Tie Fighter Approach: How to do it?

[Felius (OP)]

So, have been tempted to try a massive beam fighter approach, but having trouble with the specifics of said fighter design. But getting to it: The idea is to have a huge number (which also requires them to be as small as possible to fit more in fighters per carrier) of semi-disposable fighters that can be built as cheap as possible but still present a reasonable volume of fire, accuracy and fire power.

The issue I have been stumbling upon is mostly the kind of weapon to go for. Lasers are the kind that feels it might be the best, but if you do use it in reduced size it loses far too much fire rate. At 0.75x size, with enough capacitor tech it's not so bad, even if you are using it in a spinal mount, but at 0.5x, you will, at best, firing once at 15 seconds or so, which means losing so much rate of fire it you might as well give up using the fighters. Alternatively, I'd consider Gauss canons, but at reduced size, while they do keep their higher weight of fire, it also loses accuracy vertiginously, to the point I don't know if they'd be worth it. And the other types tend to be a bit too big to really fit the proposed design philosophy.

So, thoughts, opinions and ideas on how to make it work, or even if it can work at all?

[Viridia]

Have you considered a 10cm railgun? I've not got Aurora on my laptop so I can't have a go at working out a design, but I don't think it'd be much more of a tonnage increase over a gauss cannon.

[Vandermeer]

Many here will not like the idea of beam fighters, and there are good reasons for that as they really get shot down easily in small groups by enemies mainly missile based ships and/or cannot take much from dedicated beam ships either. However, if you consider that beam attacking is basically a strategy that involves getting as fast as close enough to the enemy before he can fire missiles back, it is obvious that small stealthy, yet lightning fast fighters must just be the ideal beam attack craft - so if the strategy is valid at all, then with this.
I personally have successfully tested larger beam-fighter groups of 20, 40 and 80 against the enemies of swarm and precursor (no NPR yet though), and every incident was a huge success - sometimes even surprising. If you always remember to keep the thermal dampening tech at the niveau that the current engines are, then most fighters will only be spotted around 3-5m kilometers in distance.(but beware of good actives. needs calculation) That still leaves the enemy time to shoot some missiles, but firstly can a sizable fighter group defend against that pretty good, and secondly even losses aren't too bad, as the enemy only slowly retargets after firing all out on simply one fighter in overkill mode, - so there is usually enough time.
The reason why beam fighters have such bad reputation though might be because they always get deployed in underwhelming numbers. The philosophy here is different from missile bombers, where a few can already have great effect (but exhaust their power quickly). If you send only 3-5, or even 10 fighters against an enemy destroyer, then it is 1.5-5kt against 7 or 8kt .... - no wonder the outcome wont be without losses. Unless you have serious tech advantage, you must be sure to meet enemies with either slightly lower, but best more than equal force. (I used for example 40 beam attackers (20kt) to hunt down 14kt precursor cruisers or pairs of destroyers, and managed to destroy them without own losses after just one salvo of point blank fire .... at TL1!*)
*= Well, except engine power factor, which was full 3.

An effective strategy I have found in beam-fighter design, is to completely forego the idea of range on them, and just always attack at point blank. Your beam fire control can be really small through this, which saves space, and you are sure to do maximum damage, as well as hitting 100% of the time thanks to the enormous pilot bonuses that fighters receive (they even allow to ignore good ecm'd ships). On top of that it also saves costs on a laser, because you can just keep using ultra cheap downgraded infra-red for fighter weaponry.  ...My face when I noticed the difference that wavelength tech makes.^^
Otherwise, the best ranges on fighters are usually around 40-120k, so really not that spectacular, and crossable by any fighters in 5 seconds at the corresponding TL, so no win in time here for sure. Range on beam-fighters would only make sense if you seek to outrange either enemy beam ships or FACs.
Beam ships will never work with that, except the stationary beam bases. Anything else usually has a larger caliber than a fighter could mount, and that settles it already.
With FACs I could be wrong, but the only ones with beams I've seen came from swarm so far, and they seem to have either 60 or 120k range - both doable. As specialized anti swarm fighter, range is actually very plausible, but as an all-mission vehicle, I would recommend only point blank.

