--- Well, I suppose I should weigh in at this point.
...I am having trouble understanding the goal of this "MaxTech" series. Is the idea to develop a RP setting or to experiment with what are the most effective ways to deploy MaxTech in a fleet setting?...
...No ship in Aurora needs 2.5 trillion km range...
...The entire propulsion system is frankly terrible. 50% engine multiplier? Why the insistence on a commercial engine for a military vessel? Even for escorting a logistics train, just send a jump-equipped ship along with the escorts, MaxTech jump drives are small and their costs scales only with size so this isn't a heavy burden on the fleet. Engine + fuel combined are 35/62 HS, why even build a ship that can spare so little tonnage for anything else? And then overload it with F/DT/ML? It's just an extremely wasteful design when MaxTech offers so much more potential...
--- This is mostly bad form on my part. To the first question, as to whether it's RP or experimenting, the answer is annoyingly, "Yes." I won't go into huge depth on the specifics because it'd be a huge paragraph of meaningless drivel, but for all practical terms, "Yes." will suffice. No, the ship shouldn't have 2.5 Trillion range, the point was to evaluate whether a ship that small might work or not with less range and more speed. The drive doesn't need to be 50% power, or even would be as the final product, but rather was a placeholder for the weapons, armor and such to be evaluated. I did this partly because I hadn't yet worked out a fleet speed, and partly because I knew it wouldn't exceed 100,000 km/s, so the turrets would be a given. All in all, poor form on my part, but for what it is worth; I got lots of good info AND the kinds of info I was looking for. So, uh, Mission Failed Successfully I guess...
...As well, you'll only get one shot at said volley because they'll transverse your whole range in less than a second anyway, so the difference in range between the laser and Gauss wouldn't make too much of a difference (I believe, but I'm not quite sure how the FDF actually works...
...At this point it'd probably be better to go with an AMM build as missile tech is insane at this point...
--- Incidentally I came to this same conclusion before I ever even checked back on this post. The laser is totally useless, at least at that size / range and AMMs are indeed insane. Final-Defensive Fire means the only difference would be that the laser and the Gauss is that the laser would be ever so slightly more accurate, for what that info is worth.
...Cloaking is very useful even on non-stealth ships as it directly reduces the active sensor lock range of the enemy to ASM missile lock ranges. At 99.5% reduction most of your main capital warships will have an active signature of 50 tons, rendering any active not on resolution 1 practically worthless. This either massively drives up Uridium cost and sensor tonnage, or severely gimps the range at which the enemy can engage you...
...This means that fighters are effectively obsolete with an exception to missile stealth bombers firing AMMs of their own as no level of speed will grant survivability against AMMs...
...So my advice regarding the initial corvette design is this:...
*Stuff*
--- I agree with all of that advice, and it is duly noted. I have in fact already replaced my Laser-Armed Starfighter with a Size-1 Missile armed version...I am very pleased with it so far, so perhaps fighters aren't
that useless? We shall see on that one. Cloaking is something I haven't gone into...
yet. It is on the slate though.
