- Location
- Utrecht
Have you heard of my pet project of weaponizing True fire on a starship level?
Well probably unlock more seer research this turn, like ghost helms.
A Different Breed (Warhammer 29K)
Well probably unlock more seer research this turn, like ghost helms.
This design would probably also be pretty brutal with a superheavy point singularity projector.
The challenge with heavy designs, and why we might prefer an up-engined medium SPG, is that they may be too wide to fit through some Webway Gates/tunnels. That's why the Eldar invented the Firestorm, IIRC, as their fighter aircraft can't always fit through to be deployed.
I hope so. Even if we need most of our Seer AP to solve the Curses, we could use some more Tools here and there.
- Location
- Germany
I don't actually think point singularity is great for long range artillery.
At least by the looks of it I get the feeling that the weapon can only fire again after the first shot hit.
This is quite bad for long range artillery because the time between shots (can) get really high there due to the distances involved.
So the rate of fire likely takes a pretty massive hit, compared to other indirect fire weapons.
Yeah, if we're going to build a Heavy chassis as a gun platform for Superheavy weapons, it should be capable of direct fire on strongpoints, exactly what the singularity gun is best at.
If all we wanted was a cheap long-range gun, something like this medium design comes out to 172 EP before the gun, so 282 with the fusion mortar, or nearly half what Skjadir's design costs:
Plan: Cheap Gun Truck
[ ] Configuration : Fully External
[ ] Type : Plasma Drive [EXPERIMENTAL] (12 EP)
[ ] Maneuvering x2 (2 EP)
[ ] Stability x3 (3 EP)
[ ] Power Plant : Psykrystal Capacitractor [EXPERIMENTAL] (5 EP)
[ ] Basic Armor : Light
[ ] Enhanced Armor : Crew Compartment (+3)
[ ] Weapons Mounts : Default
[ ] Crew Spaces : Open
[ ] Basic Defense : Refractor Field (+2 EP)
[ ] Basic Defense : Deflector Field [EXPERIMENTAL] (+7 EP)
[ ] Defense System : Holo-Field [EXPERIMENTAL] (11 EP)
[ ] Defense System : Grav-Shield Generator [EXPERIMENTAL] (18 EP)
[ ] Defense System : Energy-Dispersion Barrier Generator [EXPERIMENTAL] (9 EP)
[ ] 1x Superheavy Slot, 2 System Slots
They probably can't be used as indirect fire artillery, you're right. This wouldn't be an indirect fire weapon, I think the use case there would be as relatively close range direct fire artillery either to soften up an enemy right before an assault or conversely to break an advancing enemy force.
With an open top I think you might as well go with an air breathing engine. That would make it much cheaper to then add some more engines to make it faster or have more spare system slots.
- Location
- Germany
Yes, but I also wouldn't expect the vehicle or the crew to survive for long when the other side starts to shoot back.
See, that's just a superheavy tank chasis. It's not an artillery chasis at all. By putting heavy armor on it you make it a superheavy tank, not an artillery piece. Sure, it might have indirect fire weapons, but it's still a tank chassis. You have heavy armor, lots of shields (TWO GRAV SHIELDS, despite those being bad against artillery fire and area-effect explosions), Fully recessed plasma drives, and an armored fighting compartment. It's a Tank, or at least a heavily armored TD.
That's a vastly superior superheavy artillery piece, and I think you could even pull the Grav-shield because that kind of shield doesn't handle artillery fire well. Just depend on the Energy-disperion barrier and the Holofield, not that this kind of vehicle should want to ever come under direct fire.
Eeeh, an air-breathing engine is a pretty big limitation on which battlefields it can be brought to. It does save 7 EP per additional engine spent on support, but there's only so many seconday defense systems I think we'll still pick up (especially having passed up the scrambler fields), and heavy guns can be provided by the crew themselves on an open-topped vehicle.
The point of long-range artillery is that you're not expecting much shooting back, other than from the other side's artillery - to which armor is less useful a defense than moving, and having a second gun to shoot their artillery with.
