Quest Deep Periphery Quest (Battletech Sandbox Empire Builder)
- Thread starter LordSunhawk
- Start date
Jarow
Well-known member
[X] Agree
Semi-free factory for a design we definitely want that we just have to make sure to always use or lose for a bit.
[X] Do not intervene
Small change to actual stat, or larger hit to two meta stats. Approval is generally more important than either, but both are significant, and will be notably more affected by this.
[X] Approve
Only "drawback" of this choice is furthers us on the path of not stealing the free folk jumpship. I don't think we want to do that, so this is 100% the better choice.
Semi-free factory for a design we definitely want that we just have to make sure to always use or lose for a bit.
[X] Do not intervene
Small change to actual stat, or larger hit to two meta stats. Approval is generally more important than either, but both are significant, and will be notably more affected by this.
[X] Approve
Only "drawback" of this choice is furthers us on the path of not stealing the free folk jumpship. I don't think we want to do that, so this is 100% the better choice.
[X] Agree
[X] Preemptive Veto
[X] Approve
[X] Preemptive Veto
[X] Approve
True but thats purely the mechanical side of things, on the narrative side we're being warned that not vetoing this could lead to more likeminded politicians being elected in the next cycle which would cause bigger issues in the long run.
Thors_Alumni
Well-known member
[X] Agree
[X] Preemptive Veto
[X] Approve
[X] Preemptive Veto
[X] Approve
Eh Easy come Easy go. Besides it won't be long before we either start building jumpships of our own or capture them from the Drac's
[X] Agree
[X] Do not intervene
[X] Approve
[X] Do not intervene
[X] Approve
Knowledgeispower
Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
I suspect the Dracs will need some new underwear when they first see the ASF and Dropship force we've built up in the time they so kindly have given us. Oh and I'd pay to see their faces when they behold a formation of Warriors approaching them.
The Warrior is a relatively specialized asset -- Sub-Capital weapons are optimal as primary weapons on even larger DropShips that can carry entire batteries of them, and as secondary weapons on light to medium sized WarShips that aren't big enough to fully saturate their fire control slots with efficient loads of capital-scale weapons.
Our naval strategy against the next Drac incursion should be to sucker them in far enough that their own velocity and inertia make it impossible to break off and withdraw their droppers and ASF once we launch to meet them. We'd also need a second force, ideally stationed further out in the system, poised to attack and capture their JumpShip(s). It'd be bad if we let any of them escape to tell the tale.
Given that we have Sarah's sensors for essentially perfect real time tracking, that should be easily accomplished.
Personally, I suspect that when the Dracs come back, it's going to be with what they think is a decisive "Enough playing around, smackdown time" force that includes a major landing force in Overlords covered by a large ASF complement and heavy carrier DropShips.
But they have NO IDEA what they're sticking their arrogant Dragon noses into.
Dive bombs and torpedoes could not be intercepted by active defenses in the 1940s and that is when the world learned that guns on carriers were a waste of space. Carrier launched aircraft had extremely short ranges compared to carriers. England built armored carriers for use within range of hostile land airbases. It did not put large guns on them.
There was a BV floor on the contract. This was a critical flaw in the contract itself that prevented a dedicated carrier (fighters, cargo, and armor only with maybe some rear facing light AA) proposal. The NCCD was closer to what I wanted and I voted for it. The Aerodyne requirement prevents the fast carrier I actually want given our current shipbuilding technology, and I would have preferred to wait or build a spheroid.
The LB-20X is not an AA gun. ASFs do not have that sort of armor threshold and in cluster mode it doesn't threshold well. anti-fighter work at that range you want ERML banks. The LB-20X is in this quest an anti-dropship gun. That's Carrier with 8 inch guns territory. One of the battlecruiser conversions did that. They weren't useful and subsequent carriers didn't waste displacement on such silliness.
This may be where you went so wrong. No dropships faster than 8/12 exist. Only one 9/14 dropship has ever been published and it is not developed until 3065. Nothing faster has ever been published. We will probably not see more than one 8/12 dropship any time soon unless we build them ourselves. The Combine does have Achilleses, but isn't likely to deploy one away from the main fronts with other great houses because they're in short supply. We probably won't see a foreign 7/11 dropship either. The Combine does not domestically produce Avengers. There's a 6/9 dropship, but it's an infantry transport with insignificant firepower. The only 5/8 combat dropship was an SLDF design swept up by Kerensky's exodus. 5/8 transports were a thing during the age of war, but any left are rare relics. We might see a Vengeance because they are drop collar efficient, but normally we'd expect to see Leopard CVs or the fighters on military transports. Those are 4/6 for the carriers or 3/5 for most of the transports.
