How to counter this hydrogen based doctrine?

Methane or Hydrogen Deuteride based Siloship with 5-10Mt nuclear missiles would destroy both the missiles and drones, or send them straight to the un-armored carrier. Then Drones can be shot down effectively by lasers even with Anti-Laser armor, because drones can be disarmed. Missiles have the highest advantage over lasers since they cannot be disarmed as easily, so using Anti-Kinetic armor is odd here.

Lastly Hydrogen Deuteride > Hydrogen in all aspects.

Alternatively, a Carrier with more drones than the other carrier can intercept incoming drones.

Seconding the HD > H2 in all aspects, though you may have meant HD originally anyways.

My best thoughts:
-Trying to survive the infinite onslaught of drones will always be a losing battle with manned ships. I don't really have a great answer on defense.
-Attacking: Long range laser (1000km) drones with MPD thrusters, large dV, and ~3-5mg accel. Hard to outrun a swarm of them, even with higher acceleration (though admittedly they are probably better to be intercepted). Have started liking this class of ship after a single drone beat On the Surface of Giants.
-Alternatively: Very large dV nuclear missiles with anti-laser armor (so HD engine with most of the fuel in external tanks jettisoned prior to encounter).
-(Doubtful) Kinetic (1g, 44km/s projectile type) drones with high delta-V. Definitely not normal.

A little bit of anti-laser armor on the carrier would counter either of these, but I don't know how much dV is lost on it. Does the AI use that carrier smartly on ranger setting or something? It would be interesting to make defeating that into a challenge mission (say, replacing the final enemy on The Fall of Titan).

We really need a thread to compile all known design and combat doctrines together so people can easily know what can counter what.

Since relying on a single inflexible doctrine is asking to be countered with extreme prejudice.

Look buddy, I'm a Republic of Free People space fleet admiral. That means I solve problems. Not problems like what is beauty, because that would fall within your purview of your conundrums of philosophy. I solve practical problems.

For instance, how do I stop some big mean United Solar Trade Aliance flagship from tearing me a new structurally superfluous behind? The answer use a nuke, and if that don't work? Use more nuke.

Take this here high-yield, Flourine-Methane powered, little old number, designed by me, built by me, and you best hope... not accelerating at you.

Yes, lasers strip the guns almost instantly when in range.  Probably help to give the drones some missiles to distract lasers. 

David367th
I meant Hydrogen Deuteride. Sorry for that confusion. As an answer to your mirror-like-better-carrier-hiveship approach: My drones would intercept your drones, my missiles would intercept your missiles and vice versa. And since my carrier is unarmored and unarmed, I have more/better drones on it for same dV and/or cost on the carrier.


newageofpower
Can your own assault/escort missile carriers successfully defend themselves against "themselves" in a mirror match? Or is it assured mutual destruction? Because that is kind of my point. Defense guns and armor on carriers are never cost effective. So I rather keep them light for max dV and burn to avoid combined with drone vs drone and missile vs missile intercepts. Just imagine your super cheap mass missiles on my carrier. Or imagine your carrier without any armor and guns and stuff and all that additional mass used for even more drones and missiles. I guess that second variant would beat the first. Also I had a look at your carrier. It has an MPD drive and <3g0 of acceleration. Please try it in the sandbox and look how long it takes to get somewhere. NTR ships run circles around it. That means they go for a single pass hohmann transfer to the body you are orbiting, drop all their stuff from high orbit or even flyby, and return. Your stuff will never get them and my carrier returns safely to pick up the next round of ammo at base.


n2maniac
Anything with MPD is not viable. NTR, chemical and resistojet can basically pick the attack vector which is bad. And while I can not outrun it on the long run, I can stage a perfect intercept with an optimized counter mix of drones/missiles because I have literally years to prepare. A regarding "a bit of anti-laser" armor. Scratch that and get more drones/missiles instead. A bit wont help anyways and with more payload I can intercept attackers even better before they get to my carrier.


dragonkid11
Doctrine is not neccessarily inflexible. I altered my post above to make my points more clear. The cornerstone of my doctrines are: Carrier/Hiveship based fleet, no armor on carrier, no guns on carrier, NTR-like dV on drones and missiles, HD NTR on carrier. My point is: All gunship approaches and all Carrier approaches that deviate from this doctrine are weaker. And until now I have not seen a strong counterexample.

lawson
And you, too: Stop putting MPD on combat ships. But you are right about lasers. That was part of my inspiration for this setup, look at jasonvance made laser drones. They fry even max-possible armor from 1000km distance. After 1.0.8 they are no longer super-duper-powered but you can still build similar stuff. There is no way any ship can be protected against those devices. So my best idea is to counter this with "more of the same" and so optimize the carrier for max carrying capacity combined with evasive options. Evasion strategy is higher dV against NTR, chemical and Resisto and against MPD we evade just by running circles around it.

