This-though I do think we should probably put building 1 or more fighter foundries on the table ASAP, since all strikecraft are somewhat attritional by their very nature. Our revised air-racer should be taken in hand to make a new interceptor ASAP, though we may need to keep the Starlances in the design in order to give it something with enough punch to bother enemy escorts.
A Different Breed (Warhammer 29K)
The problem with that analysis regarding the Imperium is that it contradicts the lore where it is clear that the "big gun mafia" is the ascendant faction and dedicated carriers are rare while hybrid combatants like the Emperor (hello BFG posterchild) and Dictator remain popular.
While the Imperium does have a ton of different ships the ones that show up the most in lore tend to either be hybrids or dedicated direct combat ships with ships like the Overload or Lunar are called out as being very popular.
I also took a look at the BFG 2010 rules and that Eldar speed figure from you is a terribly warped representation of how fast Eldar ship can move (you neglected to mention the base speeds of Eldar ships which are between 25-30cm) and also involves jank numbers like Imperial escorts having a similar base speed to Eldar escorts at 30cm each.
Another bit of jank is that you can have strikecraft that should be slower than the ship they are escorting continue to be able to intercept ordinance in CAP mode like 20cm Thunderhawks escorting a 30cm Cobra so it sounds like strikecraft having lower speed is a balancing decision rather than a realistic representation of how they function in lore.
Quite frankly I'd take BFGA2's representation over that mess.
The issue with strikecraft production is that we don't actually know how quickly they get pumped up from foundries or if they get produced by foundries at all. For all we know they come packaged with the ship that is supposed to carry them.
It's not like we'll be pumping out refits in great numbers either, realistically we can maybe afford one or two BAP in refits each turn if we're lucky given how cut throat BAP allocation has been each turn.
I'm impressed you latched onto the one time I used "count" (thanks autocorrupt) when I've been using capacity every other time.
Indeed. Strike Craft for our fleet aside (and I agree we are still going to want some Strike Craft for our existing ships in the near future), we could probably use air support for our ground forces that isn't just "grav tank going higher up."
You may have been using it the other times semantically, but you certainly weren't using it logistically. But sure, if by "latched onto" you mean "gave a one-line correction of the word used and then a multi-paragraph breakdown of the problem with the idea," yeah, I "latched onto" it.
Care to do the same?
Given one foundry costs three times as much as a single refit, if we can only afford one or two refits a turn, well... the maths on that should speak for itself.
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It certainly seems like latching when you ignored every other instance where I used capacity.
It doesn't help that you've got this weird fixation on the idea that I've totally meant "count" every time I've used capacity.
Besides that, the rest of your argument runs into the issue of us not knowing how efficient a strikecraft foundry is and how long it takes to build which I did cover in that posy.
Fundamentally I am inclined to believe that a few foundries costing less than 54 BAP should produce enough strikecraft for 210 squadrons in the time it takes for us to shake loose the additional 54 BAP needed to refit every Carrack.
Keep in mind this all assumes that a Carrack can indeed be refit in a single turn. If that doesn't hold true then all these estimates go out the window.
Well, you need 210-48 squadrons. A squadron is 6 aircraft, but let's presume a heavy vehicle foundry does 1 squadron per turn. Five foundries would get this done in 33 turns, and would cost 15 BAP. To get this build done in 11 turns, we need 15 foundaries, and 45 BAP. This is comparable to the amount needed for all the refits.
You're assuming foundry output is static rather than it increasing each time we do BAP increase action which we will likely do on the regular since we have so many projects that require BAP.
Mechanis said:
Once we get a few foundries up they should keep scaling without further direct BAP investment while ships will always require BAP input that could otherwise go into further BAP expansion or other major projects.Mechanis said:
In addition we aren't always going to be able to spend the BAP on a ship refit (we actually haven't done any this turn or the last turn for example) due to all the other projects that we have while the foundries will keep chugging along once they are done.
This does raise the concern that we could potentially outstrip out ability to sustain strikecraft production since we only get 120 Psy-Scopes a turn but if we go with a conservative 1 Fatesever design with the other 2 vehicle slots armed with some other kind of weapon it should remain sustainable long enough for us to get around to expanding Psy-Scope production.
I'm pretty sure that for next 2-3 turns all Foundry-building BAP will go for armour and weapon production, then Fata Morgana-based vehicles will most likely take priority, assuming nothing more urgent comes up. And that's just foundries, without taking into account engine repairs, baseline industrial improvements and all the different things clamoring for buildpower. Strike Craft are simply not necessary for the fleet composition we have at the moment, so they go down on the list of things to build. Maybe we can squeeze 1 foundry to slowly refit the Eagles into new chassis designs (simplification), but I doubt we'll have free capacity for more.
