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A Different Breed (Warhammer 29K)

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Alectai said:
Wait, wait, you're telling me "Spike Weapons are cheaper than lasers, they required research, but because they're cheaper they're obviously inferior and we were suckers for taking that action?"

I... Can see where you got that? When our only criteria for stuff is "How much it costs", could we get a sanity check on that @Mechanis ? I got the impression that Spike/Needler weapons were generally better than our baseline Laser stuff, and the discount comes from it being made-for-purpose as opposed to kitbashed stuff (Like how our Brigantine is superior to Wraithbone Hardsuits but costs a fair bit less anyway), but if it just doesn't scale well into the naval level, that does take my argument down.
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No. I'm saying breaking this down to 'cheaper or more expensive' 'research or no research' is probably overly reductive. Laser lances in 40k have always been precision long range weapons that annihilate armor. The Spike Cannon is clearly a macro-battery that tends to be used to bracket and hammer at a target, usually a good way of oversaturating shields but often lacking the individual impact or precision of a lance weapon.

I don't doubt that our current Needler/Spiker infantry kit is better than our bargain bin local brand of lasgun. But lasers have very prominent roles in both the Imperial and more specifically various Eldar navies as long range weapons focused around fewer but harder hitting strikes*. Naval Spike Cannons are probably very similar to Imperial Macro-Cannons in terms of role and are thus suited for a slugging match of gradually eroding a target's shields and degrading their capabilities with successive attack after attack. May @Mechanis smite me if my assumptions are wrong (it has been a while since I've played a lot of BFG 2)- but these are pretty core to naval combat in 40k afaik.


*The Eldar las lances are much more rapid firing than an Imperial lance but still probably substantially less rapid than the collective macro battery.
 
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Except we don't have those more rapid firing Eldar pulsar lances yet? Because those were derived from several centuries--if not millennia--of refining and optimization that we haven't even had a chance to start yet. Just like how we're getting the chance to tailor our Plasma weapons to our doctrine.
 
[X] Stellar Rose-class Lance Frigate (350 SC, ~50 NEP)

[X] Void-Sail Ketch

Both of these seem like good picks for different reasons, Void Sails give us a balanced ship that has an equal amount of lance and macrocannons so we'd be able to more easily overwhelm shields and chop up hulls, while the Stellar Rose goes all in on long range lance weaponry.

Ultimately, the choice is either a balanced breakfast of medium / long range weaponry, or going all in on sniper doctrine.

(I'm not sure on how effective lances are against shields, but what I do remember from BFGA2 is that macros are generally better at peeling shields than lances, right?)
 
LOLROFL said:
How are Fatesheer CIWB better for Battle Carracks? CIWB are explicitly not as good against strikecraft or ordinance as PD and our Battle Carracks have 3 unused weapon slots that we can use to further enhance it's firepower. The fact that it already has 3 Fatetwister batteries means that it's all-round firepower is already incredibly good and those Fatesheer's aren't going to be contributing much more to that in comparison.

Fatesheer CIWB and CIWB in general synergizes much better with ships that aren't armed with Fatetwister batteries as those ships will have significantly worse anti-ship firing arcs compared to ships armed with Fatetwisters. Ships with Fatetwister batteries benefit much more from PD since PD does the anti-strikecraft and anti-ordinance role better for cheaper compared to CIWB.
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Because CIWB weapons are liable to be much longer range given they're superheavy weapons rather than merely vehicle scale weapons. While the CIWB are less effective against ordnance that still leaves a much larger area of coverage and the ability to better overlap point defense fire with other ships. While I would probably favor the Fatesheer CIWB on the Brig given it's massive emphasis on Starlances over the Carrack (your point about CIWB being less necessary on a ship with Fatetwisters makes sens), better ability to overlap point defense to me is worth having weaker individual PD grids. Especially since the real trade off with various Fatecaster defensive batteries is range/rate of fire rather than hit rate or accuracy given their nature.

