Wait, I assumed the Reinforced Hull had some kind of EP cost as well. Is that not the case? Either way though, I'm skeptical that Nettle would see more total losses. I figure the increased chance of a Mobility kill would counterbalance being physically tougher, considering being dead in the water nullifies their biggest defense of speed and Holo fields.
We don't know, it probably does but I'm confident that it's nowhere near 12 NEP (A las cannon PD grid is 4 times the cost of an escort's Holo-Field generator, I'm not assuming more armor is more expensive than a shield generator). And I think you're discounting just how fragile this thing is going to be to any weapon that lands in spite of the defenses or can ignore the defenses (obviously we're not fighting Nova weapons at the moment but AOEs in space are definitely a thing in 40k)
We literally have no idea of how many escorts of ours just died once they lost mobility compared to those survivors. If we just extrapolate entirely from the damaged vessel list we have no way of knowing what actually ends up with a ship dead or a ship damaged.
Edit: The fact is the known cost for your components is 24 NEP versus the Bramble's 12 NEP. If they were the same cost I wouldn't even be debating, but there's a decent chance the Nettle winds upwards of 50% more expensive than the Bramble while still remaining situationally less survivable. Those Las-cannons are largely only going to be protecting the destroyer itself given range limitations so its paying a lot for that capability on a platform that isn't necessarily worth that investment.
Point worth making, but who the fuck is going to be throwing out major AOE like that in sufficient saturation to ensure hits against Troop Transports? Major artillery barrages aren't cheap, aren't easily concentrated, aren't even easily targeted at our shit given how fast Eldar vehicles tend to be, and these are fucking troop transports.
The counter to our vehicles is the sort of shit that'd be being used against Super-Heavies or Battle Tank Divisions for any other faction, and the absurdity of how disproportionately difficult to kill our stuff is is quite frankly amazing, and should be enough.
Uh, the Guard throws out a lot of mortars and tube artillery. Template weapons in general counter our defenses. Guided missile artillery is probably going to be fairly effective against our vehicles given that defeats grav-shield deflection and the holo-field is probably offsetting it several meters where a large enough warhead could still inflict damage. Now, *shrapnel* is affected by a grav-shield (though that's a lot of attacks) and our troop transports are undoubtedly insanely tough for what they are, but they probably don't need tanks or super-heavies to engage them with any success.
But yeah, the Mirage is
done as far as I'm concerned. Going back to refit it with conversion fields we won't have for several turns isn't even on my radar.
We probably wouldn't want plasma for direct fire weapons, but to make munitions: plasma grenades, missiles, artillery and mortar shells, which we're currently lacking.
Grav self-propelled guns with a small Webway portal and indirect fire howitzers firing plasma shells guided by fatescopes could be very, very deadly, as flying quickly and firing while not needing to properly aim but them functioning as if they're precision guided is an incredibly potent effect.
Particularly as it would make the shells proportionately very cheap, and with the webway portal an exceptionally high volume of fire could be sustained. This would be very effective against both orks and eldar enemies with holo-fields.
It would also work well with seer directed targeting to say where abouts to aim for maximum strategic impact, with what's effectively terminal guidance supplied by the fate scope.
I can see us going for some plasma macro-batteries to supplement Las Lances as our primary non-exotic ship to ship weapon, maybe as a non-exotic vehicle weapon that hits hard while still having decent RoF. But I agree that we largely want it for munitions.
This would probably be actually possible for a Super Heavy vehicle. We know the Storm Serpent can pack a mobile Webway portal (though that one is sized for everything up to Vypers to fit through it), I guess you could link multiple artillery batteries to fire out of any individual SPG's portal. I can't imagine a Webway portal is cheap or tough though, so it'd definitely still be a superheavy artillery piece that doesn't want to be exposed to incoming fire.
With our current fighter design a single squadron is 240 Starcrystals and 2,814 EP, if you wanted to fill just a single twin hangar Dhow design it would be 480 Starcrystals and 5628 EP assuming each hangar fits one squadron.
That's more than the cost of a Forge of Vaul action just in EP and that's before factoring the cost of Dhow itself.
Even an stripped down fighter design with Starlances replaced with Las-cannons or Spike Cannons but with Holofields and a single Grav-Shield would cost 357/367 EP apiece or 2142/2202 EP per squadron so it still would be most of an entire Forge of Vaul action just to stand up 2 squadrons for one average carrier, much less a Void-Stalker/Emperor equivalent with 4 hangars.
Now it is possible that filling the hangar of a starship works differently from building a fighter that can fight with our ground forces but we'd need QM clarification to answer that.
I don't think spamming our incredibly expensive fighters on the single frailest ship we'll likely ever build is a better solution. Even if we're only paying in NEP, that puts a squadron at 28 EP (22 EP for your cut down versions). We want to convert a lot of our destroyers to whatever design we make along with getting our Combat Brigs (our existing carriers) online for Biel-Tan. This makes that effectively impossible besides refitting a handful of pocket carriers.
