Remove ads

A Different Breed (Warhammer 29K)

Reader mode
We already have a budget escort in the form of the Nettle, having the Assault Ketch be a little less common isn't that big of an issue given how capable each one would be.

We will have over 100 of them for barely any Psy-Scope or Starcrystal expenditure before we need to worry about additional costs and even after that compared to how much more expensive outfitting a capital ship would be this thing isn't that big of a burden.

Another thing to factor in is build time, if you want capital ships with Fatetwister or Starlance batteries you're looking at several turns of build time. A Ketch takes a single turn to build so if we ever have an emergency where we need naval killing power NOW we can crash build a ton of these and have them ready in one turn Vs needing to wait several turns overwise.
 
vsh said:
This was the cost for escorts. Capital ships equipment is bigger and more expensive.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Fair enough, that will probably let us stretch our PS farther in that context.

LOLROFL said:
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.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Yeah, these things are going to be absolute murder dogging the flanks of a force while our capital ships and more mass producible escorts pin them down. We really do need to make sure our capital ships get a bit more staying power shields aside because I really do want to make sure we have a resilient pinning force to pair with such a lethal and expensive escort swarm.

That's the other real concern is just the inherent fragility of a ~1km escort compared to a cruiser that masses 9 times as much or a battleship massing maybe a few dozen times as much given canon ship sizes. If the price for things like PD and CIWB scale, I wouldn't be surprised if some other things scaled like Grav-Shields, hull reinforcement, and a lot of the weapon batteries. Investing so much in escorts makes us pretty brittle to losses in a way.
 
Last edited:
Alectai said:
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.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I can do something like that I suppose. I mean, not right this second; its late enough that doing comparitive weapons anyalisis is not a project I want to start when I'm tired and probably going to sleep in the next hour, but tomorrow maybe.
 
Karugus said:
Fair enough, that will probably let us stretch our PS farther in that context.


Yeah, these things are going to be absolute murder dogging the flanks of a force while our capital ships and more mass producible escorts pin them down. We really do need to make sure our capital ships get a bit more staying power shields aside because I really do want to make sure we have a resilient pinning force to pair with such a lethal and expensive escort swarm.

That's the other real concern is just the inherent fragility of a ~1km escort compared to a cruiser that masses 9 times as much or a battleship massing maybe a few dozen times as much given canon ship sizes. If the price for things like PD and CIWB scale, I wouldn't be surprised if some other things scaled like grav shields, hull reinforcement, and a lot of the weapon batteries.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Eldar escorts quite a bit more survivable compared to their Ork and Human contemporaries (Necrons are BS though) in BFGA2. The biggest weakness of escorts is they generally have tiny HP pools (Roks notwithstanding) compared to capital ships and crumple like paper bags when rammed.

Eldar escorts have Holofields which massively reduce the chance of getting hit in the first place and in our case also have Grav-Shields which can deflect a number of the shots that do hit. Our Ketch design in particular also has 3 propulsion units (2 sails 1 plasma) compared to basically all the other Eldar escort designs we've seen which only have 2. This should give it above average speed and maneuverability among even Eldar escorts.

That combo hugely alleviates the universal weakness that all escorts suffer from since our escorts will almost never take damage barring a truly insane amount of saturation fire and are fast and nimble enough that the only ships we could reasonable expect to be able to ram us are other Eldar ships or Necrons.

Edit:
Example from BFGA2, in multiplayer I had a Hemlock destroyer weather sustained fire from a Drukhari battleship long enough that I was forced to kill it by ramming via Wraithbone Shift (basically gives your ship a massive bump in speed) so it couldn't escape (it already used Wraithbone ship so it couldn't sprint away).

Since then whenever I played against fellow Eldar I found that Wraithbone Shifting into escorts was the most reliable way to kill them as they'd never stay in range long enough to kill otherwise.
 
Last edited:
I did some napkin math and I figured that - if we get rid of the CIWB - we'd be able to order 2 of either the Void Sail or the stellar rose assault ketches every turn with about a hundred starcrystals left over for other projects (with the only difference between the two being an extra 20 scopes going towards the fatetwister cannons in the void sail plan)

Either way, exotics production would be able to handle building 2 ketches per turn (at current passive income) and in response, we get something that could be a pretty big threat to heavier ships if we're favoured by the dice.

That being said though, yeah these guys are gonna be expensive little bastards, but with any luck we'll (eventually) be able to increase exotics production to be able to produce these at a greater quantity.

