Reduced size large caliber spinal lasers

[nakorkren (OP)]

I was toying with the idea of producing a large number of small displacement (~2kton) pinnacles, each armed with a single large caliber reduced size spinal laser.  It would make for an incredible beam alpha-strike capability, particularly if you ran them off a carrier and they could fly into range, shoot, and fly back out of range to recharge.

Right now with one level of reduced size laser tech I could mount the following (I included the high and low extreme of cap tech to see what the impact on cost is, since part of the strategy may be accepting some level of ship loss and you'd want to keep them cheap)
45cm (53 damage) lasers for 550 tons with a recharge of 180s (and a cost of 164) or
45cm (53 damage) lasers for 550 tons with a recharge of 1060s (and a cost of 27)
With the 2nd and final level of reduced size laser tech I could mount:
45cm (53 damage) lasers for 350 tons with a recharge of 885s (and a cost of 109.2) or
45cm (53 damage) lasers for 350 tons with a recharge of 5300s (and a cost of 18.2)

I was thinking something like this:

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Lancer - Copy class Fast Attack Craft (P)      1,000 tons       48 Crew       437.9 BP       TCS 20    TH 360    EM 0
18010 km/s      Armour 4-8       Shields 0-0       HTK 7      Sensors 0/0/0/0      DCR 0      PPV 7
Maint Life 0.36 Years     MSP 27    AFR 80%    IFR 1.1%    1YR 75    5YR 1,118    Max Repair 180.00 MSP
Lieutenant Commander    Control Rating 1   
Intended Deployment Time: 2 months    Morale Check Required   

Internal Fusion Drive  EP360.00 (1)    Power 360.0    Fuel Use 804.98%    Signature 360.00    Explosion 30%
Fuel Capacity 25,000 Litres    Range 0.56 billion km (8 hours at full power)

45.0cm C0.3 Far Ultraviolet Laser (1)    Range 384,000km     TS: 18,010 km/s     Power 53-0.3     RM 50,000 km    ROF 885       
Beam Fire Control R384-TS10000 (SW) (1)     Max Range: 384,000 km   TS: 10,000 km/s     97 95 92 90 87 84 82 79 77 74
Tokamak Fusion Reactor R0 (1)     Total Power Output 0.3    Exp 5%

The damage per BP ratio is about 3x better with the pinnacle design vs one of my larger (30kton) frigates, which mount an equivalent 45cm spinal laser and 10x 30cm lasers. However, those have a much higher DPS and higher survivability due to additional shielding and armor, AND don't require a carrier to deliver them.

Having a large alpha-strike sounds fun in principle, but my concern is that this may not be particularly useful, tactically. If you outrange and outspeed the enemy, you'd get better DPS with full sized lasers. If you don't outspeed them, you can't get away to recharge or control the range. If you haven't exhausted their AMMs (and their ASMs), those'll shred you before you get into beam range.

I really WANT the idea to work because it seems cool, but I can't see how it would be better than other, more conventional options. Thoughts?

[Droll]

Well you want it to be super fast / very armored and do hit/run. Your worst enemy is damage falloff so you need to decide an optimal firing range for each enemy based on their counter measures. If you can have FACs close in, do a run and have a decent amount survive that you have a strong beam/missile bomber hybrid.

You could additionally consider using particle lances with minimal capacitors. Less damage overall but the damage pattern means that you'll have less of that damage be absorbed by enemy armor. Plus no damage falloff potentially means that you can do runs further out which means more survivability against enemy beamers. Because your using min capacitors the lances should be very cheap, problem is particle lance size.

[misanthropope]

i think the crux of the matter is whether the spinals are big enough.  in a lot of contexts spinals perform well against very large dps disadvantages because they have a good chance of impairing the enemy immediately.  feel a 53 point hit on a lot of reasonable opponents is mostly going to get soaked.  it will leave big soft spots for dps-type weapons if you happen to have those.  i tend to gravitate to mixed weaponry, ymmv

it makes a big difference whether your opponent has six layers of armor, or ten, and also whether there will be enough lancers that any given enemy ship has a reasonable risk of taking two hits close together in the first volley.  if i didnt have any idea who my next victim was i'd be that much more reluctant.

probably im being too simplistic, but if your recharge is already 160 sec, why not take the cost savings and go all the way to 5300?  the scenario where you come off the ropes with a haymaker after he's been beating on you for thirty rounds unopposed, seems pretty remote, to me .

