Understanding CIWS and Fire Controls

[Zincat]

CIWS are more compact than any PD turret that you can build yourself, and (once the bug is fixed.  1.10?) work even when your sensors are down and during jump-shock, so they may still be worth it on high value warships.

Fair point about the jump shock, CIWS can have value for that specific situation. Worth considering.

About them being more compact, that is true but in general I would still not consider that enough of a motivation to use them, because in the end there is no guarantee that the ship they're on is going to be the one targeted if the fleet is sufficiently large. And if I have 20 ships with 1k tons of space dedicated to PD on each ship, 20k ton of FDF gauss or laser PD is obviously a lot better than 1K ton of CIWS. However...

Since you spoke of high value warships, a very edge case comes to mind where there is good reason to use them CIWS. Say you have a fleet with two 100k tons battleships/carriers and 30 or so 5k escorts of various kind. In this situation the escorts are expendable, and it makes a lot of sense to add CIWS to the 100k tons ships since they each have more value than ten of the escorts.

I don't generally build fleets which such large disparity between ships, but if one does, then indeed extra CIWS of the large ships can be worth it in order to protect the only ships of real value you have.

[liveware (OP)]

Since you spoke of high value warships, a very edge case comes to mind where there is good reason to use them CIWS. Say you have a fleet with two 100k tons battleships/carriers and 30 or so 5k escorts of various kind. In this situation the escorts are expendable, and it makes a lot of sense to add CIWS to the 100k tons ships since they each have more value than ten of the escorts.

I don't generally build fleets which such large disparity between ships, but if one does, then indeed extra CIWS of the large ships can be worth it in order to protect the only ships of real value you have.

Are NPRs more likely to target larger ships? This would affect my missile defense strategy.

[Pedroig]

@spikethehobbitmage

Thanks on correction on guns/turrets...

However, there is no practical difference between the Final Defense PD commands:

Final Defensive Fire
Final defense occurs at the end of the last movement segment, when the missile intercepts any ship in this task group. Range to the missile is 10,000 km, the smallest unit of distance in Aurora, thus assuring maximum hit chances at point-blank range.

Final Defensive Fire (self only)
Like above, but only if the missile attacks the ship carrying the fire control and not a different ship in this task group. Use this when you want to reserve this weapon to protect the high-value ship it is mounted on.

The confusion on Area Defence most likely comes from it targets at the beginning of the movement segment versus the end.

Area Defense
Area defense occurs during the normal weapons fire segment of a 5-second increment. If a missile crosses the engagement range of a weapon set to Area Defense during a single movement then it will not be engaged.

Example: a laser turret has its mode set to "(Area PD Mode 19)", i.e. automatically fire at anything within a range of 190,000 km. If a missile moving at 45,000 km/s (thus traveling 225,000 km per 5-second turn) begins the turn 210,000 km away, just outside that range, it will never "stop" inside the weapon's range and will not be fired at before impact.

combined with

Fire controls set to Area Mode or for AMMs will only fire defensively when that fire control is set to 'Open Fire'.

Modern maritime spacing is 1 km on the breadth and 2 km on the beam for safety spacing minimums.  (Naval vessels tend to use time at speed differences for minimum spacing)  So having a fleet all within 10,000 km of each other does not seem realistic even at "slow speeds" of 1000 km/s...

[Zincat]

Second situation would be that of a group of ships, with the ability to mutually support one another, attempting to close with an enemy in order to destroy it. Here is where I expect that gauss turrets would gain an advantage as a great many ships would be able to support a larger number of turrets, or alternatively a single dedicated missile defense ship could support the rest of the fleet. Obviously it would be important to keep the fleet tightly clustered for this to work, but this would allow for a larger volume of anti missile fire and presumably would be more successful than the lone small ship concept. More ships also means more targets for the enemy to shoot at which could lead to smaller individual salvos directed at each ship which should further improve the success of any antimissile fire.

Are NPRs more likely to target larger ships? This would affect my missile defense strategy.