Alectai said:
Except we don't have those more rapid firing Eldar pulsar lances yet? Because those were derived from several centuries--if not millennia--of refining and optimization that we haven't even had a chance to start yet. Just like how we're getting the chance to tailor our Plasma weapons to our doctrine.
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Not all Eldar lances are rapid fire, only the Pulsar lances. Notably most of their escort lances aren't rapid fire and are probably much more similar to our current ones than we'd think. I also think we're going to have a fair amount of incentive to pursue rapid fire lances given that Mechanis was explicit that Pulsars are imitative to Starlances, and a laser overhaul would probably be working backwards from Starlances at least as much as working forward from lasguns. Our las-lances certainly aren't going to be inferior to Imperial lances, (or even GC lances that are more associated with Chaos by canon)- so I feel really confident in saying they have the range and accuracy to engage enemy escorts at a distance while the frigate squadron is lining up to make some enemy's day a lot worse with their hilariously big primary guns.

I'm also not sure how much more expensive plasma ship scale weapons will be than our existing options. Notably Fatetwisters cost exactly as much NEP as a Las-Lance and even the basic Starlance is only 10 NEP (compared to the more common 5 NEP, I genuinely don't think we'll see a naval weapon cheaper than 3 NEP). Given compromises can reduce costs and we chose low cost as a feature for our plasma weaponry I'm expecting it to be fairly ubiquitous- maybe in the 7-8 NEP range. It probably won't be like heavy weapons where a exotic heavy weapon can easily be 3-5x times as expensive as something more conventional.
BigFungus26 said:
Both of these seem like good picks for different reasons, Void Sails give us a balanced ship that has an equal amount of lance and macrocannons so we'd be able to more easily overwhelm shields and chop up hulls, while the Stellar Rose goes all in on long range lance weaponry.

Ultimately, the choice is either a balanced breakfast of medium / long range weaponry, or going all in on sniper doctrine.

(I'm not sure on how effective lances are against shields, but what I do remember from BFGA2 is that macros are generally better at peeling shields than lances, right?)
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That generally follows afaik but it's important to consider that the lance is already a Heavy Weapon battery. It's not a 50/50 split of firepower, it's a lance being the majority of the firepower and even something as capable as a Fatetwister being a secondary weapon by comparison. A fatetwister is almost certainly long enough ranged that it can engage targets in ideal conditions alongside the H. Starlance, but it is really paying a premium in exotics to do so. A basic Starlance battery would be *significantly* more affordable and fit most of the same qualifications. The fact that's still arguably too rich for my blood should make my stance fairly apparent.
 
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[X] Void-Sail Ketch

BigFungus26 said:
[X] Stellar Rose-class Lance Frigate (350 SC, ~50 NEP)

[X] Void-Sail Ketch

Both of these seem like good picks for different reasons, Void Sails give us a balanced ship that has an equal amount of lance and macrocannons so we'd be able to more easily overwhelm shields and chop up hulls, while the Stellar Rose goes all in on long range lance weaponry.

Ultimately, the choice is either a balanced breakfast of medium / long range weaponry, or going all in on sniper doctrine.

(I'm not sure on how effective lances are against shields, but what I do remember from BFGA2 is that macros are generally better at peeling shields than lances, right?)
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Macro-cannons are generally only considered inferior long range weapons compared to lances because their accuracy diminishes the further away a target is (the macro-cannons on a Retribution class battleship from BFGA2 for example could reach out about as far as its lance turrets unless the lock-on buff is active).

That isn't really the case for Fatetwisters thanks to them being able to cheat so the Fatetwisters should have no trouble engaging targets at long range.

Personally I'd treat Fatetwisters as macro-cannons that have the lance-like characteristic since their space-time BS gives them comparable if not better accuracy while it's weakness seeking BS gives it comparable or superior armor pen and crit chance.
 
We genuinely have more H. Starlances in in our Assault Ketches than we do regular Starlances everywhere else. Apart from the concentrated killing power of the Mega Star-Lance and the and the hilarity of 3 Fatetwister batteries on the Battle Carrack I feel pretty confident saying those frigates with H. Starlances are going to do the majority of the killing. The Battle Carrack is such an unbelievably mean cruiser it comes to fighting escorts and brawling that I want to see it in action more than almost anything else. Meanwhile the Brig carries a ton of Starlances but no heavy batteries, which means it can engage a lot of targets with its lances while it brings its spinal to bear.

