Author Topic: Is this silly for a Heavy Battlecruiser?  (Read 2744 times)

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Offline Neceros (OP)

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Is this silly for a Heavy Battlecruiser?
« on: March 26, 2018, 10:28:12 PM »
This is going to be the flag ship in a combat fleet. It's the biggest ship, and so should get targeted more often. That said, is this ridiculous or can you see anything I should change?

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Overlord class Heavy Battlecruiser    61 450 tons     1575 Crew     22548.4 BP      TCS 1229  TH 7500  EM 6000
6102 km/s    JR 6-50     Armour 40-138     Shields 200-300     Sensors 900/250/0/0     Damage Control Rating 60     PPV 216.72
Maint Life 0.75 Years     MSP 6880    AFR 1006%    IFR 14%    1YR 9191    5YR 137867    Max Repair 1895 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 60 months    Spare Berths 1   

2205 J66000(6-50) Military Jump Drive     Max Ship Size 66000 tons    Distance 50k km     Squadron Size 6
2201 2500 EP Magnetic Fusion Drive (3)    Power 2500    Fuel Use 84.85%    Signature 2500    Exp 20%
Fuel Capacity 5 000 000 Litres    Range 17.3 billion km   (32 days at full power)
Xi R300/360 Shields (40)   Total Fuel Cost  600 Litres per hour  (14 400 per day)

Twin 35cm C8 Far X-Ray Laser Turret (8x2)    Range 480 000km     TS: 10000 km/s     Power 64-16     RM 8    ROF 20        32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 28 25
2201 Gauss Cannon R4-100% (4x4)    Range 40 000km     TS: 10000 km/s     Accuracy Modifier 100%     RM 4    ROF 5        1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
Fire Control S02 240-10000 H50 (1)    Max Range: 480 000 km   TS: 10000 km/s     98 96 94 92 90 88 85 83 81 79
Fire Control S00.5 60-10000 H50 (1)    Max Range: 120 000 km   TS: 10000 km/s     92 83 75 67 58 50 42 33 25 17
2201 Inertial Confinement Fusion Reactor Technology PB-1 (1)     Total Power Output 132    Armour 0    Exp 5%

Thermal Sensor TH50-900 (50%) (1)     Sensitivity 900     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  900m km
EM Detection Sensor EM50-250 (1)     Sensitivity 250     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  250m km

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
-N
 

Offline TheBawkHawk

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Re: Is this silly for a Heavy Battlecruiser?
« Reply #1 on: March 27, 2018, 12:09:37 AM »
Overall, it looks good to me except for a few minor things.

1. The speed might be a bit too low to catch a sufficiently advanced ship, but if your enemies are slower than you then it should be okay.

2. No active sensors, although I'm guessing you have sensors on an accompanying ship. NPRs like to prioritize shooting at sensor ships when they can if I'm not mistaken, so that might be something to keep in mind. Even putting on a tiny active sensor, just in case your sensor ship goes down while you're in a brawl. Just flip on the reserve sensor and you're good.

This is what I tend to do, with each ship having a small active sensor just large enough for it to still be able to do it's job, just in case the main fleet sensors get knocked out. It can get expensive on the uridium depending on your fleet doctrine, but it's saved my bacon a few times.

3. The maintenance life is much lower than the deployment time. This might not be a huge issue, but it'll end up costing you a bit more minerals in maintenance supplies and frequent overhauls.

4. Might not hurt to drop a few layers of armour to put in some more fuel efficient engines. If you've got a healthy fuel production and some hefty tankers it should be fine, but I personally would look to drop the fuel consumption a bit.

Other than that, maybe adding a few spare fire controls just in case they get damaged. Nothing worse than finally getting into beam range and then getting your fire controls knocked out due to shock damage or something.
 
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Offline Neceros (OP)

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Re: Is this silly for a Heavy Battlecruiser?
« Reply #2 on: March 27, 2018, 12:49:32 AM »
I have issues with maintenance and engineering spaces.