I have still not been in a large missile fight in c# aurora. It's been some hectic weeks for me.  If it has changed and I'm wrong with this, I hope someone will correct me and you can ignore this specific post, I will write this post assuming it has not. I only had very small engagements up to now in C# Aurora.

I do not know exactly how the AI chooses its target. I assume it does decide based on a criteria. However the problem here is not that, but rather how it allocates missile launchers.
Say that the enemy fleet has 80 missile launchers, all with the same timing. The AI will not split them between enemy targets, no. It will shoot all 80 missiles at ONE enemy ship, in order to overwhelm the defenses and destroy it. Then once they're ready to shoot again, it will aim them at a newly selected ship, or at the same one. This might work differently for truly massive fleets, if it has enormous amount of launchers (say 2000?), but I don't recall ever seeing that.

This means that no matter how many ships you have in a fleet, ONE ship will have 80 incoming missiles targeting it. This is precisely why CIWS are inferior in a sufficiently large fleet. Say you have CIWS on all 20 ships, only the CIWS on the targeted ship will fire, all the others will stay silent and useless, while FDF PD gauss or laser will always react to any incoming missiles no matter which ship in the fleet is targeted.

In the edge case I posted about the two huge battleships and thirty escorts, you may want to put CIWS on the battleships in consideration of the fact you don't really care if you lose one escort while you really don't want to lose those battleships. So in case a battleship is targeted, you have extra defense. In my opinion only worth it if there's a really HUGE difference in size and value between ships though... And as said it had not occured to me because I don't build that way personally.

For lone ships, since CIWS are more compact, they are a valid solution but you should probably only use them if you're sure  the ship is intended for solo deployment

For civilian ships... well, CIWS are the only thing they can use. Let me say though that unless you have a lot of ciws and the attacking fleet is small, the civilian ship will likely die quickly anyway. A couple of missiles can be enough to kill civilians because they have 1 armor and no shields...

Modern maritime spacing is 1 km on the breadth and 2 km on the beam for safety spacing minimums.  (Naval vessels tend to use time at speed differences for minimum spacing)  So having a fleet all within 10,000 km of each other does not seem realistic even at "slow speeds" of 1000 km/s...

While I respect your point of view, what you said is roleplay. In Aurora, a fleet is modeled as many ships considered in the exactly same location. As such, final defensive fire WILL defend all the ships in the fleet and is superior to Area defense unless the Area defense weapons have enough range to shoot at incoming missiles at least twice.

If you want to roleplay ships not being in the exact same point, you will need to make a fleet out of each single ship, and manually space them. In this situation of course you would need area defense, but it's not how the game normally works. And my respect to you if you do play this way, cause having a single fleet for every ship would drive me nuts 

[Froggiest1982]

I do not know exactly how the AI chooses its target. I assume it does decide based on a criteria. However the problem here is not that, but rather how it allocates missile launchers.
Say that the enemy fleet has 80 missile launchers, all with the same timing. The AI will not split them between enemy targets, no. It will shoot all 80 missiles at ONE enemy ship, in order to overwhelm the defenses and destroy it. Then once they're ready to shoot again, it will aim them at a newly selected ship, or at the same one. This might work differently for truly massive fleets, if it has enormous amount of launchers (say 2000?), but I don't recall ever seeing that.

This means that no matter how many ships you have in a fleet, ONE ship will have 80 incoming missiles targeting it. This is precisely why CIWS are inferior in a sufficiently large fleet. Say you have CIWS on all 20 ships, only the CIWS on the targeted ship will fire, all the others will stay silent and useless, while FDF PD gauss or laser will always react to any incoming missiles no matter which ship in the fleet is targeted.

This is not the behaviour I noticed so far. But I haven't participated in many combats. So far only 5 or 6, won 5 of them with patrols but lost the scout.

[SpikeTheHobbitMage]

CIWS are more compact than any PD turret that you can build yourself, and (once the bug is fixed.  1.10?) work even when your sensors are down and during jump-shock, so they may still be worth it on high value warships.

Fair point about the jump shock, CIWS can have value for that specific situation. Worth considering.

