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Post by The Genocide God on Mar 2, 2017 2:29:30 GMT
I've been playing around with the Interamnia incident mission, in which you have to destroy a laser skiff with a gunship. Setting up the encounter @ ~50 km starting range, I disabled all weapons on the gunship except for 100 MW lasers, and ordered them to target my opponent's 13 MW green lasers (Ignore range was activated). Within a second of unpausing, each of the gunship's 7 laser turrets was destroyed by enemy laser fire one after the other. My own laser fire didn't do any appreciable damage to the enemy's lasers. This behavior is rather unusual, because the gunship's laser armament is much more powerful than the skiff's, has better armoured turrets and more of them (frontally focused), yet its entire battery was taken out in about a second without comparable duration fire disabling even one enemy turret. I have run this test multiple times and the results are consistent. Am I missing something obvious, or is this behavior a bug?
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Post by lieste on Mar 2, 2017 3:38:51 GMT
Relatively weak, inefficient lasers have an advantage when low intensity falling into the relatively weak mirror is all that is needed.
The small laser has a smaller aperture (harder to hit target at "long" ranges for the system), and a relatively wide/weak beam.
High intensity lasers concentrate more power into a tiny point, but have bigger apertures. Without checking the modules to confirm, this is what may be happening here.
I'd set the lasers off to start, plink either the turrets or radiators with one of the EM weapons, or distract him with missiles, then pick apart whatever else needs to go down with the lasers once you have a clear run.
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Post by Enderminion on Mar 2, 2017 19:28:03 GMT
the problem is that the EM weapons and flak tear holes through the skiff which is a mission fail
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Post by lieste on Mar 2, 2017 20:54:48 GMT
Flak missiles fired as distractions will be engaged. They need not be homed on the target, and can be terminated (if they even survive).
In the earlier version, the ship could be immobilised without problem, only killing the crew was an issue. If the redesign of the weapons placed the laser modules or hottest radiators over the crew compartment then a hard kill would put the crew at risk, but I haven't looked at the detail design of the stock ships.
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Post by nerd1000 on Mar 2, 2017 23:16:16 GMT
Don't bother actually sending your gunship to attack the laser skiff. Instead just fire a large salvo of flak missiles at him. The laser skiff's radiators are just in front of its reactor and NTR, so when the skiff tries to dodge by thrusting your missiles will perforate both without touching the crew module.
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Post by Enderminion on Mar 3, 2017 1:28:33 GMT
umm you can't kill the ships crew module, you have to strip its lasers, cannons, engine, and launcher; WITHOUT hitting the reactor, crew module and attendent radiators
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Post by nerd1000 on Mar 3, 2017 2:42:10 GMT
umm you can't kill the ships crew module, you have to strip its lasers, cannons, engine, and launcher; WITHOUT hitting the reactor, crew module and attendent radiators On the contrary: I double checked by completing the mission before posting my original suggestion and got a silver grade in one try (I fired a total of 30 missiles, but could probably have done it with fewer if I used a single salvo rather than 2). The crew module isn't considered destroyed when the reactor is knocked out, only unable to control the ship due to low power. |
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Post by Enderminion on Mar 3, 2017 3:05:00 GMT
all I remember from the mission, is that if I effed up and used EM weapons I failed
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core2
New Member
Posts: 16 
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Post by core2 on Mar 3, 2017 4:56:24 GMT
It is probably a combination of the overly fragile optics i described in this thread and the ai beeing set to always target active lasers first in most behavior presets. (You can see this in the behavior details in the sandbox) You probably just set all enemy lasers as target. In that case your ship just picks the closest one which is not allway the one firing at you. |
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Post by The Genocide God on Mar 3, 2017 6:27:06 GMT
After conducting further testing, this time laser skiff vs laser skiff, the same results were obtained, i.e. my lasers were destroyed immediately. It seems that whoever fires first trashes their opponents optics, regardless of the laser type/power. I suspect that due to my opponent starting the tactical engagements presenting a side on aspect, his turrets needed to gimbal less, and were thus able to fire first consistently. It is probably a combination of the overly fragile optics i described in this thread and the ai beeing set to always target active lasers first in most behavior presets. (You can see this in the behavior details in the sandbox) You probably just set all enemy lasers as target. In that case your ship just picks the closest one which is not allway the one firing at you. It certainly seems that the optics are quite fragile, I am unsure if they should break so easily even from a relatively weak laser from long distance. |
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Post by deltav on Mar 3, 2017 6:47:50 GMT
After conducting further testing, this time laser skiff vs laser skiff, the same results were obtained, i.e. my lasers were destroyed immediately. It seems that whoever fires first trashes their opponents optics, regardless of the laser type/power. I suspect that due to my opponent starting the tactical engagements presenting a side on aspect, his turrets needed to gimbal less, and were thus able to fire first consistently. It is probably a combination of the overly fragile optics i described in this thread and the ai beeing set to always target active lasers first in most behavior presets. (You can see this in the behavior details in the sandbox) You probably just set all enemy lasers as target. In that case your ship just picks the closest one which is not allway the one firing at you. It certainly seems that the optics are quite fragile, I am unsure if they should break so easily even from a relatively weak laser from long distance. This means laser turret speed becomes the most important number in laser duels doesn't it. Just like the old west, the quickest gun wins the draw. Might even be worth it to have couple weak "laser optic snipers" with the fastest turret turning angle you can get. |
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Post by thorneel on Mar 3, 2017 9:18:48 GMT
In John Lumpkin's Human Reach books, ships have dedicated laser counterbatteries in addition to their main laser cannon - the theory (untested at the start of the books) being to aim extremely fast and fry the enemy main laser as it is firing, before it has time to shutter again. (In the second book, based on their first experiences of actual warfare, they add counterbattery setting to their main lasers as well, to give extra range despite possible other disadvantages.)
I would suggest a similar design on heavy laserstars, with many redundant turrets. Giving it laser drones for extra counterbattery power may also be a good idea.
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Post by concretedonkey on Mar 3, 2017 12:44:07 GMT
In John Lumpkin's Human Reach books, ships have dedicated laser counterbatteries in addition to their main laser cannon - the theory (untested at the start of the books) being to aim extremely fast and fry the enemy main laser as it is firing, before it has time to shutter again. (In the second book, based on their first experiences of actual warfare, they add counterbattery setting to their main lasers as well, to give extra range despite possible other disadvantages.) I would suggest a similar design on heavy laserstars, with many redundant turrets. Giving it laser drones for extra counterbattery power may also be a good idea. I'm currently working on a ship like this... it has 76x relatively small laser turrets driven by 25 lasers. The wattage (14MW each), is not very impressive but currently it wins every combat I have against my larger laser ships. I might try with even smaller turrets but I still wanted to keep it effective against drones and missiles. A specialised micro laser will be better at laser sniping but then again it will probably never do anything else. |
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Post by deltav on Mar 3, 2017 17:32:24 GMT
Looking at the new standalone laser modules and turrets, the cost and weight of the turrets are considerable.
So the only advantage of this new standalone system is in power use.
The standalone lasers turrets use 1/10 or even less the power that the laser module itself does.
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