Ship classes

Post ideas & suggestions you have pertaining to the game here.
JohnBWatson
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The Sung are too advanced and heavily industrialized to be ignored as mere criminals and they are engaging in acts of war against the Commonwealth and the Commonwealth is engaging in acts of war right back. Attacking a sovereign nation when you get the chance is war. The CW isn't even using deniable assets. They're using card carrying militia officers.

The Militia is not the CW military, it is their National Guard. They attack stations that are interfering with commerce, and attack convoys moving through their territory. The relationship between the CW and Sung can be considered similar to what existed between America and England before the war of 1812: Yes, there were actions considered acts of war, but declaring war outright was not seen as a viable course of action for the weaker power, regardless of its growth in power.

A turret is an auton with tiny engines only suitable for station keeping. They are as good as free. That more stations don't have them is gameplay story segregation. Turrets around stations (unless implemented as ships like the Ares turrets) cause UI issues with docking.

The ability to place a turret is limited by game balance. If omnidirectional turrets are so expensive why do freighters bother with them even when the gun they mount on them is useless? Because if gunship NPCs all had turrets the game would be too difficult and if PCs had turret slots the game would be too easy and doing both would make combat less interesting and still muck up the difficulty.

Freighters are larger than gunships, and, by virtue of the goods they carry, much more expensive. In addition, their turrets are anything but useless in the area they are balanced for.

Stationary fortress duty is not a death sentence. Not any more than marching with a pike while someone fires at you with cannons. People used to do that for pay. Most fortresses will not be attacked in force. Most probes will fail if there's a fortress in place. But if you refuse to believe in the applicability of history, a fortress that doesn't bear on the gate is no less a target and is easier to destroy because it doesn't contribute to the interlocking defense that can actually keep enemies from engaging it. A pure logistics platform will die the moment the enemy pushes through a single fast cruiser. A proper fortress that contributes heavy fire to an interlocking defensive network will survive until the enemy commits a heavy assault because having several howitzers bear on the gate makes a difference.

In a time when death by numerous preventable diseases was the most likely end, marching into death with a pike didn't seem like such a bad deal.

In any case, a station armed with multiple howitzers is a massive investment, and if it's not going to come under attack, there is no justification for constructing one outside of a capital system, as deterrence(constructing one on the front lines will get it destroyed, and constructing one further back is devoting resources to something that can't assist in winning the current conflict while the enemy does otherwise). Exposing such an investment while its still under construction guarantees an attack, and a loss of the huge investment with nothing to show for it. There's also the fact that noFriendlyFire isn't easy to set up, given that no stations or capital ships in the game have it.


The whole point of a fortress on the gate is that it is very difficult to fire on. Most ships gating through will not live long enough to fire very many shots because a structure bigger than a dreadnought that doesn't need to waste any space on mobility can mount a *lot* of guns. The armament is probably economic, but however many guns you have the budget for a fortress capable of mounting them is cheaper than enough cruisers or dreadnoughts to mount them. It doesn't need big engines and doesn't need to have big engines maintained.

While such a structure is being built, it is vulnerable to attack. Assuming two equal factions, the one that spends resources on constructing a static defense is going to have less resources to build a fleet to defend it while under construction.

On another note, there's no reason a missile capable of gating can't be invented, and a universe featuring your defensive strategy virtually guarantees its use. Build a few Hydras or Warhammers that gate, detonate, and destroy nearby turrets, and you've just leveled a very expensive wall of turrets for a very minimal cost. Alternatively, just point in the direction of the fortress, arm a howitzer, gate, shoot, gate, repeat.


It's not economical to look for Magelen stargates when circular stargates are also present because Magelen stargates are less conveniently placed. A system accessible only by a Magelen gate is many times more expensive to access than a system accessibly by a circular stargate. Criminals and desperate refugees are exactly the sort most likely to look for them.

The Magelen gates for Sol are reasonably placed, so it's not really certain that they're as far off as Huaramarca. Assuming they are, entire systems full of ore are a powerful motivator for the CH, UAS, and other factions both richer and more capable of exploration than the Charon Pirates.

Distance doesn't matter. Delta V matters. This is why nobody would bother looking for Magelen gates unless they wanted to hide, but the Delta V cost for a circular stargate is negligible. They're in the same orbits as other objects of interest.

Everything requires maintenance. Ships in need of maintenance can move to a station and dock. Stations in need of maintenance can use onsite equipment and resources that are unsuitable for long distance use(small drones, people in spacesuits, whatever's available). Turrets around stations have access to the same resources.

If you wish to keep turrets around a stargate in long term operation, you must regularly bring station - tier logistical capability to the stargate(requiring an entirely new ship class), and leave this massively expensive ship full of delicate equipment in range of sudden attack long enough to repair the turrets.


So what makes them not cruisers then? They attack capital ships and stations. How is that at all different from the cruiser role? What does a Deimos do that a Cometfall doesn't? The Deimos has a bit more combat endurance because it doesn't use ammo, but that's only relevant if it's not being shot at with anything effective.

A Deimos has less speed and a much larger frame. It's more expensive, and mounts a turret designed to engage gunships effectively. The Cometfall's turret provides token defense, but nothing truly effective against anything that can damage it. The Deimos's shots are faster and have a swivel, making them harder to avoid(even a capital ship can avoid Warhammers at sufficient range, though not reliably).

Ultimately, a Deimos can handle attacks from medium and heavy gunships, and a Cometfall can't. It can also engage in pitched battles with less risk of friendly fire.


You mean that the player is not permitted to abuse overpowered mechanics. The Sung cyberdecks are repeatable. If they weren't there'd be no reason to keep them around because they would have been patched already. The Sung aren't new and they aren't rare and don't avoid attracting attention like (non-PC) CDM shards and remotes. Those cyberdecks are a huge part of their operations and if they couldn't work around changing security the Sung could have been easily wiped out just by rolling out a new patch simultaneously with a major offensive.

Come to that, your claim that defense would prevent repeat attacks implies that someone's writing and applying patches in real time on a ship under attack. I hope you recognize how silly that sounds. They would be applying patches to high powered equipment without time to test and if they missed cleaning out a single worm going root to apply a patch would just be handing their computers over as soon as they plugged them back into the network.


Code can seemingly patch itself against multiple attacks in this universe. It's established that biological technology is used here(ROM Biosoft), so it's certainly possible, given how the immune system works. Modern antivirus software to be heading down that path. Indeed, if it weren't possible to identify and remove cyberattacks, they'd just keep their targets disarmed and unshielded forever.

Actually, they can. We don't see them used by NPCs in the vanilla game, but there are free standing barricades that ships can use for cover. They have to move in and out of cover unless they have a turret on one end, but they can use cover. Cover aside, being within the defensive envelope of a fortress does wonders for their effectiveness. At least if friendly fire interactions are turned off. They can't accomplish much on their own (see Hornet lore) but if they have any ability to do damage at all they're at their most useful adding their fire to larger ships or armed stations. And armed stations should always be more capable than ships. They aren't because currently most loot comes from stations, but changing this dynamic to make stations more dangerous and harder to kill is a planned change, or at least it was last year.

Friendly fire is in effect for everything that isn't a stationary turret with a light weapon right next to a station capable of assisting its targeting software(yes, the turrets in Juno violate this principle, but they don't do anything useful anyways, so it's reasonable to dismiss that). While light ships are at their most useful supplementing harder hitters, they are much more vulnerable to attrition than anything else in the game. Drawing off fire during an assault for long enough for the target to be destroyed is one thing, protecting a station from raids is another. Ultimately, the more survivable stations get, the less utility is gained from putting a ship with little staying power into a conflict on its side, due to the fact that they'll get swatted early in a battle regardless.

A while ago you were talking about people not being willing to follow suicidal orders. Here's an in game counterexample. They never survive unless the PC manages to either lure everything or kill the station before they arrive. Either the PC does all the heavy lifting or the attack fails and usually unless the PC is very fast he's the only survivor. The most effective tactic is to hang back and spam longbows from maximum range and Ronin As trying to guard someone doing that aren't distracting enemy defenders or turret fire because they're not in range.

That was true in earlier versions, but now the attackers typically hold their own. It's been a while since I've lost even one of them, even with starting equipment and minimal intervention. This may be due to the glitch below, but lighter Ronins are needed to defend the missile armed ones regardless.

As for distracting enemy defenders, they'll move out to attack things attacking the station. Without light gunships intercepting them, they're able to destroy the Ronin spamming longbows. A glitch in the latest version makes them not do so until the station is destroyed, but still.


Equipment damage doesn't get reversed. The smoke stops, but with the right weapon you can completely disarm one ot the Ares capships and it will follow you glaring impotently until you gate or you or someone else puts it out of its misery. Several weapons don't need to hit precisely: they effect everything. That includes the Ares nukes, the NAMI S3, S5, and XM900 missiles, and the high flux MAG off hand.

I could swear that I've seen a damaged weapon come back online, but evidently not. Still, destroying weaponry isn't a common occurrence.

