Sounds great! All beam weapons....does that include Tractor Beams too

But wasn't one of the arguments against the new pinning proposals that they would allow the resupplying of ammo, thus reducing drastically the only real advantage of photons (they don't use ammo)?

The idea of resupplying pinned ships also came up on a seperate proposal as well.

So for longer battles, your ammo based ships *will be able* to be resupplied with ammo (how practical that will be is another matter). Thus there is very little point in using a very much lesser powered weapon just because it doesn't run out, photons would need another advantage to make them viable.

And as things stand the side with the pinning advantage can already resupply as much ammo as they want. if the defender had photons yes they might be able to keep shooting for longer but would it really make much of a difference to total damage in the end?

The point is not that a ship can get resupplied but actually the logisitcs involved in getting the ships supplied in the first place. It takes alot of cargo ships and production to keep missile / torp ships supplied.

Photon weapon ships will still be the mainstay of any fleet as they are consistent and hit time and again if configured properly. Missile ships may not have the supplies available to hit back. The logisitcs in getting missile ships supplied is horrendous so the photon weapon ship will always be the mainstay of the fleet as you cannot count on having the missile ships firing every day or even every other day if having to break a pin.

Cargo ships can get intercepted etc etc

Soon-ish, but with David's impending holiday, he is coding beyond what is immediately needed as it would be folly to run the new code while he is out of touch irrespective of how much testing has been conducted.

Humm, but higher mk's PW do not have an accuracy bonus, but higher mk's launchers do.

We do however see your point and the ability of the lighter weapons to achieve gutting would be problematic.

So:

LPG +6
PG +7
PC +8
PB +10
HPB +12
+1 per mk.

This definitely gives a use for the currently pointless HPB.

David would like to reduce kinetic missile damage to 60.

That makes a lot more sense, and actually makes the investment in higher mk photon weaponry worth the effort.
I still see the problem with PCs beeing very effectively at disabling enemies ships though, but if the majority wants this then I'm happy to adopt this tactic.

Mica, can you please state the reason for this? Personally I think this would make kinetics unusable against heavy hulled and armoured ships as well (just like the missile) and I do not see the reason for this.


Thomas

nope, my argument was that the base dodge drops off around 6 and it is very hard to get over 6 only based on thrust factors (engines).

I never said it is hard to get a dodge of more than 6.




Thomas

Yes to an extent, and I think with 80 damage (that currently does not seem to increase on higher mk kinetics) there is little damage dealt already.

60 dmg against 80AR will nearly no damage, not talking about 100 AR and 120 AR.

In ship to ship combat this is not a real problem as you can use missiles alongside torps, but for starbases and platforms that cannot use torps due to 0g combat speed this does not seem right.


Thomas

LPGs are designed to be used against light hulled ships which have little combat speed and are easy to hit. Also, given that PCs will very quickly take out engines with a +8 accuracy, isn't it better to have the following (so phoron guns are as they currently are as the basis for things):

LPG +5
PG +6
PC +7
PB +9
HPB +11
+1 per mk.

Will higher mark photon weaponry also have increased damage values as it currently is, or just increased accuracy?

Nik

By this very argument though, changing the stats of a kinetic missile would not make any difference as they do not hit!

Kinetic missiles do not do that much damage against heavy hulled/armoured ships. They do against light hulls/armour, but so does everything else and LPG/LRG/etc are far more effective. There are also a lot better ways to soak up point defence than missiles. If missiles are only used for this reason, then it'd be better to have space fighter ships or more torpedos on a ship and the kinetics become obsolete like missiles.

Nik

The argument for dropping the Kinetic Missile to 60.

The balancing comes down to damage to mass ratio weighted against battle length (this is the reload time, not the actual length of the battle).

The original set-up was based on the 5 day battle, thus 20 rounds of missiles. Therefore the launcher required 1 1/3 magazines (10+20/30*50)= 44mu.
Further Kineticsdelivered 70 v 40 armour (bell curve, so approx half standard armour of 80) = 30 * 20 = 600mu.
600/44 = 13.6 damage:mass

Compared with 90mu Cannon v 45 armour + scint = 45 * 20 = 900mu.
900/120 = 7.5 damage:mass

Nearly twice as effective but need to reload.

However at two days the mass of the kinetic missile drops to 24mu (10+ 25*8/15).
30*8/24 = 10 damage:mass
Whereas the PC
45*8/120 = 3 damage:mass

Dropping the battle length means that the balance is shifted in favour of the kinetic.

Dropping the kinetic missile damage down to 60 restores the balance
20*8/24 = 6.7 damage:mass

While a strong argument, my thoughts are that as the kinetic does not increase in damage with mk whereas armour does, dropping this is not as critical as improving the acc of the photon weapons.

Its not critical but it gave a more palitable outcome for the Normal/light with missiles vs Heavy.

So currently vs 80AR at missile does ~10dmg and a kinetic does 30 dmg.

So for a light ship attacking with missiles
200 x 10 x 4 round= 8000 dmg (but the is a big variance) ~25% hull dmg ouch but not disaster. If you spit at the attacker (3 missiles) then there is a casscade missile explosion on round 1. 30k production (20k for ship +10k for officer) caused ~10k dmg (0.13x53k + 0.87x4k)

So for a light ship attacking with kinetic missiles
200 x 30 x 4 round= 24000 dmg ~60% hull dmg then very messy. 30k production just caused ~38k dmg (0.64x53k + 0.36x12k)

Mind you the whole thing is messy. I still like the idea that interceptors get to pepper any attacking ships with very low dmg, before each round.

True - but - sheer size means not always over in a day, cavalry fleet, ability to build rail weapons, massive targeting bonus due to not having space limitiations, space fighters are good, platforms in orbit, planetary shields, point defence, starbase spread means some damage misses.

The defence of a starbase is as good or as poor as the governor makes it. It is up to the players to exploit any chinks in their armour.

Just torps.

I was under the impression that that rail weapons could be used as indirect weapons from orbit against ground installations, but that the opposite was not true. Is this wrong?

Not tested it yet but I'm pretty sure you can fire rail weaponary from ground at orbital positions even though you are not in line of sight

Rail, space fighters, missile weaponary, and targetting bonus/capacity conceeded.

Likewise, starbase spread can help admittedly - at the cost of shield/scint depth, and more importantly ground combat tactics.

When a starbase employs starbase shields it can't fire back anyway.

Platforms - again, is there any point in platforms using photon weaponary? Especially when they can be resupplied with missiles by the starbase/ships acting on behalf of the starbase.

Here's another one for you. Heavy Photon Batteries - considering it takes 80 platform hulls to hold just one of these for 1200 damage a round, and in the same space you could have 100 missile launchers firing kinetic missiles for 7000 damage a round, plus a tonne of kinetic missiles and magazines.

Personally, I'd say that batteries and heavy batteries were designed specifically for use at a starbase/outpost - and the line of sight rule makes them next to useless for that purpose.

What I wouldn't give for the good old days of 'if you can see em you can shoot at em'.

Oh well, I'll just go back to building starbase shields and phalanx missiles.