Were we going to just say "the LLP is the standard vessal for the SA henceforth" or did we plan on introducing Cruiser or Dreadnought level ships with whole new gimmicks? (Also, were the revised treaty restrictions fixed?)
We probably will go about designing replacement Cruiser and Dreadnought level ships eventually but the economics of things are such that LLPs are going to be our primary focus for a while.
First lets consider what we can take away from Alliance fleet construction from this update:
Alliance Assets
Alliance 3rd, 4th, and 5th fleet
3 dreadnoughts
189 upgraded cruisers
706 upgraded frigates
80 laser pyndas
We have three fleets in play so assuming a roughly even distribution of ships that comes out to one Dreadnought anchoring a fleet, 63 Cruisers providing the real firepower, and 262 Frigates screening the rest of the fleet. Right away this tells us that in terms of getting our technology out there Frigates are the way to go as they are by far the largest portion of the Alliance fleet.
That said if you look at the costing of things a Dreadnought is roughly ten times the price of a Heavy Cruiser which is ten times the price of a Light Cruiser, which is ten times the price of a Frigate. So if things were balanced in terms of spending a fleet should consist of one Dreadnought, ten Heavy Cruisers, a hundred Light Cruisers, and a thousand Frigates which is actually what we see with the Turian fleets (technically it should be 5:550:5000 not 5:500:5000 since the latter seems to be forgetting the Heavy Cruisers) but we all know the Alliance historically, and canonically, went hard on Dreadnoughts and other large ships so they could sit at the big boys table.
This is where the first bit of economics comes into play. For the price of a single Dreadnoughts we can build a
thousand Frigates. In reality it is closer to
two thousand because thanks to PI's technological advancements LLPs are roughly half the cost of a normal Frigate. Or to put that another way considering the Alliance only has five fleets right now (IIRC) we could replace
all their Frigates for less then the price of a
single Dreadnought. Given how much of an advantage PI technology is in space combat and how overstretched the Alliance is getting more ships out there is better then a few bigger ones.
The next bit of economics is simply we are in perpetual crunch hell with more things to produce then available production. While that will hopefully lighten up as more and more factories come online it is the current state of things and Starships eat Production like nothing else. This quarter we had 20.7 million Production which was allocated as follows:
- Lite Laser Pynda: 6.1 million
- Zama: 3.0 million
- Hammerhead: 2.7 million
- Soldier Set: 2.7 million
- Tiger IFV: 2.7 million
- Legionary V1.00: 2.7 million
- Arc Reactors: 0.4 million
- Other: 0.4 million
For comparison a
single Light Cruiser takes up ~0.3 million Production (per quarter) and follows the same ten times scaling as price does for larger classes. So much like how the Alliance can best afford lots of Pyndas we can best production lots of Pyndas since every step up in size consumes an order of magnitude more Production and thus results in an order of magnitude fewer ships.
The final point is construction times. A Frigate finishes in a single quarter so we can basically build them as fast as we can allocate the Production. A Cruiser meanwhile takes two quarters and a Dreadnought four quarters. That means they tie up yard space, lock in Production, and have a slower return.
Those discussions implicitly assumed that the LLP would have infinite space and time and time to kite the dreadnought over, to truely take advantage of the difference in missile speed and power generation, which usually would be a reasonable assumption for space, which is known for being large and empty.
Where exactly did you get that idea from? What makes the Pynda's so deadly is their lasers ignoring Kinetic Barriers allowing them to target the emitters underneath and rapidly strip the enemy's shields:
You note the hungry eyes of the frigate commanders you demonstrated to after one of them asked if he couldn't use the powerful lasers in a lower powered "wide beam mode" to destroy the relatively fragile shield emitters of an enemy and then use the main gun to annihilate the ship though the hole in the shields. There is of course no reason other needing to be in the right range, less than a thousand kilometers, give or take.
The Pyndas flew like silver knives across the battlefield, making use of their repulsor given speed to dive through the Batarian fleet at such speeds that what little fire that reached them could easily be brushed off by their overpowered barriers while in return sweeping their laser weapons in close range but wide angles to utterly destroy their shield emitters, effectively removing their main defenses for the Alliance fleet to take advantage of.
while in a solo battle against a Dreadnought the Pynda would likely have to kite to some degree after stripping its barriers because Dreadnoughts can mount significant armoring as well as Kinetic Barriers while the Pynda has a pretty small MAC all things considered (still OP with 10x standard rate of fire) this is a fleet engagement. The role of the Pynda is to get in, strip enemy targets of shields, and allow the larger fleet elements to destroy the now defenseless targets.
The problem here is fleet size. We have
eighty Pyndas going into an engagement with over six and a half
thousand enemy ships. Sure they'll likely be prioritizing Cruiser and up but that is still over a
thousand ships. Meanwhile the enemy knows how terrifying just
five Pyndas have been over the course of this conflict. They are going to focus
hard on countering the Pyndas deployed here.
