My first

[James McGuire (OP)]

Whelp after finally getting all the issues sorted with screen resolutions and the rest I just spent a whole day playing this game instead of doing what I'm supposed to be doing and studying.

I am loving it.

Just had my first run in with Aliens. Thirty three 800 Ton Meson armed 'Obliterator' class gun ships which completely obliterated my two 7000 Ton 'Ned Kelly' class jump cruisers representing the entirety of my armed naval force without me being able to get a single shot back.

I am now frantically re-jigging all my sensors so they detect ships of such a small size whilst desperately finishing all the advances that were in the works for new near-Ultraviolet lasers and higher level capacitors before retooling my shipyards to build them 8 at a time.

I haven't had this much fun getting my arse handed to me in a long time  .

Meson Lasers apparently pass through armour I'm assuming then shields are the only way to stop them?

[welchbloke]

I haven't had this much fun getting my arse handed to me in a long time  .

Meson Lasers apparently pass through armour I'm assuming then shields are the only way to stop them?

Killing them before they get within Meson range would be better    I tend to use missiles against this type of opponent.

[James McGuire (OP)]

Sadly my brand sparkling new destroyers found that one out the hard way  .... oh and now there are 53 Obliterators 

 

[welchbloke]

Sadly my brand sparkling new destroyers found that one out the hard way  .... oh and now there are 53 Obliterators 

 

Yes they tend to breed 

[Brian Neumann]

Meson weapons ignore all shields and armour.  Their drawback vs other beam weapons is that they have 1/2 the range they would normally otherwise have and they only do 1 point of damage per shot.

Beam weapon damage is normally calculated as the damage the weapon does at point blank range (10cm laser is 3, 10cm railgun is 1 but it gets 4 shots) times the range modifier.  For a meson the range is calculated like it was a laser, but then is halved.

For mesons this has two significant effects.  The first is that as you get bigger caliber weapons you normally do more damage, mesons are fixed at 1 point of damage.  The only benifit for the larger size meson is the extra range.  The second effect is harder to see in combat.  Large systems, or those especially designed to have more than 1 HTK (hit to kill) may not be destroyed when hit by a meson.  A good example is a magazine with 2 points HTK,  when hit by a meson the chance of actually destroying the magazine is 1/2 (Weapon damage divided by hits to kill of system).  Another good example is with turret weapons.  They often have a fairly high htk number.  Any time this occurs the chance is determined seperately from all other hits.  So if in one round your quad 20cm laser turret is it 10 times with a meson then the chance of any one hit hit destroying it would be 1/12 or about 8% on each shot.  This can be important when shooting a ship with lots of large systems as your hits may often be ignored.

Brian

[James McGuire (OP)]

Meson weapons ignore all shields and armour...

Which would explain why the 24 shield systems I put in place seemed to do nothing  .

Over to you ECM  , and to lasers that can shoot out past 70, 000 km

Fortunately they don't seem to be interested in coming through the jump gate that I built for those nice brand spanking new destroyers to pass through.