Posted by: Arwyn
« on: March 13, 2014, 05:20:44 PM »
No argument that the range for beams isn't fantastic. NPR's do tend to be stupidly aggressive, so if you do have a station illuminating the warp point with active sensors, you will often see them bracket the active sensor target and charge it. Unarmed scouts tend to immediately run the other direction, which can also be helpful.
I built a battery of fighter sized beam bases, then bracketed a problematic warp point with four groups of them set up on the corners of a imaginary square with the warp point in the center. The bases were located at just under max weapon range from the warp point. In this case, 100,000km. Admittedly not very long range. Active sensor platforms were set up further behind the beam bases in four groups of two, only 1 station in each group active at a time. Max observed speed of the NPR was 2250 k/ms to 2750 k/ms.
The result worked moderately well. Not perfect, but it was doing a decent job killing scouts, and smaller warships. Bigger fleets would push through, but take damage doing so. 4 groups of sixteen of these were pretty effective. In all the encounters, I believe I only had one occasion where two groups ever engaged a group at the same time, with pretty poor hit results.
On more than one occasion, I had enemy ships get blown to slag at point blank range as they jumped in on top or next to the beam group.
The whole point to these was to have some sort of defense that wasn't going to consume tons of missiles. The war with the NPR was killing me economically, missile consumption was so high that industry couldn't keep up, so I needed something cheap that wouldn't tie up shipyards or drain minerals at a disastrous rate. Since these got built as fighters, they were on a separate production track, and didn't interfere with warship production.
These little bases did the trick. Killed the leakers, killed the smaller warships groups, and mauled the bigger fleets when they blew past. As my economy recovered, I started emplacing groups of mines further back behind the beam bases, well back from the warp point. They were too far back to engage the warp point, but if a fleet pushed past the bases, one or more mine groups would launch. THAT did wonders against bigger fleets.
Biggest problem I had with these was the NPR anti-missile escorts, they would kill 2 to 3 of these stations every volley if I didn't kill them first. Still, at just under 90 bp, they were cheaper than the mineral costs of the minefields I had been using, and I had no wasted missiles.
Here are the bases in question, tech was mid-ion;
Punji class Beam Defence Base 478 tons 20 Crew 88.9 BP TCS 9.55 TH 0 EM 0
1 km/s Armour 1-5 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 0 PPV 4
Maint Life 6.43 Years MSP 29 AFR 7% IFR 0.1% 1YR 1 5YR 18 Max Repair 29 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 36 months Spare Berths 1
12cm C4 Near Ultraviolet Laser (1) Range 120,000km TS: 3000 km/s Power 4-4 RM 3 ROF 5 4 4 4 3 2 2 1 1 1 1
Toller M64/3000 Fire Control (1) Max Range: 128,000 km TS: 3000 km/s 92 84 77 69 61 53 45 37 30 22
Powertek PR-1/4.5 Reactor (1) Total Power Output 4.5 Armour 0 Exp 5%
This design is classed as a Fighter for production, combat and maintenance purposes
