Mid game beam ships

[user-unknown (OP)]

I'm planning on building a fleet of beam ships for assaulting a jump point and could use some advice.  I've always really concentrated on missile ships before - I have built a few meson frigates in this game, but they were pretty much just engines plus as many fixed mesons as I could fit.


NPR is currently friendly but I can trivially kill swarm and precursor ships and feel like trying out a homeworld invasion.  They have a large fleet (I think 100+ ships) on the single jump point in to their homeworld, which I could currently just fly past as an ally and then obliterate with missiles from extreme range, but that seems somewhat boring so I'm going to kill a few of their ships in Sol first to warn them of my intentions

Anyway, my espionage teams have found a few of their ship designs and they seem to have a max range of about 200k km with their fire controls, in those designs at least.  My current plan is to build several groups of 5 of these plus a group leader with a 6-750 jump drive, combat transit in and proceed to murder them from about 300k.  I will probably take quite a lot of missile fire at the time, but I'm hopeful my gauss turrets will thin them out enough to let the shields and armor take them.  Hopefully. 

My current preferred design has a bunch of advanced particle beams which will do 64 damage total.  Assuming they actually hit.

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Paladin class Destroyer    12,000 tons     1368 Crew     5272.4 BP      TCS 240  TH 1920  EM 1500
8000 km/s     Armour 9-46     Shields 50-600     Sensors 32/40/0/0     Damage Control Rating 36     PPV 95.68
Maint Life 3.92 Years     MSP 1785    AFR 177%    IFR 2.5%    1YR 185    5YR 2768    Max Repair 270 MSP

Inertial Confinement Fusion Drive E3 (12)    Power 160    Fuel Use 30%    Signature 160    Armour 0    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 250,000 Litres    Range 125.0 billion km   (180 days at full power)
Xi R600/15 Shields (10)   Total Fuel Cost  150 Litres per day

Particle Beam-8 (8)    Range 320,000km     TS: 8000 km/s     Power 15-8    ROF 10        8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8
Single Gauss Cannon R3-100 Turret (4x5)    Range 30,000km     TS: 32000 km/s     Power 0-0     RM 3    ROF 5        1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Fire Control S02 37.5-32000 (4)    Max Range: 75,000 km   TS: 32000 km/s     87 73 60 47 33 20 7 0 0 0
Fire Control S03 225-8000 (2)    Max Range: 450,000 km   TS: 8000 km/s     98 96 93 91 89 87 84 82 80 78
Inertial Confinement Fusion Reactor (1)     Total Power Output 6    Armour 0    Exp 5%
Inertial Confinement Fusion Reactor (5)     Total Power Output 60    Armour 0    Exp 5%

Active Search Sensor MR14-R1 (1)     GPS 36     Range 14.4m km    Resolution 1
Active Search Sensor MR170-R140 (1)     GPS 5040     Range 170.4m km    Resolution 140
Active Search Sensor MR57-R16 (1)     GPS 576     Range 57.6m km    Resolution 16
Thermal Sensor TH1-32 (1)     Sensitivity 32     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  32m km
EM Detection Sensor EM1-40 (1)     Sensitivity 40     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  40m km

Compact ECCM-2 (2)         ECM 50

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
I haven't really seen many particle beam ships - is there some reason most people don't use them?  I can swap the beams 1-1 for a bunch of fixed 25cm X ray lasers which do 16 damage at close range (or turreted variants) and have a max range of somewhere around 900? (max fc is 600k though)  The particle beams will probably do more damage at the range I want to stay, but I guess it might be useful to be able to hit at 600, even if it is only for pitiful damage.   

Example of possible alternative, not entirely finished:

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Swiftsure class Cruiser    12,000 tons     1284 Crew     5439.2 BP      TCS 240  TH 1920  EM 1500
8000 km/s     Armour 10-46     Shields 50-600     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 35     PPV 101.76
Maint Life 2.06 Years     MSP 1416    AFR 230%    IFR 3.2%    1YR 447    5YR 6698    Max Repair 450 MSP

Inertial Confinement Fusion Drive E3 (12)    Power 160    Fuel Use 30%    Signature 160    Armour 0    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 250,000 Litres    Range 125.0 billion km   (180 days at full power)
Xi R600/15 Shields (10)   Total Fuel Cost  150 Litres per day