Until then though, we have about 108 Ketches we'll be able to refit first (so our production problems don't really matter since we can just repair and refit them in bulk) and the starcrystals we'd get from recycling the CIWB might even be enough to double the amount of Ketches in our fleet (Don't quote me on that wild estimate, but yeah, those CIWB aren't worth the crystals, those can go elsewhere)

Besides, whichever vote wins, our ketches get almost HALF as cheap in terms of crystals without compromising on their biggest gun, and their survivability improves by a substantial amount thanks to the extra mobility, grav and holo-fields we added to it)
 
Karugus said:
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.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
That was my thinking for the Frigate as well. Keep the Heavy Starlance and Fatetwisters on this design, because giving it defenses and swapping out the Superheavy Starlances still makes it a bit cheaper. Then we have so many Ketches to refit that when we next design a frigate there'll be both plenty of hulls still in need of refitting and a lot more variety in non-exotic weaponry to pick from.
 
Professor Vesca said:
Yeah, right now I just want a Refit to expand our ships capability while keeping their fate twisters, with the actual production ships coming out later
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Pretty much this.

It's a design for a solid retrofit for the 108 Assault ketch we already have.
And the big case for the keeping the Fatetwister macro cannons for me (at least for now) is that we need to be able to punch up against other Eldar ships pretty hard due Biel-Tan + our smaller field size.

And the Fatetwister macro cannons do that, because they just ignore the Holo-Fields BS and hit the enemy ship and without shields (which is something we can expect out of almost all other eldar forces) do critical damage with each of them as they hit sensitive stuff.


For people worried about a mass producible design, Just for the Assault ketch we have enough to retrofit for likely the next ~9 turns (that is with an investment of 4 EP per turn into retrofitting just the Assault Ketch) or so and if we include the capital ships and nettle design in the overall repair/retrofit pile, that turns likely more into 20–30 turns before we have gone through most of our ships for retrofitting/repairs and start with new ship contstruction.

There is also another reason on why to delay the mass producible design, our weapon options at the moment are kind of limited (and overall the non-exotic options being mostly meh). And by the time our repair/retrofit pile is getting closer to empty we should have a nice number of additional things we can put on our ships, from Conversion fields to more weapon types: Melta, Plasma, Gravity and Torpedos. At least from the stuff we already know is on our list.

More or less by the time we are done with the retrofits, even if we go for a mas producible design we will likely want to change that by the time we are done with the repairs/retro fits due to more/better options for the non-exotic/special resources weapons.
 
Last edited:
Would Meltas be effective as a short range battery when we get them? Or does scaling them down make them too short ranged for Voidships?
 
IronFist said:
Would Meltas be effective as a short range battery when we get them? Or does scaling them down make them too short ranged for Voidships?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Going base off the weapon battery sized ones being short ranged:
Mechanis said:
Colossal Melta weapons designed for use by and against voidships, these weapons are short ranged but extremely deadly within that range, as the Orks found out.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I think that would likely a case of not enough range to be useful for a Close-In Weapons Battery.
 
Last edited:
LOLROFL said:
Example from BFGA2, in multiplayer I had a Hemlock destroyer weather sustained fire from a Drukhari battleship long enough that I was forced to kill it by ramming via Wraithbone Shift (basically gives your ship a massive bump in speed) so it couldn't escape (it already used Wraithbone ship so it couldn't sprint away).

Since then whenever I played against fellow Eldar I found that Wraithbone Shifting into escorts was the most reliable way to kill them as they'd never stay in range long enough to kill otherwise.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It's more cases of guided torpedoes (there's no reason to assume only the Tau will ever get them), strikecraft, or special area of effect weapons like Nova Cannons being pretty much unmitigated by our defenses that has me concerned. PD addresses the first two, and we may want to look into our own laser modifications ala Turbolasers and Volcano Cannons to even more thoroughly address that- but like you said there's very little we can do to address the fragility itself of an escort. I'll probably just advocate that we keep this design as the sole escort using exotics in the long run and push for the first truly new capital ship to be a light cruiser with a minimal (but still present) exotic load out.

In other words, I live in terror of the day we run into an Adeptus Mechanicus fleet and the Priests of Mars cheer as their nigh-universal Nova weapons are brought to bear :V
Karnax626 said:
That was my thinking for the Frigate as well. Keep the Heavy Starlance and Fatetwisters on this design, because giving it defenses and swapping out the Superheavy Starlances still makes it a bit cheaper. Then we have so many Ketches to refit that when we next design a frigate there'll be both plenty of hulls still in need of refitting and a lot more variety in non-exotic weaponry to pick from.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I suspect our general purpose escort is probably going to be a torpedo boat- because if nothing else torpedoes are fantastic ways to force the enemy to maneuver in ways you'd prefer, and that probably will want some of the juicy non-exotics we'll have coming down the pipeline.
 
