First questions

[Della (OP)]

OK, so. This is my first serious, large-scale combat, and i have some questions based on my impressions.

1) lasers seem astonishingly useless. I've never once been able to even get remotely within range of anything, since all combat takes place at a range of tens of millions of kilometers due to missiles. But then, i see people posting around beam warship designs, so apparently lasers CAN be used. What am i doing wrong?

2) related, turreted point-blank defense lasers are just as useless. Sometimes, if the missile approaches fast enough, they don't even have time to open fire.Isn't it better to just ditch them completely and get more CIWS in their place?
Still, sometimes they DO hit something, and can target missiles not aimed at that ship, so i guess they're not nearly as useless as ship-to-ship lasers.

[Kurt]

OK, so. This is my first serious, large-scale combat, and i have some questions based on my impressions.

1) lasers seem astonishingly useless. I've never once been able to even get remotely within range of anything, since all combat takes place at a range of tens of millions of kilometers due to missiles. But then, i see people posting around beam warship designs, so apparently lasers CAN be used. What am i doing wrong?

2) related, turreted point-blank defense lasers are just as useless. Sometimes, if the missile approaches fast enough, they don't even have time to open fire.Isn't it better to just ditch them completely and get more CIWS in their place?
Still, sometimes they DO hit something, and can target missiles not aimed at that ship, so i guess they're not nearly as useless as ship-to-ship lasers.

1.  Lasers abd other direct fire weapons are only useful in several specific circumstances.  If combat begins at close range, like in orbit around a world with former friends or neutrals, or in a contested warp transit, then they are useful.  Otherwise, missiles are the king of combat.  Direct fire weapons only become useful in the above circumstances, or if you can survive the enemy's missile barrage and close with his ships to engage at close range.  

2.  CIWS are a relatively new development in Aurora.  Before that, the only point defense was turreted weapons and rail guns. One important thing is that CIWS only defends the ship it's mounted on, meaning that an enemy can try to overwhelm each individual ship if you don't have any other defenses.  

The best missile defense is a nested defense, with long range anti-missiles, short range turreted beam weapons, and point blank CIWS.  You can get away with eliminating one of the above and still probably have a decent defense, though.

Kurt

[Steve Walmsley]

OK, so. This is my first serious, large-scale combat, and i have some questions based on my impressions.

1) lasers seem astonishingly useless. I've never once been able to even get remotely within range of anything, since all combat takes place at a range of tens of millions of kilometers due to missiles. But then, i see people posting around beam warship designs, so apparently lasers CAN be used. What am i doing wrong?

2) related, turreted point-blank defense lasers are just as useless. Sometimes, if the missile approaches fast enough, they don't even have time to open fire.Isn't it better to just ditch them completely and get more CIWS in their place?
Still, sometimes they DO hit something, and can target missiles not aimed at that ship, so i guess they're not nearly as useless as ship-to-ship lasers.

Combat in Aurora is a little like combat in the Honor Harrington series. Missiles have a huge range compared to beams (ten of millions of km vs hundreds of thousand of km) but beams can be devasting within their range. They are ideal for jump point defence but their primary advantage over missiles is logisitical. Missile warships can be very effective, as long as build enough missiles and get them to the ships. Otherwise they are just expensive targets. Beam warships never run out of ammunition. If you having trouble with beam turrets, make sure you have a fire control fast enough to track the missiles. Also, which automatic point defence mode are you using?

Steve

[Hawkeye]

Blowing into the same horn as Kurt here

I don´t look at the defense capability of a single ship but at the capabilities of a squadron, as none of my warships will _ever_ travel on its own!

Imagine a battlegroup of, say 4 Missile cruisers, each mounting 1 or 2 CIWS, 4 Escort Cruisers, each mounting 8 AMM launchers and a tripple PD-Laser turret, 6 destroyers, armed with railguns, that also can help a bit in a counter missile role and 6 destroyer-escorts, each mounting 4 AMM launchers and a dual PD-Gauss turret.

