[CORE] Challenge: Lightest GP ship to solo VO guns blazing
May 7, 2019 19:46:27 GMT
AtomHeartDragon and airc777 like this
Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on May 7, 2019 19:46:27 GMT
I tried plain old missile spam earlier but it gets too laggy to be fun in the final fleet combat. They do help with getting there, since missiles easily destroy both enemy missiles and drones. So I ditched that and went for EM gun spam:
The 60 MW reactor can run ~33 of the guns at once. I put on a few extra ones for redundancy too, and in case overheating limits the fire rate. There's a few nukes for PD use, and some 60mm guns to punch through armor faster. The coilguns shoot really small rounds with a lot of spread, so they tend to just melt radiators but are fairly slow at going through armor. Adding the 60mm's increases the kill speed against more armoured targets so might as well put them there.
For armor, I a fairly light scheme with a little bit of everything. Against ballistics, most of the protection comes from mounting the guns far away from the ship's centerline. Since the AI only shoots at guns, this will make most shots to pass through the empty nose cone but not hit anything vital inside the main hull.
Design export: jt Fun Gun.txt (1.54 KB)
Combat report with screenies below:
Mission start burn:
I don't want to go too fast to have more shooting time, but not too slowly to give the enemy time to spam more missiles. 2.5 km/s seems to be a good balance, and gets rid of the drop tanks too. After that is done, I pop out 15 PD nukes in case I run into enemy missiles. Against drones the guns and armor are enough protection, but devastators have enough armor to usually get through the gun spam. Against both missiles and drones, I disable the engines on the ship and set all guns to ignore range. Against drones, the PD missiles can idle, but against enemy missiles they need to be used. The capital doesn't have enough armor to survive devastators point blank, so sending nukes against them means they detonate a lot further away, making them harmless. For devastators, it might also make sense to fold radiators so that you can use your missiles as flares.
Enemy drone fleet intercepts me, but ends up just flying past without doing any significant damage:
That's the only drone/missile intercept I get. Thanks to the fast intercept burn, you can often get away with 1-2 missile/drone fights before you hit the main fleet:
At the start of combat, I again set all guns to ignore range and launch any remaining missiles. They won't live to impact, but at least they'll keep the enemy lasers busy for a while.
Pews:
After a minute or so of fighting, two ships are down and the remaining two are pretty much helpless:
Finishing off the corvette at close range:
Winner winner chicken dinner:
The 60 MW reactor can run ~33 of the guns at once. I put on a few extra ones for redundancy too, and in case overheating limits the fire rate. There's a few nukes for PD use, and some 60mm guns to punch through armor faster. The coilguns shoot really small rounds with a lot of spread, so they tend to just melt radiators but are fairly slow at going through armor. Adding the 60mm's increases the kill speed against more armoured targets so might as well put them there.
For armor, I a fairly light scheme with a little bit of everything. Against ballistics, most of the protection comes from mounting the guns far away from the ship's centerline. Since the AI only shoots at guns, this will make most shots to pass through the empty nose cone but not hit anything vital inside the main hull.
Design export: jt Fun Gun.txt (1.54 KB)
Combat report with screenies below:
Mission start burn:
I don't want to go too fast to have more shooting time, but not too slowly to give the enemy time to spam more missiles. 2.5 km/s seems to be a good balance, and gets rid of the drop tanks too. After that is done, I pop out 15 PD nukes in case I run into enemy missiles. Against drones the guns and armor are enough protection, but devastators have enough armor to usually get through the gun spam. Against both missiles and drones, I disable the engines on the ship and set all guns to ignore range. Against drones, the PD missiles can idle, but against enemy missiles they need to be used. The capital doesn't have enough armor to survive devastators point blank, so sending nukes against them means they detonate a lot further away, making them harmless. For devastators, it might also make sense to fold radiators so that you can use your missiles as flares.
Enemy drone fleet intercepts me, but ends up just flying past without doing any significant damage:
That's the only drone/missile intercept I get. Thanks to the fast intercept burn, you can often get away with 1-2 missile/drone fights before you hit the main fleet:
At the start of combat, I again set all guns to ignore range and launch any remaining missiles. They won't live to impact, but at least they'll keep the enemy lasers busy for a while.
Pews:
After a minute or so of fighting, two ships are down and the remaining two are pretty much helpless:
Finishing off the corvette at close range:
Winner winner chicken dinner: