, and good speed, but could be shot down.  Don't act like you explained the downsides.  You didn't.

[General Battuta]

Regular Trebs should be interceptable.

[MatthTheGeek]

Regular trebs are affected by countermeasures. Fighters have countermeasures, capships can have countermeasures too in BP canon. That can be considered as being interceptable.

[Aesaar]

No it can't.  Avoidable and interceptable are two different things.

If it wouldn't completely screw up up balance in WiH1, I would be completely behind giving the bomb flag to every heavy missile (Treb, Grimler, Paveway, with Slammer and TAG-C very maybe).

[General Battuta]

The way countermeasures work right now, capships won't be able to use them for Treb defense. That's something we would like to change.

[-Norbert-]

Why a bomb flag for a Slammer? Apart from it doing very little damage to anything that isn't a strikecraft, it "lives" far too shortly to be effectively targeted and shot down.

[The E]

A slammer at max range has a flight time of a few seconds. Long enough for turrets on bombers to engage it.

[-Norbert-]

Which makes me wonder something.
In BP the torpedoes "activate" only shortly before the impact, thus they do as good as no damage to their surroundings if they are shot down, rather than hitting, where in the original bombs always exploded full force.

Would it be possible to have something in between?

For example the Slammer, due to being shot down, can't properly deploy it's submunitions, but they still work as "classic" shrapnell and thus still cause some damage.

[MatthTheGeek]

Bombs in FS2 also had next to 0 shield damage, which isn't the case of BP bombs and torpedoes. Believe me, you WANT those things to do next than 0 damage when you're intercepting them.

[niffiwan]

Which makes me wonder something.
In BP the torpedoes "activate" only shortly before the impact, thus they do as good as no damage to their surroundings if they are shot down, rather than hitting, where in the original bombs always exploded full force.

Would it be possible to have something in between?

For example the Slammer, due to being shot down, can't properly deploy it's submunitions, but they still work as "classic" shrapnell and thus still cause some damage.

Dinky shockwaves might be able to simulate what you're thinking of.  BP already use dinky shockwaves for some missiles/bombs (IIRC), but I think it's to achieve the arm-just-prior-to-detonation effect.