Both our primary cruiser and our primary battleship are pretty well suited to punching downwards and engaging a lot of smaller targets with either a lot of range and/or incredible accuracy. That tells me that we can probably afford to tailor our H. Starlance frigate around it's gun and role as a long range skirmisher/killer that wants to keep distance while the heavier ships wade into the fray and create areas of coverage that are incredibly difficult to traverse for the small attackers best suited to trying to get to grips with our fancy frigates.

The Fatetwister really nicely helps with that, but we're probably going to have to come back to drawing board sooner than later to design a frigate design that's more scalable in terms of production. That being said- that's arguably a feature considering plasma weapons, melta-weapons, torpedoes, and likely things we haven't seen (hoping the turbo lasers and volcano cannons helps pave the way for our own laser development), and even conversion fields are all going to be coming down the pipeline sooner than later.
 
Karugus said:
Because CIWB weapons are liable to be much longer range given they're superheavy weapons rather than merely vehicle scale weapons. While the CIWB are less effective against ordnance that still leaves a much larger area of coverage and the ability to better overlap point defense fire with other ships. While I would probably favor the Fatesheer CIWB on the Brig given it's massive emphasis on Starlances over the Carrack (your point about CIWB being less necessary on a ship with Fatetwisters makes sens), better ability to overlap point defense to me is worth having weaker individual PD grids. Especially since the real trade off with various Fatecaster defensive batteries is range/rate of fire rather than hit rate or accuracy given their nature.
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It is just noted that PD is very very good at engaging strikecraft and ordinance, no indication that PD has shorter range than CIWB.
Mechanis said:
There's actually two kinds; vehicle scale ones that are only good against smallcraft (and missiles) but very very good at that role, or "Close-In Weapons Batteries"--Superheavy scale weapons which, while somewhat less effective against smallcraft, are actually powerful enough to inflict meaningful damage to another Voidship at close range.
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Also, a single Fatesheer CIWB costs more than 3 Fatetwister batteries worth of Psy-Scopes while only being relevant at close range when it comes to ship to ship combat. It makes much more sense to just get more Fatetwisters over a Fatesheer CIWB if you want anti-ship coverage and use the extra system slots for PD.
 
Karugus said:
We genuinely have more H. Starlances in in our Assault Ketches than we do regular Starlances everywhere else. Apart from the concentrated killing power of the Mega Star-Lance and the and the hilarity of 3 Fatetwister batteries on the Battle Carrack I feel pretty confident saying those frigates with H. Starlances are going to do the majority of the killing. The Battle Carrack is such an unbelievably mean cruiser it comes to fighting escorts and brawling that I want to see it in action more than almost anything else. Meanwhile the Brig carries a ton of Starlances but no heavy batteries, which means it can engage a lot of targets with its lances while it brings its spinal to bear.

Both our primary cruiser and our primary battleship are pretty well suited to punching downwards and engaging a lot of smaller targets with either a lot of range and/or incredible accuracy. That tells me that we can probably afford to tailor our H. Starlance frigate around it's gun and role as a long range skirmisher/killer that wants to keep distance while the heavier ships wade into the fray and create areas of coverage that are incredibly difficult to traverse for the small attackers best suited to trying to get to grips with our fancy frigates.

The Fatetwister really nicely helps with that, but we're probably going to have to come back to drawing board sooner than later to design a frigate design that's more scalable in terms of production. That being said- that's arguably a feature considering plasma weapons, melta-weapons, torpedoes, and likely things we haven't seen (hoping the turbo lasers and volcano cannons helps pave the way for our own laser development), and even conversion fields are all going to be coming down the pipeline sooner than later.
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Yeah if the plasma / grav weaponry turns out
to be effective, I'd atleast consider refitting some of our ships with them (Longer range and higher power plasma sounds promising, but only time will tell if they're as good as - or better - than canon naval plasma batteries, and who knows what we can get with grav?)