That's only true if you assume the Militia is catching every single convoy. If they were the Sung and Marauders would either have beefy enough convoys to be invulnerable or would be dead for lack of shipping. The Militia gets a tiny fraction of convoys from spies. When the stakes are an invasion you need a 100% prediction rate. The only way to get that is to accept a 100% false positive rate as well and just keep forces on station.

Firstly, it cannot be spies. Defecting Fleet assets are hostile to the Ares as well, yet they can anticipate an Aurochs. Certainly, not every freighter is caught, but an invasion force featuring multiple dreadnoughts is orders of magnitude larger than a shipping convoy, and takes much more time to set up.

You're not seeing the real CW cost either. You're seeing the market price. The CW does not pay 14kc for a TeV-9. If they did they wouldn't turn around and sell them to a pilgrim for 17150 credits even if he had blown up a few Sung for them. Maybe someone resident in the system who would stick around and use it for defending, but not a pilgrim.

Is that a typo? I'm fairly sure they'd sell it to anyone not actively trying to kill them for a 3150c profit.

In any case, Pilgrims do quite a bit more for security than ordinary citizens. Entire systems worth of hostiles are destroyed by them(and that won't change even if enemy factions are buffed to the point where a corsair is more powerful than a CSC. Gamers find a way.).


We do know. We know their size. We know they're ship scale because of the Ares turrets and because it makes no sense for them to be larger based on their capabilities. We know objects that size can be launched from unmodified freighters. The idea that they have to be built in situ when anything can launch an auton is absurd.

Ares turrets may well be an entirely different breed. Frankly, they don't make much sense at present due to their expensive weaponry and low health, but they may be getting reworked soon anyways, so I'd not worry about it.

Autons are basic gunships that can be tossed out of a cargo hold and brought online. Turrets have to be secured against gravity over long periods, work for long periods without direct support or orders, and other things that autons don't have to do. Granted, the only autons we see outside of the player's control are the useless TA3s and the fully automated Lumiere, so there's certainly a lot of room for them to be reworked.


You're assuming your conclusion. Gunships can only scout an enemy system if there are no defenses. As soon as anyone sets up gate defenses assaults can only be predicted if your spies get lucky, not by military scouting.

You're breaking your own rules. If an assault only has to travel out of a defended system to reach its target, then there are no contested systems in between them where scouting can occur, and your claim that the player only sees contested systems is even less workable.

We know how fast kinetic weapon shots are. Unless ship speed and weapon speed are lies (in which case they replace kinetic weapons not dealing damage based on velocity to the list of lies gameplay tells) the ship relative velocities very much are significant compated to weapon velocity. The presumption that shields must predict incoming fire is completely unsupported and shields do not act as proof of FTL sensors.

It's not hard sci - fi. Lasers are projectiles rather than beams here, and we can see what fired them, so there's how our computer tells us where they are. Position can be determined with starting position, velocity, and time. If you'd prefer they work as hitscan weapons(in which case their trajectory would be simple to determine based on where it's hitting), that's something you can suggest or mod in.

CC uses the legacy D&O system and EP uses chunks of the D&O topology and otherwise happens in a stateless region.

The UAS, ED, NAU, APD, and Luminous would beg to disagree. The former 4 are headquartered on earth, and the other one has its capital system shown in game with no gate defenses.

The rumors indicate otherwise. If the mines were any sort of monopoly the individual miners wouldn't be talking about getting rich from ithalium strikes because they wouldn't see more than a finders fee deliberately low enough to keep them from retiring. Flatly put the miners don't act like wage slaves. They act like entrepreneurs. You also haven't shown any evidence at all the outlaw mines sell to enemies of the CW. The CW isn't making organized efforts against them like they would for selling to enemies. They're just declaring that they aren't under the protection of the law, which is entirely appropriate for claim jumpers in a difficult to police armed society.

The mining stations are known CW assets. The individual miners, we don't know how it works, really. They're likely independent contractors of some kind, as is everyone with a ship.

We do know for a fact that they sell to enemies, as we see the outlaw transports full of ore docking at their stations and the stations of CW enemies. Them simply not being protected by the law is also untrue, given that CW units shoot them on sight. If they were just unprotected, they'd be neutral rather than hostile. The Ferians are a good example of miners that the CW doesn't protect which sell to legitimate entities.


Which is more likely, that George forgot a tag or that the Commonwealth's enemies are all stupid enough to not attack Gunsan when they can set up stations within the same system?

We can assume Gunsan has hanger bays that we don't see and CH protection. Anton and Kate are there to protect it when the Chimeras arrive, and the chimeric Centurions and Brits emerge too fast to be built rather than converted. Major stations certainly need more guards, like the Arcology and Shipyard Kibo, but that's easy enough to fix without rewriting the lore entirely.

Friendly stations are subject to even more rigorous balance concerns: enemy ships can be lured into them for easy kills.

They certainly could do to be more balanced, but at present, they aren't. The Ringers get swept out of the last system in minutes, and CW metropolises aren't nearly as well defended as they ought to be.

We know there's only one system because of the singular definite article.

Arguing semantics on a sentence I've not read is pointless.

My preference is to use Wolfy's setup and assume the TeV9 turrets aren't visible and make the big turrets mark Vs or thermo cannons depending on the CSC's vintage (the thermo cannon description said they were a very old design). This makes them less criminally underdefended. The other option is to use a weapon cluster of 8 TeV9s and represent it in game by giving a firerateadjust of 12.

I'm not sure those main turrets are even turrets, but thermo cannons sound reasonable. I'd lower the firerate of the Tev9s to balance, and only use the thermos against major targets to conserve ammo, but it works.

When you objected to fortresses you said WMD weapons killed everyone. Now you're saying it doesn't. Civilian stations aren't made to survive weapons fire. They're designed for ease of use. They're not going to have survivors if a military station doesn't. The small number of coffins is because all cargoes are several orders of magnitude smaller than they should be for the size of the vessel carrying them. It's another case of gameplay story segregation. This time related to concerns of not providing excessive loot or giving the player more slaves to recover than he can possibly have capacity for.

I'd say, based on what little knowledge is available, that destroying a station kills almost everyone on it, but a few people could survive for a handful of days. Assuming the Sung use the current amount of coffins, and the size of their transports is based on long term life support capability rather than size, it might be reasonable to simply destroy stations and take the survivors. Assuming many more slaves are required, they likely just force - dock like the First Hunters and take who they can after killing the defending gunships.

There are several arks as evidenced by the name table. There's some 3 dimensionality to the gate network and several lawless regions. The Xenophobes aren't necessarily a contiguous power and independent arks could operate in U2 (below the OR across from the Ares; reserved for canon expansion) and R4 (above UT; undeveloped but contains Huarmica). The OR is no one's territory so nothing stops the Xenophobes from operating freely throughout it. The UT are the ungoverned territories. They don't really make sense. I would far rather have them made sense of than keep them nonsensical.

The name table doesn't prove multiple arks for certain. The deep Outer Realm is Ares territory and the start of it is Ranx, isn't it?

If they wanted to prevent Taikon from researching it rather than wanting to research it themselves they would have destroyed it.

It's possible that they can't, given that the manipulators are similarly indestructible. In any case, they use CW and CH technology, attack the Ferians despite the fact that they're little more than animals loosely owned by the Ringers and cannot possibly be seen as a culture, and share their armor plating with the Gaians, so I'm going to guess that there's more to them than an ideological hatred of different cultures.
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If you'd prefer they work as hitscan weapons(in which case their trajectory would be simple to determine based on where it's hitting), that's something you can suggest or mod in.
I wish modding hitscan weapons in without side-effects was so easy. (Mine have super-passthrough, due to lack of collision detection options.)

Hitscan weapons would be FTL tech, and beyond human tech... or would be except humans DO have FTL tech, but are too oblivious to notice. For example, instant communications (SRS showing ships shooting lasers at you as they happen, every station in every system knows you are a "pirate" the instant you kill a freighter, scramble cubes work on everything up to range 16+ instantly, etc.) and nuclear explosions or other area effect weapons. Yes, gameplay and story segregation, but I tend to view a game world and lore run by the rules of the game, even if nonsensical, and savvy actors should exploit the game rules when possible (and if such rules make the game unfun, either make the enemy dumb to make the game fun or rewrite the rules if intelligent actors are more important).
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Drake Technologies (Alpha): More hardware for combat in parts 1 and 2!
Star Castle Arcade: Play a classic arcade game adventure, with or without more features (like powerups)!
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Other playable mods from 1.8 and 1.7, waiting to be updated...
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Atarlost
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For reference Atarlost and JBWatson

The Sung are too advanced and heavily industrialized to be ignored as mere criminals and they are engaging in acts of war against the Commonwealth and the Commonwealth is engaging in acts of war right back. Attacking a sovereign nation when you get the chance is war. The CW isn't even using deniable assets. They're using card carrying militia officers.

