@hubgbf:
Main point : with 1 year of maintenance life, your carriers won't delay the ennemy long...
you also need spare maintenance to replenish your fighters.
Put more engineering spaces and less maintenance storage.
Reinforcements, if required, can be sent in 10 days, so a year is plenty. The ship has zero storage bays and 58 engineering spaces.
2nd point : why do you have such big active sensors? Do you really need a 300 mkm sensor which will say to everybody where you are?
If you plan to defend your system, jut emplace some deep space tracking station on some asteroid. It is stealthier.
And use scout fighters.
Same thing for your fighters, you do not need to have an active sensor on each of them.
And what about your AS45-R1 ? if your fighters are deployed on a defensive position, you do not need it, if not, you have no defense against missile, so why do you care ?
As your ship will operate solo, perhaps CIWS will be more usefull.
The enemy already knows where I am, because I have people living there, and there's no way to hide 9900EP of heat. All the sensors on the carrier add up to 2.5% of its displacement, so I considered it worthwhile for the redundancy.
I considered scout fighters, and can still swap some current parasites for some, but they will either require protection or stay with the strike group. Since beam ships have so little range, a minimum-size sensor can already do the job, so I have decided against dedicated scouts for now. The AS45-R1 is this sensor.
I have considered CIWS on the carrier, but decided the tonnage is better spent on more shields. This can be a design decision to make for sure.
About your concept, my current magneto plasma unoptimized fleet of 16*6k ships has 60 AMM launchers, range 3.7 mkm. Nearly the same size as your behemoth.
Speed is roughly 4 kkms. I'll flee to increase my opportunity window. Closure rate is 20 kkms.
Your fighters will need 165 seconds to be able to fire. It means that I will fire 16 times. 960 shots vs 72 fighters. Or rather 12...
You've got 60 railgun (1*4) with TS 24kkms firing at 60 AMM with a 38kkms speed. You'll have only one shot as you must be in final defensive fire.
Do you think you'll have a good enough hit ratio ? How many hit to make your fighters useless ? 3-4 as every hit which go through the armor will mission-kill your fighter I think.
Let's consider your 5-armor fighter. The second hit has 20% to hit at the same place and do internal damage (= mission kill), the third, 40% the forth 60%, and the sixth is sure to mission kill your fighter.
I have run the numbers prior to designing the whole thing, and 60 ships, at 4 shots of 24,039km/s tracking speed per shot, add up to a total PD capability of 5,769,360 km/s per 5s interval. This is good for shooting down 100 missiles, probably a bit less due to overkill effects, optimized against these fighters specifically (using Iceranger's tool), or 150 of your unoptimized AMMs, per 5s.
If you're only firing 60 at a time, I only expect to lose a few fighters at most, not to mention I also have the option, with my faster fighters, to disengage and retreat to the carrier, which is practically impervious to AMMs because it has over 2000 shield points.
Certainly a dedicated fleet with miniaturized size-1 launchers will erase my strike force, as will time-matched salvos (though difficult to match properly with the fighters such a large fraction of missile speed), but those are very specialized designs that I do not expect to face, even role-playing assuming a competent human opponent.
If my numbers prior to designing this whole package did not work out so favorably, I would have went for a more traditional design with missiles and gauss, which I had done for previous defense ships.
If you want to use beam fighters, I suggest you do it in another way.
Use microwave aboard armored fighters instead of PD fighters. You'll go through and will be able to destroy the AMM fire control. Even a 2 layered fighter is far more difficult to shot with AMM.
As soon as the fire control of AMM (and beam) ships are destroyed, you close with your bomber and fire. Then you wait for reload while shooting microwave to keep them blind.
Microwaves are an interesting idea that I will definitely keep in mind. I consider microwaves, paired with boarding pods, the ideal jump defense paradigm, because shields do not survive transit, but that's another story. I can easily swap some or all of my parasites for microwave ships.
I can't agree with armoring these fighters. By armoring them to 2 layers, their speed reduces to 22084km/s, which represents a net loss of 469,200km/s of PD ability, which means 8.5 fewer optimized missiles, or 12.3 fewer of your AMMs, shot down per 5s. This is not acceptable to me. Armored fighters may have a place somewhere, but not in this plan.
@Jorgen_CAB:
But you really need to be able to survive and speed will not make you do that alone, you also need either armour or shields. I would prefer some decent shields as you can recharge them while recharging the weapons or armour if you rely more on the particle lance with less recharge rates.
Recharging shields while recharging lasers is a concept I had totally neglected, but it makes a lot of sense. I'd need much larger ships for it though. Stripping the second layer of armor on the Peregrine only lets me fit a single shield point, which is funny, but probably not effective.
Trying to use DPS to fight with smaller ships or worse fighters can often be very difficult, especially if the enemy have decent beam weapons or worse good multi-purpose PD weapons.
The Hornet has a BFC range slightly longer than the minimum required for PD. The intent is to use this range to engage enemy fighters if they try to target the Bombardier or Peregrine, which are indeed vulnerable to this kind of attack if they cannot stay at range. I don't know how well the plan would work, though.
There is nothing wrong with deploying a 42kt gunboat that incorporate both the railguns and then main beam in one package. Perhaps you want more spinal weapons and you could bring say 6x7000t gunboats instead... still decent shields and armour possible.
A 42kt, 3x engine boost parasite sounds like a lot of fun, but then it can't be deployed anywhere else because it needs a hundred thousand ton carrier to move it around. Ships have to get pretty big for shields to be effective, and the optimal size for them remains to be seen. Presenting a bigger target and taking a bigger loss in case one ship goes down are real problems though, and is one of the difficulties I face when deciding between my two existing designs. The logistics of losing loadout flexibility with larger parasites is probably outside the scope of this discussion. though.
@liveware
So let's consider a hypothetical match up: 1x of your Hornets against 4x of my Athens (500 tons vs 500 tons). Your Hornet is faster but my Athens have longer range. If you're managing your Hornet well you could kite my missiles. If I'm managing my Athens well I will never let you get close enough to engage. You can only shoot at me (or my missiles) from at most 32k km, but your BFC tracking speed is good enough to possibly guarantee that you'd destroy all 4 of my Athens' missiles. So I might instead run a mix of 2/2 Sparta/Athens or 3/1 Sparta/Athens. Then I could overwhelm your railguns and score some hits. And I could launch from well outside of your Hornet's engagement range of 0.2b km. So I could probably hit-and-run you to death if I manage my fighters correctly.
Comparing fighter-bombers and beam fighters ton for ton is not fair because it ignores the carrier's need to carry both magazines and anti-missile defense. Even if you say these factors reduce your bomber to 3/4 of my interceptors' tonnage, though, scaled to equal tech, a 110kt carrier of them probably beats mine. Or at least stalemates it, since my best strategy is to simply never launch any fighters until I detect missiles.
Such a battle is kind of ridiculous to imagine, though. A dedicated AMM escort would shore up my carrier's biggest weaknesses, but then you can shore up your own weaknesses too by adding ships, and it becomes a question of fleet composition, which is its own topic.
Head to head comparisons aside, in terms of doctrine, I think of fighter-bombers as reusable first stages of extreme-range missiles. Compared to multi-stage missiles fired out of regular launchers, I have to pay for extra hangars, extra fire controls, extra armor, extra engines, and extra depreciation through obsolescence. In return I get longer range from the larger, more efficient engines, better chance for my carrier to evade detection, and if I use the fighter enough times, it pays for itself by not being disposable. I would, therefore, use fighter-bombers if these three things are important to me. For the intended role of my current designs, I'd rather do without.
Thanks to everyone for your thoughts.