Posted by: Michael Sandy
« on: September 27, 2019, 02:11:46 PM »
I really like that gunboat concept. Except possibly the cloak. I am mixed on that. A missile ship with that kind of cloak would be awesome. You could engage with relatively short-ranged missiles from outside of enemy AMM fire controls.
However, as a beam ship that has to close against missiles, that means there is still a good bit of distance that it is exposed to enemy missile fire... or would be if the AI included res 1 fire controls as a backup to their main anti-ship fire controls.
Among the things that I like about it is that you could have a bunch of these lurking with engines down and the enemy would have no way of knowing they were there while you were tracking them on passives.
I like the concept of build a fast parasite craft around a weapon and fire control. However, the cost of it is daunting, it costs about 40% more than the Chatam.
On the subject of, I suggest that you include a res-1 fire control on your missile ships, as an RP matter, if nothing else, on the grounds that it should be able to engage ship types that it knows can exist.
I DO like the Chatam's endurance stats. MSP > x2 MAX repair, and 12 months might be a little long, but it is a good standard. However, rapid fire long ranged missiles is rarely a good mix. Rapid fire 2-stage missiles where the 1st stage is matched to the speed of your cruiser, so all missiles separate at the same time, that time on target style is potentially very effective. If you had about 4x as many .25 sized launchers, you would have a larger volley to penetrate enemy point defense.
And your magazine looks a bit smaller than I would prefer. If you could replace your entire launcher system with box launchers and have the same total missiles, you may have insufficient magazine to launcher ratios. A rule of thumb I go by is at least as many HS in magazines as you have in launchers.
With long ranged missile ships, the cost of the missiles in the later game can exceed the cost of the ship. So you want to be economical with them, which means firing a volley, waiting and observing the effect, and then firing again. Something that rapid fire launchers would be somewhat inefficient for.
It would be highly effective at defeating most enemy small craft, which is very nice.
You may consider a budget version of it, with only 1-2 full sized fire controls, and a bunch of backup small fire controls, with which it can engage an enemy just outside of beam range with a fire control for each launcher.
An interesting variant might be to have a res 500 fire control as well, for anti-civilian shipping use, with even longer ranged 2-stage missiles.
For fun, see what kind of res 500 active sensor you could put on an unarmed gunboat variant. It would be noisy as frakk, but it could always turn that off, and you could use it to bait and kite an enemy around. Or see what the largest sensor you could put into it without having to retool. In order to get the best use of your gunboats' range, you will want to have some kind of sensor variant. You may also look into a tanker variant for your gunboats, giving your strike wing more range.
If I had that fleet and wanted to make it work with the least expensive and least time consuming changes, I would research some cheap 1 MSP decoy missiles that I would use to bleed an enemy of AMMs, then send in the Fires, where hopefully their beam range would exceed the range the enemy could use anti-ship fire controls against them.