[Jorgen_CAB]

I did some testing a while back with laser weapons and found out that a mix of high DPS and low DPS but high damage laser is much more effective than either extreme, by quite a margin actually.

So yes... using a mix of these weapons is really powerful. My experimentatorn lead me to use roughly 1/3 high damage low DPS and 2/3 high DPS as the most effective combination.

High damage have a much higher chance to do chock damage but the biggest effect is carving a bigger hole in the armour and thus making those high DPS weapons more effective in starting to do internal damage that much quicker. But the high DPS weapon also help the low DPS weapons too by stripping away some of outer armour layers which make the high damage weapons start doing internal damage as well earlier than you probably otherwise would with any consistency.

Whoever start doing internal damage first usually win as even a tiny amount of internal damage can be quite lethal to the overall combat effectiveness of a fleet.

[kilo]

Do not read the following paragraph, if you do not want to be discouraged:



Your design looks good on paper, but I can tell you from experience that it does not work. At first, you need an escort to protect you from all sorts of missiles, as you have no protection yourself. I bet this is why you cheaped out on the laser range, as you are expecting losses, significant losses to be honest. This decision has severe consequences though. Your damage drop is terrible and you are basically using a larger plasma carronade and you will only cause max damage up to your range modifier (x times 10k km; x is one in your case) after that your damage will behave antiproportional and half every time the distance doubles.  At 40k km your damage will be down to 13 already.
This means your ship will hardly be able to kill enemy ships swiftly, while it is carrying a box-laser. Alternatively you can go and fire your weapon from inside Gauss range. I do not know, whether this is smart though. Putting a more expensive weapon on such a fragile hull on the other hand has problems of their own.

[Andrew]

I experimented with a similar concept not as an independent strike platform but as extra spinal mounts so a carrier would launch these ships and they would stay with the fleet protected against missile fire

[nakorkren (OP)]

As kilo noted, I AM trying to come up with a use for a "box-laser" i.e. reduced size but increased recharge time. I like the name

I took misanthropope's suggestion (and kilo's implied suggestion along the same lines with his comment about expensive weaposn on a fragile hull) and went all-in on the trade between weapon cost vs recharge time by reducing the laser to cap 1, which reduces the cost of the overall ship from 438 BP down to 347 (of which the laser cost is now 18BP).

kilo, you said this is equivalent to using a plasma carrondade, which is true to the extent that I'm trying to cause high alpha damage, but plasma carronades are much larger to get the same level of damage. You're right to note, as I did in my original post, that this design needs other ships to provide missile PD or it'll get blown out of the "water" before it can close to range. For context, my normal fleet is a mix of dedicated gauss PD destroyer escorts, beam cruisers, and a single missile destroyer. My beam cruisers each mount a normal-size 45cm spinal laser and 10x 30cm lasers, so mixed DPS vs high caliber as other posters discussed being optimal. I use the gauss PD to soak up the enemy ASMs, then as the fleet closes to the enemy's AMM range I use the missile destroyer to force the enemy AMMs to concentrate of my ASMs while the beam cruisers engage outside the enemy fleet's effective beam range (not necessarily outside their range entirely, just far enough that the beam ship's shields can soak the damage for a few minutes of combat). In that context, I would deploy the "box-launcher" FACs as part of the beam combat phase.

However, I'm honestly confused by your comment that I "cheaped out on range". I used the longest range BFC I can make at my current tech level (4x range), and the laser likewise has the longest range available (X-ray). I agree that the damage fall-off with range will be the challenge to utilizing these, but since I purposefully kept the range as long as possible, I can't make heads or tails of your comment. Is my BFC range lower than you'd expect give the tech level of the rest of the components?

I'm also still on the fence if I wouldn't be better just fielding an equivalent tonnage of small to mid-sized railgun fighters, or sticking with my 2kton combat boarding shuttles that I currently use for mopping up damaged enemy ships that fall out of their fleet during the battle.

[ISN]

I've considered doing something like this as well, although in a jump point picket role rather than as part of the main fleet. You should be able to produce these as picket ships rather cheaply, and with several of them you'll be able to get a powerful alpha strike against anything that doesn't squadron transit (or squadron transits too close to the JP). Against NPRs at least, if you don't cripple or destroy the enemy fleet, you can often escape by jumping through to the other side and waiting for them to go away. Of course another player race wouldn't be fooled by this, but they could still serve as an effective deterrent if they can inflict damage disproportionate to their cost. A downside is that if they're operating on their own they'll have trouble following up on the alpha strike, so depending on your doctrine you might want to pair them with some other picket ship.