The Militia is not the CW military, it is their National Guard. They attack stations that are interfering with commerce, and attack convoys moving through their territory. The relationship between the CW and Sung can be considered similar to what existed between America and England before the war of 1812: Yes, there were actions considered acts of war, but declaring war outright was not seen as a viable course of action for the weaker power, regardless of its growth in power.

The national guard are military. If a national guard regiment marched into Mexico Mexico and the UN and everyone else in the world would view it as an act of war.

A turret is an auton with tiny engines only suitable for station keeping. They are as good as free. That more stations don't have them is gameplay story segregation. Turrets around stations (unless implemented as ships like the Ares turrets) cause UI issues with docking.

The ability to place a turret is limited by game balance. If omnidirectional turrets are so expensive why do freighters bother with them even when the gun they mount on them is useless? Because if gunship NPCs all had turrets the game would be too difficult and if PCs had turret slots the game would be too easy and doing both would make combat less interesting and still muck up the difficulty.

Freighters are larger than gunships, and, by virtue of the goods they carry, much more expensive. In addition, their turrets are anything but useless in the area they are balanced for.

The EI1700 has a useful turret for its region. The EI100, EI200, and Antares I do not.

Stationary fortress duty is not a death sentence. Not any more than marching with a pike while someone fires at you with cannons. People used to do that for pay. Most fortresses will not be attacked in force. Most probes will fail if there's a fortress in place. But if you refuse to believe in the applicability of history, a fortress that doesn't bear on the gate is no less a target and is easier to destroy because it doesn't contribute to the interlocking defense that can actually keep enemies from engaging it. A pure logistics platform will die the moment the enemy pushes through a single fast cruiser. A proper fortress that contributes heavy fire to an interlocking defensive network will survive until the enemy commits a heavy assault because having several howitzers bear on the gate makes a difference.

In a time when death by numerous preventable diseases was the most likely end, marching into death with a pike didn't seem like such a bad deal.

In any case, a station armed with multiple howitzers is a massive investment, and if it's not going to come under attack, there is no justification for constructing one outside of a capital system, as deterrence(constructing one on the front lines will get it destroyed, and constructing one further back is devoting resources to something that can't assist in winning the current conflict while the enemy does otherwise). Exposing such an investment while its still under construction guarantees an attack, and a loss of the huge investment with nothing to show for it. There's also the fact that noFriendlyFire isn't easy to set up, given that no stations or capital ships in the game have it.


A station armed with multiple howitzers is far cheaper than enough cruisers to mount the same howitzers. Fortresses would primarily have been constructed during the same cold war period as the Point stations were built with renewed building during the 2373-2416 cold war.

The whole point of a fortress on the gate is that it is very difficult to fire on. Most ships gating through will not live long enough to fire very many shots because a structure bigger than a dreadnought that doesn't need to waste any space on mobility can mount a *lot* of guns. The armament is probably economic, but however many guns you have the budget for a fortress capable of mounting them is cheaper than enough cruisers or dreadnoughts to mount them. It doesn't need big engines and doesn't need to have big engines maintained.

While such a structure is being built, it is vulnerable to attack. Assuming two equal factions, the one that spends resources on constructing a static defense is going to have less resources to build a fleet to defend it while under construction.

The faction that spends resources on constructing a static defense has a fleet they can actually use while the faction that does not has a fleet tied down doing jobs static defenses could do more cheaply.

On another note, there's no reason a missile capable of gating can't be invented, and a universe featuring your defensive strategy virtually guarantees its use. Build a few Hydras or Warhammers that gate, detonate, and destroy nearby turrets, and you've just leveled a very expensive wall of turrets for a very minimal cost. Alternatively, just point in the direction of the fortress, arm a howitzer, gate, shoot, gate, repeat.

Doesn't work. Objects come through the gate stationary. The ability to gate while in motion, like the ability to perform accelerations your ship is not normally capable without expending fuel while docking, is not representative of the actual gate mechanics. The duration of the gate effect and the rate of stargate spin indicate that gating requires sitting in the middle of the gate long enough for the arms to rotate 180 degrees. A missile might be able to be built to do that, but it would not be able to get targeting data from the firing platform and would need an auton AI, come through with no base velocity, and be a larger target than a normal missile. This is one of those things that a turret ring is really good at shooting down.

It's not economical to look for Magelen stargates when circular stargates are also present because Magelen stargates are less conveniently placed. A system accessible only by a Magelen gate is many times more expensive to access than a system accessibly by a circular stargate. Criminals and desperate refugees are exactly the sort most likely to look for them.

The Magelen gates for Sol are reasonably placed, so it's not really certain that they're as far off as Huaramarca. Assuming they are, entire systems full of ore are a powerful motivator for the CH, UAS, and other factions both richer and more capable of exploration than the Charon Pirates.

No, the Sol stargate is not reasonably placed. It's way the bleep out in the Kuiper belt. KBOs are not mineralogically interesting.

Distance doesn't matter. Delta V matters. This is why nobody would bother looking for Magelen gates unless they wanted to hide, but the Delta V cost for a circular stargate is negligible. They're in the same orbits as other objects of interest.

Everything requires maintenance. Ships in need of maintenance can move to a station and dock. Stations in need of maintenance can use onsite equipment and resources that are unsuitable for long distance use(small drones, people in spacesuits, whatever's available). Turrets around stations have access to the same resources.

If you wish to keep turrets around a stargate in long term operation, you must regularly bring station - tier logistical capability to the stargate(requiring an entirely new ship class), and leave this massively expensive ship full of delicate equipment in range of sudden attack long enough to repair the turrets.


No you don't. They're auton sized. You send out an Aurochs. If there's anything that can't be fixed in the field with spare parts it carries it can carry dozens of whole turrets to replace any that need more repairs than it can provide. The delta V to get from any station to a circular stargate is smaller than the delta V to get a Space Shuttle Orbiter up to the ISS.

So what makes them not cruisers then? They attack capital ships and stations. How is that at all different from the cruiser role? What does a Deimos do that a Cometfall doesn't? The Deimos has a bit more combat endurance because it doesn't use ammo, but that's only relevant if it's not being shot at with anything effective.

A Deimos has less speed and a much larger frame. It's more expensive, and mounts a turret designed to engage gunships effectively. The Cometfall's turret provides token defense, but nothing truly effective against anything that can damage it. The Deimos's shots are faster and have a swivel, making them harder to avoid(even a capital ship can avoid Warhammers at sufficient range, though not reliably).

Ultimately, a Deimos can handle attacks from medium and heavy gunships, and a Cometfall can't. It can also engage in pitched battles with less risk of friendly fire.


Pitched battles are a means to an end and Cometfalls have no reason to get involved in them: they have other means to the same end. The terrible AI is misleading you as to their capability. They outrange pretty much everything by a large margin and a wing of them can put up a flak cloud that would shame a new series battlestar. The whole point of heavy gunships is that capital ships don't economically beat them. If they did there would be no point in building them. Both the Deimos and Cometfall should lose to their equivalent production in heavy gunships. Their purpose is not to kill gunships. That's a job for the Chasm and Sandstorm. Their purpose is to kill stations and capital ships. The Deimos does so by getting close and not dieing. The Cometfall does so by staying far away and not getting shot at.

You mean that the player is not permitted to abuse overpowered mechanics. The Sung cyberdecks are repeatable. If they weren't there'd be no reason to keep them around because they would have been patched already. The Sung aren't new and they aren't rare and don't avoid attracting attention like (non-PC) CDM shards and remotes. Those cyberdecks are a huge part of their operations and if they couldn't work around changing security the Sung could have been easily wiped out just by rolling out a new patch simultaneously with a major offensive.

Come to that, your claim that defense would prevent repeat attacks implies that someone's writing and applying patches in real time on a ship under attack. I hope you recognize how silly that sounds. They would be applying patches to high powered equipment without time to test and if they missed cleaning out a single worm going root to apply a patch would just be handing their computers over as soon as they plugged them back into the network.


Code can seemingly patch itself against multiple attacks in this universe. It's established that biological technology is used here(ROM Biosoft), so it's certainly possible, given how the immune system works. Modern antivirus software to be heading down that path. Indeed, if it weren't possible to identify and remove cyberattacks, they'd just keep their targets disarmed and unshielded forever.

The key word is ROM. You can flush your RAM and be ready to go after a reboot if all your software is on ROM, but you can't patch vulnerabilities that way. That ROMs are consumed in installation is proof you're actually sticking a ROM module into your computer or onto your device not just loading the software so the unalterable ROM is always there to boot from.

Actually, they can. We don't see them used by NPCs in the vanilla game, but there are free standing barricades that ships can use for cover. They have to move in and out of cover unless they have a turret on one end, but they can use cover. Cover aside, being within the defensive envelope of a fortress does wonders for their effectiveness. At least if friendly fire interactions are turned off. They can't accomplish much on their own (see Hornet lore) but if they have any ability to do damage at all they're at their most useful adding their fire to larger ships or armed stations. And armed stations should always be more capable than ships. They aren't because currently most loot comes from stations, but changing this dynamic to make stations more dangerous and harder to kill is a planned change, or at least it was last year.

