The design is : 42% carronade, 20% engine, 11% armour, 8.9% fuel.
I should mention that this game is testing my standardised engine system. A single 850 ton engine for all ship classes, each ship gets one engine per 4,000 or so tons. At the moment considering the low engine tech every ship has a high multiplier and therefore a single battle might very well destroy my fuel reserves, however later on i may make different engines for different roles, but I'll still keep my standard size system.
If I design a 1700 ton engine It'll save 20% on fuel, but cost twice as many RP to develop, however once I've researched efficiency .6 and power multiplier 1.75% I may be tempted to make larger higher lowered engines for my next gen cruisers. Or i could go straight to the next engine tech.
Anyway back to carronades, The interesting thing to note with the design is that anywhere past 30k kilometers and they will only do 1 damage each, 10cm infrared lasers only start doing damage at 30k kilometers, so basically your effective range is basically the same with either.
For reference here is the same ship with 40 10cm lasers.
CS Cornwallis - Copy class Strike Cruiser 17,000 tons 604 Crew 2192.8 BP TCS 340 TH 1224 EM 0
3600 km/s Armour 4-58 Shields 0-0 Sensors 36/6/0/0 Damage Control Rating 7 PPV 120
Maint Life 2.24 Years MSP 564 AFR 330% IFR 4.6% 1YR 152 5YR 2275 Max Repair 153 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 6 months Spare Berths 1
306 EP Ion Drive x1.5 (4) Power 306 Fuel Use 182.98% Signature 306 Exp 15%
Fuel Capacity 1,500,000 Litres Range 8.7 billion km (27 days at full power)
Prototype 10cm C3 Infrared Laser (40) Range 30,000km TS: 3600 km/s Power 3-3 RM 1 ROF 5 3 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Fire Control S04 96-3000 (1) Max Range: 192,000 km TS: 3000 km/s 95 90 84 79 74 69 64 58 53 48
Fire Control S04 24-12000 (2) Max Range: 48,000 km TS: 12000 km/s 79 58 38 17 0 0 0 0 0 0
Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor Technology PB-1 (27) Total Power Output 121.5 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Active Search Sensor MR5-R1 (1) GPS 96 Range 5.8m km MCR 627k km Resolution 1
Thermal Sensor TH6-36 (1) Sensitivity 36 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 36m km
EM Detection Sensor EM1-6 (1) Sensitivity 6 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 6m km
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
This one has 40 5 second lasers bringing 120 damage, or 600 per 25 seconds, compared to the carronades with 240 damage per 25 seconds.
The lasers have basically the same hit percentage as the carronade since I'm using the same firecontrol, BUT, this ship can also double as point defence, my question is which fire control should i use, the 12,000 km/s but 79% accuracy one, or the 3000km/s 95% accuracy one, I',m heavily leaning towards the faster lower accuracy one being better for missile defence, but am including the more accurate slower one for firing at ships.
The only major difference is this one costs 11% more Build points.
So the question is, which ship is better? Well the only thing really going for the carronade is the possibility of shock damage, and the slight amount of damage it can do at longer range, but keep in mind that while it can do 10 damage every 25 seconds at 100,000 km albeit at terrible hit rate, the fact is that merely 10 seconds after firing it's carronades at max range an enemy ship travelling towards at the same speed will be 72,000 kilometers closer and able to fire It's 10 cm lasers with impunity.