Obviously actual box launchers fulfil this role better, but optimal doesn't always equal fun

[kilo]

As kilo noted, I AM trying to come up with a use for a "box-laser" i.e. reduced size but increased recharge time. I like the name

I took misanthropope's suggestion (and kilo's implied suggestion along the same lines with his comment about expensive weaposn on a fragile hull) and went all-in on the trade between weapon cost vs recharge time by reducing the laser to cap 1, which reduces the cost of the overall ship from 438 BP down to 347 (of which the laser cost is now 18BP).

kilo, you said this is equivalent to using a plasma carrondade, which is true to the extent that I'm trying to cause high alpha damage, but plasma carronades are much larger to get the same level of damage. You're right to note, as I did in my original post, that this design needs other ships to provide missile PD or it'll get blown out of the "water" before it can close to range. For context, my normal fleet is a mix of dedicated gauss PD destroyer escorts, beam cruisers, and a single missile destroyer. My beam cruisers each mount a normal-size 45cm spinal laser and 10x 30cm lasers, so mixed DPS vs high caliber as other posters discussed being optimal. I use the gauss PD to soak up the enemy ASMs, then as the fleet closes to the enemy's AMM range I use the missile destroyer to force the enemy AMMs to concentrate of my ASMs while the beam cruisers engage outside the enemy fleet's effective beam range (not necessarily outside their range entirely, just far enough that the beam ship's shields can soak the damage for a few minutes of combat). In that context, I would deploy the "box-launcher" FACs as part of the beam combat phase.

However, I'm honestly confused by your comment that I "cheaped out on range". I used the longest range BFC I can make at my current tech level (4x range), and the laser likewise has the longest range available (X-ray). I agree that the damage fall-off with range will be the challenge to utilizing these, but since I purposefully kept the range as long as possible, I can't make heads or tails of your comment. Is my BFC range lower than you'd expect give the tech level of the rest of the components?

I'm also still on the fence if I wouldn't be better just fielding an equivalent tonnage of small to mid-sized railgun fighters, or sticking with my 2kton combat boarding shuttles that I currently use for mopping up damaged enemy ships that fall out of their fleet during the battle.

Maybe I misread it, but I was under the impression you were using IR lasers. These are horrible, as they have HUGE damage losses. UVs on the other hand have a far lower damage drop off. They should cause some damage and you should be able to fire from inside beam and outside of PD range. Hopefully, it will still cause enough damage.
 

[misanthropope]

on a 10 or 15k beam-ship chassis (propulsion and armor) put on the spinal, and divide the remaining weapon space 70/30 between ack-ack (gauss or rails to your taste) and the best medium-range DPS lasers you have.  my rule of thumb is "biggest laser with 10 second recharge".  you get a savage knife fighter with respectable versatility.

im not saying "this is the right thing.  do it" im saying "i really enjoy this class, throw it into your melting pot". 

[Noble713]

I've considered doing something like this as well, although in a jump point picket role rather than as part of the main fleet. You should be able to produce these as picket ships rather cheaply, and with several of them you'll be able to get a powerful alpha strike against anything that doesn't squadron transit (or squadron transits too close to the JP).

I'm researching Advanced Spinals in my game right now to make spinal laser JP picket satellites. I think I'll drag one of my maintenance stations close to the JP to maintain them, and then just spam a bunch of 1-2kt laser sats. No engines is a huge savings, and their ease of targeting due to their lack of speed shouldn't matter because they will get those critical first shots in regardless.

[nakorkren (OP)]

Since you'll be at knife-fighting range anyway, you may want to throw on a few small to mid-sized railguns, since those have higher DPS and will continue poking the holes your spinals made in the first strike while you wait for the spinals to recharge.

Are you planning to use reduced size lasers? You'd only get a single big alpha strike, but since they already take so long to recharge you only need a tiny reactor. You save lots of space (at only 1/10th the cost of full size laser) on both the laser and the reactor. That way you can afford to field a lot more, and perhaps distribute them around the jump point a bit to help reduce the impact of a squadron transit.

Either way, I would definitely pair them with other ships to finish the job. Cheap rail fighters in a carrier (or carrier station) would be my preference since they have the speed to chase the enemy down if it gets away and they're pretty much expendable anyway.