So the dropships we're actually likely to face are 4/6s and 3/5s. And the dropships we've seen deployed are 4/6s and 3/5s. We might be aware that Achilleses existed at the time of the Exodus and had factories survive the Amaris Civil War, but they are best dealt with by having armor and investing more in fighters because even the fastest dropships can be outmaneuvered by the slowest fighters if they let them match velocity, which they must do to attack a carrier that isn't running away faster than its fighters can follow.
If we build fast dropships we'll have a near monopoly on them. Doing so isn't a bad idea, but we don't need to build our forces around facing them. We might see one when they break the treaty. I'd be shocked if we saw two.
There is a space combat doctrine that leverages fast dropships to exhaust enemy ASF defenses on long chases and then pounce when they RTB, but no one has the ships for it. It's one of those things where if you ever tried it on the tabletop you'd get the table thrown at you like showing up to a game on rolling mapsheets with nothing but H-7s except that unlike H-7s they're only practical when used in such a fashion as would induce table flipping.
That might be true in their original context, but there are no warships and fighters are much less threatening without advanced tech. In the current era 10,000 tons of Sphereoid are more than enough to max out the free fire control on one arc with LSCCs with dogfighter avoiding acceleration and adequate armor for the era (where adequate armor is over twice what any other dropship mounts, but not over a thousand points average per facing).
The Warrior is not a ship I want. It's not only confused, it's slow. The factory is very good news if it can handle larger transit drives, but it'll take time in universe to get a design ready. If they were gambling on military contracts I'd buy some to keep the company solvent while a faster design is developed, but it sounds like they have civilian contracts lined up.
[X] Disagree
[X] Do not intervene.
[X] Approve.
Once again, you dishonestly ignore most of my actual point and cherry pick one piece to twist and misconstrue.
I never said anything about shooting down incoming ordnance; I said they could intercept and deter attacks, which was just as true back in WWII as it is today. To do so, they relied on a combination of intercepting fighters, CAP, escorting support vessels, and in fact their own considerable armament of guns.
What carriers didn't have were capital scale guns, which you're double-dishonestly conflating with smaller-caliber weapons that they did, in fact, mount literally by the hundreds. Nothing we're putting on these carriers is capital scale; they're not even equivalent to five-inch dual-purpose guns, because those are NL35s.
Joyousmadman
Well-known member
[X] Agree
[X] Preemptive Veto
[X] Approve
[X] Preemptive Veto
[X] Approve
UltimatePaladin
Well-known member
[X] Agree
[X] Do not intervene.
[X] Approve
[X] Do not intervene.
[X] Approve
Lightwhispers
Well-known member
[X] Agree
[X] Do not intervene
[X] Approve
Pretty even on the stats for the parliament vote, so going with my "you should be able to handle this yourself" leaning.
[X] Do not intervene
[X] Approve
Pretty even on the stats for the parliament vote, so going with my "you should be able to handle this yourself" leaning.
The bottom line is that unarmed carriers are dead meat in Battletech because ASFs are short range, *high speed* platforms which cannot be reliably intercepted short of reaching the carriers, especially since they're also well-armored and can survive multiple salvos of weapons fire from other ASFs. This was, of course, not true of any real life fighter; no one has *ever* built "flying armored bricks" powered by fusion thrusters. In this paradigm, the carriers *have to* be able to fight in their own defense, and they have to be able to decisively punch out the heavily armored style of fighters that are present in BTech.
In fact, the Strategic Operations rule actually *require carriers to roll* to determine what percentage of their fighters they manage to launch in time in a high-speed closing engagement scenario, with a *maximum* roll of 90% of fighters deployed. This rule specifically applies to "Fast" engagements where closing velocity is 5000+ hexes a turn, which are "representative of jump point to planet transit velocities" where the ships are engaged in long duration 1G-1.5G burns for several days at a time.
