How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets

[Pax]

If units only seperated their damage-to-kill points into the right kinds of categories -- one for each kind of special damage -- then you could model the *effects* of shield-depleting weapons, and the like.

Even if each Category was summed up for the whole stack (to destroy ANY fighter weapons you have to destroy them ALL ... until then, they all function at 100%).

It would be an improvement, and only a few extra numbers to track per stack of units. And then ... shield depleting or shield piercing weapons would function reasonably well against fighters, etc ... the fighter-stack's TOTAL pool of shields owuld have to be depleted to get any ONE fighter "naked to vacuum" if you will, but at least then ... the guns'd stop shooting the fighters and switch to a new target!

[TerranC]

-Fighters stack in combat. This is the biggest balance issue. Having 200 odd fighters moving around individually would be evil, but I'd rather see that (on an enlarged combat screen) than have all these constant niggling problems and patches to do with fighters. Besides, maybe ships could be stackable again, like in SEIII.

Ships stacking?... This could lead to something like what the that species did on voyager: Link up ships to destroy a planet. Or: One ship to hold arnaments, One ship to hold armor, One ship to hold supplies and one ship designed to carry sensors and you have a fleet that works as one ship. I see more usage for all-pupose ships, but I see 5 baseships destroying homeworlds in a single shot.

-Fighters are destroyed when they run out of supplies. I think. This could be fixed by adding a "destroyed when out of supplies" ability, and giving it to fghters only.

I think you're thinking of drones. I don't know about fighters since I never seen them go out of supplies.

-Fighters can be stored in cargo. I can see that this would be a nightmare for Aaron to uncode, but imagine the possibilities if there was a "can be cargo" ability for ship (ie fighter) hulls (in fact, 2 abilities- "can be cargo on ships" and "can be cargo on planets"): Then you could mod the game so that you can launch escorts from baseships and bring dreadnoughts down from orbit for to hide them from detection- hell, maybe even the game could use them as weapons platforms=-)

Launching Drones and recovering them would be more economic. Since they are units, they don't have maintenance. Now if you're talking about destroyers...

Also, ships smaller than 500KT should not be allowed to land in planets. Heavy ships are subject to heavy gravitational pull. Heavier the gravitation pull, the more the ship becomes subjective to inertia. In order to lift off from a planet, you need to have enough force (Escape velocity) to overcome inertia. Heavier the ship, the faster the escape velocity. If the ship is light enough, it should lift off without any difficulties, but a battlecruiser lands and tries to lift off:

1) lifts off gently, to account for the crew members or the fragile equipment. Force isn't enough to overcome inertia and gravity and the ship lands back down again, or worse, crashes.

2) Lifts off hard and overcomes newton's laws, but every crewmember has died, even the ones on seat belts, when their organs ruptured when they hit the walls on the back of them equal to the force of the ship lifting off or their bones shattered for the exact same thing. All fragile equipment has been destroyed since they just flung to the back.

Star trek compensates for this with technobabble, and sadly, real life problems cannot be solved by saying: the inertial dampeners are working 1000% skip.

Forgive my rant, but it did give me something to chew over.

[Pax]

1.001g's of constant acceleration upwards will kill nothing, and if you can apply that level of force to the ship in a stabel sustanable way, the ships' mass doesn't matter.

Remember, it's not the energies applied that matter to crew and cargo. It's the ACCELERATIONS imposed, a.k.a. the NET FORCES.

1.1G upward force-and-acceleration won't kill anyone. Yes, for a 1500kT Baseship, that's a BLOODY LOT of energy.

But it's still only 1.1G of force, and 1.1G of acceleration. And only an added 10% to perceived mass ...hell, elevators subject people to that, or slightly more.

People could probasbly take a fairly-lengthy period of 2G net force (which woudl be 1G net upwards speed, which would be like falling away formt he planet); I'm not a doctor of space medicine or the like, but I suspect we can tqake 2G's for a few hours, maybe a day or two, without Lasting effects. Discomfort yes, but not death, and certainly not death as a mass of hyperdense goo against the rear bulkhead.

The only catch is, the sustained output, over time, of engines that can MOVE big objects at that steady accelerative speed, wouldbe prohibitive. That is really one of the only TWO reasons (the other being ease of stability maintenance during flight) why modern space-launch vehicles use such tremendous accelerations to get into orbit fast-fast-fast: COST.

[Phoenix-D]

"In order to lift off from a planet, you need to have enough force (Escape velocity) to overcome inertia. Heavier the ship, the faster the escape velocity."

Not quite. Escape velocity is the *same* for any and all objects. It's the force required to get there that differs. 600kt of ship would take quite a lot of thrust to get up.. but nothing says that thrust has to be delivered like it is now (i.e. really fast HARD rocket kick).

Put it this way. In a car, you can floor it, and reach 60mph quickly. Or you can accelerate gently and reach 60mph slowly. The percieved force is quite less the second way, but the speed is the same! The hard part is finding that point. 1.001G of thrust on an earth-mass planet would do it. The only reason we can't do something like that now is we'd run out of fuel before we hit orbit.

Phoenix-D

[TerranC]

Thank you for killing my ignorance, I was taught different

But then, please answer me why we can't just attach 2 fuel rockets to the ISS and lift it up into space.

[jim]

I know it is a band-aid solution, but can someone tell me why it would be hard to make anti-shield weapons unable to target fighters?

As it currently is, no AI can be scripted to use anti-shield weapons w/o setting them up for this exploit. Nor can I, in moi vs AI games use shielded fighters w/o undue advantage if such could be the case.

Similarly, I cannot use anti-shield weapons because most of the AI races use at least some fighters. For all the statements that PDC is too powerful, stacks 20 - 50 double-shielded fighters do not die very easily to PDC. Since they can have CSM Vs or the parasite equivalents in their wake, it can get tough to dispose of such fighters w/o the ability of having non-PDCs begin their attrition beyond the short range of PDCs.

I like anti-shield weapons, and cannot really use them because of this BBBUUUGGGGGG!

[Phoenix-D]

"But then, please answer me why we can't just attach 2 fuel rockets to the ISS and lift it up into space."

More mass, more thrust, more fuel needed. As I said we can't do it because no matter what we do we'd run out of gas first.

Phoenix-D