(Honestly, off topic but I'm kind of picturing our grav-shielded vehicles, Ithilmar and starships as having a passive gravitational lensing effect when you look at them, and considering that our colour scheme is - i think - mostly black with some green trim, we could definitely give a few Human / Imperial ships a scare when they see midnight-black ships gliding through the void and bending the light around them)
 
Karugus said:
We genuinely have more H. Starlances in in our Assault Ketches than we do regular Starlances everywhere else. Apart from the concentrated killing power of the Mega Star-Lance and the and the hilarity of 3 Fatetwister batteries on the Battle Carrack I feel pretty confident saying those frigates with H. Starlances are going to do the majority of the killing. The Battle Carrack is such an unbelievably mean cruiser it comes to fighting escorts and brawling that I want to see it in action more than almost anything else. Meanwhile the Brig carries a ton of Starlances but no heavy batteries, which means it can engage a lot of targets with its lances while it brings its spinal to bear.

Both our primary cruiser and our primary battleship are pretty well suited to punching downwards and engaging a lot of smaller targets with either a lot of range and/or incredible accuracy. That tells me that we can probably afford to tailor our H. Starlance frigate around it's gun and role as a long range skirmisher/killer that wants to keep distance while the heavier ships wade into the fray and create areas of coverage that are incredibly difficult to traverse for the small attackers best suited to trying to get to grips with our fancy frigates.

The Fatetwister really nicely helps with that, but we're probably going to have to come back to drawing board sooner than later to design a frigate design that's more scalable in terms of production. That being said- that's arguably a feature considering plasma weapons, melta-weapons, torpedoes, and likely things we haven't seen (hoping the turbo lasers and volcano cannons helps pave the way for our own laser development), and even conversion fields are all going to be coming down the pipeline sooner than later.
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Given one of our primary enemies for the foreseeable future is going to be Biel Tan letting our Ketch's keep their Fatetwister batteries will make them absolute nightmares to deal with.

Lances meanwhile are very bad against Eldar ships since Holofields (while Biel Tan will likely have) are very good at countering weapons with a low ROF/number for shots.

Having an escort with just 2 lance weapons (like the Stellar Rose) is just asking for a deadweight design whenever we need to fight Biel Tan.

As we have seen with Arach-Qin's fleet and our own the ships fielded by other Craftworlds will likely have at least 1 Aethersail. With how effective Fatetwisters will be at inflicting partial or total mobility kills on those sorts of ships due to the fragile nature of Aethersails each Ketch with a Fatetwister battery becomes an extremely mobile (2 sails plus plasma thrusters will make it extremely agile) kneecapper that can deal disproportionate damage to even Biel Tans largest ships by shredding Aethersails.

While I understand that escorts should be spammable we need to keep in perspective that the only other ship with Fatetwisters in our fleet cost more than 6 times as much in terms of Psy-Scopes not to mention taking 3 times as long to build. Even if you fix that by removing the Fatesheer CIWB it's still 3 times as costly in Psy-Scopes and will take much longer to build.
 
So dies any attempt at a coherent naming convention. Every quest I want to make it work, and every quest my dreams die :V

LOLROFL said:
It is just noted that PD is very very good at engaging strikecraft and ordinance, no indication that PD has shorter range than CIWB.
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I think it's a bit cavalier to assume that vehicle grade weaponry has the same range as the sort of guns you'd put on Titans and other super heavy combatants. You can disagree that we don't have explicit range differences, but I could extend that to say we don't have indications that Starcarvers are shorter range than Starblades and that obviously sounds a bit absurd.

LOLROFL said:
Also, a single Fatesheer CIWB costs more than 3 Fatetwister batteries worth of Psy-Scopes while only being relevant at close range when it comes to ship to ship combat. It makes much more sense to just get more Fatetwisters over a Fatesheer CIWB if you want anti-ship coverage and use the extra system slots for PD.
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Where are you getting the prices for these things? 10 Superheavy Fatesheers cost 40 Psy-Scopes. A single Fatesheer CIWB costs less than a single Fatetwister. It's the 60 Fatesever Cannons that cost 120 Psy-Scopes for Fatesever PD. That's the other reason I was adamantly against them.