What stats should I shoot for with regards to failure rates and MSP amounts? Do you always supply enough MSP to equal the deployment time?
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Iranon

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Re: Is this silly for a Heavy Battlecruiser?
« Reply #3 on: March 27, 2018, 12:54:56 AM »
Very costly for its capability.
With that amount of armour, I'd probably call this a battleship!
Are you playing with maintenance off? Otherwise, deployment time and maintenance life seem mismatched.

4 engines at 1.5 power and 1m fuel would achieve the same speed and slightly more range on the same tonnage with half the fuel consumption.
Personally, I'd favour a larger propulsion plant for more speed, 10000km/s would be a reasonable target as you could remove the turret gear from your lasers and replace the Gauss Cannons with 10cm railguns without losing capability. Slash some of the passive defences to make space,  because "speed is armour" in Aurora, and you gain the speed practically for free.

That would mostly be useful if you could do something similar to your entire fleet... a speed gain just for the flagship may not matter much in practice. At its current speed, he main artillery and associated fire control is fine if you expect fast opponents.
Your Gauss Cannons aren't tracking fast enough to outperform 10cm railguns ton for ton. Increasing turret gear and FC capability is an alternative.

You have a nice passive sensor suite, but I'd throw in an active that allows it to fight if everything goes pear-shaped (enemy is target the fleet equally, this is the lone survivor because of heavy armour). For beams, this can be tiny.

 

Offline Barkhorn

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Re: Is this silly for a Heavy Battlecruiser?
« Reply #4 on: March 27, 2018, 11:47:55 AM »
Your sizes are weird.  You've got a jump engine capable of jumping 66,000 tons, but your ship is only ~61,000 tons.  That's 5,000 tons of jump capacity going to waste.  I suspect there's also some slipway size going to waste, because your ship's size isn't divisible by 500.

Your laser fire control is too small.  Accuracy decreases with range, with your weapon being 50% accurate at 50% range.  So you'll almost never hit at max range.
 

Offline TT

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Re: Is this silly for a Heavy Battlecruiser?
« Reply #5 on: March 27, 2018, 02:36:09 PM »
I think everyone covered the main issues. One thing I thought I would mention is that you should put your main active sensors on this ship.  If it is the biggest and most visible, then the bad guys are going to prioritize this as a target. If you can use this ship to draw there fire, then you skimp on the rest of your fleets armor

Also, if you are making this ship to function as part of a fleet, you should establish a fleet speed and then develop all of your ships to go that speed.

Finally, that seems lik a lot of armor.  You could safely cut it down by half or more and use the space to give the ship more punch.

Good luck
 

Offline Neceros (OP)

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Re: Is this silly for a Heavy Battlecruiser?
« Reply #6 on: March 27, 2018, 03:58:40 PM »
Thanks for the replies everyone!

About the armor, perhaps you guys could enlighten me as to how it works? I see the weapon signatures on the wiki, but how does that relate to armor?

Does armor have a depreciating value?


Thanks!
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Offline Barkhorn

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Re: Is this silly for a Heavy Battlecruiser?
« Reply #7 on: March 27, 2018, 10:13:13 PM »
The number you pick for your armor is how many layers deep it is.  Damage carves triangular holes into it, the depth of which depends on the type and amount of damage.  The damage value for a weapon is how many armor panels get destroyed.  Missiles, rail guns, and plasma carronades blast an isosceles triangle-shaped hole, lasers and particle beams blast a steeper triangle.  A missile will penetrate the square root of it's damage.  So a 9 damage missile will carve out a triangle 3 layers deep, totaling 9 armor panels.  5 in the top layer, 3 in the middle, 1 in the last.  A ship with 3 or more armor would take no internal damage, a ship with 2 layers would take 1, and a ship with 1 layer will take 4 internal damage.  This isn't including shock damage, which I don't know how to calculate.  I also don't know how exactly laser and particle beam damage is calculated, suffice to say it penetrates deeper.
 