How long do you want them to survive? What should they be able to survive? Endure Infantry Fire, Vehicle, Titan or Startship Firepower?
Sure, sometimes the enemy will surprise us and manage to concentrate forces on us, but that seems like a thing that can happen to any military.
On a strategic level the Eldar are in decline, but if we accept that and set ourselves appropriate ambitions then...
Oh wait, we want to break into hell and liberate our sex god. Maybe appropriate ambitions aren't the vibe
Still, I think if we're fighting 100-to-1 regularly then we're probably just being stupid unless our training and equipment is so much better every time that we're just fine every time.
Like, with the Freebootas, the station was rendered combat irrelevant by ranged fire but we still boarded it with marines and cleared it room by room. We didn't need to do that. Turns out space elves are well 'ard, so it was fine, but it's a bit daft.
Our whole invasion felt a lot like what the orks would do to an unprepared Eldar colony.
I think this kind of action and story is rooted in generic fantasy memes that have clear white-supremacist or right-wing vibes (the wise and valuable few whose lives are worth 100s of greenskin savages; the enemy that cannot or must not be reasoned with; the alien populations that breed too quickly and will take over unless culled, etc).
I would rather that this quest subverts these kinds of memes, as open_sketch, DragonCobolt, Maugan Ra, BoneyM and others have done to varying degrees. (I think the anti-fascist themes in open_sketch's WH40k work are particularly well done)
Maybe that's where you are going with the smart ork pirate and with the Eldar doing kind of insane things? Maybe I was just reading that into it 🙃
- Location
- Germany
Grav shields are needed for high power shots because the conversion field has problems handling them, expect the counter battery to be superheavy or coming close to it in nature.
The armor itself is so the crew survives the vehicle when the shields fail.
Reminder we will pretty much always outnumbered and outgunned.
The clacs to trace the fire back are pretty easily done, and we can likely expect the counter battery fire to be superheavy in size.
So planning on just being able to evading the counter fire is really dangerous.
-> Shields to catch the fire that almost certainly will hit
-> Armor to save the crew when the shields fail
Experienced crew here are way more valuable than the crew, and with the expected level of counter fire if the shields fail i don't think medium or heavy armor save the crew from dying.
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Yes. Which means we need to make the absolute most of our resources.
I think having a second gun with which to hammer their artillery on the first strike is going to help more frequently than the heavy armor will - except on the direct-fire guns for breaking strongpoints.
Thinking about it, what I'd probably spend extra slots on for this is transport capacity, so the vehicle can bring a unit of guards with it who can fire from the barge.
And while it does limit our ability to fight on low/no atmosphere worlds, how often are we going to be doing that? I honestly don't know the answer to that question, but it could well be not often for us to care.
A big question, I suppose, for the very long term, is whether the Garden of Nurgle has something that behaves like an atmosphere.
I think the idea would have to be that we were already somewhere else while whatever we'd fired was still in flight.
Whether because we could fire the super-heavy while moving, or because we can stop and go very quickly.
Probably. I expect it to be highly corrosive, though.
... Not a good place to bring an open-topped vehicle regardless.
I think we should calm down and actually see what we can do with clean sheet heavy and superheavy chassis designs before we start planning out their roles in our army.
Before this design vote we didn't even know you could potentially cram a superheavy weapon onto a properly designed medium chassis, we didn't know what the base System Slot values were for each chassis, and we didn't know what level of armor our vehicles have.
Maybe invest 4 Warrior AP into a clean sheet heavy and superheavy chassis next turn and see what comes up first.
Edit:
Another example is with the armor scale so far we've seen:
Light -> Medium -> Heavy -> Superheavy
But it wouldn't surprise me if with a superheavy chassis we could potentially see something like 'Titanic' scale armor but it's up in the air on whether a heavy chassis would have the same option.
Before this design vote we didn't even know you could potentially cram a superheavy weapon onto a properly designed medium chassis, we didn't know what the base System Slot values were for each chassis, and we didn't know what level of armor our vehicles have.
