ok, so something I relized that might be a good case for plan 2. Plan 2 gives the dragons nest what it needs to make Gjallarhorn Battlecrusers and deploy Ragnarok cannons. Why is this important? because Ragnarok cannons are stupid good, possibly against nids in particular. See, nids at least used to need capital ship sized hive ships to direct the escort and cruiser sized hiveships, and Ragnarok cannons are the best battleship killer weapons we have. at first glance it looks like they send 27% of their damage into BBs, but they also send 19% into Dreadnoughts. That means in the absence of a dreadnought scale hiveships, they will be sending 46% of their damage into battleships. that is insane, whats more they have the raw damage to rip most battleships apart.
here is the math for what a squadron of Gjallarhorn Battlecrusers firing their main guns at extreme range would do the Batleship sized hive ships.
((72*6)*0.35)*0.46= 69.552
now, this is before armor, but they have piecing 12. a typical battleship has armor 8, and nids have specked out of armor. so armor is unlikely to cause a major reduction in damage. an imperail BB has 14 shields and 55 hp, I expect a hiveship would be around that much. so in a singly volley, a squadron of Gjallarhorn battlecruisers will just about kill a battleship scale hiveship.* That is at extreme range, where most weapons are slap fighting. wanna see what it does at long?
well the math now looks like ((72*6)*0.80)*0.46=158.976
so that's a bit over twice the damage. meaning we're looking at at least two dead battleships, per volley. this is per battlecruiser squadron. that is a massive amount of firepower out of a battlecruiser squadron, and BC is fast enough to build that they should be able to churn out a run or so of them in time to be of major use. each takes only 12 years to build, and only needs a Huge shipyard to produce. Dragons nest would likely be able to field them in useful numbers.
So, TLDR** the second option will let dragons nest build a ship that is stupid good at killing Tyranid battleships, and the last time we saw them they needed those battleships to maintain effective CnC of their space born assets. Given how much of this fight will be determined in space, that is a massive edge for dragons nest. Even if the nids don't need Battleships for CnC, capital ship supremacy is still a massive edge in a space battle.
* pre armor the damage would near exactly kill it. i'm assuming the lances will make up the difference for the last few % of its hp since I rather doubt it will get much armor mitigation.
** totes fair. its long and mathy. My eyes glazed over a few times while I was writing it.
