[glances up a bit, yucks, moves on to try and reassure people]
I just had a horrifying thought. What if a mentat was working on some thing similar to the biophage. What would happen?
It depends on how good a job they did. The most likely outcome given how reckless mentats are is that the ghastly nanomechanical space virus they were working on would simply
eat them and become everyone else's problem.
I think it's a choice between going after Silent Repose OR going after the Subspace Wavefront System. If we take out Silent Repose being split up won't matter as much because we'll be able to play risk-reward with how much strength to commit to different planets.
However, I think the Wavefront system is far more important. It allows us to effectively concentrate unopposed, which means even if we don't know the exact number of ships over a planet, we can lump up and be reasonably sure our concentrated firepower can defeat them. So I think the silos are a critical target.
The sunstation is obviously ominous and will need to be destroyed, so that's critical #2.
Here comes my big split feelings. Reading through the combat log with the new engines, it's really appearent what made the Enterprise and Sarek such beasts in the mock battles was their high L amounts making it hard to burn through and do significant, C-reducing damage.
If by 'burn through' you mean 'beat down the shields by sheer brute force,' you're right.*
Thing is, the Empire's ships (if they're coming) is going to take some time to get here. Warp drive flight between even nearby star systems takes hours or days, not minutes. If we can't hit two waves of targets in that amount of time, then the Ked Paddah would have been complete morons to plan to
capture this system. At most they would be planning to raid it, to do what is in military terms literally called "reducing the defenses" as preparation for future attacks.
If the Empire does show up with battleships, fighting them with 2xL will be a nightmare. That makes Iron Dome a high priority to eliminate. In addition, I don't think it's actually protected by outposts, unlike the Subspace Wavefront System.
Iron Dome is arguably the highest priority target
after Silent Repose, and the Subspace Wavefront System, and the sun station.
Unlike the last two items on that list, it lacks the ability to cause a disaster for our fleet all by itself. It's only going to be a problem for us if we're fighting an enemy force that was already within shouting distance of our task forces' combat power.
I'd say that Iron Dome is a major target for follow-up attacks; I'd recommend throwing our next round of attacks at Iron Dome, the long range torpedo battery around Ixira V, and possibly the "high energy beam" installation if we haven't already taken out Silent Repose.
After THAT, we'll have pretty well pulled the teeth of the Ixira system's defenses. If an Imperial reinforcement fleet is inbound, we may have to fall back before hitting the homeworld, but we'll have left Ixira extremely vulnerable to a prompt followup attack from, say, Nash's fleet plus the Gaeni task force.
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*[Personally this is why I differentiate between 'burnthrough' damage caused while shields are still functional and 'blowthrough' damage that hurts the hull after the shields are gone.]
However, I share
@SynchronizedWritersBlock 's concerns about mines. They have been the biggest threats to our ships since the Courageous struck one. It makes me nervous about going for all three targets because we're liable to lose a ship for each one, nevermind a likely fight going after the silos for the Subspace Wavefront System w/ two outposts in orbit of the primary.
The idea behind targeting the silos is to engage them
without having to fight past the outposts.
We'll probably still have to contend with a minefield. But what it comes down to is that every time our ships attack a target, they risk getting hit by mines. If we attack only one wave of targets and then run (or win by seizing their main world, assuming the rest of the system surrenders which is NOT certain)... Well, then our ships have to roll a "mine check" once- but we also have to contend with the full concentrated power of their strongest defenses right over their main world.
If we hit two waves of targets, we roll mine checks twice- but we strip away so much of the Ixira system's defenses that we can afford to send in a whole new fleet to actually take down the system.
If we hit
three waves of targets, we're gonna have problems with mines, I have to admit... but we'll have a lot less problems than we'd otherwise have with the outposts, and we'll probably have knocked out the enemy's ships in-system by then.
Honestly, I've been pretty frustrated with how effective mines are. I'll grant they must have some ability to manuever in order to hit ships (or might be Casaba-Howitzer devices), but Iit seems bizarre that they're so damage-dealing despite costing 'as much' as photon torpeodos. The only way that makes sense to me is if mines are 100-ton fusion devices with yields in the 500MT range, if that's even feasible. Which I guess would be cheaper than filling up AM pods. More importantly though, it seems totally at odds with how Trek combat works. Mines played an important role like what, once in all of Trek? Maybe I'm forgetting something in TOS, but certainly in DS9 it was more Orbital Weapons Platforms that were the issue.
Can't remember a single instance of a mine showing up in TOS- as opposed to what amounted to space IEDs like the trick the Romulans used to nuke the
Enterprise in
Balance of Terror.
I think Oneiros looked at the balance of forces and concluded that mines were a necessary element of the defenses, rather than just beefing up the defensive firepower of stations, outposts, and starbases, or spamming such installations all over Gabriel Expanse/Licori space. I think they MAY be overpowered, but that may be an illusion.
Although I do think that if
@OneirosTheWriter intends mines to continue to play such a major role in space combat in the game, then fairness demands that we get a chance to develop counter-mine technologies that help diminish the threat, just as we were able to start work on counter-cloaking technologies back at game start when it was expected that our likely opponents would be Romulans or maybe Klingons.