Friendly fire is in effect for everything that isn't a stationary turret with a light weapon right next to a station capable of assisting its targeting software(yes, the turrets in Juno violate this principle, but they don't do anything useful anyways, so it's reasonable to dismiss that). While light ships are at their most useful supplementing harder hitters, they are much more vulnerable to attrition than anything else in the game. Drawing off fire during an assault for long enough for the target to be destroyed is one thing, protecting a station from raids is another. Ultimately, the more survivable stations get, the less utility is gained from putting a ship with little staying power into a conflict on its side, due to the fact that they'll get swatted early in a battle regardless.

Friendly fire prevention is underused because most friendly fire is an artifact of compressing 3d space into a 2d game.

A while ago you were talking about people not being willing to follow suicidal orders. Here's an in game counterexample. They never survive unless the PC manages to either lure everything or kill the station before they arrive. Either the PC does all the heavy lifting or the attack fails and usually unless the PC is very fast he's the only survivor. The most effective tactic is to hang back and spam longbows from maximum range and Ronin As trying to guard someone doing that aren't distracting enemy defenders or turret fire because they're not in range.

That was true in earlier versions, but now the attackers typically hold their own. It's been a while since I've lost even one of them, even with starting equipment and minimal intervention. This may be due to the glitch below, but lighter Ronins are needed to defend the missile armed ones regardless.

As for distracting enemy defenders, they'll move out to attack things attacking the station. Without light gunships intercepting them, they're able to destroy the Ronin spamming longbows. A glitch in the latest version makes them not do so until the station is destroyed, but still.


The only change is the glitch. The lighter Ronins aren't needed. More real gunships are needed. The missile-less Ronin are As with light ceramic plate and no shields. The Charon raid leaders are Cs with heavy ceramic plate and class ii shields. That's almost 3 times the survivability against laser and more than 4 times as much against blast. They're an insignificant ship with no offense worth mentioning that a better AI would ignore.

Equipment damage doesn't get reversed. The smoke stops, but with the right weapon you can completely disarm one ot the Ares capships and it will follow you glaring impotently until you gate or you or someone else puts it out of its misery. Several weapons don't need to hit precisely: they effect everything. That includes the Ares nukes, the NAMI S3, S5, and XM900 missiles, and the high flux MAG off hand.

I could swear that I've seen a damaged weapon come back online, but evidently not. Still, destroying weaponry isn't a common occurrence.

Destroying weaponry isn't a common occurence only because weapons aren't treated as partially external even though there's no way to build a turret that isn't. The primary missiles used by both the Ares and Commonwealth are space filling. Area and Radius fragments represent the same thing, the difference is which set of bugs you want your weapon to suffer. Both hit all facing ship components and would damage surface components on an unshielded ship.

That's only true if you assume the Militia is catching every single convoy. If they were the Sung and Marauders would either have beefy enough convoys to be invulnerable or would be dead for lack of shipping. The Militia gets a tiny fraction of convoys from spies. When the stakes are an invasion you need a 100% prediction rate. The only way to get that is to accept a 100% false positive rate as well and just keep forces on station.

Firstly, it cannot be spies. Defecting Fleet assets are hostile to the Ares as well, yet they can anticipate an Aurochs. Certainly, not every freighter is caught, but an invasion force featuring multiple dreadnoughts is orders of magnitude larger than a shipping convoy, and takes much more time to set up.

That's a non sequitur. Rogue fleet has nothing to do with the existence of spies. Not everyone who deserts goes and joins the other side. Most don't, they just don't want to fight anymore and if they can't go home they turn to brigandage because they're already outlaws for deserting. That has nothing to do with either nation employing spies.

You're not seeing the real CW cost either. You're seeing the market price. The CW does not pay 14kc for a TeV-9. If they did they wouldn't turn around and sell them to a pilgrim for 17150 credits even if he had blown up a few Sung for them. Maybe someone resident in the system who would stick around and use it for defending, but not a pilgrim.

Is that a typo? I'm fairly sure they'd sell it to anyone not actively trying to kill them for a 3150c profit.

That should be 7150. The Militia armory marks down to as low as 55% of market price.

In any case, Pilgrims do quite a bit more for security than ordinary citizens. Entire systems worth of hostiles are destroyed by them(and that won't change even if enemy factions are buffed to the point where a corsair is more powerful than a CSC. Gamers find a way.).

Most pilgrims die without accomplishing much. If other pilgrims were as thorough and successful the PC would have nothing to shoot at.

We do know. We know their size. We know they're ship scale because of the Ares turrets and because it makes no sense for them to be larger based on their capabilities. We know objects that size can be launched from unmodified freighters. The idea that they have to be built in situ when anything can launch an auton is absurd.

Ares turrets may well be an entirely different breed. Frankly, they don't make much sense at present due to their expensive weaponry and low health, but they may be getting reworked soon anyways, so I'd not worry about it.

Autons are basic gunships that can be tossed out of a cargo hold and brought online. Turrets have to be secured against gravity over long periods, work for long periods without direct support or orders, and other things that autons don't have to do. Granted, the only autons we see outside of the player's control are the useless TA3s and the fully automated Lumiere, so there's certainly a lot of room for them to be reworked.


Securing against gravity is not an issue. Current real world ion thrusters can run constantly for nearly a year. You really don't need a lot of thrust to remain near an orbiting body unless you're really low over a gas giant. If a stargate appears there it's an obvious bug because putting a stargate somewhere with high deltaV requirements is counterproductive and nobody would do it if they had other options, which they demonstrably have.

You're assuming your conclusion. Gunships can only scout an enemy system if there are no defenses. As soon as anyone sets up gate defenses assaults can only be predicted if your spies get lucky, not by military scouting.

You're breaking your own rules. If an assault only has to travel out of a defended system to reach its target, then there are no contested systems in between them where scouting can occur, and your claim that the player only sees contested systems is even less workable.

Please stop cutting your own stuff. In this case I can't tell what your original point is supposed to be. You may be right about scouting in contested systems, but you're assuming that something can be done about an invasion, which severely constrains your fleet posture. Fixed installations are far cheaper than mobile forces and even if you don't have ships on the gate you have to have them either in system or on the gate leading into the system to react to scouting.

The player certainly does go only through Commonwealth, contested or possibly Sung systems. We have a map. The Outer Realm region is outside the Ares and Ranx borders.


We know how fast kinetic weapon shots are. Unless ship speed and weapon speed are lies (in which case they replace kinetic weapons not dealing damage based on velocity to the list of lies gameplay tells) the ship relative velocities very much are significant compated to weapon velocity. The presumption that shields must predict incoming fire is completely unsupported and shields do not act as proof of FTL sensors.

It's not hard sci - fi. Lasers are projectiles rather than beams here, and we can see what fired them, so there's how our computer tells us where they are. Position can be determined with starting position, velocity, and time. If you'd prefer they work as hitscan weapons(in which case their trajectory would be simple to determine based on where it's hitting), that's something you can suggest or mod in.

The point isn't that the game needs to be changed. The point is that you can't treat the game as though it reflects the reality of the setting. The fact that you think hitscan would be a better laser representation doesn't say anything good about your sense of scale, though. Lasers move at light speed. Hitscan "moves" at infinite speed. They aren't the same and at the scales the game operates at there's a huge difference. Lasers are acting exactly as they should. It's the display that isn't. Making the display respect the light speed limit would be more trouble than it's worth, but for that very reason the fact that it doesn't does not imply that humans in Transcendence really have FTL sensors.

CC uses the legacy D&O system and EP uses chunks of the D&O topology and otherwise happens in a stateless region.

The UAS, ED, NAU, APD, and Luminous would beg to disagree. The former 4 are headquartered on earth, and the other one has its capital system shown in game with no gate defenses.

None of those except Luminous are states. Being headquartered on Earth is what makes is impossible for them to be states. They can't control their own orbitals because there are four of them under the same sky. In a spacegoing civilization you can't be considered sovereign if you're based on a planet that you don't have uncontested control over the orbital space over. The Luminous are a video game boss and George is designing them as a videogame boss rather than a system designed by a machine superintelligence. Their defensive perimeter is huge and setting it in close rings around any dozen stargates would provide better defense.

The rumors indicate otherwise. If the mines were any sort of monopoly the individual miners wouldn't be talking about getting rich from ithalium strikes because they wouldn't see more than a finders fee deliberately low enough to keep them from retiring. Flatly put the miners don't act like wage slaves. They act like entrepreneurs. You also haven't shown any evidence at all the outlaw mines sell to enemies of the CW. The CW isn't making organized efforts against them like they would for selling to enemies. They're just declaring that they aren't under the protection of the law, which is entirely appropriate for claim jumpers in a difficult to police armed society.

The mining stations are known CW assets. The individual miners, we don't know how it works, really. They're likely independent contractors of some kind, as is everyone with a ship.