Gotta be a contrarian here, swap PD to a hangar is not a bad idea for a torpedo boat Caravel. It essentially means we'll have a caravel with no PD until we build enough strikecraft factories but after that we'll have a more versatile support ship. Given we have no active wars ATM and an allies fleet that can provide PD screen when shit hits the fan, it's not a bad tradeoff. I personally wouldn't make it but I can see the appeal.
I think there might be an amazing synergy between Fatetwister/Fatesheer Cannons and Graviton Thruster Lances. The Lances can easily pierce things like reinforced starship hulls with ease, riddling them with holes but doing little else barring a lucky hit to something explosive. The Fatehaxx Cannons can then use these holes to easily reach the vulnerable insides of the ship, shredding through things like engine compartments and ammo storages. They could also just target the crew directly, leaving the ship effectively unmanned, lightly damaged, and incredibly easy to salvage later.
- Location
- Utrecht
If you want to kill the crew without destroying the vehicle completely, meson blasters.
If you want to kill the vehicle without hurting the crew, haywire torpedoes.
Coming soon to a craftworld near you.
Looks like we'll need a second combo weapon. For when we really want to kill both.
- Location
- Utrecht
Nah., for that situation you just use any old weapon. Just smash it.
If meson blasters are a particle beam, the ship will need decontamination from all the radiation.
I want meson blasters so bad
I noticed that not a single plan is using the melee option, so I want to rectify that. The problem is that I have no idea what I'm doing...
[ ] Choppa Class Assault Clipper
-[ ] Chassis: Clipper (+12 Systems, +4 Weapons, +2 Heavy Weapons)
-[ ] 2 heavy weapon slots traded for 4 system slots.
-[ ] Weapons: 4x Graviton Sheer Carronade
-[ ] Systems: 4x Plasma-Thrusters, 1x Spike Cannon Point Defense Battery, 2x Reinforced Hull, Holofield, Gravity Shield
[ ] Choppa Class Assault Clipper
-[ ] Chassis: Clipper (+12 Systems, +4 Weapons, +2 Heavy Weapons)
-[ ] 2 heavy weapon slots traded for 4 system slots.
-[ ] Weapons: 4x Graviton Sheer Carronade
-[ ] Systems: 4x Plasma-Thrusters, 1x Spike Cannon Point Defense Battery, 2x Reinforced Hull, Holofield, Gravity Shield
Professor Vesca
Good News Everyone!
Witness me bloodbag!
Now is time for refit of existing ships but I dig that design, I really do.
UPD: on a fresh hull design it sound use 4x graviton sheer CIWB to be able to chop enemy craft into chunky salsa too.
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- Location
- Utrecht
Needs an actual Grav blade too. Because it's not really glorious melee combat if you don't get up close and personal.
We aren't expecting to get into a serious fight in the next 2-3 turns either so that point is moot. Our current fleet is made up of whatever could be scrounged up during the fall and shouldn't be considered even remotely close to a well thought out fleet composition.
Especially since we picked the "Peaceful" trait during faction generation which means we are two levels of military preparedness behind a militant Craftworld like Zahr-Tann which the QM has noted isn't fully prepared for fighting an interstellar war either, just way more ready than we are.
This why I think this brainbug of insisting that we don't need a decent amount of strikecraft is foolish.
When a militant Craftworld like Zahr-Tann which has a lot in common with us ship design wise as they use 2 separate active defense technologies, lots of Aethersails, basically no hull reinforcement, and have very powerful naval weapons in the form of their Combi-Grav weapons still sees the need for one of their heavy fleets to have almost twice as many strikecraft in it as we have strikecrat in our entire navy it is basically a very strong hint that neglecting to build them just because we currently don't have many hangars is a terrible idea.
Again, we don't need to match their strikecraft numbers, we just need to beef up our interceptor numbers as unlike them we aren't planning on using them as a major striking arm (only 32 of the 88 non assault shuttle strikecraft in the Heavy Fleet are interceptors).
- Location
- Utrecht
Notably, they do not have holo fields on their ships, which is something we are going for across the board.
We'll have a very different fighting style. Which one is best? That is still to be seen.
We do get to see them in action with our fleet when we stomped those Freebootas
Some things to note are that their ships were in front of ours since the vast majority of our ships still have no active defenses and likely won't for the foreseeable future given how tight BAP is.
While the Bright Eagles did fine in this engagement they are noted to be putting themselves at significant amount of risk because of the lack of active defenses.