About them being more compact, that is true but in general I would still not consider that enough of a motivation to use them, because in the end there is no guarantee that the ship they're on is going to be the one targeted if the fleet is sufficiently large. And if I have 20 ships with 1k tons of space dedicated to PD on each ship, 20k ton of FDF gauss or laser PD is obviously a lot better than 1K ton of CIWS. However...

Since you spoke of high value warships, a very edge case comes to mind where there is good reason to use them CIWS. Say you have a fleet with two 100k tons battleships/carriers and 30 or so 5k escorts of various kind. In this situation the escorts are expendable, and it makes a lot of sense to add CIWS to the 100k tons ships since they each have more value than ten of the escorts.

I don't generally build fleets which such large disparity between ships, but if one does, then indeed extra CIWS of the large ships can be worth it in order to protect the only ships of real value you have.

Even if the fleet are evenly sized, whichever ships carry the long range sensors and/or the Admiral (usually the same ship) get a couple of CIWS in my navy.  Brass has its privileges. 

Are NPRs more likely to target larger ships? This would affect my missile defense strategy.

Smaller ships are harder to see at long range, and they can't target what they can't see.  Beyond that I have no idea how the AI selects targets.

@spikethehobbitmage

Thanks on correction on guns/turrets...

However, there is no practical difference between the Final Defense PD commands:

Final Defensive Fire
Final defense occurs at the end of the last movement segment, when the missile intercepts any ship in this task group. Range to the missile is 10,000 km, the smallest unit of distance in Aurora, thus assuring maximum hit chances at point-blank range.

Final Defensive Fire (self only)
Like above, but only if the missile attacks the ship carrying the fire control and not a different ship in this task group. Use this when you want to reserve this weapon to protect the high-value ship it is mounted on.

The confusion on Area Defence most likely comes from it targets at the beginning of the movement segment versus the end.

Area Defense
Area defense occurs during the normal weapons fire segment of a 5-second increment. If a missile crosses the engagement range of a weapon set to Area Defense during a single movement then it will not be engaged.

Example: a laser turret has its mode set to "(Area PD Mode 19)", i.e. automatically fire at anything within a range of 190,000 km. If a missile moving at 45,000 km/s (thus traveling 225,000 km per 5-second turn) begins the turn 210,000 km away, just outside that range, it will never "stop" inside the weapon's range and will not be fired at before impact.

combined with

Fire controls set to Area Mode or for AMMs will only fire defensively when that fire control is set to 'Open Fire'.

Modern maritime spacing is 1 km on the breadth and 2 km on the beam for safety spacing minimums.  (Naval vessels tend to use time at speed differences for minimum spacing)  So having a fleet all within 10,000 km of each other does not seem realistic even at "slow speeds" of 1000 km/s...

I'm not certain that I understand your argument.  If you have two or more ships in the same task group then they are within 10,000 km of each other and will protect each other in normal FDF mode, but not in FDF(self) mode.  ADF mode will always give inferior results in this case because it will always* attack at greater than 10,000 km and thus incur a higher range penalty.  Unless you have a need to spread out for other reasons, bunching up is always the best defensive strategy.

*ADF can only attack at 10k if the missiles were headed somewhere else and just happened to pass that close that tick.  This situation is very hard to engineer and incredibly rare by chance.

@Zincat Due to sensor costs I tend to only have one AWACS/flag ship in a fleet.  While my PD escorts carry backup sensors they simply don't have the range to support offensive action, so losing the flagship tends to be a mission-kill.  While they can't be shielded, commercial ships can be armoured and critical tenders such as colliers tend to be worth the cost of a CIWS or two.

[liveware (OP)]

I get the impression the AI targets the first ship it detects first, however if a new ship appears closer than the originally detected ship, it will shift targeting to the new closest ship.

This is based on my extremely limited C# combat experience, where I had a carrier get ambushed near a jump point. In order to try and save it, I launched a couple of fighters to draw away the enemy ships. This did appear to work, however it didn't buy enough time and I still lost the carrier.