Now for design - I doubt a beam fighter can be done smaller than 400t, except if you use gauss, which I wouldn't recommend because of the gruesome useless hit-rates of smaller cannons. Even a miniaturized laser is still 100ts though, and with the beam control and generator surely 150. An efficient fighter should have around 40% engines at least, which counts double for beam fighters, because, again, beam attack is all about getting in as fast as possible. So with that it is already 300ts, and with the adding of smallest possible engineering, life quarters, armor and some fuel, there surely is another 50t=100t with engines to come.
I would like to see any design that can do it lower though. I personally always look to go to 500 directly, because I like to have some modular extras on them like more armor, a stealth suite to also hide from actives (which is needed more against higher TL enemies), or my favorite...

..Even if you might look out to miniaturize for bigger fighter loads, but if your tech level outranks the casual enemies a bit, consider adding a small ecm on beam fighters. The thing really enhances survival chances greatly on ships that are already hard to hit due to speed, so additional 20% or more might make your fighters up to immune at some point even. (my best test was against swarm facs here, where I could just fly 40 fighters directly on top of a stack of 80+, and they couldn't do anything about it anymore. from there I just shot them down with the 'different targets' option automatically. the most efficient anti swarm weapon I found yet, but you need to have a great technical edge of +3-4 levels, so 20-30% offset through small ecm)

[83athom]

I think gauss cannons are the way to go honestly. I is wise to add a few small missile box launchers to add a lot of firepower. And to the railgun fighter idea, I've done it and it is awesome. I deleted the game with my Heavy Rail Fighter that was the full 500ton while going the speed of a light frigate. I think you should base the fighter on one small railgun, a few gauss, and a few missiles (size 2-3, specially made for very short range ie 50-100 km max range).

[Felius (OP)]

The basic idea would be for it to be used against other star fighters (and maybe other lightly armored vessels), while keeping cost and size down so they can be swarmed against an enemy, while the beam focus is more for role play and design philosophy reasons. If I wanted practicality I'd go with missiles in box launchers instead (or just skew the figthers altogether and use a big missile + submunission approach ). Here I was pretty much trying to literally emulate the idea behind the Star Wars tie figther, that is, a cheap but decent enough in the numbers said low cost and size could allow it to be fielded.

That said, playing around with a full tech "tester" save, there are two main issues I've identified, both due to cost escalation: Each point of engine power costs the same no matter your tech (with each engine costing a minimum of 5 build points, but that's irrelevant for the issue at hand), no matter if said engine power comes from engine tech or fuel efficiency tech, so if I want the fighter to be fast, the engine is going to cost a lot. Furthermore, the same is true, if to a lesser degree, for the beam fire control. And while the problem increases with maximum tech, it's still present at lower tech too.

In all, without much of a strech, you could have over half of the cost of said fighter to be taken by its engine, and that's using a single engine. At top tech levels it's even worse, with the engine costing around 150, fire control not being under 45 (if you sacrifice its accuracy a bit at that level even), so, even if the rest of the craft costs around 10-20 BP in total, it's still going to be costing over 200 BP.

And if you are going to be expending that much BP anyway, since you are not going to be using it to swarm quite as easily as before, you might as well increase said cost a bit more and make it an actually reasonable figther. Or putting it another way, if you can field 5 mediocre fighters for the cost of a single good one, it can be worth it, but if you might get 3 mediocre ones for the cost of 2 good ones you might as well go for the good one.

[GreatTuna]

I'm wondering why you don't consider using meson fighters for swarm tactics.

Yes, meson cannon weighs 150 tons, but it's not like fighters can't carry this mass. Mesons bypass armour and shields completely, resulting in your swarm destroying enemies more quickly and taking fewer losses.
_{Hell, the actual Star Swarm uses mesons!}

Speaking of BP, my fleet fields fighters with 400-500BP cost. One type is decently armored (and shielded) and can take on 2-3 "conventional swarm" fighters and win, another will outrun them, third is a bomber. With "conventional swarm" fighter costing around 300BP, I don't think that it's better to keep price down.

