Well, first of all there are a couple issues with your ship design. You've got a resolution 1 sensor on it, but the only good reason to use one is for point defense, and the ship has no PD weapons. (And it's too short-ranged for countermissiles, anyway.) Second, it has no maintenance modules at all. See the IFR 13.9%? That means there's a 13.9% chance of something breaking every five day increment - and it goes up the longer you stay away from home without refits. With no maintenance storage, you can't fix them, either. Third, your longer-ranged sensor has only half the range of your missiles; the other half of the range is wasted. That's fine if you plan to deploy them with another ship class with better radar, though.
Anyway, your existing fleet is screwed. Did you have your sensors on? That should have picked them up at a decent distance, but sometimes with long increments fleets can seemingly warp in on top of each other. Even if you'd spotted them at range, though, you wouldn't have had enough missiles to put them all down. You'll have to rebuild. Do you have PDCs on Earth? The mothership may or may not find the jump gate, but if it does it'll head for Earth, and a few good PDCs should be able to put it down. You're likely to lose a bunch of ships on the way, though. If you don't have any PDCs, build some. Armor is useless against swarm ships, so you can skimp on it for now. What you want is lots of missile tubes, and lots of missiles to put in them. (You don't need to worry about magazines, though; PDCs can load missiles from the population instantly.) The queen takes a beating to put down, and the more tubes you have the less shield regeneration you'll have to worry about.
Oh, and if you have no good scientists, build more academies. The more academies you have, the more commanders you get, and some fraction of them will be scientists. The more scientists you get, the more good scientists you get.
Well then, the resolution 1 sensor was really designed just to get some information on the enemy missile capabilities, since this ship was designed to defend against other NPRs (And for serving as cannon fodder to the Precursors) and as such, it isn't particularly suited for combat with the Swarm.
I already know about all the Maintenance stuff, but I like to play without it, so if I could, I would remove even the ones that are in design as of now.
The Longer-Ranged sensor stuff, actually is something that I didn't knew, thanks about that.
Now for the other half:
My fleet was screwed, now it exists no more. I did have the Active Sensors on but they cover such a tiny area that I'm surprised, that I was surprized about what happened.
Yeah, I ordered a full 30 day increment since no one got to my fleet in the 2 days. The little buggers targeted each ship at a time, and that slowed them down a bit. (enough to make the slaugher take around 40 seconds to finish)
I managed to fire 12 missiles at a couple of them, but the missiles did no damage whatsoever, and the bastards had only level 2 armour!
I got no PDCs, since I was counting on the fleet to decrease the unrest in Mars, thought I'm pretty sure they haven't found the Jump Gate, since they where hidden for more than 5 years!
I'm probably safe for now, thought I've been lurking throught the forums and I think I found a solution: Mines! I'll place a couple around the Jump Gate, the bastards come in, the mines launch the missiles, the bastards don't see it and get blown up, and if they don't get blown up they will probably be crippled enough for my crappy ships to take them out. (Except for the queen of course)
I'll try to build some PDCs just in case thought.
The Academies, damm! I knew that I forgot something, I'll rush to build 15 of them (ultra gigantic stockpile of Minerals on Earth)
That S22-R60 active sensor will only detect 800-ton targets at 1.5 m-km anyway... that's barely enough time to get off a single salvo at them, considering how fast they move. Even if you detected them, you aren't likely to hit them with those missiles. Surely you can build more accurate missiles with Ion tech level? My current (size-6) Ion-tech missiles have more than three times as good a to-Hit chance:
Missile Size: 6 MSP (0.3 HS) Warhead: 4 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 15
Speed: 30000 km/s Endurance: 28 minutes Range: 50.0m km
Cost Per Missile: 4.125
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 450% 3k km/s 150% 5k km/s 90% 10k km/s 45%
Materials Required: 1x Tritanium 3.55x Gallicite Fuel x2500
Development Cost for Project: 412RP
Have you read my thread in the Academy section... "Missile Design for Noobs"?
EDIT: link: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,4215.0.html
Yeah, I know the sensors are as good as crap now but I got nothing else, atleast for that size and tech.
I was trying to get the size on the missiles kinda low, so that it doesn't take more that a few months to make, cost less, and be able to shoot more that them, but since the warhead is, effectively, useless I will be obligated to make them bigger, I think I'm lucky as, I just expanded one of my Naval Yards to 9000 tons.
But now I got Mag Plasma Drives and the speed of the frigate got up to 4800km/s, it aint much but in a few months I'll have better missiles, until then, I'm just going to build up my military.
No, I'll read it now, thanks.
Thanks for the advice you two.