@firsal:
Overall your ship looks quite feasible. What I notice most is your relatively large amount of fuel and fuel consumption. Using 2 million liiters of fuel for each trip is quite a steep deployment cost in my book, and I would advise against it unless you are rolling in fuel in your game. From calculating backward through your tech, I have come up with you using 100 HS for engines with size 10 engines 100% power/efficiency and 42.5HS on fuel. Now 40% of engine size as fuel is technically the optimal amount of fuel to engines if you need to get to a certain range at the fastest possible speed. This is without considering the fuel efficiency gain from using larger engines, and just has to do with the amount of engines and the power/efficiency multiplyer. However, because this is the optimal value, it also means that one should never cross it in terms of more fuel (unless there are special economic interests at hand), since you would getter more range by using more engines with more economical power/efficiency multiplyers. Now, due to being so close to the limmit, and due to the discrete nature of the designs, it would be hard to find a more optimal value. On the other hand is the small engine size. These could relatively easily be increase, to 20, 25, or 50 HS. This would ofcause increase the maximum component cost, and reduce the redundancy of the engine, but since the Hit To Kill of engines are half the HS of the engines rounded down they will still be as hard to take out, and even with 50 HS engines you will still have some redundancy. The extra fuel efficiency gained from this could either be used to save increase the power of the engines (about 25% for 50 HS), or used to save space from reducing fuel tanks (more than 16 HS for 50 HS engines). Some of the extra space could then be used to add more engineering bays/additional maintaince storage, which would keep your high maintenaince multiplyer and even increase it.
I like the idea of using railguns for clean up, since it gives you a high probability of hitting the holes in the armor. For this though, you might want to add som shields if you want to use it against ships armed with anti ship beams, since they might still have a few weapons left over that could take a pot shot at you or 2, and it will help to give you some leeway when trying to find the distance you want to engage them on. For jupm point defense the railguns are somewhat less usefull, if they are used alone that is. This has to do with their low penetration power, which means that they will have to work their way through most of the ships armor before they get to start to cripple the other ship. Because of this they might not get as much of a significant headstart of damage as they might need to, and if deployed against well armored ships you might end up suffering casuelties. I would suggest deploying them together with some heavy laser weaponry or large warhead missiles, whos job it is to punch holes in the armor which your railguns can then find. If you have access to decent laser tech, I would suggest replacing your largest rail gun with equally large lasers, since this will help you with both long range beam combat (for finishing off foes without damage) and for punching holes which your railguns can then use.
@83athom:
For both your larger ships you really need to work on matching up your beam fire control tracking speed with your weapons tracking speed. This is because for any given pairing of weapon to fire control only the lower of these 2 values will be used, while the higher value is just wasted. I can only really come up with 2 scenarios for when not to do this: 1) If you are futureproffing your ships to reduce the amount of components that need to be refitted on later versions. 2) If you do not actually need the high tracking speed for those weapons, and you are getting the extra "for free". However number 2 only works for extra tracking speed on non-turret weapons. On the Admiral class Battlecruisser you have a fire control with a tracking speed of 30,000 km/s, with no weapons to make use of this, which means it is just a waste of space a resurces to make it so large, while on the Brawler class you have turrets with a tracking speed of 94,500 km/s, which can only employed by END game tech (TL12, the last one). With fire controls that only go to 30.000 km/s you are either doing some extreme future proffing, without actually going all the way to 100.000km/s, or you are simply wasting valueable space and resources on makeing the turrets way to large. I would suggest lowering them to 60.0000 km/s and increasing the fire control to the same speed. About Close In Weapon Systems (CIWS) I would like to point out that they are technically just gauss turrets configured in a special way, and that converting them into gauss cannons could for the doctrine be described as "using improved versions", and it would theirfor not necessarily conflict with your fleet doctrine, unless you specifically wish it to do so.
At the tech level of gas core AM drives (TL 9) I would say that your ships and missiles are quite slow (the brawler is more acceptable). The "Standard Speed"* for gas core AM drives is 12.500 km/s, which those 5,xxx km/s is awefully short of. Based on this (and other) observations, I would guess that you have only really been encountering low tech NPR's, since those are the main kinds of targets that your ships and missiles speeds will be effective against. I am also going to assume that you are not a missile based empire, since the missiles you have on your Adminral class Battlecruiser are not exactly very potent (compared to what else it features). Since you only have a resolution 10 missile fire control, you cannot use your AF/AM missiles against missiles, since they would targetable at any reasonably range (about 65,000 km), and they would be bad against missiles anyway, since they do not feature any agility, and therefor has a Target Speed** of 6,500 km/s, which is awefully slow for most missiles (the slowest missiles I have had used against me were 8000 km/s), not to mention that such targets could have been completely invalidated by increasing the ships speed (which means you could have simply run from their missiles). They also need to reach the 4 point warhead to be really effective against fighters and other strike craft, since that will allow them to punch through the normal 1 thickness armor and do significant internal damage (most fighters have very few internal hit to kills), while their speed is only enough to target early tech fighters. Your ASM are also quite slow, and with a Target Speed of 2.200 km/s they will start losing effectiveness against ships with just ion engines (which is somewhat embarissing for an anti-matter age empire). They do pack a decent amount of punch and penetrates to the 4th armor layer. All this means that the missiles are fine enough against low tech empires, but anything more than that and they end up being less than optimal. The ranges are somewhat strange though, with a 180m km range AMM against the 60m km fire control, which I suppose is for use on other ships with much larger fighter targeting systems. The ASM missile has somewhat shorter range, which is more accetable considering that the fire control could be reduced by ECM, until you consider that the empires with sufficient tech to go above 2 ECM level, is probably going to be hard to hit with those missiles anyway. The secod problem with those missile speeds, are that they end up being much easier to shoot down than otherwise necessary. Lastly, the amount of missiles carried are insufficient to do any serious damage to a ship of its own size, which again suggests that I have just rambled on for very long against what is most likely just some test sidearms, or old missiles to be disposed of.