[linkxsc]

Honestly after I tech up a bit, fighters become more of a thing for me. A lot of the time, I'll just throw together a bunch of fighters, and put up a hangar PDC with long range active sensors. Thats what I use often for defense. And usually the squadrons will be split up like say, 180 500t fighters. 30 lasers, 30 railguns, 15 mesons, 15 microwave, 30 AMM equipped, 30 size 2 missile craft, and 30 size 3 missile craft. The microwaves in particular I've found to be quite useful, due to their ability to well, knock out sensors. With both of the missile craft, all together from their box launchers they can put out a 450 missile volley.

Meanwhile, the 250t fighter market is going strong for my people aswell. What with having a cheap disposable craft that carries a few launchers, and often armed with the longer ranged self guided missiles, to lob at where I think enemies are going. Even have used 200t fighters before in the mid tech levels. (1 size 2 engine, few box launchers, tiny fuel tank, and a tiny MFC with a larger 50kt resolution, no armor). Great for hunting down civilian shipping.

But here is an example early game beam fighter that I've gotten a bit of use out of already in my game.

Code: [Select]

X Corsair class Fighter    500 tons     4 Crew     229 BP      TCS 10  TH 67.2  EM 0
19200 km/s     Armour 3-5     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 0     PPV 3
Maint Life 0 Years     MSP 0    AFR 100%    IFR 1.4%    1YR 60    5YR 900    Max Repair 168 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 0.1 months    Spare Berths 6   

192 EP Magneto-plasma Drive (1)    Power 192    Fuel Use 897.9%    Signature 67.2    Exp 30%
Fuel Capacity 15,000 Litres    Range 0.6 billion km   (8 hours at full power)

10cm C3 Infrared Laser (1)    Range 30,000km     TS: 19200 km/s     Power 3-3     RM 1    ROF 5        3 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Fire Control S00.5 32-5000 (FTR) (1)    Max Range: 64,000 km   TS: 20000 km/s     84 69 53 37 22 6 0 0 0 0
Stellarator Fusion Reactor Technology PB-1.25 (1)     Total Power Output 3    Armour 0    Exp 20%

This design is classed as a Fighter for production, combat and maintenance purposes
I'm too early in tech to do a real proper fighter, I really need the next level or 2 in beam fire control range, but I was going for drive tech first. Few thigns to note. I do have longer range laser tech, however I'm still running Infrared as the tech. This is because the infrared costs 1/4th what my current ultraviolet would. Also I have C4 capacitor charging, but used C3 instead because there is no benefit for the higher charge rate (Also cheapened the weapon) Also the reactor is highly boosted to get enough power out of a tiny spot. This becomes less of an issue at the higher tech levels. But where I currently am, what with it only having 3 armor. Its not like it would survive long under fire anyways.

Currently I have been toting ~60 of these around in a few carriers along with ~30 missile ones. Their main goal so far has been hunting down and killing hostile NPR survey ships and scouts. 24 of them also managed to take down a 11000t NPR missile destroyer with 0 losses.

Railgun fighters also work

Code: [Select]

X Hellcat class Fighter    500 tons     4 Crew     244 BP      TCS 10  TH 67.2  EM 0
19200 km/s     Armour 3-5     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 0     PPV 3
Maint Life 0 Years     MSP 0    AFR 100%    IFR 1.4%    1YR 64    5YR 956    Max Repair 168 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 0.1 months    Spare Berths 6   

192 EP Magneto-plasma Drive (1)    Power 192    Fuel Use 897.9%    Signature 67.2    Exp 30%
Fuel Capacity 15,000 Litres    Range 0.6 billion km   (8 hours at full power)

