Guardian class Base 6700 tons 630 Crew 901 BP Signature 134-0
0 km/s Armour 2 Shields 20-300 Sensors 1/0/0/0 Damage Control 0-0
Quad Point Defence Laser Turret (4x4) Range 90,000km TS: 13200 km/s Power 12-12 RM 3 ROF 5 3 3 3 2 1 1 1 1 1 0
Avro Point Defence Fire Control (2) Max Range: 48,000 km TS: 12800 km/s 75 50 25 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor (6) Total Power Output 54 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Steve
Steve -
I have a question about the fire control/laser ranges. I noticed in my own campaign that it seems that lasers out-range equivalent fire controls by a significant margin. I'm not sure if this is an oversight or as intended, but it is somewhat frustrating to develop and design a main battery for my warships and then realize that I can't utilize it any where near its capability.
For example, I have a 20cm Ultraviolet laser that has a maximum range of 400,000 km's. The 20cm and the ultraviolet are both the fourth research level in their respective trees. Unfortunately, the best beam fire control I can build is also the fourth step in the beam fire control tree, or 32,000 km. Now, as I understand it, this 32,000 is actually the 50% range, so its real max range would be 64,000. I can also build a 4x range for 4x cost/size installation, however, that only gives me 256,000 km's range, or 64% of my main battery's range. To reach my main battery's range I would need a 7x installation, or to develop a 50,000 km fire control range, but I'm not sure how many steps in the tree this is, and would be very expensive.
Like I said, this appears to be an imbalance between laser ranges and fire control capabilities at similar tech levels, but you may have done this for a reason that I don't know about. The obvious solutions are:
1. Reduce laser ranges, but this has balance problems with other weapons;
2. Increase beam fire control ranges to match similar tech beam ranges;
3. Increase the options on the fire control installations, i.e., 5x, 6x, 7x.
My first inclination was for #2, because a 4x installation already eats up a lot of space, but after thinking about it #3 might be more reasonable. After all, we are talking about hitting small moving targets very far away, so at longer ranges it might be reasonable to think that a very large fire control installation would be necessary.
Kurt