[Father Tim]

One of the improvements C# Aurora is supposed to include -- as part of differing NPR design philosophies -- is how and why they split up targets for attacks.  In VB Aurora they would pretty much only go for the largest target(s) first, on the theory that jump ships couldn't move anything larger than themselves, so the biggest ship(s) had to be (or, at least, include) the jump ship.  They would also prioritise the ship with the strongest active sensor they could see, in hopes of blinding the enemy fleet.

[Father Tim]

. . .However I would still be interested in doing a side by side CIWS vs gauss turret test for this use case in order to better quantify the differences between these two weapon systems.

These aren't two different weapon systems.  CIWS is a "gauss turret" -- specifically, a turret containing two 50% accuracy (half-size) GC of your empire's tech (at 250 tons instead of 300), a reduced-size beam fire control and a small sensor.

At very low tech levels, CIWS will be slightly worse than a regular twin-50% turret.  As tech goes up, the BFC & sensor will get smaller; when their combined size drops below 50 tons the CIWS becomes more efficient than the regular turret.

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=1691.0

[consiefe]

Say that the enemy fleet has 80 missile launchers, all with the same timing. The AI will not split them between enemy targets, no. It will shoot all 80 missiles at ONE enemy ship, in order to overwhelm the defenses and destroy it. Then once they're ready to shoot again, it will aim them at a newly selected ship, or at the same one. This might work differently for truly massive fleets, if it has enormous amount of launchers (say 2000?), but I don't recall ever seeing that.

This means that no matter how many ships you have in a fleet, ONE ship will have 80 incoming missiles targeting it. This is precisely why CIWS are inferior in a sufficiently large fleet. Say you have CIWS on all 20 ships, only the CIWS on the targeted ship will fire, all the others will stay silent and useless, while FDF PD gauss or laser will always react to any incoming missiles no matter which ship in the fleet is targeted.

I can confirm this targeting behaviour as I faced against 300+ missile salvos in C#. And because I made lots of testing on the situation, I can safely say FDF %17 quad rof4+ gauss turrets are excellent. I try to put one or two %100 quad gauss turrets as safety measurements. Which I still need to try is Laser turrets. I have x-ray turrets and 600k BFCs. I wasn't aware I should turn them on for ADF so gausses did the work. I wonder what their performances will be.

Edit: Main and decisive disadvantage of the CIWS is they are self defence weapons. As many pointed out, in a fleet, custom turrets will cover way more than CIWS can because of stacking.

[Froggiest1982]

. . .However I would still be interested in doing a side by side CIWS vs gauss turret test for this use case in order to better quantify the differences between these two weapon systems.

These aren't two different weapon systems.  CIWS is a "gauss turret" -- specifically, a turret containing two 50% accuracy (half-size) GC of your empire's tech (at 250 tons instead of 300), a reduced-size beam fire control and a small sensor.

At very low tech levels, CIWS will be slightly worse than a regular twin-50% turret.  As tech goes up, the BFC & sensor will get smaller; when their combined size drops below 50 tons the CIWS becomes more efficient than the regular turret.

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=1691.0

Just had a test. So at the moment it works like this:

The AI still target only one ship mostly and then reserves a salvo for other ships.

However this behaviour is per fleet.

So I had 5 fleets each fleet had one ship taking most of the salvos and the others taking only 1 sometimes 2.

Interesting fact: After I jumped in with my fleet and found the aliens waiting for me I managed to kick them out with my superior batteries. While moving away they kept launching missiles at me. After the second salvo hit me I had the idea of jumping 4 fleets back so that missiles would get lost and then jump back into the system. I also sent one fleet after a slower ship. As soon as I jumped the surprise.
All enemy salvos redirected to my fleet still in the system. NPR had built active sensor missiles!
The interesting part is that I could test rerouting of missiles on both ends and verify (as I suspected) that despite many bugs report the rerouting works quite well!
At least in that combat.

[Zincat]

Which I still need to try is Laser turrets. I have x-ray turrets and 600k BFCs. I wasn't aware I should turn them on for ADF so gausses did the work. I wonder what their performances will be.

