# Fleets Move
# Fighter Groups Move
# Fighter Groups Reload (remaining rearm time is reduced)
# Monsters Move (including precursors)
# Missile Salvos move (including intercept, point blank point defense and damage allocation\planetary bombardment)
Or possibly questions, depending on how the initial answer goes.
Anyways, while searching for reasons why my anti-missile fighters were completely ineffective, I noticed this bit in the sequence of play:
It didn't occur to me when I first read through that bit, but after experimenting in SM mode, I realize that this makes beam based anti-missile fighters completely useless unless the missiles are either slow enough that they will still be in range of the fighters after the movement phase (In which case any half-assed point defense would be more than enough to take care of'em) or you manually calculate where to place a waypoint in anticipation of where the missiles will be and hope that you're within firing range (Good luck with that if you're using low/mid tech gauss weapons).
I suppose the initial reason for missiles moving last was to allow one to put some additional distance between themselves and the missile salvos, but it makes it nearly impossible to carry out what should be the rather trivial order of intercepting missiles.
One possible solution is to add an intercept order that, at least when used against missiles, would simply have the ships move after the missiles do. Would be a bit more complicated when dealing with targets that have actual initiative, but it shouldn't be too difficult.
Of course, it's always possible that I've overlooked an existing order/set of orders that will carry out what I'm trying to do, but after looking over everything again, I still don't see anything.
Tribal class Fighter 123 tons 3 Crew 36 BP TCS 2.45 TH 58 EM 0
23673 km/s Armour 1-2 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 0 PPV 0.75
Maint Life 0 Years MSP 0 AFR 24% IFR 0.3% 1YR 1 5YR 22 Max Repair 15 MSP
FTR Magneto-plasma Drive E1120 (1) Power 57.6 Fuel Use 11200% Signature 57.6 Armour 0 Exp 80%
Fuel Capacity 5,000 Litres Range 0.7 billion km (7 hours at full power)
Gauss Cannon R3-12.5 (1x3) Range 30,000km TS: 23673 km/s Accuracy Modifier 12.5% RM 3 ROF 5 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Fire Control S00.3 16.32-6250 (FTR) (1) Max Range: 32,640 km TS: 25000 km/s 69 39 8 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Hood class Cruiser 6,000 tons 542 Crew 1041 BP TCS 120 TH 400 EM 0
3333 km/s Armour 4-29 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 4 PPV 42
Maint Life 4.24 Years MSP 434 AFR 72% IFR 1% 1YR 39 5YR 582 Max Repair 270 MSP
Hangar Deck Capacity 1000 tons
Magneto-plasma Drive E8 (5) Power 80 Fuel Use 80% Signature 80 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 350,000 Litres Range 131.2 billion km (455 days at full power)
Quad R12/C3 Meson Cannon Turret (2x4) Range 120,000km TS: 21700 km/s Power 24-12 RM 12 ROF 10 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Fire Control S03 75-24000 (1) Max Range: 150,000 km TS: 24000 km/s 93 87 80 73 67 60 53 47 40 33
Active Search Sensor MR5-R1 (1) GPS 53 Range 5.8m km Resolution 1At the moment have your fighters positioned near the missiles intended target.
@Charlie
But you miss their core design principle: To be as light and as fast as possible in order to keep up with all but the fastest missiles. Sure, I could go lasers for more range, but that adds on a good 140 tons at that tech level, halving the number of fighters I can carry and crippling their speed advantage. The same thing would be argued if I increased the size of the BFC to maximize their to hit. They rely on being able to keep up with all but the fastest missiles so that they can attack during multiple phases.
Around this tech level, for half a HS less than the hanger, you can put in a quad gauss turret tracking at 20k with a base hit rate of 67%. Note that this does *not* include the non-trivially sized BFC that you'll need to properly target the missiles, but lets be generous and give the design advantage to the system that's thought superior. If we throw in the BFC that I designed for my carrier we're looking at an additional 3HS and an accuracy of 93% at 10k. Let's also assume that the missiles are moving at 20k, as that's a fairly realistic expectation at this tech level, with a reload of 30sec. Oh, and because I'm lazy, I'll just fix the gauss rate of fire at four.
