Posted by: RougeNPS
« on: January 14, 2021, 11:47:47 PM »I think you could use actual missiles rather than plasma carronades for space opera style bombers, especially if they had enormous warheads and you launched them from point blank range
So imagine you're facing an enemy that maybe builds tons of AMMs but not a lot of beam weapons with high tracking speeds, you could get a big formation of 'bomber' fighters or FACs together with ECM and tons of PD to protect themselves from AMMs, and launch very short-ranged huge-warhead missiles at the enemy fleet within 5s missile flight time range, you'd at least get your missiles past their AMMs and any area defense beams, they'd get FDF to protect themselves but if that was inadequate, you could get a lot of damage through. I think you could potentially also fire a ton of size 1 missiles at the same time as the large ones to overwhelm enemy FDF.
A 15cm carronade is 200 tons and requires, depending on your tech, probably a ~20 ton power plant and a ~20 ton BFC plus ~10 crew for 6 damage output, but a 5 ton MFC and a size 30 box launcher fit in about the same space or less and require 0 crew, and a missile that size can easily do 10x the damage of the carronade or more, pierce many layers of armor, and cause serious shock damage against a heavily armored target
Another idea would be to send in a squadron of fighters with HPMs right before the bombers to knock out all of the target's shields, sensors, and defensive fire controls so the bombers' missiles could reach their targets without even getting shot at, this would work in advance of boarding shuttles as well
The whole point of my style of bombers is for shield knocking and potentially, critical systems elimination. The rest of the supporting fleet would then rip the ships to shreds via whatever means necessary. I was thinking i would also likely employ FAC or PD fighters as missile screens.