Meanwhile it's Zahr-Tann's Crossbows which are called out as actually eliminating the swarm as our Bright Eagles were only able to disrupt the swarm likely due to their low numbers and lack of active defenses forcing them to withdraw.
This again suggests that our current strikecraft are inadequate and given the fact that a foundry will be constantly active once it has been completed our strikecraft inadequacy is something that is easier to fix than equipping all our ships with active defenses which would cost well beyond a hundred BAP.
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- Location
- Utrecht
but wouldn't we have to refit our ships to have more hangars first?
The only ship with a hangar is the combat brig, and we don't have many of those.
Sure, upgrading the fighters would be a "stealth upgrade" to the combat brig before we get to the actual refit, but that's not going to do much for the number of ships isn't it?
Our Carrack is a formidable gunship, and the current winning plan for carracks just puts active defences on it. It would take just as long to put a hangar on it, as it would to just armor up.
Only having a few fighter makes the fighter refit factories a lower priority. Creating more demand for fighters just adds more pressure on the already precious BAP, slowing the refits even further.
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- Location
- Somewhere Beyond the Sea
[X] Cepheid-class Light Cruiser
-[X] Chassis: Caravel (+8 Systems, +4 Weapons, +1 Heavy Weapons)
-[X] Convert 1x Weapons to Systems
-[X] Weapons: 2x Naval Suncannon Batteries, 1x Heavy Torpedo Launcher Battery, 1x Heavy Graviton Thruster Lance
-[X] Systems: 3x Aethersails, 1x Point Defense Battery (Spike Cannons), Holofield, Grav-Shield
[X] War Carrack, No extra exotics
-[X] Chassis: Carrack (8 Systems, 6 Weapons Batteries, 2 Heavy Weapons Batteries)
-[X] Convert 2 Weapons Batteries and 1 Heavy Weapons Battery to System Slots (+4 Systems)
-[X] Weapons: 1x Heavy Starlance, 3x Fatetwister Cannon Batteries, 1x Macro-Suncannons
-[X] Systems: 3x Aethersail, 1x Plasma Drive, 1x Fatesheer Close In Weapons Battery, 1x Holofield, 1x Grav-Shield
-[X] Chassis: Caravel (+8 Systems, +4 Weapons, +1 Heavy Weapons)
-[X] Convert 1x Weapons to Systems
-[X] Weapons: 2x Naval Suncannon Batteries, 1x Heavy Torpedo Launcher Battery, 1x Heavy Graviton Thruster Lance
-[X] Systems: 3x Aethersails, 1x Point Defense Battery (Spike Cannons), Holofield, Grav-Shield
[X] War Carrack, No extra exotics
-[X] Chassis: Carrack (8 Systems, 6 Weapons Batteries, 2 Heavy Weapons Batteries)
-[X] Convert 2 Weapons Batteries and 1 Heavy Weapons Battery to System Slots (+4 Systems)
-[X] Weapons: 1x Heavy Starlance, 3x Fatetwister Cannon Batteries, 1x Macro-Suncannons
-[X] Systems: 3x Aethersail, 1x Plasma Drive, 1x Fatesheer Close In Weapons Battery, 1x Holofield, 1x Grav-Shield
- Pronouns
- Reader
so, now that we won't be regaining any Fatebender Psyscopes from Carrack refits, what are we going to put on the Sword of Vaul Class serpent of the stars in there place?
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
We still have a decent sized reserve, we should be fine.
I don't think we should be going for a pure Fatesever PD network in the first place. Yes, they're very nice PD, but we're only going to have the one Sword of Vaul, we can't afford to make it easy to specialize against.
I'd like to get through at least the first level of Missile Launchers soon, plus any more steps we might need for seeking properties; Missile PD with Haywire Missiles ought to be pretty good, too. Other than that, a single Starlance PD net is going to be pricy but very effective, I expect.
I'd like to get through at least the first level of Missile Launchers soon, plus any more steps we might need for seeking properties; Missile PD with Haywire Missiles ought to be pretty good, too. Other than that, a single Starlance PD net is going to be pricy but very effective, I expect.
- Pronouns
- Reader
no we shouldn't. we have 2029 as of the start of next turn. we are planning to put fatesever on our bright eagle refit design and a regular battleship uses 360 fatebender Psyscopes in just the PD. even if we go Close in Fatesheer instead it's still going to be expensive enough to make fatetwisters a very minor part of the serpent of the stars arsenal.
of course we are going to diversify on the sword of Vaul class PD, but we'll still want Fatesever and given the size of the vessel a 1000 Fatebender psyscopes is probably optimistic low-ball on costs.
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