LOLROFL said:
Given one of our primary enemies for the foreseeable future is going to be Biel Tan letting our Ketch's keep their Fatetwister batteries will make them absolute nightmares to deal with.

Lances meanwhile are very bad against Eldar ships since Holofields (while Biel Tan will likely have) are very good at countering weapons with a low ROF/number for shots.

Having an escort with just 2 lance weapons (like the Stellar Rose) is just asking for a deadweight design whenever we need to fight Biel Tan.

As we have seen with Arach-Qin's fleet and our own the ships fielded by other Craftworlds will likely have at least 1 Aethersail. With how effective Fatetwisters will be at inflicting partial or total mobility kills on those sorts of ships due to the fragile nature of Aethersails each Ketch with a Fatetwister battery becomes an extremely mobile (2 sails plus plasma thrusters will make it extremely agile) kneecapper that can deal disproportionate damage to even Biel Tans largest ships by shredding Aethersails.

While I understand that escorts should be spammable we need to keep in perspective that the only other ship with Fatetwisters in our fleet cost more than 6 times as much in terms of Psy-Scopes not to mention taking 3 times as long to build. Even if you fix that by removing the Fatesheer CIWB it's still 3 times as costly in Psy-Scopes and will take much longer to build.
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We cannot be entirely building our navy around dealing with Biel-Tan- nor do we actually lack for significant existing counters to that threat. Especially when that's the entire reason we went with the destroyer escort we did- precisely so it could bracket and get mobility kills with it's spike cannons. You can dismiss our Carracks if you want, but they're liable to be both far more durable than our escorts and have a lot of Fatetwisters mounted on them, hence the cost. If Fatetwisters are a useful specialist weapon to hard counter a specific strategy and enable all of our Starlances to be on target, we shouldn't be locking ourselves into spending proportionally more on the Fatetwisters than we are on Starlances. The other thing to consider is that for all Biel-Tan is more martial... they are no more doctrinally oriented around fighting and killing other Eldar than we are at the moment.


I'm going to repeat that you provide your numbers because your cost estimates for Fatesheer and Fatesever PD/CIWB are wildly out of line with what Mechanis told us. I'm aware not all the numbers on the sheets seem to line up for those costs, but we all have to bow before WoG. This means your promised windfall of Psy-scopes is maybe a third of what you estimated, and that the CIWB in particular is both point defense coverage and a close in macro battery that costs less than the Fatetwister.
Mechanis said:
Each PD battery is 60 individual weapons (for an Escort anyway) whilst CIWBs are 10 individual weapons (again, for escorts).
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Karugus said:
So dies any attempt at a coherent naming convention. Every quest I want to make it work, and every quest my dreams die :V


I think it's a bit cavalier to assume that vehicle grade weaponry has the same range as the sort of guns you'd put on Titans and other super heavy combatants. You can disagree that we don't have explicit range differences, but I could extend that to say we don't have indications that Starcarvers are shorter range than Starblades and that obviously sounds a bit absurd.


Where are you getting the prices for these things? 10 Superheavy Fatesheers cost 40 Psy-Scopes. A single Fatesheer CIWB costs less than a single Fatetwister. It's the 60 Fatesever Cannons that cost 120 Psy-Scopes for Fatesever PD. That's the other reason I was adamantly against them.



We cannot be entirely building our navy around dealing with Biel-Tan- nor do we actually lack for significant existing counters to that threat. Especially when that's the entire reason we went with the destroyer escort we did- precisely so it could bracket and get mobility kills with it's spike cannons. You can dismiss our Carracks if you want, but they're liable to be both far more durable than our escorts and have a lot of Fatetwisters mounted on them, hence the cost. If Fatetwisters are a useful specialist weapon to hard counter a specific strategy and enable all of our Starlances to be on target, we shouldn't be locking ourselves into spending proportionally more on the Fatetwisters than we are on Starlances. The other thing to consider is that for all Biel-Tan is more martial... they are no more doctrinally oriented around fighting and killing other Eldar than we are at the moment.


