It is arguably to our advantage for our warships to have high Science. Two of our potential (if at the moment not
likely) enemies use cloaking devices. The third could theoretically develop them and may well have at least some knowledge of how to go about doing so. And good overall sensor performance is one of the areas we're likely to be able to cultivate an advantage over at least some of our enemies.
I'm not even sure HOW the saber is getting at least all 2s at only 300kt-I think it's only possible because those stats have never been updated for the new sheet, because if it was I'm sure the ship would double in size at least.
Combination of futuristic technology and the fact that all the 'canon stats' for ships are numbers Oneiros more or less pulled out of a hat and/or online, before we had
any options for custom ship design, let alone a process that made custom ship designs effectively mandatory.
Once we hit the combat cap we'd presumably be looking to get more stats per ship, as opposed to stat efficiency, that is, we'd start building more Excelsior-equivelents than Centuars or Renaisssances.
(Because a C6 H6 L6 is superior to 2 C3 H3 L3 in a straight combat, although the bigger ship probably costs more than the two combined.)
Uh... why would you believe this to be true?
Later, I would like to update the Science Escort requirements to allow for C3, so that our Keplers have some bite to them.
Why? Keplers aren't for biting things, they're for event response, interior patrols, and providing science vessel support to the ships that
have bite.
The Miranda-A is about the best you can get for 60 br and 45 sr. Like, I was able to replicate it, but only just.
We'd need a modification of our combat frigate requirements, but on a 600kt hull I can get you this:
C4 S2 H4 L3 P1 D3 - 65br 50sr - 649kt 2yr - O1 E3 T2
I feel this ship is trash bin trash, but it is nominally an upgrade to the M-A. e: Also it's on the edge of the militarization formula, which usually means militarization per hull after the sniff test.
Ah. Okay!
Thank you for answering the question clearly. This helps illustrate the nature of the problem nicely.
Hypothetical ships in a hypothetical combat.
The idea is that randomized, the larger ship will statistically start damaging the smaller ships' hull before getting damaged itself.
Except that's not actually true. On average, if you ignore evasion, the big ship lands half as many hits with double the power, while the small ships land twice as many hits with half the power. Both sides will (ignoring evasion) do 60 HP of damage in roughly the same amount of time.
In theory, if the big ship gets lucky and significantly more than half of its hits land on one of the two smaller ships, it might bring down the shields on one of the smaller ships before experiencing shield failure itself. However, this is not inherently likely: a Combat 6 ship is dishing out an average of 3 HP of damage per shot. You're looking for the equivalent of, say, flipping a coin 20 times and getting 13 heads and 7 tails or vice versa- possible, but not very likely.
And even this very incremental and tiny advantage is almost certainly going to be eaten up by the evasion difference.
So I still don't understand why you expect the larger ship to start inflicting hull damage first, if both sides still have equal
total amount of shield and combat scores. Some luck might make that possible, but it's not what you'd predict to happen over and over every single time, or even most of the time.
Well functionally then with that we'd be served by building hordes of maxstat explorers, then? Under a Combat Cap scenario, of course - it'd likely be hidieously expensive.
Trying to balloon the stats of the explorers to the highest possible values (say, "all 9s" on a 3100-kiloton hull) would be counterproductive, because that -2 Combat per explorer is a flat bonus. It would be more beneficial to build greater numbers of explorers with lower firepower. However, because NPCs in this game behave like
actual people and not drooling morons or mindless robots, we aren't going to be able to get away with, say, spamming hoards of Combat 4 explorers with their Hull and Shields cranked up hella high to make them indestructible on the battlefield. The Council would be able to tell we were trying to do that and we'd probably end up losing part or all of our Combat discount on explorers.