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Offline Gabethebaldandbold

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Re: Is this silly for a Heavy Battlecruiser?
« Reply #8 on: March 28, 2018, 06:46:16 PM »
Thanks for the replies everyone!

About the armor, perhaps you guys could enlighten me as to how it works? I see the weapon signatures on the wiki, but how does that relate to armor?

Does armor have a depreciating value?


Thanks!
personally I find armour to be very usefull when you dont have speed advantage, and also when your enemy has a solid hiting offense, but speed is of the essence, because not only does it reduce the window of time the enemy has on you, it also reduces its chance to hit. but you see, a well designed missile will consistently hit fast ships for its tech level, and at your tech level, that can mean 80% chance at 10000km depending on how much damage you want on your missiles. tracking speeds are usually at least 10000 km/s for most turrets so anything below the speed of a fighter is not going to save you. to have your speed be your defense, you would need to go at least 12000 km/s, more if possible, otherwise, it is usefull to have armour. also for an engagement to be viable, you need to be eigther faster or longer ranged than you enemies. preferably both. otherwise you are a dead man, a very dead man, and you only hope is that they only they are using missiles and they run out, and even then the enemy might just ram you, and no armour is going to save you from ramming atacks.

but armour doesn't save you from all atacks, mesons and microwaves(?) completely ignore it, and high damage beam weapons in general will eat through most armours like it was nothing, so dont expect to be imune(although with 40 armour you can probably expect to be safe from almost everything). Shields are usually better at dealing with this sort of thing since they are a flat hip point bar that needs to be degenerated, and it regenerates over time, to if you want to be really durable you could probably cut your armour to 20 and put all the rest in shields. that would put in a position where you can probably survive most alpha strikes from missile using enemies, while still being considerably stronger against beam using enemies.

Also if you are planing to use any of your weapons for point defense I seriously recomend you pump these tracking speeds up as much as you can, with some care to not overengineer your turrets. its much beter to fire 5 shots with a 100% hit chance than 20 shots at 20% hit chance and you have the spare space in your jump drive to make it 16 shots with those gaus canons, with very good hit chances, and that can mean completely ignoring 10-13 missiles so if I were you I would do that.

Having active sensors big enough to cover you weapon's range is generally a good idea (unless you have missiles, then you need your designated sensor ship to stay alive, but that is generally much easier when the enemy is at several millions of kilometers away), because it means no matter how bad things go, if you still have ships, you can still keep fighting. no fleet can fight without seeing what its shooting.

but overall I think your design is very solid and I think you did a good job drawing this ship, the whole idea behind a flagship is that it stays alive, is fearsome and leads the fleet, and you did that very well. your ship is one of the harder nuts to crack from what I have seen here in the bureau, 40 armor is nothing to be sneezed at, way more survival capabilities than I have ever put in a ship, and although your firepower is not the most impressive for 60ktons it IS decent, and since its a flagship, it assume it goes around with a fleet, and said fleet can do the dirty work for it. so long as you dont let the enemy bombard you from outside your range you should be fine.

By the way the name selection for this class was just perfect, never seen one go so well with a flagship
To beam, or not to beam.   That is the question
the answer is you beam. and you better beam hard.
 
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Offline 83athom

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Re: Is this silly for a Heavy Battlecruiser?
« Reply #9 on: April 02, 2018, 11:59:10 AM »
I have issues with maintenance and engineering spaces.
What stats should I shoot for with regards to failure rates and MSP amounts? Do you always supply enough MSP to equal the deployment time?
You should be looking at your overall maintenance life instead of failure rates or MSP stores. I generally put maintenance life higher than deployment time. As a general rule of thumb I try to keep around 1 engineering space for every 1000-1500 tons of ship, so for you would be 41-62 engineering spaces. Although generally I like to keep around 2 years of deployment time for warships, not 5 years, in order to bring life support requirements way down and reduce the overall tonnage by a bit.