I'm going to repeat that you provide your numbers because your cost estimates for Fatesheer and Fatesever PD/CIWB are wildly out of line with what Mechanis told us. I'm aware not all the numbers on the sheets seem to line up for those costs, but we all have to bow before WoG. This means your promised windfall of Psy-scopes is maybe a third of what you estimated, and that the CIWB in particular is both point defense coverage and a close in macro battery that costs less than the Fatetwister.
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We aren't, we are just keeping these guns until Biel-Tan is repulsed. Then we can start building more economical ships.

It's just for the duration of expected hostilities.
 
Karugus said:
I think it's a bit cavalier to assume that vehicle grade weaponry has the same range as the sort of guns you'd put on Titans and other super heavy combatants. You can disagree that we don't have explicit range differences, but I could extend that to say we don't have indications that Starcarvers are shorter range than Starblades and that obviously sounds a bit absurd.


Where are you getting the prices for these things? 10 Superheavy Fatesheers cost 40 Psy-Scopes. A single Fatesheer CIWB costs less than a single Fatetwister. It's the 60 Fatesever Cannons that cost 120 Psy-Scopes for Fatesever PD. That's the other reason I was adamantly against them.

We cannot be entirely building our navy around dealing with Biel-Tan- nor do we actually lack for significant existing counters to that threat. Especially when that's the entire reason we went with the destroyer escort we did- precisely so it could bracket and get mobility kills with it's spike cannons. You can dismiss our Carracks if you want, but they're liable to be both far more durable than our escorts and have a lot of Fatetwisters mounted on them, hence the cost. If Fatetwisters are a useful specialist weapon to hard counter a specific strategy and enable all of our Starlances to be on target, we shouldn't be locking ourselves into spending proportionally more on the Fatetwisters than we are on Starlances.


I'm going to repeat that you provide your numbers because your cost estimates for Fatesheer and Fatesever PD/CIWB are wildly out of line with what Mechanis told us. I'm aware not all the numbers on the sheets seem to line up for those costs, but we all have to bow before WoG.
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I made a post about it a while back I'll just include the relevant parts here.

Below are the Battle Carrack numbers
Battle Carrack
Equipment:
• 1x Heavy Starlance
• 3x Fatetwister Cannon Weapons Batteries
• 1x Fatesheer Cannon Close-In Weapons Battery
• 3x Æthersails
• 1x Plasma Drive
Construction Time:
• 3 Turns (single unit)
• 5 turns (Batch of 2)
Special Resource Requirement:
• 350 Starcrystals
• 310 Fatebender Psy-Scopes
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As you can see the Battle Carrack costs 310 Psy-Scopes, since Fatetwister batteries costs 50 Psy-Scopes each that means 160 of the 310 Psy-Scopes are for paying for the single Fatesheer Cannon Close-In Weapons Battery that it has.

Each Fatesheer costs 4 PS so that's roughly 40 Fatesheers equivalent in cost.

Meanwhile for the Combat Brig (which I realize I've been calling the Battle Brig a lot):
Combat Brig
Equipment:
• 1x Starcaster Mega-Lance
• 6x Starlance Weapons Batteries
• 1x Fatesever Cannon Point Defense Weapon Battery
• 2x Æthersails
• 2x Plasma Drives
• 1x Strike Craft Hanger
• Webway Gate
Construction Time: 6 turns
Special Resource Requirement:
• 1600 Starcrystals
• 120 Fatebender Psy-Scopes
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Since it doesn't have any Fatecaster weapons besides the PD we can conclude that the PD costs the whole 120 Psy-Scopes that the Brig requires. That 120 PS is equal to 60 of the 2 PS costing Fatesever cannons.

TLDR Fatecaster based PD and CIWB is very expensive.

As for arguing that a Ketch with Fatetwisters is too specialist, we just saw in the last update that Fatetwisters performed extremely well against the Orks. Fatetwisters are not a specialist weapon, they are just a straight upgrade compared to generic macro-cannons and lances since they have comparable or superior ROF and damage to a macro while having comparable or superior accuracy, armor pen, and crit chance as lances.