Any hostile missile making it through the AMMs, has to face a total of 10 PD-turrets and the railguns of the DDs. The CIWS on the CGs only come into play, if anything still gets through and then targets the CGs specificly, but any reasonable salvo should never make it that far (until I run out of AMMs, that is)

Missiles are now a lot less deadly as they were some time ago, when you could amass a salvo numbering into the thousands at a waypoint and send them in in a huge, devastating wave (just a sidenote)

[Father Tim]

OK, so. This is my first serious, large-scale combat, and i have some questions based on my impressions.

1) lasers seem astonishingly useless. I've never once been able to even get remotely within range of anything, since all combat takes place at a range of tens of millions of kilometers due to missiles. But then, i see people posting around beam warship designs, so apparently lasers CAN be used. What am i doing wrong?

2) related, turreted point-blank defense lasers are just as useless. Sometimes, if the missile approaches fast enough, they don't even have time to open fire.Isn't it better to just ditch them completely and get more CIWS in their place?
Still, sometimes they DO hit something, and can target missiles not aimed at that ship, so i guess they're not nearly as useless as ship-to-ship lasers.

1.  Lasers and other direct fire weapons are only useful in several specific circumstances.  If combat begins at close range, like in orbit around a world with former friends or neutrals, or in a contested warp transit, then they are useful.  Otherwise, missiles are the king of combat.  Direct fire weapons only become useful in the above circumstances, or if you can survive the enemy's missile barrage and close with his ships to engage at close range.  

2.  CIWS are a relatively new development in Aurora.  Before that, the only point defense was turreted weapons and rail guns. One important thing is that CIWS only defends the ship it's mounted on, meaning that an enemy can try to overwhelm each individual ship if you don't have any other defenses.  

The best missile defense is a nested defense, with long range anti-missiles, short range turreted beam weapons, and point blank CIWS.  You can get away with eliminating one of the above and still probably have a decent defense, though.

Kurt

- Missiles are nigh-useless in warp point assaults, and mediocre in warp point defense.

- Point-defense is a maze of choices and theories, many of which do not mesh well together.  One of the toughest things in Aurora is to design and build a good squadron point defense net.

- Virtually every new player to Aurora builds ships that are too big, too slow, and too lightly armoured.

- Tech differential and size-of-fleet differential is going to decide combat two times out of three, regardless of the weapons employed.

- NPR combat AI is (currently) far weaker than a good human player.  Especially in the area of changing tactics that clearly aren't working.

- Missiles are hideously expensive in terms of minerals & manpower.  It takes 50,000 people three months and twnty-two days to build a single SS-N-4 Shadow:

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   SS-N-4 Shadow
    Missile Size: 4 MSP  (0.2 HS)     Warhead: 6    Armour: 0     Manoeuvre Rating: 10
    Speed: 24000 km/s    Endurance: 68 minutes   Range: 97.5m km
    Cost Per Missile: 3.1
    Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 240%   3k km/s 80%   5k km/s 48%   10k km/s 24%
    Materials Required:    1.5x Tritanium   1.35x Gallicite   Fuel x3250
    Development Cost for Project: 310RPMost empires struggle to build enough missile to fill their fleets' magazines once.  Any protracted war results in economic upheaval.


Most Player vs Precursor combats go like this:  A single ship encounters a precursor and is abruptly destroyed.  Later, a massive player fleet arrives, blows up one at a time until the precursor runs out of ammunition, then whatever ships remain close and destroy the near-helpless precursor.

Oh, and missiles don't work in a Nebula.  At all.

[Della (OP)]

1.  Lasers abd other direct fire weapons are only useful in several specific circumstances.  If combat begins at close range, like in orbit around a world with former friends or neutrals, or in a contested warp transit, then they are useful.  Otherwise, missiles are the king of combat.  Direct fire weapons only become useful in the above circumstances, or if you can survive the enemy's missile barrage and close with his ships to engage at close range.

So it would make sense to build a class of ship specialized in beam combat and use them to picket warp points?

2.  CIWS are a relatively new development in Aurora.  Before that, the only point defense was turreted weapons and rail guns. One important thing is that CIWS only defends the ship it's mounted on, meaning that an enemy can try to overwhelm each individual ship if you don't have any other defenses.