We do know for a fact that they sell to enemies, as we see the outlaw transports full of ore docking at their stations and the stations of CW enemies. Them simply not being protected by the law is also untrue, given that CW units shoot them on sight. If they were just unprotected, they'd be neutral rather than hostile. The Ferians are a good example of miners that the CW doesn't protect which sell to legitimate entities.


Which is more likely, that George forgot a tag or that the Commonwealth's enemies are all stupid enough to not attack Gunsan when they can set up stations within the same system?

We can assume Gunsan has hanger bays that we don't see and CH protection. Anton and Kate are there to protect it when the Chimeras arrive, and the chimeric Centurions and Brits emerge too fast to be built rather than converted. Major stations certainly need more guards, like the Arcology and Shipyard Kibo, but that's easy enough to fix without rewriting the lore entirely.

Friendly stations are subject to even more rigorous balance concerns: enemy ships can be lured into them for easy kills.

They certainly could do to be more balanced, but at present, they aren't. The Ringers get swept out of the last system in minutes, and CW metropolises aren't nearly as well defended as they ought to be.

They are balanced. They're balanced deliberately weak in order to counteract an exploit known as luring. Their real armaments are greater.

We know there's only one system because of the singular definite article.

Arguing semantics on a sentence I've not read is pointless.
Urak wrote:In 2194, the Urak system was colonized by Russian exiles from Earth and Luna. The colonies prospered in the first half of the twenty-third century, mostly on the strength of ceralloy prices.
In 2247, an outbreak of phobos aerium decimated the population. With many other systems occupied by war, few were able to help the Urak and the system descended into chaos.
In 2276, one warlord clan triumphed over the others and imposed a strict military order in the system.
One system descended into chaos. One system was united by the victorious clan. But I found something even more explicit.
timeline wrote:2247: Phobos aerium devastates Urak system colonies.
My preference is to use Wolfy's setup and assume the TeV9 turrets aren't visible and make the big turrets mark Vs or thermo cannons depending on the CSC's vintage (the thermo cannon description said they were a very old design). This makes them less criminally underdefended. The other option is to use a weapon cluster of 8 TeV9s and represent it in game by giving a firerateadjust of 12.

I'm not sure those main turrets are even turrets, but thermo cannons sound reasonable. I'd lower the firerate of the Tev9s to balance, and only use the thermos against major targets to conserve ammo, but it works.

They're a ball with ridges in another color to represent elevation tracks with a cylinder sticking out and the TeVs fire from their locations. They're turrets.

When you objected to fortresses you said WMD weapons killed everyone. Now you're saying it doesn't. Civilian stations aren't made to survive weapons fire. They're designed for ease of use. They're not going to have survivors if a military station doesn't. The small number of coffins is because all cargoes are several orders of magnitude smaller than they should be for the size of the vessel carrying them. It's another case of gameplay story segregation. This time related to concerns of not providing excessive loot or giving the player more slaves to recover than he can possibly have capacity for.

I'd say, based on what little knowledge is available, that destroying a station kills almost everyone on it, but a few people could survive for a handful of days. Assuming the Sung use the current amount of coffins, and the size of their transports is based on long term life support capability rather than size, it might be reasonable to simply destroy stations and take the survivors. Assuming many more slaves are required, they likely just force - dock like the First Hunters and take who they can after killing the defending gunships.

I agree they dock. I don't agree that there's anything to dock with after shooting a station up with a Quianlong. Big nasty guns are counterproductive for taking people alive and the Dragon Slaver is therefore not suited to an anti-station role for the Sung. It might be for another faction, but not the Sung.

There are several arks as evidenced by the name table. There's some 3 dimensionality to the gate network and several lawless regions. The Xenophobes aren't necessarily a contiguous power and independent arks could operate in U2 (below the OR across from the Ares; reserved for canon expansion) and R4 (above UT; undeveloped but contains Huarmica). The OR is no one's territory so nothing stops the Xenophobes from operating freely throughout it. The UT are the ungoverned territories. They don't really make sense. I would far rather have them made sense of than keep them nonsensical.

The name table doesn't prove multiple arks for certain. The deep Outer Realm is Ares territory and the start of it is Ranx, isn't it?

No. We have a map. Ares and Ranx space are marked. The Outer Realm is marked. The Outer Realm is not in Ares or Ranx territory.

If they wanted to prevent Taikon from researching it rather than wanting to research it themselves they would have destroyed it.

It's possible that they can't, given that the manipulators are similarly indestructible. In any case, they use CW and CH technology, attack the Ferians despite the fact that they're little more than animals loosely owned by the Ringers and cannot possibly be seen as a culture, and share their armor plating with the Gaians, so I'm going to guess that there's more to them than an ideological hatred of different cultures.

Repeat after me. Gameplay-story segregation. Equipment is reused, especially on older factions. The Xenophobes use EI lancers and Makayev howitzers as stand ins for functionally identical Xenophobe manufactured weapons. The Sun use EI and Bushido particle weapons as stand ins for functionally identical weapons of Sung manufacture. The Ranx use Rasiermesser and EI weapons (unless the Kiloton got moved from EI to Rasiermesser at some point) as stand ins for functionally identical weapons of Ranx manufacture. Only the Ares and some of the expansion factions like the Lumierre have complete factional equipment, but that doesn't mean the Ranx have no domestic weapons industry or that the Sung import all their particle beams. The Gaians use worldship plate because meteorsteel armor's thickest version was called that before they existed not because they have anything with the xenophobes other than sharing a similar ideology.
Literally is the new Figuratively
JohnBWatson
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For reference Atarlost and JBWatson

The national guard are military. If a national guard regiment marched into Mexico Mexico and the UN and everyone else in the world would view it as an act of war.

Transcendence politics are more lenient than modern politics. The NAU, UAS, ED, and APD all fire upon covert operatives openly using faction specific military weaponry, and they aren't at war with each other.

The EI1700 has a useful turret for its region. The EI100, EI200, and Antares I do not.

The 100 and 200 have quite useful turrets, considering raiders are only willing to risk gunships to take them. The Antares does not, but that's largely because of the fact that guns with slow projectiles don't work well as omnidirectional weapons.

A station armed with multiple howitzers is far cheaper than enough cruisers to mount the same howitzers. Fortresses would primarily have been constructed during the same cold war period as the Point stations were built with renewed building during the 2373-2416 cold war.

Cold war? As I recall, the Ares retreated after the bombing of Mars, and the Fleet was sent after them to finish them off.

The faction that spends resources on constructing a static defense has a fleet they can actually use while the faction that does not has a fleet tied down doing jobs static defenses could do more cheaply.

A defense is only needed when it is likely the enemy will launch a major attack. Standard defensive complements around stations, as are seen ingame, are enough to handle minor attacks. If the enemy's fleet is occupied defending a point right next to a stargate under construction, they cannot attack.

Doesn't work. Objects come through the gate stationary. The ability to gate while in motion, like the ability to perform accelerations your ship is not normally capable without expending fuel while docking, is not representative of the actual gate mechanics. The duration of the gate effect and the rate of stargate spin indicate that gating requires sitting in the middle of the gate long enough for the arms to rotate 180 degrees. A missile might be able to be built to do that, but it would not be able to get targeting data from the firing platform and would need an auton AI, come through with no base velocity, and be a larger target than a normal missile. This is one of those things that a turret ring is really good at shooting down.

A hydra that detonates into its cluster munitions upon gating would work well for that. In addition, you're contradicting yourself again. Either projectiles require dedicated(and expensive) point defense devices to shoot down reliably or they don't.

No, the Sol stargate is not reasonably placed. It's way the bleep out in the Kuiper belt. KBOs are not mineralogically interesting.

The systems it links to have minerals, which is what would attract private attention.

Also, it's no farther out than any standard stargate, assuming the same scale is used across systems.


No you don't. They're auton sized. You send out an Aurochs. If there's anything that can't be fixed in the field with spare parts it carries it can carry dozens of whole turrets to replace any that need more repairs than it can provide. The delta V to get from any station to a circular stargate is smaller than the delta V to get a Space Shuttle Orbiter up to the ISS.

They may require constant maintenance, refueling, and targeting assistance. We don't really know what it takes to maintain them, so all we really have are assumptions. I'm making assumptions that support what we see ingame, and your making assumptions that contradict it.

Pitched battles are a means to an end and Cometfalls have no reason to get involved in them: they have other means to the same end. The terrible AI is misleading you as to their capability. They outrange pretty much everything by a large margin and a wing of them can put up a flak cloud that would shame a new series battlestar. The whole point of heavy gunships is that capital ships don't economically beat them. If they did there would be no point in building them. Both the Deimos and Cometfall should lose to their equivalent production in heavy gunships. Their purpose is not to kill gunships. That's a job for the Chasm and Sandstorm. Their purpose is to kill stations and capital ships. The Deimos does so by getting close and not dieing. The Cometfall does so by staying far away and not getting shot at.