What adding Fatetwisters to a Ketch does is give it the ability to hit well above it's weight class against Eldar while still retaining excellent performance against any other faction. While you are paying a premium for it can you think of any other faction (besides Necrons) that have escorts that are even remotely as terrifying to face?
 
LOLROFL said:
I made a post about it a while back I'll just include the relevant parts

Below are the Battle Carrack numbers
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Like I said, we have outright WoG of exactly how much they should cost- I know it doesn't line up with the listed costs for the ships, but until Mechanis weighs in I have to assume the 60 Vehicle Weapons and 10 Superheavy weapons he told us is the accurate account.

LOLROFL said:
As for arguing that a Ketch with Fatetwisters is too specialist, we just saw in the last update that Fatetwisters performed extremely well against the Orks. Fatetwisters are not a specialist weapon, they are just a straight upgrade compared to generic macro-cannons and lances since they have comparable or superior ROF and damage to a macro while having comparable or superior accuracy, armor pen, and crit chance as lances.

What adding Fatetwisters to a Ketch does is give it the ability to hit well above it's weight class against Eldar while still retaining excellent performance against any other faction. While you are paying a premium for it can you think of any other faction (besides Necrons) that have escorts that are even remotely as terrifying to face?
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I'm not saying these escorts aren't the scariest escorts around until Necrons start waking up. I'm saying we are investing a fuck ton of exotics into fundamentally fragile and unarmored small spacecraft and that these ships are too costly to replace in any realistic sense. Its viable to keep the Fatetwister, but it is absolutely relegating this ship to being an elite unit to be carefully conserved rather than one of our primary classes in the long run. 2 escorts a turn, maybe 3 a 100 years down the road can't even pretend to be a ship we can produce in meaningful quantities.

And unlike the H. Starlances where the refit is producing a stockpile of SC to further fuel fleet expansion and reform, you can't promise any PS from the Assault Ketch refit and I can't accept your estimates for ~100+ PS per Carrack refit because it doesn't match up with the WoG we've got on CIWB and PDB.

Believe me, the biggest problem I have with your plan in a vacuum is that it's ignoring the poisonous/thorny plant naming convention Eldar escorts go for :V. I just think we have to acknowledge that we are never going to be affording another two dozen of these these things in a reasonable time span (and I think we should aiming to massively expand our navy within a millennia). We absolutely need to be looking at the future fleet we're going to need when it comes to parceling out the glut of exotics these refits are freeing up or the lack thereof. I guess I've misrepresented my argument at some point, but the point I'm trying to make is that retaining the Fatetwister means this design will transition from being a widely produced line frigate to an elite frigate backstopping a core of advanced but significantly cheaper and more expendable designs in the long run.
 
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To help visualize what it would feel like to fight these things if they had a Heavy-Starlance battery and a Fatetwister battery, imagine an escort that's packing a lance that hits as hard an Eldar pulsar cruiser's full pulsar loadout (Starlances hit 3 times harder and 4-5 times faster than regular lances) that also has perfect accuracy macro cannons that have a near 360 firing arcs and AP and crit as good as a lances.

Your first sign that they are there is when you eat a face-full of lance fire that either annihilates whatever escort had the misfortune to run into it or your capital ship just had a significant chunk of it's shields drained. Then when you try to chase them you're ships are eating constant macro fire despite the fact that they are practically flying directly away from you, further draining your shields until they drop but at least it's only hitting your well armored frontal arc right?

Nope, the macro-cannon fire shots are magically twisting to go straight for your ships defenseless rear and your ships engines quickly sputter out as they can't take any more long rods penetrating them. Once all of your ships have been similarly penetrated and crippled they turn around and hose you down with lance-fire until all your ships are reduced to hulks.

It's even worse vs Eldar since they'll immediately start experiencing mobility kills as their Aethersails get shredded by Fatetwister until a crit eventually knocks out their Holofield generators and they get finished off by a Starlance.

