Active Sensors and Fire Controls

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Ouch, means I am reading the ranges wrong, who ever these Aliens are they are fast 16km/s. ok thanks was my mistake, I was reading it as 3748 but actually it is 3748k km which means 3 million not 3700 hundred, Boy do I feel dumb.


Bullet

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OK this time I have my ew set, under the battle screen where you have the eccm, fire control ,weapons and missiles I have it set as follow, I select my fire control, beam, then assign ew to it, select the 25 cm lasers, then target assignment and this is what I get.
http://s949.photobucket.com/albums/ad339/bhockstad/?action=view&current=Newlog.png.
I am at a loss as to why I can not shoot beams, unless I broke something while giving earth more mins... Please let me know.


Bullet

[ZimRathbone]

OK this time I have my ew set, under the battle screen where you have the eccm, fire control ,weapons and missiles I have it set as follow, I select my fire control, beam, then assign ew to it, select the 25 cm lasers, then target assignment and this is what I get.
http://s949.photobucket.com/albums/ad339/bhockstad/?action=view&current=Newlog.png.
I am at a loss as to why I can not shoot beams, unless I broke something while giving earth more mins... Please let me know.


Bullet

According to that screenshot the Bremen is trying to hit the Hornets at 19 Million Kilometers (19,000,000 km) - which is WAAAAY out of your Beam Fire control range - Your Missile Fire controls are targeting fine but you need to close the range MUCH more to get the beams in - max range seems to be 480 thousand Km (480,000km) and I would not be surprised to see the range around half that before you get regular hits.

Slainthe

[Vanigo]

Yeah, you've got exactly the same problem as last time. You should read distances more carefully. Also, there's a show max weapon range option on the system map you could use, if you really can't tell the difference between an m and a k.

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So basically you need to be merged to fight with beams weapons, no wonder my beam ships get smoked... Whelp looks like missils for me. Thanks for your help.


Bullet

[Vanigo]

Well, beams are at a heavy disadvantage in open space, but they're great for jump point defense, and can be quite effective in ambush (typically mounted on FACs).

[Hawkeye]

So basically you need to be merged to fight with beams weapons, no wonder my beam ships get smoked... Whelp looks like missils for me. Thanks for your help.


Bullet

While I use missiles heavily myself, you might sing a different song once your economy crushes due to running out of minerals because you are constantly building missiles or once your main battlefleet runs out of missiles and gets clobbered by a beam armed NPR (been there, done that   )

So, the advice here is, yes, missiles are great, but don´t over-concentrate on them and allways have something as a backup, once this kind of situation happens.

[Brian Neumann]

If you build your ships faster than your enemy ships you can actually do quite well without offensive missiles.  You will need a lot of point defense beam weapons, and it really helps to have missile armed ships for point defense.  The thing is you do not need great launcher tech for your counter missiles.  You will need to get your warhead damage multiplier up a bit (around x5 works well) so you are not using to much of your size 1 missile's capacity on the warhead but after that the engine reasearch is a derivative of your ship engine reasearch.  The only other major cost of reasearch is for missile agility.  Once you have the launcher rate 3 you can fire your counter missiles every 10 seconds.  Use your missile escorts to thin out large salvo's that your beam point defense cant handle well and you will be able to survive a lot of incomming missiles.  Once they are out of missiles things get easier.  There are a lot of tricks to this though, so have fun figuring them out. 
To give you a hand the best dual purpose weapons to use for point defense are the lasers and mesons, and to a lesser extent railguns.  Railguns overall have about the same chance to shoot down an incomming missile as a turret mounted laser/meson without the mass penalty of the turret.  They are however horribly outranged by both lasers and mesons.  Lasers have better range than the mesons, but mesons ignore armour so they are really good for ripping appart anything that does get into their range.

Brian

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I just ran into the low mineral scenario, so this is what I decided, I have a mix of ships and I figure I will engage missiles first while my beam ships close as I can make them faster. I did run into a hostile at a jump point and I was within range, 10k and my beams tore them up In fact I did not fire a missile . Thanks again for the help, I now have researched beam control 100k so this should help some
 I still am finding the range confusing, but the more I read the better understanding I am getting.


Bullet

[UnLimiTeD]

It might be an option to just boost the economy.^^