Their range isn't much better than a Deimos, Phobos, or Aquila. Heavy gunships are built to knock out capitals that are designed for attacking stations and capital ships, capitals designed for patrol, like naval vessels designed for patrol, can effectively engage lighter craft. Capital ships designed for patrol have to be able to fight gunships, because if they can't, they'll be hunted down and destroyed by them. They can't outrun them, after all.

Friendly fire prevention is underused because most friendly fire is an artifact of compressing 3d space into a 2d game.

Assuming multiple ships in close combat and heavy weaponry, friendly fire's going to be present.

The only change is the glitch. The lighter Ronins aren't needed. More real gunships are needed. The missile-less Ronin are As with light ceramic plate and no shields. The Charon raid leaders are Cs with heavy ceramic plate and class ii shields. That's almost 3 times the survivability against laser and more than 4 times as much against blast. They're an insignificant ship with no offense worth mentioning that a better AI would ignore.

They can damage gunships that can hit their missile gunships, which are focused on destroying the fortress and would be torn up by its defenses if they had to spend time keeping themselves protected rather than firing on the station. They're also quite a bit cheaper than the C - variant.

Destroying weaponry isn't a common occurence only because weapons aren't treated as partially external even though there's no way to build a turret that isn't. The primary missiles used by both the Ares and Commonwealth are space filling. Area and Radius fragments represent the same thing, the difference is which set of bugs you want your weapon to suffer. Both hit all facing ship components and would damage surface components on an unshielded ship.

If area damage of any kind wrecks all turreted weaponry, it's not worth building at the current capability of shields. I've got to assume that armor is applied over turrets as well, such that they're reasonably survivable.

That's a non sequitur. Rogue fleet has nothing to do with the existence of spies. Not everyone who deserts goes and joins the other side. Most don't, they just don't want to fight anymore and if they can't go home they turn to brigandage because they're already outlaws for deserting. That has nothing to do with either nation employing spies.

The Ares are a separate race. Their only conceivable source of spies is defecting CW assets.

Most pilgrims die without accomplishing much. If other pilgrims were as thorough and successful the PC would have nothing to shoot at.

A pilgrim that joins the Militia has experience as a combatant. One who makes it to Colonel has saved millions of credits in trade goods, stopped multiple valuable enemy freighters, and likely destroyed a handful of raider stations. That's better than what the average station guard will do in his lifetime.

Securing against gravity is not an issue. Current real world ion thrusters can run constantly for nearly a year. You really don't need a lot of thrust to remain near an orbiting body unless you're really low over a gas giant. If a stargate appears there it's an obvious bug because putting a stargate somewhere with high deltaV requirements is counterproductive and nobody would do it if they had other options, which they demonstrably have.

Stargates defy human physical concepts in many ways. The folks who put them there likely have different requirements than we do.

Please stop cutting your own stuff. In this case I can't tell what your original point is supposed to be. You may be right about scouting in contested systems, but you're assuming that something can be done about an invasion, which severely constrains your fleet posture. Fixed installations are far cheaper than mobile forces and even if you don't have ships on the gate you have to have them either in system or on the gate leading into the system to react to scouting.

The player certainly does go only through Commonwealth, contested or possibly Sung systems. We have a map. The Outer Realm region is outside the Ares and Ranx borders.


I cut out discussion from past posts because otherwise the pages would be impossible to navigate. It'd probably be easiest to break the discussion into sections(IE: viability of static defenses, piracy and trade, etc.) if you think reading it ought to be more user - friendly.

With regard to scouting, patrols and guards at important stations are the most that I see as needed. If a scout can see you, you can likely see it, after all. This would also make stealth more practical.

With regard to the map, the Charon Pirates label isn't anywhere near Charon, so it can be assumed they're more general than you indicate.


The point isn't that the game needs to be changed. The point is that you can't treat the game as though it reflects the reality of the setting. The fact that you think hitscan would be a better laser representation doesn't say anything good about your sense of scale, though. Lasers move at light speed. Hitscan "moves" at infinite speed. They aren't the same and at the scales the game operates at there's a huge difference. Lasers are acting exactly as they should. It's the display that isn't. Making the display respect the light speed limit would be more trouble than it's worth, but for that very reason the fact that it doesn't does not imply that humans in Transcendence really have FTL sensors.

I do not believe lasers should be hitscan weapons, but you seemed to. Based on the strangeness of scaling, it may or may not be logical. As I see it, we know how fast the shot moves and we can theoretically determine when it's fired by the energy buildup, so our computers can derive the current position from those factors.

They are balanced. They're balanced deliberately weak in order to counteract an exploit known as luring. Their real armaments are greater.

The means of preventing luring is the recent implementation of an avoidance radius for enemies. Indeed, this is the correct way for it to work, as logically, ships should not be willing to pursue a target into the weapon range of a well defended station.

Stations being wiped out completely within a couple of days of the player's appearance when they've supposedly been there for years isn't balanced or logical. The better means of resolving this is to improve their defenses, expand the avoidance radius, and apply the avoidance radius to patrolling ships as well as avenging ones.


Repeat after me. Gameplay-story segregation. Equipment is reused, especially on older factions. The Xenophobes use EI lancers and Makayev howitzers as stand ins for functionally identical Xenophobe manufactured weapons. The Sun use EI and Bushido particle weapons as stand ins for functionally identical weapons of Sung manufacture. The Ranx use Rasiermesser and EI weapons (unless the Kiloton got moved from EI to Rasiermesser at some point) as stand ins for functionally identical weapons of Ranx manufacture. Only the Ares and some of the expansion factions like the Lumierre have complete factional equipment, but that doesn't mean the Ranx have no domestic weapons industry or that the Sung import all their particle beams. The Gaians use worldship plate because meteorsteel armor's thickest version was called that before they existed not because they have anything with the xenophobes other than sharing a similar ideology.

The weapons may not be imported, but the designs could well be pirated. The Ranx have connections to Rasiermasser and are formerly CW colonies, and the Sung seem to come from the same region as Bushido.
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Atarlost
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For reference Atarlost and JBWatson

The national guard are military. If a national guard regiment marched into Mexico Mexico and the UN and everyone else in the world would view it as an act of war.

Transcendence politics are more lenient than modern politics. The NAU, UAS, ED, and APD all fire upon covert operatives openly using faction specific military weaponry, and they aren't at war with each other.

They also aren't nations. Their entire war must be covert because rather than having tax bases they sell things to the same pool of external customers.

The EI1700 has a useful turret for its region. The EI100, EI200, and Antares I do not.

The 100 and 200 have quite useful turrets, considering raiders are only willing to risk gunships to take them. The Antares does not, but that's largely because of the fact that guns with slow projectiles don't work well as omnidirectional weapons.

The limit on ships used by pirates against light freighters is a metagame thing. Just like if a level 8 D&D party goes after a dragon it will turn out to be a juvenile or young adult rather than a great wyrm. Corsairs cannot be used alone because they don't have the space to recover loot. Vikings or better have to be involved in every single realistic pirate action to box up the booty. And bolides are not adequate against Vikings.

A station armed with multiple howitzers is far cheaper than enough cruisers to mount the same howitzers. Fortresses would primarily have been constructed during the same cold war period as the Point stations were built with renewed building during the 2373-2416 cold war.

Cold war? As I recall, the Ares retreated after the bombing of Mars, and the Fleet was sent after them to finish them off.

You don't recall at all because you haven't actually seen any sort of history. There's a timeline. The Point stations are every bit as hard to build during wartime as gate defenses and the more recent 2373-2416 cease fire is clearly noted in the timeline.

The faction that spends resources on constructing a static defense has a fleet they can actually use while the faction that does not has a fleet tied down doing jobs static defenses could do more cheaply.

A defense is only needed when it is likely the enemy will launch a major attack. Standard defensive complements around stations, as are seen ingame, are enough to handle minor attacks. If the enemy's fleet is occupied defending a point right next to a stargate under construction, they cannot attack.

An enemy is always likely to launch a major attack. If an enemy's fleet is occupied defending a fortress under construction it's temporary. If there's no fortress under construction the fleet is stuck there until the war ends and maybe longer depending on the nature of the peace.

Doesn't work. Objects come through the gate stationary. The ability to gate while in motion, like the ability to perform accelerations your ship is not normally capable without expending fuel while docking, is not representative of the actual gate mechanics. The duration of the gate effect and the rate of stargate spin indicate that gating requires sitting in the middle of the gate long enough for the arms to rotate 180 degrees. A missile might be able to be built to do that, but it would not be able to get targeting data from the firing platform and would need an auton AI, come through with no base velocity, and be a larger target than a normal missile. This is one of those things that a turret ring is really good at shooting down.

A hydra that detonates into its cluster munitions upon gating would work well for that. In addition, you're contradicting yourself again. Either projectiles require dedicated(and expensive) point defense devices to shoot down reliably or they don't.

A missile capable of independent target acquisition would be auton-scale and not require ICX to target. Not that longreaches are terribly expensive.