If you look at some of the designs we and Arach-Qin have most escorts are usually a mix of either just 2 Aethersails or 1 Aethersail and 1 Plasma thruster. This ship will likely be one of the faster escorts around with it's 2 sails and 1 plasma unless Biel Tank has decided to invest a ton in speed at the expense of everything else.

Karugus said:
Like I said, we have outright WoG of exactly how much they should cost- I know it doesn't line up with the listed costs for the ships, but until Mechanis weighs in I have to assume the 60 Vehicle Weapons and 10 Superheavy weapons he told us is the accurate account.
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Then you should have no problem finding a WOG quote then. All my numbers are straight from the "Warhost of Vau-Vulkesh" threadmark in the "Starships" section where you can find all the cost figures for our ships.
Karugus said:
I'm not saying these escorts aren't the scariest escorts around until Necrons start waking up. I'm saying we are investing a fuck ton of exotics into fundamentally fragile and unarmored small spacecraft and that these ships are too costly to replace in any realistic sense. Its viable to keep the Fatetwister, but it is absolutely relegating this ship to being an elite unit to be carefully conserved rather than one of our primary classes in the long run. 2 Escorts a turn, maybe 3 in a 100 years can't even pretend to be a ship we can produce in meaningful quantities.

And unlike the H. Starlances where the refit is producing a stockpile of SC to further fuel fleet expansion and reform, you can't promise any PS from the Assault Ketch refit and I can't accept your estimates for ~100+ PS per Carrack refit because it doesn't match up with the WoG we've got on CIWB and PDB.

Believe me, the biggest problem I have with your plan in a vacuum is that it's ignoring the poisonous/thorny plant naming convention Eldar escorts go for :V. I just think we have to acknowledge that we are never going to be affording another dozen of these these things (and I think we should aiming to massively expand our navy within a millennia), and I think we absolutely need to be looking at the future fleet we're going to need when it comes to parceling out the glut of exotics these refits are freeing up or the lack thereof. I guess I've misrepresented my argument at some point, but the point I'm trying to make is that retaining the fatetwister means this design will transition from being a widely produced line frigate to an elite frigate backstopping a core of advanced but significantly cheaper and more expendable designs in the long run.
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If we go with my proposal to swap out all the Fatecaster based CIWBs on our capitals we will have enough just from that to more than double the amount of Ketch's that we can build.

While it is indeed expensive the ability to shred enemy fleets from max range (because that's what these things will excel at) means that it isn't likely to take anywhere near as many casualties as what most factions can expect their escorts to take, not to mention that we also have the Nettle if we need something relatively expendable.
 
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On the numbers: firstly, I will be going over the fleet posts and double checking that the math for exotics is correct tonight. Because there's been some confusion on that, and I did discover a calculation error the other day.

Secondly, though, PD and CIW batteries are indeed larger/more expensive on capital ships, with a higher number of weapons per mount.

Finally, Fatetwister Cannons are indeed quite good, but they are pricey enough that you may not want to keep them on Escorts, as that would severely limit any ability to produce large numbers of the class in question. You can, of course, make an "only ever a refit" design for your existing fleet, and commit to a new production design later---certainly you will be getting (or likely getting) several technogies over the next few turns that will be significantly expanding your available options vis-a-vis ship weaponry.
 
Mechanis said:
On the numbers: firstly, I will be going over the fleet posts and double checking that the math for exotics is correct tonight. Because there's been some confusion on that, and I did discover a calculation error the other day.

Secondly, though, PD and CIW batteries are indeed larger/more expensive on capital ships, with a higher number of weapons per mount.

Finally, Fatetwister Cannons are indeed quite good, but they are pricey enough that you may not want to keep them on Escorts, as that would severely limit any ability to produce large numbers of the class in question. You can, of course, make an "only ever a refit" design for your existing fleet, and commit to a new production design later---certainly you will be getting (or likely getting) several technogies over the next few turns that will be significantly expanding your available options vis-a-vis ship weaponry.
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One thing I definitely hope you can do sometime soon if give us a general overview of what the difference between guns are. Right now, I think the only real thing we have going for them is a bit of fluff and then their cost.
 
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