Regarding lasers, you should use them in ADF only if they have enough range to shoot at least twice before the enemy missiles hit you. To make an example, if your laser 10cm turrets have 210k km range, but the enemy missiles have a speed of 30k kms, final defensive fire is still the best solution as you cannot be sure you'll shoot at them twice, and final defensive fire by its own nature has much higher chance to hit because it targets the enemy missiles at 10k km.

Regarding gauss vs lasers, as soon as you research a couple of gauss tech levels gauss are strictly better than laser in a anti-missile situation. And the more you research gauss, the wider the gap becomes. But gauss are a strictly anti-missile weapon, while lasers are not.

A 10cm laser turret can be used with profit against enemy fighters and even against enemy capital ships if they are in range, while gauss will be limited to anti-missile situations barring rare occasions. As such, the question then becomes what your fleet is supposed to do. If you are using a missile fleet, are confident you can keep the enemy at range and you know the enemy is not heavy on fighters or FACs, then you don't really need laser turrets and gauss turrets are better against missiles.

If you are instead using a beam fleet or your enemy uses beam fleets and/or you are not confident you can keep at range and/or the enemy uses a lot of fighters/Facs, laser turrets can be a good idea as they can be used in multiple situations. They are basically the most versatile thing you can have... You can also opt for a mix of gauss and lasers in this situation.

[Ulzgoroth]

.  .  . However I would still be interested in doing a side by side CIWS vs gauss turret test for this use case in order to better quantify the differences between these two weapon systems.

These aren't two different weapon systems.   CIWS is a "gauss turret" -- specifically, a turret containing two 50% accuracy (half-size) GC of your empire's tech (at 250 tons instead of 300), a reduced-size beam fire control and a small sensor.

At very low tech levels, CIWS will be slightly worse than a regular twin-50% turret.   As tech goes up, the BFC & sensor will get smaller; when their combined size drops below 50 tons the CIWS becomes more efficient than the regular turret.

hxxp: aurora2. pentarch. org/index. php?topic=1691. 0

It might suffer on performance against ECM missiles, if that post's statement about CIWS ECCM being only half-effective still holds.

Also, note that you now get some savings from building larger turrets - a quad turret requires less gear and crew than two dual turrets.  Not sure under what circumstances that could make up for saving 1/6th of the weapon system weight due to the CIWS gun shrinkage though.


Obviously using non-CIWS turrets opens the option of using your gauss battery to buzz-saw enemy ships at point-blank range, but however marginally helpful that may be for warships it's probably of no use at all to a survey ship that wants to flee from all hostile contact.

[SpikeTheHobbitMage]

Regarding gauss vs lasers, as soon as you research a couple of gauss tech levels gauss are strictly better than laser in a anti-missile situation. And the more you research gauss, the wider the gap becomes. But gauss are a strictly anti-missile weapon, while lasers are not.

If by "a couple" you mean that Gauss ROF 2 beats anything not a Railgun for missile PD, then this post is exactly correct.

[liveware (OP)]

. . .However I would still be interested in doing a side by side CIWS vs gauss turret test for this use case in order to better quantify the differences between these two weapon systems.

These aren't two different weapon systems.  CIWS is a "gauss turret" -- specifically, a turret containing two 50% accuracy (half-size) GC of your empire's tech (at 250 tons instead of 300), a reduced-size beam fire control and a small sensor.

At very low tech levels, CIWS will be slightly worse than a regular twin-50% turret.  As tech goes up, the BFC & sensor will get smaller; when their combined size drops below 50 tons the CIWS becomes more efficient than the regular turret.

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=1691.0

In the interest of splitting the finest of hairs, I must disagree.

A CIWS as implemented in Aurora appears (to me) to utilize PR gauss technology (a weapon, but not a weapon system), along with some other magic (sensors and a beam fire control? why aren't these the same thing?).

A gauss turret comprises of a single turret with 1 or more guass weapons mounted on it. Fire controls notwithstanding (they could arguably be mounted on a different ship).

So I think there is some ambiguity in terminology that should be cleared up for more precise discussion. I am confident the game implementor(s) considered these details for it seems to be practically relevant.