Yeah, i kinda noticed that with waves of 20+ missiles smacking around my destroyers one by one.

Combat in Aurora is a little like combat in the Honor Harrington series. Missiles have a huge range compared to beams (ten of millions of km vs hundreds of thousand of km) but beams can be devasting within their range. They are ideal for jump point defence but their primary advantage over missiles is logisitical. Missile warships can be very effective, as long as build enough missiles and get them to the ships. Otherwise they are just expensive targets. Beam warships never run out of ammunition. If you having trouble with beam turrets, make sure you have a fire control fast enough to track the missiles. Also, which automatic point defence mode are you using?

I tried a bit all, but i don't really get what's the difference, i didn't find it explained anywhere

Imagine a battlegroup of, say 4 Missile cruisers, each mounting 1 or 2 CIWS, 4 Escort Cruisers, each mounting 8 AMM launchers and a tripple PD-Laser turret, 6 destroyers, armed with railguns, that also can help a bit in a counter missile role and 6 destroyer-escorts, each mounting 4 AMM launchers and a dual PD-Gauss turret.

Any hostile missile making it through the AMMs, has to face a total of 10 PD-turrets and the railguns of the DDs. The CIWS on the CGs only come into play, if anything still gets through and then targets the CGs specificly, but any reasonable salvo should never make it that far (until I run out of AMMs, that is)

Is it a standard approach to build escort-type ships focused on improving the anti-missile defence of the fleet?

- Virtually every new player to Aurora builds ships that are too big, too slow, and too lightly armoured.

Up to now my usual design has been: 10000-ton battleship with armor 6, 8000-ton cruiser with armor 4 and 4000-ton destroyer with armor 2, with speeds in the 3200-4000 range.

- Tech differential and size-of-fleet differential is going to decide combat two times out of three, regardless of the weapons employed.

Yeah, I realized this the hard way.

Most Player vs Precursor combats go like this:  A single ship encounters a precursor and is abruptly destroyed.  Later, a massive player fleet arrives, blows up one at a time until the precursor runs out of ammunition, then whatever ships remain close and destroy the near-helpless precursor.

This too.

Oh, and missiles don't work in a Nebula.  At all.

Oh. Didn't know that.

[Andrew]

I use a similar laired defense concept combined with heavy armour and enougth shields to absorb 2 or 3 missile hits. I use AMM's to intercept at long range although if the enemy are firing small salvo's I will stop launching AMM's to conserve money and then pretty much every ship in my fleet mounts Gauss cannon turrets set at Final defensive fire (I find that area defensive fire rarely works so I never use it) this means most of the enemy missiles are shot down in a hail of gauss cannon fire (My 10 ship battle group mount 100 AMM tubes, and 60 gauss cannon turrets) in fact I consider that against a reasonable defense(i.e. my own) missile fire is likely to be ineffectual . At the moment I am trying to counter this using Box launchers to overload the defenses but this is hard to do and gaurantee to kill all enemy ships, the next likely choice is to design some ships whcih are very fast and have heavy beam weapons , wait until my enemy has exhausted his missile fire against my defenses and then chase him down to kill with beam weapons.
In the warp point defense role beam weapons are devestating two 6,300 ton precursor ships with 30cm x ray lasers killed a 40,000 ton battleship and crippeled another in 30 seconds
edit . I rarely use CIWS because it only protects one ship , I find the benefits of mutual defense outweigh the costs. CIWS only goes on ships which will not mount any other defensive weapons(Missile boats, troop transports etc)

[Della (OP)]

Another question: would it be feasible to have a high-speed ship armed with beam weapons and loaded with anti-missile defences whose purpose is to survive enemy missile barrages and bring the fight up close and personal?

[Andrew]

Another question: would it be feasible to have a high-speed ship armed with beam weapons and loaded with anti-missile defences whose purpose is to survive enemy missile barrages and bring the fight up close and personal?

