At least it would probably get within range of my ships and so get to fire me - without the cloak it has no hope
I am actually looking at a similar concept for my fleet..

Keep the hull space to 20 or less and you'll have a much more combat effective FAC.

In case some new players are wondering where the 20HS number came from: Ships of size 20 or less do NOT require a bridge.  This saves you 1HS (5%) that can be used for payload.  This is true both for FAC and for "normal" ships.  So 1000 ton corvettes are often a good design decision - with 2 engines they're the same speed as a FAC and still have 6-7 HS that can be devoted to payload.

John

Considering the missile and fire control ranges (54m km+) on the Niteshade the cloak is wasted space.  If they were intended to engage from sub-20m km then the cloak would start to be of use. 

NPR's are not going to engage a TSC of 20 or less at half that range.  Drop the cloak and bridge and add more launchers.  Cut the missile range to around 25m km and the fire control to around 32-33m km.  Keep the hull space to 20 or less and you'll have a much more combat effective FAC.

Keep in mind my opinion of the cloak is that it is best used on scouting platforms not combat hulls.  Your mileage may very. 

Carrier operations!

The Tiger's Claw is designed to carry a full squadron of cloaked fast attack craft (can anyone tell me why they have to be cloaked?  hm?)

It is the hanger-strapped-to-engines design, and carries its squadron of 15 Nightshades (see above) and one boomer (not shown) that is designed to sneak in, and in case target locks are needed, can paint with active sensors, give the shades time to release, then go quiet and allow the whole squadron to fly back to the carrier with impunity.

Tiger's Claw class Carrier    50,000 tons     2592 Crew     10734 BP      TCS 1000  TH 4160  EM 0
8320 km/s     Armour 4-120     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 30     PPV 0
Annual Failure Rate: 666%    IFR: 9.3%    Maint Capacity 6025 MSP    Max Repair 120 MSP    Est Time: 3.38 Years
Hangar Deck Capacity 23000 tons     Magazine 1800    

IC Fusion Drive Standard (52)    Power 160    Fuel Use 50%    Signature 80    Armour 0    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 2,450,000 Litres    Range 176.4 billion km   (245 days at full power)

ECM 20

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes

The claw can't take a beating, and isn't cloaked, so I intend to keep them a little behind everyone else.

And heres a cute little PDC-- 1 boomer and 5 nightshades.  They can pull ordinance\fuel directly from the planet, or, should I load the magazines and fuel on the PDC itself?  Suggestions?

PDC Fighter Base class Planetary Defence Centre    9,300 tons     265 Crew     939 BP      TCS 186  TH 0  EM 0
Armour 5-39     Sensors 1/0     Damage Control Rating 0     PPV 0
Hangar Deck Capacity 8500 tons     


To eyeball the failure chance of everything else on the ship, remove the jump drive and see what happens to the maintenance numbers.  It'll be off somewhat because of the overall size change, but it will give you an idea.

So looking at that damage breakdown, I see the jumpdrive has a 1/20 value while the turrets, for example, has a 8/8.  The secondary numbers all add up to more than 100, so its not percentage, So to estimate the damage, what would I do-- add up all the secondary values times the first value and take ratios?  (ie considering these two components, 20/20+64)

I suspect that that should be read as "1 at 20" and "8 at 8".  If you look at the range of numbers, I expect you'll see jump drive taking up 20 numbers and lasers 64 (8x8).

John

Submitted for your approval, the Dominus Astra
My important question comes in maitenence.  The jump drive on this monster is enormous.  If that fails, thats a lot of maintenence points.  But I realized that I wasn't getting much improvement by adding storage.  Am I right in thinking its probably just number skew by the size of the jump drive.  If the drive fails 4 times in a year, thats the end of its maintenance points.  But thats unlikely, right?  Or do I really just have a bucket of bolts that can only be expected to fly for one year?  

Secondarily, I threw two damage control units on there, but I'm not really sure what they're actually doing or how that rating is measured.

The current method that Steve used for figuring the estimate time for running out of maintenance is to assume that any failure will be of the  most expensive system.  In your case this is partially true.  Look at the damage allocation table (tab in F5 screen)  and see what the chance is that your jump drive will be what fails.  As it is a big part of the ship it has a high failure chance.  Use that as a modifier on the number shown to get a better idea of how long your maintenance supplies will last.  Second part is that the maintanence storage bays (3 hs 1000 points of maint.) only add the extra maintenance points they do not reduce the chance of failure that the standard engineering spaces do.  In most cases I find 3 engineering spaces will give me more endurance than 1 maintenance storage bay will.  Maintenance storage bays are most usefull on carriers where they will be reparing their parisite ships.  The damage control units each add 10 points to the damage control rating.  The higher the damage control rating the faster the ship will fix battle damage.  I do not remember the actual code but I have a recolection that larger items take longer to repair in general.  Also when repairing damage after the fact and not a maintenance failure you will use up twice as many maintenance points as normal.  So for your huge jump engine remember to have more than 4 times as much mainenance on hand so you can do a battlefield repair and still have some left over for other repairs.  Improved damage control adds 20 to your damage control rating, Advanced 30 ect.

Brian