No Missiles?

[Crustypeanut]

Well, I'm aiming for mainly using gauss cannons for my primary weapon, especially since I have a kinetics weapon researcher with 40% bonus that can use 40 labs at a time (which I have).   

All of these are rather short range too, I don't expect to fight anyone more than 2-3 systems from any maintenance/fuel stations for now.  I'm playing it nice and slow.

[Mel Vixen]

Thats an fairly odd choice. Gauswepons are normaly sidearms for PD but still i would advise to incrasethe Turnspeed of that turrets and the trackingspeed of the fire control so you can shot down any missiles comming your way.

[HaliRyan]

The thing I discovered very quickly was that if you're building a fleet don't use any CIWS. You want gauss cannons with lots of fire controls. I lost a couple ships to missiles because even though I had the accuracy and number of shots to destroy every oncoming missile, I didn't have the fire controls to target more than a few of the salvos at once. So when 20 salvos came in I had loads of wasted shots and most of them got through.

On the other hand I have several big 100kt battleships designed for solo work, and they use CIWS exclusively since there's no point using normal gauss if you don't have multiple ships supporting each other on PD.

Hope that made sense, it's 6am.  

[Crustypeanut]

It does make perfect sense, but I have a few reasons why I'm still using a ton of CIWS:

Since each CIWS has its own built in Fire controls, each one can fire on different salvos, if needed.   Plus, since each ship has at least one CIWS, even if my escorts are preoccupied, all of my ships will at least have some defense.

As for my escorts, each one has two fire controls with three single turrets apiece.   I suppose I could've sacrificed their CIWS in place of another 4 fire controls, allowing each turret its own fire control, but I'm fine with my current decision.

I'm still assembling the fleet, so we'll see how it works when I meet some neighbors.   If I die, I die.   I mean, as we say over on the Dwarf Fortress forums, Losing is FUN!

[HaliRyan]

The thing about those CIWS is that they can only target missiles fired against the ship mounting them, so they're essentially wasted space most of the time in a fleet. With more fire controls and turrets you'll actually have better overall defense.

[Crustypeanut]

Aye I'm aware they only target missiles fired against the ship mounting them.   

I'll probably include far more turrets and fire controls when I start building bigger ships.   For now, since each ship is small, I like to have a semi-self contained defense, so that no ship is left defenseless in case of a missing (or destroyed) escort.

[HaliRyan]

Well, it can certainly work. I look forward to hearing about your experiences with them. 

[Crustypeanut]

Well I found my first enemies, one system away from Sol in the system Ásgarðr.   Beautiful, beautiful system, one of the gas giants has TWO moons with colony cost 2x on them.  Named one Asgard and the other Valhalla.   No thermal signatures from my scout ship when it went to do a geological survey, but a number of ships jumped me during the survey.   I think they're you-know-what.   My ship didn't stand a chance, as it was a simple survey vessel.

Seeing as their speed is over 5000 km/s, I'm going to research new engines before I go in there.   Plus, my fleet is on training exercise still.

[Crustypeanut]

Lol well, tell you one thing - my first combat did NOT go well. 

Its not that my ships were designed poorly, as they did last a while, its that 2 things:

We were only slightly faster than our enemy, so we couldn't catch up to him fast enough. 

And the big one: Our turrets were NOT meant for 40k km/s missiles.    They were meant for 1/4th of that. 

--

Found out the enemy (Who is either you-know-what, or just an advanced NPR who is impossible to communicate with) is based on a venus-like planet that has too high of gravity for human life.   Named it Valaksjalf, and I shall eventually colonize it with a group of genetically modified humans known as the Aesir! Once I get around to conquering it, of course.

[Charlie Beeler]

The is one thing it doesn't look like you've taken into consideration, NPR beam armed ships.  You've armed your fleet with the shortest ranged beam in the game.  This is going to be especially telling when facing meson armed ships. 

[Yonder]

Haha, I am doing a no-missile game right now as well (or I was, before the infinite error messages I posted in the bug thread killed my game. I'm not sure what I'll do now).

My rational was that after a devastating World War III that humanity barely survived (happening at the opening of the Trans-Newtonian period) All nuclear weapons have been banned and scrapped, and military vessels can not arm missiles, since they can attack inhabited planets. (Meson weapons are something known as a theoretical possibility among the scientific community, but since they have never been implemented outside of a lab or fired in anger there was no political will to ban them. Even if they did exist they probably wouldn't have been banned since they aren't exactly able to wipe out cities and kill millions at a time.

At the start of the game all previous military vessels had been scrapped, the only military force left was the new four large orbital point defense bases constructed with starting laser tech in order to defend any populations against space or land fired missiles that had survived the purge. (I had put all of the military portion of my starting tech into missiles, to fit with the back story, each 8000 ton Shield PDB would struggle to keep up with a missile attack from a single 5000 ton "Archer"--the ship I designed at the beginning of the game to represent the best of the last-generation missile ships that was scrapped).

An amusing sidenote is that 25 years into my game my two Energy Weapons scientists had died, leaving me with 4 or 5 really nice Missile/Kinetic scientists.

[Crustypeanut]

I do believe my ships will have a fun time against beam weapons, thats for sure.   But heres the thing - if my ships can get close enough, the sheer volume of shots being fired should prove strong enough.

I hope.