So, with all that said, my fighters are looking at three to four phases of combat to the turret's one due to the 30sec reload.
Fighters: With three phases of combat, we're looking at 3 * 32 * 0,086 for their expected number of hits. With four, it'd simply be 4 * 32 * 0,086. (Phases of combat * shots per phase * accuracy, if it wasn't clear).
Turret: We're looking at roughly 16 * 0,62.
Feeling too lazy to do some arithmetic, so I'll just simplify the three to 16 * 0,51 for the fighters@3, 16 * 0,68 for fighters@4, and 16 * 0,62 for the turret.
This is, of course, a simplification of the combat as other factors are not included for the sake of simplification. There's no missile tracking bonus, which is something that would favor the turret slightly. The missiles are all assumed to be in a single salvo, which favors the turret heavily. In a more realistic setting, even if the fighters were barely half as effective in my simplified model as the turret, they may well take down more missiles if the turret is forced to fire on a salvo with only four missiles in it. ECM/ECCM haven't been included at all. There are probably other influencing factors that I haven't included here, but this should get the point across that the fighters hold up well against the turrets on paper.
@general
The thing is, I can already accomplish what I want to do (intercept the missiles), but it's a complete pain in the ass as I'm forced to visually estimate, without a grid, where the missiles will end up after their phase of movement. Combine that with the fact that I'll have to be sending many squads of fighters to that location (Each "carrier" (Escort is a better name) only carries eight) and I'll be doing several minutes of tedious micromanagement to pull off a single phase of anti-missile combat.
The reload rate was for some size four launchers that the opponent was using.
I'll continue to disagree that PD turrets are more effective in all situations as they're prone to being over saturated when dealing with low RoF, high quantity strategies (Fighters using box launchers, for instance). And that is the exact area where my fighters would excel, as their time on each group of salvos is dependent upon the amount of time the opponent takes to reload.
Steve shouldn't need to change the way initiative works, I'm just looking for the game to calculate where the enemy will be in five seconds/at the end of the movement phase and move to that point (All of the information to do so is already presented to the player) instead of moving to where it was when the movement phase started.
New Class #6988 class Cruiser 145 tons 4 Crew 55.5 BP TCS 2.9 TH 94 EM 0
32413 km/s Armour 1-2 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 0 PPV 0.5
Annual Failure Rate: 29% IFR: 0.4% Maint Capacity 0 MSP Max Repair 30 MSP Est Time: 0 Years
FTR Magnetic Confinement Fusion Drive E750 (1) Power 93.75 Fuel Use 7500% Signature 93.75 Armour 0 Exp 100%
Fuel Capacity 5,000 Litres Range 0.8 billion km (7 hours at full power)
Gauss Cannon R3-8 (1x3) Range 30,000km TS: 32413 km/s Accuracy Modifier 8% RM 3 ROF 5 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Fire Control S01 40-5000 (FTR) (1) Max Range: 80,000 km TS: 20000 km/s 88 75 62 50 38 25 12 0 0 0
This design is classed as a Fighter for production, combat and maintenance purposesThis is simply the absolute smallest I could make a fighter with a gauss cannon. I haven't invested anything significant into gauss but you can assume a better tracking speed if you want. Missile Size: 5 MSP (0.25 HS) Warhead: 6 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 10
Speed: 79100 km/s Endurance: 13 minutes Range: 60.3m km
Cost Per Missile: 8.0887
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 791% 3k km/s 260% 5k km/s 158.2% 10k km/s 79.1%
Materials Required: 1.5x Tritanium 6.3387x Gallicite Fuel x2093.5
Development Cost for Project: 809RP
| Nuclear Thermal Nuclear Pulse Ion Magneto-plasma Internal Confinement Magnetic Confinement Inertial Confinement Solid Core Gas Core Plasma Core Beam Core Photonic | 12,500 20,000 30,000 40,000 50,000 62,500 80,000 100,000 125,000 150,000 200,000 250,000 |
| Range To Hit speed modified |
| 10,000 20,000 30,000 | 7.040% 6.000% 4.960% | 2.885% 2.459% 2.032% |
| Range To Hit speed modified |
| 10,000 20,000 30,000 | 6.000% 4.000% 2.000% | 2.459% 1.639% 0.820% |