10cm Railgun V4/C3 (1x4)    Range 40,000km     TS: 19200 km/s     Power 3-3     RM 4    ROF 5        1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
Fire Control S00.5 32-5000 (FTR) (1)    Max Range: 64,000 km   TS: 20000 km/s     84 69 53 37 22 6 0 0 0 0
Stellarator Fusion Reactor Technology PB-1.25 (1)     Total Power Output 3    Armour 0    Exp 20%

This design is classed as a Fighter for production, combat and maintenance purposes
However there is 1 very special thing to note. See both of these fighters have the same effective range. And you can argue the whole laser penetration at point blank vs the 4 shots per round sandpapering. Mind you, railgun fighters work a HELL of a lot better at missile interception (literally 4x the chances to hit). But we run into a bit of a problem.  Lets just compare the 10cm infrared laser, to the 10cm railgun.

Code: [Select]

10cm C3 Infrared Laser
Damage Output 3     Rate of Fire: 5 seconds     Range Modifier: 1
Max Range 30,000 km     Laser Size: 3 HS    Laser HTK: 1
Power Requirement: 3    Power Recharge per 5 Secs: 3
Cost: 5    Crew: 9
Materials Required: 1x Duranium  1x Boronide  3x Corundium

Development Cost for Project: 50RP

10cm Railgun V3/C3
Damage Per Shot (4): 1     Rate of Fire: 5 seconds     Range Modifier: 3
Max Range 30,000 km     Railgun Size: 3 HS    Railgun HTK: 1
Power Requirement: 3    Power Recharge per 5 Secs: 3
Cost: 15    Crew: 9
Materials Required: 3x Duranium  3x Boronide  9x Neutronium

Development Cost for Project: 450RP

The railgun at the same range, costs 9x as much research, and 3x the cost and minerals. Dropping the railgun range down to the 1st level tech still results in a 300RP research project to design it, and then it can only be fired from <10,000km. (basically useless for missile interception at that point)
10cm rail is 1000rp for the tech, then range is 1000/2000/4000. Resulting in the 30,000km ranged railgun actually costing 8450RP from start. (both weapons use the same capacitor tech, and same amount of power)

Laser on the other hand, 1000 for the laser, 500 for the infrared. Total cost of the weapons system is 1550RP, from conventional start. Just a little something to think about. Lasers are by far, the cheapest to research and design weapons systems, at virtually all levels. Also as tech goes up farther, at capacitor recharge 12, you can do a 75% size laser with a 5 second rof. 16 will get you 12cm lasers reduced with a rof of 5 seconds. Microwave and meson tech also cost significantly more than laser tech. but I guess that's a balancing factor in the game.

[Rich.h]

On the meson front I also tried playing around with a microwave fighter to work alongside boarding. I considered these to be semi expendable in low numbers, but they worked well for hitting ships with low or no shielding. Couple them with high speed fighter sized assault shuttles and it allowed me to easily capture ships rather than try to salvage wrecks.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Sounds allot like my Patrol Corvettes I had in a campaign a while ago.

They were armed with two twin turrets... one was a 12cm Laser turret and the other with Microwave cannons. They also had an internal hangar with a rescue shuttle and an assault shuttle and a company of Marines. I think it also had a CIWS system and a 24 cell (box launchers) PD missile system.

Their main job was to keep the peace as patrol craft in my own systems. If any suspect ships entered the system they patrolled they could disable and board them.


Beam fighters is very useful for many things, mainly against other fighters, scouts or ships with otherwise low defences. Against a real warship with adequate defences they are just meat in a slaughterhouse...

Since all my campaigns revolve around multiple factions not controlled by the AI beam fighters is not used against enemy warship unless there is a very good reason to do so. Such as a last ditch defence or to defend a jump point together with a fleet.

[Ninetails]

I quite like the idea of beam fighters, but they can just be a bit hard to design well. I have not gotten around to actually designing and building any fighters and/or carriers yet, but here are my thoughts on it anyway.

