Yeah, that was one of the things that I was wondering about. My thinking was that the turrets are only slightly larger (300 vs 359 for the 20cm) than the unturreted lasers for a 25% increase in tracking speed, so I thought it might be worth it, since my raiders currently have a speed of 4600 km/s. This way I am sure that the tracking speed exceeds the raiders and the turrets also get 2 layers of armor for protection, so there is less of a chance of being disarmed. Though it might be worth it to focus on the next research tech for base tracking speed and then try to squeeze in an additional laser instead of the turrets.
If we assume spherical cows, then I think that the difference in point-blank alpha strike damage is pretty small. I didn't bother calculating DPS since raiders are pretty fragile and can't handle slugging matches.
- A 300t laser doing 10 damage would have 87% accuracy, resulting in an expected 0.0290 damage/ton
- A 359t turret doing 10 damage would have 100% accuracy, resulting in an expected 0.0286 damage/ton
The turrets would cost more to research, but that comes out of the science, not the naval, budget.
That is a really interesting design. So the maintenance modules essentially counteract the ticking maintenance clock of the parasites in a civilian hangar?
Yep! It's better to think of the Toukon as a mobile maintenance base rather than a traditional carrier. This means that I can ignore my escort carriers during day-to-day life; I only have to pay attention to them if they run into trouble.
The biggest enemy in my games is typically not raiders or NPRs, but rather the limitations of my short/medium-term memory. While others may keep notes or spreadsheets to mitigate this problem, I prefer to roleplay this as imperial overreach: as the empire gets bigger and bigger, Terra's bureaucracy becomes less and less efficient.
Beam parasites would arguably require even less micromanagement, but in practice I get more enjoyment from seeing "4x Nuclear Detonation: Strength 20" than "10x Energy Weapon Impact: Strength 1" when avenging my murdered civilians.