No, the Sol stargate is not reasonably placed. It's way the bleep out in the Kuiper belt. KBOs are not mineralogically interesting.

The systems it links to have minerals, which is what would attract private attention.

This is only true because it's the only gate in Sol. If there were a circular gate it would have been around Earth, Mars, or Venus or in the asteroid belt or maybe around Jupiter. With a nearer gate no one would have ever bothered with the Kuiper Belt. There are systems closer and the circular gates are more conveniently placed on both ends.

Also, it's no farther out than any standard stargate, assuming the same scale is used across systems.


It's not. Sol is compressed heavily for playability.

No you don't. They're auton sized. You send out an Aurochs. If there's anything that can't be fixed in the field with spare parts it carries it can carry dozens of whole turrets to replace any that need more repairs than it can provide. The delta V to get from any station to a circular stargate is smaller than the delta V to get a Space Shuttle Orbiter up to the ISS.

They may require constant maintenance, refueling, and targeting assistance. We don't really know what it takes to maintain them, so all we really have are assumptions. I'm making assumptions that support what we see ingame, and your making assumptions that contradict it.

We know this is all bogus because we have been able to build space probes for decades that last for decades, we can right now build ion engines that last for nearly a year of continuous thrust, and autons exist. You are also making assumptions that directly contradict what we see in game and what is really possible with real technology.

Pitched battles are a means to an end and Cometfalls have no reason to get involved in them: they have other means to the same end. The terrible AI is misleading you as to their capability. They outrange pretty much everything by a large margin and a wing of them can put up a flak cloud that would shame a new series battlestar. The whole point of heavy gunships is that capital ships don't economically beat them. If they did there would be no point in building them. Both the Deimos and Cometfall should lose to their equivalent production in heavy gunships. Their purpose is not to kill gunships. That's a job for the Chasm and Sandstorm. Their purpose is to kill stations and capital ships. The Deimos does so by getting close and not dieing. The Cometfall does so by staying far away and not getting shot at.

Their range isn't much better than a Deimos, Phobos, or Aquila. Heavy gunships are built to knock out capitals that are designed for attacking stations and capital ships, capitals designed for patrol, like naval vessels designed for patrol, can effectively engage lighter craft. Capital ships designed for patrol have to be able to fight gunships, because if they can't, they'll be hunted down and destroyed by them. They can't outrun them, after all.

Um. The range is more than twice a Deimos, Phobos, or Aquila. They don't fire at range because of an AI bug. Either gunships can threaten capital ships or they can't. If they can then the Deimos and Cometfall both die to gunships. If they can't then there would be no gunships. Since the Deimos can't fill an anti-fighter role or the entire Commonwealth force structure stops making sense the roles filled are the same and the Cometfall's ability to open fire at vastly greater ranges compensates for its poor short range performance.

Friendly fire prevention is underused because most friendly fire is an artifact of compressing 3d space into a 2d game.

Assuming multiple ships in close combat and heavy weaponry, friendly fire's going to be present.

They aren't in close combat. Ships and distance are not to the same scale. Even the tightest formation is mostly empty space.

The only change is the glitch. The lighter Ronins aren't needed. More real gunships are needed. The missile-less Ronin are As with light ceramic plate and no shields. The Charon raid leaders are Cs with heavy ceramic plate and class ii shields. That's almost 3 times the survivability against laser and more than 4 times as much against blast. They're an insignificant ship with no offense worth mentioning that a better AI would ignore.

They can damage gunships that can hit their missile gunships, which are focused on destroying the fortress and would be torn up by its defenses if they had to spend time keeping themselves protected rather than firing on the station. They're also quite a bit cheaper than the C - variant.

They don't do enough damage to matter. A C variant does not have to spend time protecting itself. The optimum attack is to time a gap in the long patrols and dump as many missiles as possible from maximum range between them and run. Since ships are tiny in reality the missiles will all hit the station unless a gunship deliberately suicides himself on one. AI Drones, zooanthropes, and religious or political fanatics might do that but pirates won't. Then the attacking gunships turn around (which the AI is incapable of doing without thrusting) and fire on any corsairs chasing them because nothing else is going to catch them. The C's particle beam is far better than two or three bolides. The Ronin C is not twice as expensive as the Ronin A. The bulk of the expense of almost any gunship is going to be the pilot. The pilot of one Ronin C eats and breathes and drinks half as much as the pilots of two Ronin As. He requires less training. He eats and breathes and drinks half as much during the course of that training. He represents half as many salaries. Another big expense is the engine. The Ronin C's engine costs half as much as the engines of two Ronin As. The Ronin C also pays for only one spaceframe and only one electronics suite.

Destroying weaponry isn't a common occurence only because weapons aren't treated as partially external even though there's no way to build a turret that isn't. The primary missiles used by both the Ares and Commonwealth are space filling. Area and Radius fragments represent the same thing, the difference is which set of bugs you want your weapon to suffer. Both hit all facing ship components and would damage surface components on an unshielded ship.

If area damage of any kind wrecks all turreted weaponry, it's not worth building at the current capability of shields. I've got to assume that armor is applied over turrets as well, such that they're reasonably survivable.

Some survivability, yes. As much armor as the non-moving parts of the ship no. Not nearly.

That's a non sequitur. Rogue fleet has nothing to do with the existence of spies. Not everyone who deserts goes and joins the other side. Most don't, they just don't want to fight anymore and if they can't go home they turn to brigandage because they're already outlaws for deserting. That has nothing to do with either nation employing spies.

The Ares are a separate race. Their only conceivable source of spies is defecting CW assets.

I don't think you're arguing in good faith. Defectors are not a unified political block.

Most pilgrims die without accomplishing much. If other pilgrims were as thorough and successful the PC would have nothing to shoot at.

A pilgrim that joins the Militia has experience as a combatant. One who makes it to Colonel has saved millions of credits in trade goods, stopped multiple valuable enemy freighters, and likely destroyed a handful of raider stations. That's better than what the average station guard will do in his lifetime.

And after the pilgrim leaves the system with his shiny new subsidized guns he's going to contribute nothing at all. It doesn't matter what you've done in the past. The militia has a responsibility to make sure its budget goes to protecting the system in the future. If the militia is merely not marking weapons up that's one thing, but if they're taking a loss and the weapons aren't being used to defend their system that's wastage and could get them increased oversight and reduced future budgets.

Securing against gravity is not an issue. Current real world ion thrusters can run constantly for nearly a year. You really don't need a lot of thrust to remain near an orbiting body unless you're really low over a gas giant. If a stargate appears there it's an obvious bug because putting a stargate somewhere with high deltaV requirements is counterproductive and nobody would do it if they had other options, which they demonstrably have.

Stargates defy human physical concepts in many ways. The folks who put them there likely have different requirements than we do.

No they don't. The magellen civilization had different requirements, but the circle gate builders didn't. We can tell because they preferentially put gates near rocky bodies close to stars. DeltaV is a concern for everyone because physics is physics. If the gate builders had cheap FTL they wouldn't have built gates. If they had economical inertialess drives the gates would be in low stellar orbit to minimize transit distance rather than deltaV requirements. They aren't.

With regard to scouting, patrols and guards at important stations are the most that I see as needed. If a scout can see you, you can likely see it, after all. This would also make stealth more practical.

This doesn't make sense at all. If stealth is practical then patrols and guards at important stations are hopelessly inadequate. I can't even tell what you're trying to argue here.

Please stop cutting your own stuff. In this case I can't tell what your original point is supposed to be. You may be right about scouting in contested systems, but you're assuming that something can be done about an invasion, which severely constrains your fleet posture. Fixed installations are far cheaper than mobile forces and even if you don't have ships on the gate you have to have them either in system or on the gate leading into the system to react to scouting.

The player certainly does go only through Commonwealth, contested or possibly Sung systems. We have a map. The Outer Realm region is outside the Ares and Ranx borders.


With regard to the map, the Charon Pirates label isn't anywhere near Charon, so it can be assumed they're more general than you indicate.

You're not understanding how the map is supposed to work. The location of minor stars is not defined canonically. Charon is marked in two places because while it is near St. Kat's in D&O that is explicitly not its canonical location and it could be anywhere in that end of the New Beyond.

The point isn't that the game needs to be changed. The point is that you can't treat the game as though it reflects the reality of the setting. The fact that you think hitscan would be a better laser representation doesn't say anything good about your sense of scale, though. Lasers move at light speed. Hitscan "moves" at infinite speed. They aren't the same and at the scales the game operates at there's a huge difference. Lasers are acting exactly as they should. It's the display that isn't. Making the display respect the light speed limit would be more trouble than it's worth, but for that very reason the fact that it doesn't does not imply that humans in Transcendence really have FTL sensors.

I do not believe lasers should be hitscan weapons, but you seemed to. Based on the strangeness of scaling, it may or may not be logical. As I see it, we know how fast the shot moves and we can theoretically determine when it's fired by the energy buildup, so our computers can derive the current position from those factors.

