Author Topic: Fighters as cheap defense?  (Read 3617 times)

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Offline Herodotus4 (OP)

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Fighters as cheap defense?
« on: May 18, 2016, 02:22:22 PM »
I am very new to aurora, 28 in game years into my first game.  My tech is at Magnetic containment fusion drives, quite a bit of laser tech and the x5 warhead power.  I currently have not run into anybody in the three solar systems I have visited so I do not have a navy of any type besides a geological/gravitational survey ship, which is still running internal confinement fusion drives.  I assume that eventually I will find unfriendly aliens somewhere so I am wondering if this will work as a quick to build defense force if I need one. 
I have fairly good fighter production from fumbling my way too building a geological survey team shuttle (I had turned off fighter production and had not realized it until I had built a bunch of fighter factories) so I plan on building a rocket fighter with a bunch of size 2 or 3 box launchers, I know that I can get the fighters up to around 13,000 KPS easily and that they should be hard to hit at that speed and if I cut the missiles rang to around 5 million kilometers I should be able to fit a power 5 warhead on a size 2 version while still keeping the missile fast, the main problem is that I do not have much tech to boost the engine power.  However as I have never seen aurora combat in aurora, how well does this work?
 

Iranon

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Re: Fighters as cheap defense?
« Reply #1 on: May 18, 2016, 02:34:03 PM »
Engine power tech is cheap compared to your base engine tech, and missiles profit greatly from it. I suggest researching it before making a missile-centric fleet.
If you don't, cutting down severely on missile range doesn't get you much, and 5m is too close for comfort.
One of the things that can make missile fighters work is that they can deliver their ordnance before they are detected, this favours the smallest practical fighters with moderate-range missiles.

Warhead 5 is also not a very happy number. Square numbers get you an additional layer of armour breached,  n^2+n (6, 12, 20, ...) gives you 2 damage on the deepest layer. So 4 is good, 6 is good, 5 is nothing special.
 

Offline iceball3

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Re: Fighters as cheap defense?
« Reply #2 on: May 19, 2016, 10:14:43 AM »
Engine power tech is cheap compared to your base engine tech, and missiles profit greatly from it. I suggest researching it before making a missile-centric fleet.
If you don't, cutting down severely on missile range doesn't get you much, and 5m is too close for comfort.
One of the things that can make missile fighters work is that they can deliver their ordnance before they are detected, this favours the smallest practical fighters with moderate-range missiles.

Warhead 5 is also not a very happy number. Square numbers get you an additional layer of armour breached,  n^2+n (6, 12, 20, ...) gives you 2 damage on the deepest layer. So 4 is good, 6 is good, 5 is nothing special.
On terms of the armor penetration of missiles, with numbers as low as that, it's usually not significant, if your target is too heavily armored to pierce on the first shot.
It's just an optimization thing, and if your missile deployment is relying on sandblasting someone's armor off (due to the armor being thicker than your penetration), then the penetration isn't so significant as much as just getting a quantity of hits and damage.
At least, in terms of whether the number is a square or not.