Any weapon, like the 10cm railguns in the large analysis post above, that is deep enough into falloff range to only hit one damage also work just as well.
Categorically not true.
Those are 0km orbital bombardment
support rules, i.e. forward fire direction. If you consider gauss and 10cm railgun range to be a concern, then neither of us are discussing bombardment support and falloff is absolutely a consideration when shelling STOs from range. Please use
Orbital Bombardment instead.
The damage in ground combat for an energy weapon is equal to 20x the square root of its point blank damage in ship-to-ship combat. Armour penetration is equal to half the damage. Fractions are retained.
Emphasis mine.
This is, again, for 0km bombardment support. While the long-range orbital bombardment rules do not reference beam damage at range, I assure you that weapons deep in falloff do
not use their point blank damage (nor should they) for long-range, unguided orbital bombardment. The same mathematics for ground combat AP and damage do still apply at any range, so while one of my 10cm lasers at 0km applies 3 ship-to-ship damage for 17.3AP/34.6dmg, the same 10cm laser at 150kkm applies 1 ship-to-ship damage for 10AP/20dmg and lowers dust generation accordingly.
Gauss are perfect at any range they can hit while both railguns and lasers, assuming they're a small enough caliber that the fire control can put them deep enough into falloff to only hit one damage, also work great. Meson and carronades would also do but particles, missiles, and I assume microwaves would not.
The problem with Gauss, 10cm railguns, etc. is that they usually have much shorter range than the anti-ship STOs you're trying to blow up, so you will tend to take a lot of extra damage or at least have to rotate ships out to recharge their shields often enough to become a micromanagement headache. Mesons and particle beams are the only weapons which can combine low damage per shot with high range, barring such a massive tech advantage over the enemy that 90% of this discussion doesn't matter.
I've only seen STOs come in three flavors: lasers, lances, and gauss. Lasers take heavy falloff, lances are dangerous, and gauss can only do a bit of sand blasting. My experience with each is to apply relatively matched counters to avoid micromanagement:
- My 150kkm laser PD turrets put laser STOs deep enough into falloff that the shields can shoulder the rest without much, if any, micromanagement. However, given their MSP burn, I suggest railguns (see next)
- Lance STOs are rough at any range; I like to sit outside of their range with a railgun caliber just large enough to apply 1 damage from slightly further away.
- Gauss STOs lack the weight of fire that fleet-based gauss PD possesses; stepping into their range for even one 5sec increment to exchange gauss fire leaves the gauss STO too crippled to continue.
For scale, 40kt of my laser PD hull is lucky to kill one STO per increment. The same 40kt of my gauss PD hull typically scores +/-12 STO kills per increment. The shields need only take a few gauss STO hits and thankfully gauss STO lack the sustained output given their losses to do more than beat up the shields and
maybe tickle the paint.
Side note on particle beams: they bottom out at 2dmg so they'll still kick up more dust than even a meson would. They're also stupidly expensive to fire (ask me about my lance hulls, ugh); I'm still not convinced that firing failures are working as documented but I've been too lazy to collect the data.
Bombardment hit chance excludes down-sized gauss odds for some reason so 17% gauss turrets kill an order of magnitude more STO per ton than anything else
An interesting mechanical glitch I've never heard of. Has anyone else seen this? Seems unintended but I can see how the mechanics as written could accidentally ignore the reduced-size Gauss %CTH malus.
On the other hand, fire control range does not change hit chance either as their anti-STO hulls pull range; it appears that any anti-ship or anti-missile motion tracking can be ignored when firing at static planetary locations. Perhaps it is appropriate to ignore down-sized gauss odds the same as ignoring long-range fire control odds.