*EDIT*
Maybe we think also about the Viability of a MPD Behemoth Doctrine. Is it possible to slap so much guns and armor on a ship that you will not ever overwhelm it cost-effectively with drones and missiles?

HD NTR are probably the best all-purpose rockets (and NTR in general certainly are) we can build ingame. Some other coolant fluids come close, probably close enough that with a better starting position they could beat an HD propelled fleet. Fusion or antimatter or so on would be better, but that currently requires a handwave to explain how the fusion is made self-sustaining or the antimatter is produced and handled in useful quantities (which don't have to be that great, but still many orders of magnitude above the human world's current production) so they aren't ingame.

If the NTR can be beaten in orbital manoeuvres, it has to be by a ship using multiple rocket types. The obvious candidate is an efficient single-fuel MPD/Resistojet pairing. The main limitation on both of these thruster types is that they have to carry themselves plus a nuclear powerplant, however, an inactive MPD or resistojet is extremely light so it's not much of a handicap on the ship to carry both thruster types (in the case of MPD, the weight is actually negligible compared to that of the powerplant+fuel, and resistos aren't much heavier). With most of the orbital manoeuvering being handled by long efficient MPD burns, a ship with the thruster pairing would conserve ΔV better than the NTR ship and when they are close enough for the acceleration advantage to matter, it can simply switch power and fuel from the high-efficiency MPD to the high-thrust resisto.

Note that in the worst case scenario for the combined thrusters ship, it's always possible to let the NTR ship burn a lot of ΔV to escape, then set up a new intercept with the MPD and try the resisto vs. NTR phase again with a larger ΔV advantage, so it would be acceptable for the resisto to be strictly worse than the NTR as it will always have the option of burning more ΔV to compensate.

One of the biggest downsides is simply a UI issue: the game always displays ΔV as an absolute, while it would be more helpful to a combined thrusters ship to see what fraction of ΔV a manoeuvre costs (because absolute ΔV is obviously very different depending on which thruster is currently being used). Another downside is having more radiators, large and vulnerable targets in combat which could cripple the ship if they're shot off as well as hugely increasing the heat signature.

An alternative is a "mothership" powered only by MPD. While it could be outmanoeuvered at close distances due to the lack of sheer thrust, this is not important if it's only purpose is to get in the general vicinity of the enemy and launch drones or long-range missiles. Like with a combined thrusters ship, it's possible to play cat and mouse with MPD until the NTR is so low on ΔV it cannot avoid the swarm attack. The biggest weakness of an MPD-only ship is that when it gets deep into a gravity well, it can take a very long time to regain orbital distance.

One of the big weaknesses of your unarmoured ship is that anything mounting a decent laser will instantly (well, at the speed of light, which the game rounds up to infinity currently I think) snipe your crew compartments at long range (which the games currently limits to 1Mm). So essentially, the best you can hope for is a mutual kill—and if the game ever actually models the requirement to have someone controlling the drone, all your remote-controlled stuff would effectively be turned into space debris. Similarly, a big nuke could detonate very far away and the long-range flash would still be enough to disable your ship. You can argue your drones and missiles would have a chance at interception, but it only takes a single laser ship/drone or single missile getting with a Mm and your ship will be instantly destroyed.

And note that any future increase in realism will be to your disadvantage, as you are very much cheesing the engine's current flaws. Allowing engagements at more than the rather arbitrary 1Mm (~0.003 light seconds) will be bad for you, making drones lag and be disabled when their controllers are will be bad for everyone using drones including you, and any modelling of space dust and radiation would litterally force you to use some light armour or die on your own, without the opponent even needing to exist. Additionally better treatment of stealth would be bad for most glass cannon strategies, including yours, since a single missile launched "dark" (no engine running, no reactor running, no communications with launching ship etc) at its launching ship's velocity could get extremely close before being detected.

Relying on the capital ship itself as a first line of defence is bad, but not giving it a last line of defence is already bad currently and as the simulation is improved will probably fall out of even niche viability. Bear in mind that many of the ingame modules litterally cannot survive in space without a protective outer hull, so maybe we should just rule out litteraly unarmoured ships on realism grounds.