How do you beat the Talisman?

[Puke]

hmm. while a one shot launcher can save mass by leaving out specific components, one shot and external do not always go together. indeed, the only thing external should mean is that its not protected by armor.

by taking a significant part of the ships displacement and bolting it outside of the armor, you should be able to get better coverage with your existing armor for the rest of the ship. i dont think there is any way to modle this though, so external missiles really mean nothing in this game.

if you are using 'external' to be synomous with 'one shot,' then the component designs make some sense, but it could be a bit clearer, i think.

i guess im just nit-picking.

[oleg]

If it would be possible to assign "armor" ability to externally mount missiles, it will work exactly as you want - it will be destroyed before internals and even absorb some damage in the process (assigned armor ability should be small of course).

[CW]

This is possible, but it takes a LOT of ships. The biggest advatage using swarms of small ships is that the difficulty in hitting them makes up for how easily they go poof when hit. Against a Tailsman fleet you lose this advantage. It's better to go with fewer larger ships that can hold up to the damage longer, since their defensive disadvantage is irrelevant anyway. In the end you will land more shots against him for the same amount of resources.

If you are using subverters against someone with talisman, it *IS* probably better to go small. AI targeting is flawed and even if you have the highest level of combat sensor, your ships won't shoot at 5 targets in one turn in simultaneous games. Build a whole bunch of light cruisers with a single virus pack and a large mount subverter each, tell them to deliver the "message" up close and personal is perhaps the best thing to do. The biggest resource wastage with small ships is that you have to build a lot more engines, so if you play with a newtonian propulsion mod the waste is a lot less significant.

By the way, fully filling up a hull is NOT a design requirement! You can always use the swarm tactic AND large/heavy mounts together. The base cost for a dreadnought is only 850 minerals more than an escort.

[ August 07, 2002, 13:12: Message edited by: CW ]

[geoschmo]

By all means CW if you have a one shot weapon that will fit on a small ship and take out an enemy with that one shot regardless of size, armor, or shields, then small is definetly a good way to go with that. But beyond the subverter there is no such weapon I am aware of, so for non Psychics larger is better when facing Tailsmans. And I wouldn't get too attached to that strategy. It's likely to get patched out in the future. It's a pretty cheese tactic. You shouldn't be able to capture a ship with a subverter because you destroyed the master computer. The ship doesn't spontaneously grow a crew when the computer is destroyed after all. The problem is that ships are immune to the subverter if they have a master computer. This is wrong, they should be immune to the subverter if they don't have a bridge/crew quarters/life support.

Puke, I think you are too married to the ship tonnage is displacment thing. If you simply view the ship sizes not as tonnage or mass, but as a measure of the size of components that they can contain, then external mounting using less of that space makes sense. In that case you would still take up some internal space as you need to have mounting equipment, hard points, etc. But they might not take up any more internal space than armor.

These ships function in a vacuum afterall. How do you displace vacuum?

Geoschmo

[Phoenix-D]

"By the way, fully filling up a hull is NOT a design requirement! You can always use the swarm tactic AND large/heavy mounts together. The base cost for a dreadnought is only 850 minerals more than an escort."

Don't forget the extra crew quarters/life support.

Phoenix-D

[Pax]

Originally posted by Phoenix-D:
Don't forget the extra crew quarters/life support.

Phoenix-D

Unless ofc you'd use the Master Computer anyway, ofc.

[Trajan]

Oh oh...I feel a physics joke coming on.....

IS THERE A SANTA CLAUS? (Spy Magazine, January 1990)

1) No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of
living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects
and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only
Santa has ever seen.

2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since
Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist
children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million
according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census)rate of 3.5
children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at
least one good child in each.

3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different
time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to
west(which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This
is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has
1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney,
fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat
whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the
sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8
million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we
know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept),
we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2
million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least
once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc. This means that Santa's sleigh
is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For
purposes of comparison, the fastest man- made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses
space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional
reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming
that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds),
the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably
described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more
than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could
pull TEN TIMES the normal anoint, we cannot do the job with eight, or even
nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even
counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison
- this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air
resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as
spacecrafts re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer
will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short,
they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer
behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake.The entire
reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa,
meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater
than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim)would be
pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's
dead now.

...........there are, of course many (eight that I know of) rebuttals to this theory.

Cheers!
Trajan