Now, my nitpicks of the ship;
1) Far to heavily armored while light on the shields. Ships of this size benefit more from stacking shields than they do armor. I'd at the very least double your shields while dropping armor by at least 10 (preferably by 20).

2) Far to lightly armed. Where are all the weapons? While on paper the lasers should be enough, generally you should be future proofing ships of this size with more defensive and secondary armaments. Missiles in reduced size launchers are very nice for giving a big extra punch for little extra tonnage. And I'd prefer using more gauss of smaller size compared to a 4x6t turret as at that point making something that large track something that fast is just a waste and inefficient use of tonnage. And then you should have other secondary weapons that fire every increment at a good range in order to deal with larger numbers of smaller ships. Also, CIWS systems on a ship this size is always a good idea (even if its just 2-4 of them)

3) You lack adequate sensors and fire control. The FC controlling your main gun should push its "max range" about 50% further than the max range of your weapons, to ensure that you can still hit targets out at the weapons' limits. You also lack main sensor capabilities. While you could use a dedicated sensor ship to bring your overall sensor size down, ships of this size should be more than capable of defending themselves solo, but without active sensors it outright can't (unless you run a complicated multi-stage missile launcher setup with mines, buoys, etc).

4) You lack fuel capability. For a ship this size and with a deployment that long, you really should have a lot more range than that. Even if you run support tankers to supplement it, the ship should have enough to limp home alone without a fleet.

5) To long deployment. At that point, you're just wasting tonnage on life support systems and inflating your crew requirements.

6) Separate your reactor into a few smaller reactors. One lucky hit with a messon and your entire ship will go boom.

About the armor, perhaps you guys could enlighten me as to how it works? I see the weapon signatures on the wiki, but how does that relate to armor? Does armor have a depreciating value?
Like others have said, the value you set is its raw thickness. The number right next to it is the surface area of the armor belt, which effects the chances of a round that impacts to where it hits on the ship. Notice how this number does not increase linearly with ship tonnage, it increases at in an exponential inverse . Coupling that with the fact that the weight of your armor is a function of its "width" and thickness, this means armor thickness weighs less per total thickness the larger your ship gets.

However, as I stated in my #1 nitpick of your ship; shields are far more valuable to a ship of this size than armor is. Despite armor getting more efficient with ship size they still weigh an absolute metric ****ton and once they get damaged they are basically useless dead weight until you get the ship all the way back to the shipyard for repairs, and add on the potential shock damage you will take from heavy hits which damage your ship through armor even if it has yet to be breached. Shields on the other hand constantly recharge their strength and completely absorb shock damage while they're still up. With enough shields, you can essentially absorb damage without your shield strength actually dropping. This is a function between your total shield strength multiplied by 5 then divided by your recharge. With your current shields, you can take 3.3 damage a turn without them dropping. However, when you double your shields you get 6.6 protection a turn. Here is where the efficiency comes in; Say you take 100 damage from an alpha (firing all weapons at the same time) every 20 seconds. Every alpha, your 200 protection shields have a net loss of 86 damage per alpha (21 damage a turn). Meanwhile, the doubled strength shields being hit with the same alpha have a net loss of 73 damage per alpha (18 per turn). This means your original shields will fall and you'll start taking hull damage in 10 turns, however the doubled strength shields will fall and you'll start taking hull damage in 23 turns. Now, if we triple the original shields instead, you'll only be taking 60 damage per alpha (15 per turn) and you're shields will take 40 turns to fall. So for 3x the weight you get 4x the protection.

Now, my personal preference is to have around 5-10 percent of your tonnage in large ships dedicated to shielding. 10% of 62000 tons is 6200, divide that by 50 tons (weight of shield) and you get 124 shields. Now, look at that; that is the 3x your current value, just like my last example above.
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