For beam weapons, especially at the small stage, there are huge boons from going slightly up in scale. For instance guass cannons are much worse than rail guns of the same size on fighters without top tier tech. Specifically, if one ignores the power requirement, then for unturrented weapons rail guns are equivalent to gauss cannons with a fire rate of 8 in terms effective fire rate pr mass of weaponry, with guass cannons being significantly worse against targets with a ECM advantage. This means that you are probably going to design your beam fighters to have 3 HS of weaponry, unless you are going for something special. With that you can get the basic type of 10cm version of most beam weapons: rail guns, lasers, mesons and high powered microwaves. Each of those weapons have different advantages. Lasers have larger range, and good possibilities for different sizing (a 4 HS 15cm laser can provide decent range and point black firepower, and the 10cm can later be reduce to 2 HS with the 75% size), rail guns allow many hits - which makes them good against missiles, mesons allow better attacks against highly defended targets, while high powered microwaves disables offensive power and damages shields. If you can design such a standard 3HS fighter, then with whatever setup you use, I would strongly suggest to also bring an amount of HPM (high powered microwaves) version fighters. The reason for this comes from the weakness of beam fighters: they need to get so close in, that pratically every type of weapon will be in range, so you will likely suffer hits, and the fighters are hard to put sufficient defense on to survive many hits, so you will likely suffer some losses. To limit such losses, it is favorable to shut down your opponents offensive capabilities as quickly as possible, which can be done with HPM against unshielded targets. If you plan on using them against heavy missile armed opponents, you are going to want to bring some anti-missile capability, which is most easily done with rail guns.

What one needs to remember, is that beam fighters forfill a vastly different role compared to missile fighters. Missile fighters are more like bombers, serving as a reusable primary stage for a 2 stage long range missile. They can often use their size to sneak in under the radar and fire off at a medium range, where they are difficult to respond to. Beam fighters needs to get up close before they can do anything, and they are therefor suspectiable to many of the same things as a standard beam fleet are, just with a lot less toughness. What they add compared to standard beam warships, is a high speed, and theirfor capability for a beam fleet to deal with opponents that could otherwise escape the main warships. Since that is one of beam fleets 2 large weaknesses (which are problems with faster fleets and problems with overwhelming voleys from box launchers), it can significantly improve on what a beam based empire is able to deal with. One should also note that carriers of beam fighters do not need to dedicate space for magazines, and there can therefor be much more room for more fighters. The use of HPM armed fighters can also be used in combined arms type of scenarios, where they can perform a type of hit and run attacks in much smaller numbers, and disable enemy sensors and fire controls, making their fleets far less effective, and thereby much eaiser to deal with by the rest of the forces. For beam based intercepters (fighters against missile based fighter/bombers), rail guns can be used favorably, since it also allow for dealing with the incomig missiles. For superiority fighters (fighters against other beam fighters) lasers and meson wins out, since the others are typicaly armored and without too much internal HTK, where laser might cut through and be able to hit more often in a dogfight due to range and mesons having longer full power range and always passing armor. My suggestion for a basic setup, would be for a few HPM armed fighters (say 2-10) and a good amount of rail gun armed fighters (enough for missile defense), possibly complimented with a few messon armed fighters (atleast the same amount as HPM fighters). This would provide anti-missile coverage while moving in, the HPM fighters would then quickly disable the weaponry (through no sensor/fire control), allowing the rest of the fighters to kill of the ships at leasure afterwards. The meson fighters would mainly be against heavily shielded targets, which the HPM fighters would have trouble with, though they would take a lot longer to achive the same effect.

[linkxsc]

Oh yes, something i left out of my earlier excerpt when talking about fighter design.

