Ideally that initial strike should be the decisive factor in reducing incoming damage for the ensuing battle. Obviously there's value in planning for when that goes wrong but the value of offense over defense (especially on big ships where evasion is limited) is heavily weighted by the cloak. To me it being non-ablative is less relevant because the importance lies in it taking effect during that vital window between uncloaking and shields coming up so that the initial strike isn't disrupted by a quick response.
"Ideally" is the key word there. When things are going
exactly right we don't need any other defenses. The alpha strike deletes the target. The problem is that I can think of any number of situations where the decloak and dagger plan won't work to win the fight. Maybe there are too many ships to delete by surprise. Maybe the enemy can put enough constant fire on the ship that it can't afford to drop the shields in order to cloak. Maybe their sensors are good enough to either fully or partially defeat the cloak. Maybe we are defending a target and if they can't shoot at the Guardian they will shoot at the Iron Road or the civilian station. We've seen hostile ships figure out where the Star Seeker was and do so much damage that the cloak was disabled. Assuming that your perfect engagement will take place and being disappointed is a very common refrain when reading about military disasters. The enemy is going to adapt and if we rely purely on 'one neat trick' they will punish us for it. That's why I've wanted good coverage once it became clear it was an option. Focus on your strengths, but not to the exclusion of all else.
So we build with a focus for a given style of combat, but we make sure that we have other options. The more layers we have on the onion the better our chances of the ship returning home. My friends can testify that I have a strong preference to strong defensive capabilities. Of my Warframe just standing and ignoring enemy fire while I'm picking them up off the ground for the 10th time. Strike hard, but be able to endure the counter punch.
The other big question is in regards to workshops. Two for redundancy seems common sense for a warship but I'm starting to doubt we need a large+normal as opposed to two normal workshops, that would free up 9 space for sensors and maybe more science.
I am pretty sure that a large workshop is going to have the room and large scale tools to do work that won't be practical or possible in a smaller one. Trying to repair/rebuild a Type 4c or a DOOM BEAM is going to involve components that are a good deal larger then I expect will be easy to deal with in a small workshop. Having tools large enough to properly work with larger items instead of jury-rigging something with things being too small seems important. For a real world example, needing to machine down a part when it won't fit in your lathe is rough. It stands to reason that the larger size will have benefits like that, otherwise why bother having different sized workshops. Just use more small ones.
When you get around to discussing the list tomorrow, what are your thoughts on only putting in power and runtime for 6 out of 8 of the T2 batteries for roughly 25 spaces that frees up?
Could do. The big question mark is what we will be allowed too do VS what we are currently planning around. If we were real engineers we'd be able to look at everything and check to see if the plans for X aux reactors was possible. Right now we are just guessing and could well be told 'nope'. Happened before with your dreams of a bunch of Heavy Transporter Bays.
If I have to err, I prefer to err on the side of ending up with a little bit of empty space that can be used in the future then rendering the ship unable to perform in combat to the levels that it can. That said I'm not holding my breath on succeeding with my 2 torp plan, even if I intend to try my best to get it to pass.
Last thing i remember for them was needing like a 100+ of them to get all the run time needed to fire all the weapons, and they already nearly doubled the CI price of the ship at that point.
You were thinking of the plan where I had 20 PD mounts. I had an option to cut that down to 10 in the same post. The plan that's clearly going to win only has nine mounts, and has four guns instead of five or seven. Roughly speaking we're looking at 50 auxiliary computers to run everything simultaneously. That's still a lot, but leave substantially more space free then the 20 Mount plan with a hundred total individual type 1 disruptors that I wanted before the math said no.