Twin 25cm C8 Soft X-ray Laser Turret (4x2)    Range 600,000km     TS: 10000 km/s     Power 32-16     RM 6    ROF 10        16 16 16 16 16 16 13 12 10 9
Single Gauss Cannon R3-100 Turret (4x5)    Range 30,000km     TS: 32000 km/s     Power 0-0     RM 3    ROF 5        1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Fire Control S05 300-10000 (2)    Max Range: 600,000 km   TS: 10000 km/s     98 97 95 93 92 90 88 87 85 83
Fire Control S02 37.5-32000 (4)    Max Range: 75,000 km   TS: 32000 km/s     87 73 60 47 33 20 7 0 0 0

Compact ECCM-2 (2)         ECM 50

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
This design needs more work though, it's lacking sensors, sufficient engineering space and reactors so can't actually fire atm...

Any suggested changes from people here?  Or things that I have missed?  I have pretty much equal tech for lasers, mesons, particle beams and railguns so am fairly flexible

Currently have fire control range 75, speed 8000, and capacitor recharge 8.

[Theokrat]

Well the particle beams do not offer much of an advantage. They do 8 damage throughout their weapon range of 320k km. Laser damage falls of linearly with distance, but starts out much higher. In fact with a max range of 600,000 lasers will still do 7 damage at 320k km - but of course reach out much further and do much more damage at closer range. Plus I believe lasers are slightly smaller, so they enjoy a bit of advantage, but I might be mistaken. So generally I would advice for lasers.

Your tactic of picking the enemy apart from distance can of course only work if you can keep the range open. So you need to be sure that you are faster than the enemy. I am only saying that because I see that you are using turreted lasers with a tracking speed of 10,000 km/s, which is only useful if the enemy goes faster than you (in which case the whole tactics will fall apart quickly). You will also need very good task-force training levels for your beam-armed ships, otherwise you are in for a nasty surprise.

Generally in order to win, beam-armed ships must be better than their opponents in two out of three characteristics: Speed, Volume of Fire, and Range. If you have better volume of fire and speed, you can close in and then do more damage per second. If you have better volume of fire and range, you can be sure that the enemy must move into range, where you can deal more damage than he. And lastly if you have better speed and range you can dictate the range and pick the enemy apart form the distance.
The point is that with 100 ships your enemy is pretty much bound to be superior in volume of fire. Even if all of his ships would only have a single weapon you might be hard-pressed to match that. I am just saying this because you have quite a lot of offensive weapons. If you have an advantage in range and speed, then you dont really need this, if not then you are toast anyway. So I would suggest using less offensive weapons and boost the survivability of your ships through much more active defenses.

Mixed notes: you are using quite a lot of firecontrolls/weapons, in particular for the gaussguns, one firecontroll per two gaussguns might be more efficient. Your Swiftsure class lacks power plants and active sensors (yes, I know you said they are not finished). The Paladin's active senors are maybe a bit oversized for its intended role. If you just want to jump-attack you would only need to spot enemies at circa 1 m km for weapon-management. The tactical intel can be gathered by a single search sensor on the jump-tender, so you could save quite bit of space and costs on the beam-ships, while still having some redundancy in case the big ship gets killed.

[user-unknown (OP)]

Good point about the turret speeds - I am faster than them, so I'm not quite sure why I bothered with turrets...  Might have been so that I could also hit swarm soldiers but I really can't remember

The sensors on the Paladin are actually only one HS each - I have very good sensor tech

I'll have another look and see if I can sort things out more - to be honest, the number of particle beams is possibly slightly excessive, but I wanted an excuse to try out the advanced techs I salvaged from ruins, and was trying to make a ship capable of taking out other combatants in a single round.  I have now realised though that 64 damage is less then a single salvo of missiles from my current cruisers does, and that won't normally kill a ship outright...

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Particle beams only look sorta bad compared to lasers.  At equivalent tech, they usually seem to have a slight advantage at their max range band compared to lasers. But they're outranged overall and worse close in.  And they can't be used for effective anti missile defence.

But since they outrange everything else they can still kinda work.  I've been contemplating a microwave/particle setup recently - particles at long range, microwaves to disable enemies that rush in.