Navy Sidewinder

[Cody]

Thargoid ECM is quite effective against hardheads as well, unfortunately.

<nods> Yep, that has been my experience too.

[Disembodied]

Thargoid ECM is quite effective against hardheads as well, unfortunately. I have sometimes lobbed four or five hardheads in quick succession at a Thargoid warship, with limited success. Sometimes one of my missiles gets through, and if the Thargoid has already taken a few hits from me it can be destroyed, but more often than not they still survive.

True, but it doesn't mean that there isn't a place for a capital ship capable of firing several volleys of hardheads in one engagement. It would need to be a dedicated battleship, pretty much - it might have a few point-defence plasma cannons too but generally it would need to be part of a battlegroup, including a carrier or carriers to provide fighter cover.

[spara]

Small update on this one. After quite a few tests, those sidewinders with beam lasers seem to kick butt . It seems that a carrier (5 military lasers pointing forward and 18 turrets) with 2 sidewinders as escorts and 4-6 as defences is quite capable when pitted in with Thargoid Thargorn (mothership with two escorts).

[cim]

Four thargoid lasers on the cruiser

It's worth noting that currently no version of Oolite actually uses more than one thargoid laser at once. The big advantage is probably its shields: around four times the strength of a standard warship. That gives it chance to stay alive long enough for the Thargons to do some serious damage.

My guess is the problem might be tactical. If the Sidewinders engaged the Thargons, that would leave the carrier to engage the Thargoid cruiser, and that may or may not be a mis-match. However they probably all attack the thargoid cruiser and therefore take heavy losses.

Six sidewinders should be able to take it on, I think. Try giving the military sidewinders good pilots - accuracy 8 or so - so that they don't miss their shots much. With military lasers they should be able to take a cruiser apart without carrier support; with beam they should still do serious damage. If there's just the one cruiser, getting too distracted by the Thargons is probably a mistake.

Thargoid ECM is quite effective against hardheads as well, unfortunately. I have sometimes lobbed four or five hardheads in quick succession at a Thargoid warship, with limited success. Sometimes one of my missiles gets through

The problem is that this leaves your missiles very close together, and hardheads have a tendency to detonate at full power when ECMd, so if the warship ECMs one, the explosion probably takes out the others too. There's a similar problem if they don't get ECMd in that the lead one hits and detonates, taking out the following ones too. Staggering your launches by a couple of seconds will help.

Following Gimi's recent complaint about the lack of proper missile doctrine of a certain other capital ship, I've implemented an AI parameter for 1.79 which means missiles can be told to automatically spread out to stagger their approach, which should make missile swarm attacks more practical. (It's disabled on the standard and hardened missiles by default, because the player should have to actually think about their missile strategy, but easy to turn on for real missile boats)

would presumably require a new response in kind from the bugs: possibly anti-missile plasma flak and/or launching Tharglets that could target missiles ...

Their main laser is also pretty effective, and generally accurate enough to hit a missile at short range.

[Cody]

I have sometimes lobbed four or five hardheads in quick succession at a Thargoid warship, with limited success.

The problem is that this leaves your missiles very close together, and hardheads have a tendency to detonate at full power when ECMd, so if the warship ECMs one, the explosion probably takes out the others too. There's a similar problem if they don't get ECMd in that the lead one hits and detonates, taking out the following ones too. Staggering your launches by a couple of seconds will help.

Get in close, and alternate between short, accurate laser bursts and hardhead launches - but take care not to frag your own hardheads.

[Diziet Sma]

After some tests, it's seems obvious that a single Carrier with Sidewinders is not enough
...
Souping up the sidewinders does not do much difference as the Carrier get's vaporized quite fast. A single escorting Light Destroyer, also by Simon, seems to help there.

In RL, a carrier with no escorts = expensive pile of metal sitting on the ocean floor. I see no reason why that would not also apply in space. No single craft can do everything adequately.

[Disembodied]

Following Gimi's recent complaint about the lack of proper missile doctrine of a certain other capital ship, I've implemented an AI parameter for 1.79 which means missiles can be told to automatically spread out to stagger their approach, which should make missile swarm attacks more practical. (It's disabled on the standard and hardened missiles by default, because the player should have to actually think about their missile strategy, but easy to turn on for real missile boats)

Cool! A missile volley from a capital ship could also be spread out simply by setting missile launch points along the length of a long-ish ship - almost like firing a broadside ...

[spara]

Alright. Progressing slowly. The problem I'm having is that the lasers of the carrier are set around the docking bay shooting forward and too often those just launched sidewinders get vaporized of friendly fire.

I've been digging around the behemoth AI, but I'm having trouble getting my head around it. Ships launched as defense are using police intercept AI. Behemoth oxp seems to try to switch them to it's own intercept AI, but it looks to be failing in that. At least that's what it looks like, maybe it's working as it should. Does seem to be working anyway. Ships launch, do their job and dock back in.

Is it possible to steer the launched ship away from the line of fire? I mean that after launch, I want it to perform a pull up maneuver.

[Diziet Sma]

Why not change the laser mount positions?

[spara]

Why not change the laser mount positions?

That's on option I did not think of, got to test it out. I think the idea of Simon's carrier is that it can shoot forward a concentrated burst of 5 military lasers. Too bad the dock is in the middle of those.

[Disembodied]

Is it worth flipping the central body of Simon's carrier, so that the dock faces to the rear? If it's the two-pronged design here
http://s598.photobucket.com/user/Simon_ ... d.png.html
then it might take a bit of reworking, but it might make more sense as a design: even without the lasers, the two prongs make launching and docking more dangerous than they might otherwise need to be.

[Diziet Sma]

Why not change the laser mount positions?

That's on option I did not think of, got to test it out. I think the idea of Simon's carrier is that it can shoot forward a concentrated burst of 5 military lasers. Too bad the dock is in the middle of those.

You may need to only relocate a couple of them.. depends where they're situated, I guess..

[spara]

I think I got it. I hacked the behemoth AI to wait a bit longer after launching fighters and now they usually get out of the big gun's way .

I like those sidewinders a lot. This Behemoth is going to offer something a bit different. After a zillion more tests this baby with 10 sidewinders flown by ace pilots (accuracy set to 8 ) is a killer. 4 sidewinders fly as an escort and 6 wait inside the Carrier. Sort of a swarming tactic combined with a huge gun to take out those big targets. Now it usually beats two thargoid-thargorns just like the original behemoths with those souped-up vipers and asps.

[cim]

Cool! A missile volley from a capital ship could also be spread out simply by setting missile launch points along the length of a long-ish ship - almost like firing a broadside ...

On the scales involved in Oolite, that probably wouldn't help much, at least not with standard missiles. The shockwave from a missile is big enough to destroy another missile within a couple of hundred metres. Unless both the capital ship and the target are significantly bigger than that length, and also considerably closer to each other than they are long (which implies that they're either well within plasma turret range of each other, or they're the size of a small planet) the missiles will converge to within the interference range before impact.

[UK_Eliter]

[. .] unless you are looking for a super-sidewinder for some reason.

There is already a 'SuperSidewinder' - available here.