Karugus said:
I suspect our general purpose escort is probably going to be a torpedo boat- because if nothing else torpedoes are fantastic ways to force the enemy to maneuver in ways you'd prefer, and that probably will want some of the juicy non-exotics we'll have coming down the pipeline.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Oh yeah I am also looking forward to a torpedo boat:

[] Torpedo Schooner
-[][Heavy Weapons Batteries] torpedo
-[][Weapons Batteries] torpedo x3
-[] Holo-Field, (Las-Lances) Point Defense Battery, Plasma-Thruster, Æthersail, 5 System Slots

Total Torpedo tubes: 9 (2 for the weapon battery ones, 3 for the heavy one)

What does it do ?
Shoot Torpedoes at long range and fade away using the Holo-Field, pretty much a submarine in space.

Things get fun when the Torpedoes also have Holo-Fields and are homing :drevil:
 
Skjadir said:
Oh yeah I am also looking forward to a torpedo boat:

[] Torpedo Schooner
-[][Heavy Weapons Batteries] torpedo
-[][Weapons Batteries] torpedo x3
-[] Holo-Field, (Las-Lances) Point Defense Battery, Plasma-Thruster, Æthersail, 5 System Slots

Total Torpedo tubes: 9 (2 for the weapon battery ones, 3 for the heavy one)

What does it do ?
Shoot Torpedoes at long range and fade away using the Holo-Field, pretty much a submarine in space.

Things get fun when the Torpedoes also have Holo-Fields and are homing :drevil:
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Fate scopes guiding Invisible Implosion Torpedos?

Oops, was that your engine?
 
[X] Void-Sail Ketch
lets do a cheap to refit design now and a new design later as we have a lot of turns to do research and get better gear to put onto it.

The next refit should be the battle Carrack as we have the following ones needing repairs and they have no defences but empty system slots
  • 7 battle Carrack (Æthersails destroyed)
  • 7 battle Carrack (One to two Weapons Batteries disabled, Plasma Drives offline)
  • 10 battle Carrack (Heavy Starlance disabled)
 
Last edited:
Karugus said:
I suspect our general purpose escort is probably going to be a torpedo boat- because if nothing else torpedoes are fantastic ways to force the enemy to maneuver in ways you'd prefer, and that probably will want some of the juicy non-exotics we'll have coming down the pipeline.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
That does remind me that we don't yet know how sacrificing safety standards for plasma will work when it comes to naval-scale versions. Maybe there'll just be a limit on how many we can fit on one ship to account for the amount of excess heat?
 
Karnax626 said:
That does remind me that we don't yet know how sacrificing safety standards for plasma will work when it comes to naval-scale versions. Maybe there'll just be a limit on how many we can fit on one ship to account for the amount of excess heat?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
We just need to figure out how to harness the heat and use it for defence.

Maybe somemm sort of theral shield that vaporizes physical projectiles?
 
[X] Stellar Rose-class Lance Frigate (350 SC, ~50 NEP)

I can agree with the refit argument, but I'll cast my vote for cheaper escorts. Considering what scope production we do have also has to compete with the guns we want for our troops makes me a little thrifty.
 
TheBlueBananaPig said:
[X] Stellar Rose-class Lance Frigate (350 SC, ~50 NEP)

I can agree with the refit argument, but I'll cast my vote for cheaper escorts. Considering what scope production we do have also has to compete with the guns we want for our troops makes me a little thrifty.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

... the scope cost is kind of irrelevant for the refit because the Assault Ketch have them as standard armament, it costs us nothing to keep them.
Switching to another weapon battery type pretty much means we rip out the Fatetwister cannons we have on these ships.
 
That's a fair point if the refit build is only going to do refits and no new builds. I will have to think on the likelihood of new build ships for a bit. I have a suspicion it is not many for a while.
 
TheBlueBananaPig said:
That's a fair point if the refit build is only going to do refits and no new builds. I will have to think on the likelihood of new build ships for a bit. I have a suspicion it is not many for a while.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Yeah, we aren't going to build any new ships of these.
But we also have 108 (51 damaged) ships of the assault Ketch to retrofit.

By the time we are done with that (and the capital ships that come afterward) we should have more tech to make more viable escort ships (big ones there are the torpedoes).
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top