A lot of the time when designing FAC with energy weapons I try to make a couple of designs. My prefered weapon on FAC's is the Meson as it ignores armor and shields, both of wich can make a big difference when fighting larger ships. Some will be equipped with a single longer ranged meson (12 or 15cm) while others will have two 10cm. All classes will have a .5hs grav sensor with a resolution of 1. This is enough for the weapons to be used as point defense. While it is not as effective as putting the weapons on turrets, I have often found that the speed of the FAC is about twice as fast as the fire control base speed. The result is that there is a lot of semi effective point defense. Against smaller salvo's this can work fairly well, against a large salvo targeted on most of the force it will not do much. Example below.
Raider class Fast Attack Craft 1000 tons 106 Crew 373.4 BP TCS 20 TH 120 EM 60
8000 km/s Armour 3-8 Shields 2-300 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 3
Annual Failure Rate: 8% IFR: 0.1% Maintenance Capacity 233 MSP Max Repair 141 MSP
GB Magneto-plasma Drive E70 (1) Power 160 Efficiency 7.00 Signature 120 Armour 0 Exp 15%
Fuel Capacity 60,000 Litres Range 15.4 billion km (22 days at full power)
Delta R300/17.5 Shields (1) Total Fuel Cost 18 Litres per day
R6/C3 Meson Cannon (1) Range 60,000km TS: 8000 km/s Power 3-3 RM 6 ROF 5 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0
Fire Control S03 80-9375 H70 gb (1) Max Range: 160,000 km TS: 9375 km/s 94 88 81 75 69 62 56 50 44 38
SF Reactor PB-1 AR-0 s.5 (1) Total Power Output 3 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Active Search Sensor S14-R1 (70%) (1) GPS 14 Range 140k km Resolution 1
Active Search Sensor S56-R20 (70%) (1) GPS 1120 Range 11.2m km Resolution 20
This design is classed as a military vessel for maintenance purposes
A typical missile is going about 32-36,000km/s for the above gunboat about 1/4 of the time they will stop an incomming missile. This does not sound all that good, until you think about having two 5 missile salvo's approaching a group of 8 gunboats. To me this would be an engagement between a pair of destroyers and a small FAC group. The missiles will have about a 60% hit rate against the gunboats. Two of the missiles will be shot down by the gunboats leaving three. Probably two of these hit for 6 points of damage each. This might or might not penetrate the armor depending if they hit on top of each other. If one more missile had hit then it would probably have done at least a couple of internals. Total damage from both salvo's is one gunboat having suffered enough damage to have a good chance of either hitting the engines or weapons. The other is probably without shields and most of it's armor but will require another salvo to take it out. If the point defense had not fired then the chances are that both would be out of action. If you repeat this four times the net effect is that 4 gunboats are out of action and 4 are still in action, compared to all 8 having been knocked out. Given the speed difference and small size the FAC's would have covered at least 240,000km assuming that the other ships are moving to slow the range change. If they are trying to seperate then the distance could be as much as 720,000km. Against such small targets this might be enough that they can not see/target you effectively.
There are a lot more variables to consider when using beam armed FAC's vs the missile armed FAC's. Beam armed FAC's have to be able to penetrate the missile envelope around thier target ships. If you can get into close range with an enemy, the big question is who has the greater effective energy range. A lot of the designs I have seen from the computer do not put a mid range middle speed fire control on the ships. This means that to target the FAC's the computer's ship must choose between a short range fire control with no reduction due to speed, or a long range fire control that takes a hefty penalty to speed. If the FAC's can stay out at a range where their hit chances are good (my gunboat above has at least a 50% chance at maximum range) then they will be able to rack up the damage while taking relitively less damage. It is all a balancing act. I have had a dozen FAC's with mesons take out an equal number of much larger ships. The larger ships had a narrow window where they could not see the FAC's because of the resolution on their grav sensors but the FAC's could still be in range of the ships. I picked the bigger ships apart without taking any damage. If they had a sensor that could see me I would have been toast.
A missile armed FAC has a good standoff range and with enough box launchers they can pack 7-10, launchers depending on size, It does not take many of these to put together a decent salvo. This is especially true if they can get into a shorter range for the missiles without being spotted. That will let you trade fuel for a bigger warhead or other options on the missile. My FAC's usually use the same size launchers as my battlecruisers on down. (The missile is usually a different design, but by using the same size they can always fall back on the more common missiles. Or my bigger ships can load up with a shorter range missile if it is called for.) This sort of thing makes the missile armed FAC's easier to use, but they are always limited by their amunition.
Here are the missiles that this same race uses just to compare.
Size 1 Anti-missile Missile (1) Speed: 32,000 km/s End: 1.3m Range: 2.6m km WH: 1 Size: 1 TH: 309 / 185 / 92
Size 2ir Anti-missil Missile (1) Speed: 32,000 km/s End: 1.3m Range: 2.6m km WH: 1 Size: 2 TH: 266 / 160 / 80
Size 4 Anti-ship Missile (1) Speed: 35,200 km/s End: 15.2m Range: 32.1m km WH: 5 Size: 4 TH: 176 / 105 / 52
Size 12a Anti-ship Missile (1) Speed: 32,000 km/s End: 22.3m Range: 42.8m km WH: 10 Size: 12 TH: 160 / 96 / 48
Size 12a2 Anti-ship Missile (1) Speed: 32,000 km/s End: 22.3m Range: 42.8m km WH: 5 Size: 12 TH: 160 / 96 / 48
Size 12f Anti-ship Missile (1) Speed: 44,800 km/s End: 0.8m Range: 2.2m km WH: 15 Size: 12 TH: 194 / 116 / 58
Size 4f Anti-ship Missile (1) Speed: 39,200 km/s End: 1.4m Range: 3.2m km WH: 7 Size: 4 TH: 156 / 94 / 47
Size 1 Anti-ship Missile (1) Speed: 32,000 km/s End: 6.7m Range: 12.9m km WH: 2 Size: 1 TH: 138 / 83 / 41
Hope my rambling on helps to put a context on the differences between the two classes of FAC's
Brian
