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VB6 Aurora > Advanced Tactical Command Academy
scout design and doctrine
Michael Sandy:
To begin with, what ARE the various scouting missions, and how important are they?
1) locating enemy fleet on offense
2) early warning of enemy fleet for strategic or tactical defense
3) shadowing enemy vessels to direct fleet assets, or to find enemy entry/exit points
4) monitoring jump points/gates. Requirements, the resolution to detect anything that can make transit. Must be able to detect transit over the range a jump ship about 2 tech levels higher could jump in.
5) probing jump points
6) probing inhabitable planets
7) early warning of missile attack, to allow fleet time to turn away or forward deploy anti-missile escort
8) recon by fire. Sometimes the only way to find out what range the enemy can detect or destroy missiles, fighters, ships is to probe. Against a faster fleet, especially precursors, you have to have this information early enough to disengage.
9) providing targeting information vs missiles, fighters and/or ships for other ships whose weapon ranges would otherwise vastly exceed their onboard sensor range.
Scouts can be anything from missiles with sensors on them, drones, fighters, lacs, all the way up to capital ships with a quarter or more of their tonnage devoted to sensors. So what keeps them alive?
1) speed. They can outrun anything that is armed
2) small size, they can detect anything big enough to harm them outside of their opponent's own sensor range
3) range, they have sensors of such size that they can sit comfortably outside of the enemy's range while directing the fight
4) they are a deliberate target, with lots of armor and shields
5) alive? They are cheap and disposable and built in ordnance factories or fighter factories
6) not as fast as possible, or as small as possible, but armed to take out or force back their opposite numbers, or part of a squadron where the design of the hitters is tied to the speed and size of the sensor equipped ship.
Some scouting doctrine ideas:
Every jump point should have a sensor on it, preferably both sides, in every system with assets that are not considered to be "disposable". Every system worth protecting should at least have a patrol capable of shadowing an enemy fleet, so in the event of a surprise attack through an undiscovered jump point, the attack can be traced back.
So, some questions:
Approximately what percentage of your fleet build is devoted to scouting? How specialized are your scouts? If your scouts are small, like missile to LAC sized, specialization seems the way to go. But for capital ship scouts, you may not have enough of a production run to justify an EM specialized capital ship and a thermal specialized capital ship etc...
baconholic:
I prefer ground base passive sensor for monitoring most things. Each one of them is a giant size 50 EM/Th sensor and you can stack them up for more power. With some tech investment, they can detect fighters at billions of km away. They only cost 300 to produce, so I just put 1 at every system, more at strategic locations like wormholes.
For the main offensive scouting, I'll put big sensors around 500-1000 tons each on a destroyer hull of 10,000 tons. There are usually three of them at 150, 20, and 1 resolution.
83athom:
1-3)Either a ship with large passive sensors and engines turned off, or a colony with a few Deep Space Tracking Station buildings on it (they don't require workers).
4)Buoys.
5)Small ship with stealthing (ECM, cloak, thermal reduction on engines).
6)General survey ship.
7)Active sensor.
8.) Not usually an issue unless you would never win either way.
9)Dedicated Sensor ships/fighters.
I usually don't have a "dedicated" sensor ship. However, most of my ships carry a small percentage of their mass as sensors as I build large ships, but I do have some scout designs with a larger percentage to sensors (larger sensors, more kinds, etc). They are usually equipped with light defenses (box launcher/.33 size launchers for anti-ship, a CIWS or two for anti-missile), big and efficient engines (with thermal reduction), ECM, and a cloak if I can fit it.
Bremen:
Like others in this thread, I usually put a few (around 10 if I can afford it) deep space tracking arrays on whatever body is closest to the jump point(s) back towards my inhabited systems for every system on my jumpgate network. This isn't perfect since it can miss small and stealthy ships, but it generally lets me know if there are any alien armadas heading for my colonies. It's also cheap and low maintenance.
I also usually have some sort of jump scout (ideally something fighter or FAC sized kept in a hangar bay, either on a carrier or a large ship with a small utility bay) just because a jump point ambush can be so horribly damaging. For the rest I usually just rely on the onboard sensors my warships carry. My survey ships also have size 1 passive sensors to hopefully detect inhabited worlds at range.
AbuDhabi:
--- Quote ---1) locating enemy fleet on offense
--- End quote ---
Adequate sensors on all combat ships.
--- Quote ---2) early warning of enemy fleet for strategic or tactical defense
--- End quote ---
DSTS.
--- Quote ---3) shadowing enemy vessels to direct fleet assets, or to find enemy entry/exit points
--- End quote ---
Never tried.
--- Quote ---4) monitoring jump points/gates. Requirements, the resolution to detect anything that can make transit. Must be able to detect transit over the range a jump ship about 2 tech levels higher could jump in.
--- End quote ---
Don't do that much, but would put a recreation station with sensors on it. Maybe two, given the bugs surrounding recreation module.
--- Quote ---5) probing jump points
--- End quote ---
7-10k scoutship. Active and gravitational sensors. CIWS for defense. Big commercial engine. Lots of fuel. Military jump drive.
--- Quote ---6) probing inhabitable planets
--- End quote ---
Small geo scoutship. Some commercial engine, moderate amounts of fuel, geosurvey sensors. No jump engine.
--- Quote ---7) early warning of missile attack, to allow fleet time to turn away or forward deploy anti-missile escort
--- End quote ---
Never tried.
--- Quote ---8) recon by fire. Sometimes the only way to find out what range the enemy can detect or destroy missiles, fighters, ships is to probe. Against a faster fleet, especially precursors, you have to have this information early enough to disengage.
--- End quote ---
Don't use missiles much.
--- Quote ---9) providing targeting information vs missiles, fighters and/or ships for other ships whose weapon ranges would otherwise vastly exceed their onboard sensor range.
--- End quote ---
I put sensors on combat ships to enable them to shoot out to their entire range.
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