Anyway, for comparioson, I am going to post 2 designs which are from the next generation of the campain I last posted about, and they were build around 60 years into a conventional game, at the same engine tech level. Note that I am going to discontinue that campain, as I happend to push the wrong bottom at the wrong place (screwing up a lot of stuff).
First is the Defiant class frigate, which can be compared to your Brawler class:
Defiant class Frigate 7,500 tons 175 Crew 2971.3 BP TCS 150 TH 2250 EM 600
15000 km/s Armour 6-34 Shields 20-300 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 62.6
Maint Life 0.13 Years MSP 248 AFR 450% IFR 6.2% 1YR 1940 5YR 29099 Max Repair 1012.5 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Spare Berths 1
Std-90 2250 EP Gas Core AM Drive (1) Power 2250 Fuel Use 7.68% Signature 2250 Exp 9%
Fuel Capacity 250,000 Litres Range 78.1 billion km (60 days at full power)
Xi R300/300 Shields (4) Total Fuel Cost 50 Litres per hour (1,200 per day)
Twin Gauss Cannon R4-100 Turret (4x10) Range 40,000km TS: 40000 km/s Power 0-0 RM 4 ROF 5 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
Point Blank Fire Control S01 37.5-40000 (4) Max Range: 75,000 km TS: 40000 km/s 87 73 60 47 33 20 7 0 0 0
Active Search Sensor MR19-R1 (1) GPS 60 Range 19.2m km MCR 2.1m km Resolution 1
ECM 30
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
The interesting thing to note here, is that it is very similiar to the Brawler. However it has more effective anti missile firepower (your 50 triple 8% hit chance gauss cannons will on average hit 50*0.08*3*6 = 36 missiles, while my 4 double 100% hit chance gauss cannons will hit 4*2*5 = 40 missiles), and have a higher effective tracking speed (40,000 km/s vs yours 30,000 km/s) all while using worse gauss and fire control tech. To top it off, the package it comes in is just slightly over 1/4th of the size. Your ship ofcause has other advantages, such as ECCM, longer weapon/firecontrol range, propor maintance, double deployment and more defenses.
The next example is for what can be done with missiles at this tech level with only mid game missile tech, the Young Archer class missile frigate:
Young Archer class Missile Frigate 7,500 tons 187 Crew 2754.3 BP TCS 150 TH 2250 EM 900
15000 km/s Armour 6-34 Shields 30-300 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 20
Maint Life 0.13 Years MSP 230 AFR 450% IFR 6.2% 1YR 1816 5YR 27237 Max Repair 1012.5 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Spare Berths 0
Magazine 560
Std-90 2250 EP Gas Core AM Drive (1) Power 2250 Fuel Use 7.68% Signature 2250 Exp 9%
Fuel Capacity 250,000 Litres Range 78.1 billion km (60 days at full power)
Xi R300/300 Shields (6) Total Fuel Cost 75 Litres per hour (1,800 per day)
RR Size 1 Missile Launcher (20) Missile Size 1 Rate of Fire 5
Missile Fire Control FC172-R1 (2) Range 172.8m km Resolution 1
"Arrow" I: 4/1 (TS15,22) Anti-ship Missile (160) Speed: 52,500 km/s End: 59.6m Range: 187.8m km WH: 4 Size: 1 TH: 507/304/152
"Watchdog" I: 1/1 (TS 82.5) Anti-missile Missile (400) Speed: 150,000 km/s End: 2.3m Range: 21.1m km WH: 1 Size: 1 TH: 2750/1650/825
Active Search Sensor MR172-R1 (1) GPS 540 Range 172.8m km MCR 18.8m km Resolution 1
ECM 30
Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
First note the ranges on the anti ship/fighte missile "Arrow", which has a quite decent long range slightly above the MFC (in case of run and chase). The speed is significantly higher and the anti ship missile can atleast 100% hit its own vessel, while the AMM can 100% hit that missile. The AMM has a somewhat shorter range (usually they would be lower, but this ship is fitted with very powerfull resolution 1 sensors), while the "Arrow" has exactly 4 size warhead to punch through thin armored ships like fighters easily (sadly I only encounted heavily armored strike craft after its commission). It also carries much much larger magazines, allowing the "Arrow"s to potentially kill a few of its own type of craft (assuming no missile defense), while there is sufficiently many missiles to weather the huge volleys that beam weapons have trouble dealing with, and the range on the sensor allow for many volleys of AMM to be fired before the missiles hit the task group.
Before people start commenting on it, I play with the "no overhauls" options, and as such does not care about maintance life, though damage control can still be usefull.
* Standard Speed is the speed at which a normal sized fire control of the same tech level can hit you at 100%, and ut is achieved by dedicating 25% of the hull to engines with 100% power/efficiency multiplyer.
** Target Speed (TS) is the speed for which a weapon (typically missile) is designated a 100% hit chance multiplyer from speed. Note that hit chance multiplyer due to speed is then min(TS/Speed,1)*100%.