Something rather important at any tech level. Even though you can save some money with shorter ranged weapons tech, and fire controls. You must strive to always outrange the enemies gauss cannon PD ships. You can't really do to much about outranging enemies with laser PD escorts, because they will almost always outrange your fighters. But gauss cannons max out at 60,000km. Letting a group of beam fighters get within range of a GC equipped escort can very VERY quickly, spell the end of your fighter squadron. Ships I am up against currently are packing dual 4 shot per 5 second GCs, 6 turrets per ship. Each 5 second if I get within 30,000km of them my fighters can take up to 4x2x6, 48 damage. Against my fighters that only have 3x5 boxes of armor. 1 of these turrets with its 8 shots in a 5 second interval is guaranteed to penetrate both the first and second armor levels, and very often will go right into the fighter and start wrecking things. This is a serious problem at lower techs, and stays a problem as tech rises, up until the point where you can start fitting your fighters with more than ~5 layers of armor.
Laser equipped escorts will also always penetrate into your armor deep, and do become more of a problem at higher tech levels, but laser PD generally stays in the 10cm (3 damage max) to 12cm (4 damage max) range, where GCs can get up to 5-8 damage per round, and have more chances to hit your fast movers.

[Ninetails]

For the gauss cannons, pretty much every other standard usable beam weapon has an easier time getting range. Even rail guns, which have the same base range and increasements as gauss cannons, have a cheaper research line (only doubles instead of triples each tier) and more tiers to it, so that you will generally end up outranging it after putting some research into it, and this is for the basic 10cm weapons. Personally I never use 12cm weapons for point defense, as they they are inferior to the 10cm and 15 cm versions (for lasers/mesons/HPM) for these roles, as they come with the same size as 15cm, but with inferior range. I would only use them as early game battle cannons, before getting the 6 recharge tech, after which they are outdated by their 15cm versions. Note that railguns works differently. For point blank point defense, there might be a point in trying to outrange them, and this is the reason why you should generally have extra long BFC range, since this will keep them somewhat effective at this range. To counter not too long range point defense weapons, the usage of EMC can be quite helpfull, as it applies after other multiplies, and if you are a bit out, it will cut a lot into their hit chance and let them hit you a lot less, even a 2 point EMC on a base 50% chance hit, will take it down to 30%, which is much more manegeable. Against good area point defense (long range high fire rate), you are going to have to accept casuelties at the ranges you have to enter. Against a 15cm laser turret, you will have to enter into its close range to do much, and there will be heavy tolls, especially since they only take a base of 4 HS and often have good tracking speed, and they can fill many of them on a ship. The more powerfull (and high tech) 20,25, and 30cm turrets will generally start being so large that there probably would not be too many of them or not have sufficiently good tracking speed. This means that if your opponent favors those kinds of point defense/beam offense weapons, you are generally bad off with your fighters, unless they only included few of these. In general you are going to lose the range arms range against all but point blank point defense (which is by far the most common).

About the cost of beam fighters in the 200-600 range, I would not consider it to be that problematic, once you consider that your other ships of the late game will easily cost many thouands of buildpoints pr 5000tons, and as such the ratio is not too far off. If employed against inferior opponents, their speed will be sufficient to make them very hard to hit, and if coupled with EMC advantage, almost invurnable. For instance, consider you were at 75% hit chance range, your speed was say 2.5 times his tracking speed (requires around a factor 2 difference in base speed), which would give an effective 25% chance to be hit, with further 2 ECM advantage, it would go to 5% and with 3 you would be unhittable. Therefor they would simply repressent the standard higher cost of ships at that point in the arms race, and if employed against similar tech the ratios would be the same, and if against inferior opponents they would just eat them alive. Note that this is all conjectures and theorycrafting, as I have not actually tested fighters myself.

[linkxsc]

Dont forget, the enemy likes their eccms themselves

[SteelChicken]

I like fighters for jump point defense (no risk to AMM fire while closing distance) and for low maintenance planetary defense.

In general, my experience with them has been poor, although ill admit I've only tried gauss fighters.  Half the time they are out of range due to initiative problems.   Meson cannons (if you use them) fighters would be awesome.

[83athom]

I usually don't start to design fighters until AM drives as I see that lesser tech engines have too much of a trade-off between speed and offence/defense. When I do have fighters at lesser tech (mag-plasma for example) I will usually have 150tons dedicated just to engines as a baseline (not including fuel), that is 30% of the max size of a fighter just to get a usable speed. Whereas you could use only 50tons (AM) and still have a much greater speed, that frees a lot of space up for offense/defense.