Maybe invest 4 Warrior AP into a clean sheet heavy and superheavy chassis next turn and see what comes up first.
Edit:
Another example is with the armor scale so far we've seen:
Light -> Medium -> Heavy -> Superheavy
But it wouldn't surprise me if with a superheavy chassis we could potentially see something like 'Titanic' scale armor but it's up in the air on whether a heavy chassis would have the same option.
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- Location
- Germany
That is the plan the problem is when they can probs level the grid you are in before you can leave.
It gets us 6 slots, so it's effectively 15 ep tax on a vehicle vehicle weapon slot. With open engines it's about 7 EP tax. Not that bad given that making a separate vehicle is closer to 30ep tax on a vehicle weapon slot.
If we can't bring enough force to prevent them from levelling the grid in the first place, we don't have enough force present and either should be retreating rather than firing at all, or are in such desperate straights that we've accepted taking massive casualties and would be better off with the extra guns.
You may notice my design wasn't using the Starlight Reactor. As such, it gets us 3 slots. We'd need to buy a lot more than one extra engine to make the Starlight cheaper, and at that point we're running a much more expensive chassis.
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- Location
- Germany
Welcome to being outnumbered all the time.
I personally expect for anything that we bring them to have like 10 to 20 times the equivalent of theirs as a base.
Okay, look. If we take your position seriously, we should do two things.
-Build no vehicles without heavy armor at all, since even 'thin skin vehicles ' need crew to drive them and we want that crew to survive.
-Never ever ever stop stacking shields to the moon on an vehicle either, since they will all come under superheavy artillery fire eventually.
Which, you know, the second I keep feeling there should be some kind of interference effect where we start getting diminishing or even negative returns from using too may emitters.
We might be outnumbered 10-1 strategically, but if we are smart and use concentration of force, we can achieve local superiority in numbers 9 times out of 10 in the critical zones. That's the heart of good generaling, and it means we don't need to imagine each of our batteries fighting 10+ of the enemy options. Especially not because, well, we might have one barrel to their ten, but the Eldar have a way of making their firepower count for far more than other people's and it's a lot of firepower to begin with.
So what impact do you see doubling our vehicle cost and halving the number of guns carried to have on that base? Because if you're saying we'll be outnumbered by 10-20 times and even our long-distance indirect fire artillery won't be able to kill their targets before the enemy just erases their grid location, what do you think the artillery with half as many guns and outnumbered 20-40 times will be able to do?
That doesn't sound like a situation where armour will save them, it sounds like a situation where the answer is "brave sir Eldar ran away, bravely turned their tails and fled!"
What we were told is:
I would hope that something like a fast medium platform that can mount a super-heavy artillery piece is the kind of thing that might even the score. Having a battery of them could kill a lot of enemies very quickly.
I would hope that something like a fast medium platform that can mount a super-heavy artillery piece is the kind of thing that might even the score. Having a battery of them could kill a lot of enemies very quickly.
- Location
- Utrecht
... now that i think about it, Night spinners are a particularly good piece of artillery for Eldar hit and run tactics.
The night spinner shots longer in the air like dense clouds, and take quite some time to land. They also release no heat, so are that much harder to detect and trace back to their origin.
The night spinner shots longer in the air like dense clouds, and take quite some time to land. They also release no heat, so are that much harder to detect and trace back to their origin.
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- Location
- Germany
For one, I expect the light one to lose a lot more crew / die a lot faster.
When the answer to the shields falling is guess the crew is dead and the vehicle is scrapped even if it isn't hit by a super heavy weapon because the vehicle only has light armor with the crew being in the open.
But no the armor isn't there to save the vehicle that would be nice but isn't expected.
It's for the crew and ensuring as many of them get off the battlefield as they can.
One of the bigger parts here will be long term attrition of our population and the people willing to fight.
Not sure what others think on the pop growth we are getting, but I would be happily surprised if we just barely get enough to hold our population numbers before factoring in death from fighting.