Possibly.
It is something I am going to try , although I will probably build fast ships with beam weapons and a seperate escort class rather than trying to mount both on the same ship\
The big problem with this tactic is going to be if you are fighting someone with better engine technology, as thery will be able to build fast ships while still having more weapons than you. NPR's tend to build mixed fleets with at least some beam armed ships so you are going to have to be able to beat these as well.

[Kurt]

Another question: would it be feasible to have a high-speed ship armed with beam weapons and loaded with anti-missile defences whose purpose is to survive enemy missile barrages and bring the fight up close and personal?

Yes, very much so.  However, having said that, unless you've encountered your enemy before you have no way of knowing what their maximum speed is, so there is no way to know if your high speed ship is faster than theirs.  If it isn't faster then you'll never catch them, even if they don't destroy you first.  

You do have a point, though.  A big missile ship that has exhausted its missiles is just a big target, until it reloads.  

Kurt

[Rathos]

Up to now my usual design has been: 10000-ton battleship with armor 6, 8000-ton cruiser with armor 4 and 4000-ton destroyer with armor 2, with speeds in the 3200-4000 range.

Your battleship is the size of my patrol ship  

[Della (OP)]

Up to now my usual design has been: 10000-ton battleship with armor 6, 8000-ton cruiser with armor 4 and 4000-ton destroyer with armor 2, with speeds in the 3200-4000 range.

Your battleship is the size of my patrol ship  

So, about lasers. Since laser range is almost universally far beyond fire control range, i'm thinking about dropping lasers. Up to now i've been using small lasers as point-defense and large lasers as anti-ship, but i realized that it would be better (although more expensive in terms of RP, maybe) to ise railguns as anti-ship weapons and gauss as point defence.

[Erik L]

I find that costs, to-build and to-refit time and annual failure rate increase far too steeply as ship size goes up, while at the same time speed plummets.
The fleet i'm developing now has :
15000-ton battleships (with anti-ship missiles, plus good CIWS as they are high-value targets)
10000-ton cruisers (with a mix of anti-ship and anti-miissile missiles, and a bit of token CIWS)
5000-ton destroyers (with anti-missile missiles and turreted gauss cannons for short-range missile defence)

This is about the sizes I use too.
4000-6000 destroyer
8000-12,000 cruiser
15,000-18,000 battlecruiser

Others as needed.

Fighters are designed like ships, except they are 500 tons or under, and require some special tech (fighter engines, command modules, couple others).

[AtomikKrab]

Another question: would it be feasible to have a high-speed ship armed with beam weapons and loaded with anti-missile defences whose purpose is to survive enemy missile barrages and bring the fight up close and personal?

Actually I'm going the otherway with an absolutely MASSIVE ship armed to the brim with beam weapons and just attempting to cleave through enemy missiles swarms with the fury of 1270 guns

[sloanjh]

*snip*... and annual failure rate increase far too steeply as ship size goes up, *snip*

Just to be clear, the annual failure rate is supposed to be proportional to the mass - it's not a bad thing to have a large rate on a large ship since breakdown cost is constant and the maintenance spares should go up linearly too.  The important quantity is

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(total maintenance spares) / ((breakdown_rate/100)*max_breakdown_cost) = (earliest possible time in years to run out of spares)

I typically add engineering until this is about 5 years.

STEVE - A lot of people are confused about this - would it make sense to put in an additional "average time until spares are exhausted" on the class design page that divides total spares by product of the breakdown rate and the average (weighted by breakdown probability) breakdown cost?

I'm thinking about adding a 20000-ton carrier to the mix, but i'm having problems. (can someone explain me how to design a fighter? maybe I'm retarded, but i can't seem to find out)

You need to research fighter engines and a fighter engine type - the fact that something's a fighter is controlled by it having a fighter engine.  It also needs to be less than 500 tons (10 HS).  Other than that, you design using the F5 screen just like a ship.  Caveat: I can't remember actually ever having built a fighter, but I just re-read the fighter thread in mechanics last night (it's from a few years ago, so one needs to dig back a ways.

And i STILL feel that a 20000-ton ship is too big. Heck, my 15000-ton battleships feel too big to me :-)

John