The vast majority of battles we've fought were of the "Slow" category, with the enemy forces slowing to below 1000 hexes per turn since they were braking for attempted landings on the planet. The one time we got hit by a "Medium" speed attack was the kamikaze run -- the high closing speed of that suicide run was why our intercepting ASFs basically had *one shot* instead of being able to dogfight. Medium speed attacks are *going* to be a major thing in our future, what with our plans to use our shiny new DropShips to intercept and engage enemy invasion/raid forces well away from our home soil -- we would be making multiple-hour burns to catch them midway through their jump point to planet transit, after they've flipped for deceleration burns but while they are still moving very fast.
Here's the key point: all of Atarlost's yammering about us having a monopoly on fast DropShips is *meaningless* in the context of Medium (much less Fast) engagements, because sustained burn transit drive velocities are *super high*. In a Medium-speed intercept, the incoming force may very well be moving *faster* than the defending force even though they are lower-acceleration ships. This is because they've got a multi-day burn behind them.
Now, I agree with Culsu that we *really* want to mousetrap the Dracs when they invade, which is precisely why we should set up our forces for this kind of intercept -- in a Medium closing speed engagement, we'd be jumping them during the middle third of their transit burn, when they're still days away from our world and yet also days away from their JumpShips, and have too much incoming velocity to avoid us. This means we're going to meet them in a single Medium closing speed pass where, YES, heavily armed carrier DropShips are *critical* to punching through and scoring decisive damage in the one pass we get.
If we were using "fast but unarmed + unarmored" carriers like Atarlost wants, they'd have to abandon their ASFs and burn "sideways" in order to avoid coming into the enemy's weapon range in a closing intercept arrangement, which would *also* mean no hope of recovering any ASFs that are damaged or have ejected pilots -- *only* close-in carriers would be in a position to effect rescues after the single gun pass.
In fact, the Strategic Operations rule actually *require carriers to roll* to determine what percentage of their fighters they manage to launch in time in a high-speed closing engagement scenario, with a *maximum* roll of 90% of fighters deployed. This rule specifically applies to "Fast" engagements where closing velocity is 5000+ hexes a turn, which are "representative of jump point to planet transit velocities" where the ships are engaged in long duration 1G-1.5G burns for several days at a time.
The vast majority of battles we've fought were of the "Slow" category, with the enemy forces slowing to below 1000 hexes per turn since they were braking for attempted landings on the planet. The one time we got hit by a "Medium" speed attack was the kamikaze run -- the high closing speed of that suicide run was why our intercepting ASFs basically had *one shot* instead of being able to dogfight. Medium speed attacks are *going* to be a major thing in our future, what with our plans to use our shiny new DropShips to intercept and engage enemy invasion/raid forces well away from our home soil -- we would be making multiple-hour burns to catch them midway through their jump point to planet transit, after they've flipped for deceleration burns but while they are still moving very fast.
Here's the key point: all of Atarlost's yammering about us having a monopoly on fast DropShips is *meaningless* in the context of Medium (much less Fast) engagements, because sustained burn transit drive velocities are *super high*. In a Medium-speed intercept, the incoming force may very well be moving *faster* than the defending force even though they are lower-acceleration ships. This is because they've got a multi-day burn behind them.
Now, I agree with Culsu that we *really* want to mousetrap the Dracs when they invade, which is precisely why we should set up our forces for this kind of intercept -- in a Medium closing speed engagement, we'd be jumping them during the middle third of their transit burn, when they're still days away from our world and yet also days away from their JumpShips, and have too much incoming velocity to avoid us. This means we're going to meet them in a single Medium closing speed pass where, YES, heavily armed carrier DropShips are *critical* to punching through and scoring decisive damage in the one pass we get.
If we were using "fast but unarmed + unarmored" carriers like Atarlost wants, they'd have to abandon their ASFs and burn "sideways" in order to avoid coming into the enemy's weapon range in a closing intercept arrangement, which would *also* mean no hope of recovering any ASFs that are damaged or have ejected pilots -- *only* close-in carriers would be in a position to effect rescues after the single gun pass.
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Knowledgeispower
Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
One thing I'll note about the warrior is that outside ComStar's hidden fleet it is the most powerful combat platform available that's not in Clan Space. Basically if an enemy dropship gets inside weapons range of a warrior it will die very quickly and not do much in return