To be realistic there should be a delay of one second per light second distance on events being displayed to the player. Because of time compression that's 1 frame per 2 light seconds. Since that is the rate at which beams propagate they would not be visible when fired at the player. If you can see them you've already been hit. This would be a lot of work and not conducive to good gameplay, but precisely because there are good doylist reasons not to go through the trouble the absence of a display delay is not proof of FTL sensors.

They are balanced. They're balanced deliberately weak in order to counteract an exploit known as luring. Their real armaments are greater.

The means of preventing luring is the recent implementation of an avoidance radius for enemies. Indeed, this is the correct way for it to work, as logically, ships should not be willing to pursue a target into the weapon range of a well defended station.

No, that is how friendly stations are balanced. You can say it should work differently. I think you're probably even right, but that is how it does work. In saying it should work differently you're admitting that the way it currently works is wrong. That's a start. The same logic applies to all the other status quo stuff you're trying to defend that is also wrong.

Stations being wiped out completely within a couple of days of the player's appearance when they've supposedly been there for years isn't balanced or logical. The better means of resolving this is to improve their defenses, expand the avoidance radius, and apply the avoidance radius to patrolling ships as well as avenging ones.

It's not logical but it is balanced. They are on the same side as the player so making them stronger makes the game easier. They are required to exist for commerce, but are required to be weak to avoid making the game too easy. It's not logical for them to be in the same system at all. Whichever was constructed first would prevent the other from ever existing unless it's a CSC or similar station-ship.

Repeat after me. Gameplay-story segregation. Equipment is reused, especially on older factions. The Xenophobes use EI lancers and Makayev howitzers as stand ins for functionally identical Xenophobe manufactured weapons. The Sun use EI and Bushido particle weapons as stand ins for functionally identical weapons of Sung manufacture. The Ranx use Rasiermesser and EI weapons (unless the Kiloton got moved from EI to Rasiermesser at some point) as stand ins for functionally identical weapons of Ranx manufacture. Only the Ares and some of the expansion factions like the Lumierre have complete factional equipment, but that doesn't mean the Ranx have no domestic weapons industry or that the Sung import all their particle beams. The Gaians use worldship plate because meteorsteel armor's thickest version was called that before they existed not because they have anything with the xenophobes other than sharing a similar ideology.

The weapons may not be imported, but the designs could well be pirated. The Ranx have connections to Rasiermasser and are formerly CW colonies, and the Sung seem to come from the same region as Bushido.

They're not related. Honoku-Tomashi, of which Bushido is a subsidiary, has always been a Commonwealth company and has no relation to either the Sung or APD. It got its start in import/export on Incandescent.
Literally is the new Figuratively
JohnBWatson
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For reference Atarlost and JBWatson

They also aren't nations. Their entire war must be covert because rather than having tax bases they sell things to the same pool of external customers.

They have citizens, cities, and militaries. They are effectively nations.

The limit on ships used by pirates against light freighters is a metagame thing. Just like if a level 8 D&D party goes after a dragon it will turn out to be a juvenile or young adult rather than a great wyrm. Corsairs cannot be used alone because they don't have the space to recover loot. Vikings or better have to be involved in every single realistic pirate action to box up the booty. And bolides are not adequate against Vikings.

A freighter can be destroyed and then looted later, once the battle is over, by any large ships not currently out raiding.

A station armed with multiple howitzers is far cheaper than enough cruisers to mount the same howitzers. Fortresses would primarily have been constructed during the same cold war period as the Point stations were built with renewed building during the 2373-2416 cold war.

Cold war? As I recall, the Ares retreated after the bombing of Mars, and the Fleet was sent after them to finish them off.

You don't recall at all because you haven't actually seen any sort of history. There's a timeline. The Point stations are every bit as hard to build during wartime as gate defenses and the more recent 2373-2416 cease fire is clearly noted in the timeline.

I don't see cease fires in which large quantities of firepower are massed at important trade routes as maintainable. A refueling station? Sure.

An enemy is always likely to launch a major attack. If an enemy's fleet is occupied defending a fortress under construction it's temporary. If there's no fortress under construction the fleet is stuck there until the war ends and maybe longer depending on the nature of the peace.

Again, minor - major attacks. A minor attack can be repulsed by the standard guards at stations and patrols(which need to be maintained for readiness anyways). A major attack requires planning and major movement of resources.

A missile capable of independent target acquisition would be auton-scale and not require ICX to target. Not that longreaches are terribly expensive.

A cluster missile that detonates immediately upon gating doesn't need any size restrictions, not that independant targeting would be required when faced with static defenses. There's also the fact that, given that projectiles take time to travel, anything that can't move and is built near a stargate is cripplingly vulnerable to anything that gates in, fires, gates out, repeats.

This is only true because it's the only gate in Sol. If there were a circular gate it would have been around Earth, Mars, or Venus or in the asteroid belt or maybe around Jupiter. With a nearer gate no one would have ever bothered with the Kuiper Belt. There are systems closer and the circular gates are more conveniently placed on both ends.

A system full of ore and reasonably protected against shorter range pirate gunships is well worth the extra fuel. If expansion weren't profitable enough to be worth a few thousand credits of fuel, it's certainly not profitable enough to wage war over.

We know this is all bogus because we have been able to build space probes for decades that last for decades, we can right now build ion engines that last for nearly a year of continuous thrust, and autons exist. You are also making assumptions that directly contradict what we see in game and what is really possible with real technology.

Our probes aren't designed to constantly keep track of targets, sustain damage from military grade weaponry, differentiate friend from foe, and be mass produced at reasonable price.

Um. The range is more than twice a Deimos, Phobos, or Aquila. They don't fire at range because of an AI bug. Either gunships can threaten capital ships or they can't. If they can then the Deimos and Cometfall both die to gunships. If they can't then there would be no gunships. Since the Deimos can't fill an anti-fighter role or the entire Commonwealth force structure stops making sense the roles filled are the same and the Cometfall's ability to open fire at vastly greater ranges compensates for its poor short range performance.

Their full range is only practical against stations. Anything else will be long gone by the time the nukes close the distance. Gunships can threaten capital ships, but they aren't universally capable of destroying them. They are to capships as aircraft are to naval ships. While escorts are essential for an efficient strategy, naval ships aren't completely helpless alone, and many are specialized to provide air cover.

They aren't in close combat. Ships and distance are not to the same scale. Even the tightest formation is mostly empty space.

AOE weaponry can be assumed to have signifigant radius, otherwise it wouldn't be AOE in effect. Higher end weaponry like plasma, non - missile blast and thermo, and ion could really be any size depending on how they work.

They don't do enough damage to matter. A C variant does not have to spend time protecting itself. The optimum attack is to time a gap in the long patrols and dump as many missiles as possible from maximum range between them and run. Since ships are tiny in reality the missiles will all hit the station unless a gunship deliberately suicides himself on one. AI Drones, zooanthropes, and religious or political fanatics might do that but pirates won't. Then the attacking gunships turn around (which the AI is incapable of doing without thrusting) and fire on any corsairs chasing them because nothing else is going to catch them. The C's particle beam is far better than two or three bolides. The Ronin C is not twice as expensive as the Ronin A. The bulk of the expense of almost any gunship is going to be the pilot. The pilot of one Ronin C eats and breathes and drinks half as much as the pilots of two Ronin As. He requires less training. He eats and breathes and drinks half as much during the course of that training. He represents half as many salaries. Another big expense is the engine. The Ronin C's engine costs half as much as the engines of two Ronin As. The Ronin C also pays for only one spaceframe and only one electronics suite.

We know that Korolov doesn't train its pilots, they come on their own and are tested. Food is cheap in Transcendence, especially low end stuff, and lives are cheap enough that pirates have sizable fleets. Spaceframes can be made cheaply from titanium, and electronics suites may not be applicable in the same scale for low end gunships.

Some survivability, yes. As much armor as the non-moving parts of the ship no. Not nearly.

I'd say that a small relative area evens that out.

I don't think you're arguing in good faith. Defectors are not a unified political block.

Not entirely, but there's a certain set of criteria. People who joined up to exterminate the Ares, saw Earth bombed by them, and have fought them for years are unlikely to up and decide to help them. Those that leave do so because they believe the war is unwinnable, not that it is immoral.

And after the pilgrim leaves the system with his shiny new subsidized guns he's going to contribute nothing at all. It doesn't matter what you've done in the past. The militia has a responsibility to make sure its budget goes to protecting the system in the future. If the militia is merely not marking weapons up that's one thing, but if they're taking a loss and the weapons aren't being used to defend their system that's wastage and could get them increased oversight and reduced future budgets.

A benefits program for pilgrims who join up provides future returns by attracting new recruits. In addition, systems are not islands, and the Militia is owned by the CW government. A pilgrim will go through other CW systems and presumably kill hostile factions' troops with their subsidized weaponry.

No they don't. The magellen civilization had different requirements, but the circle gate builders didn't. We can tell because they preferentially put gates near rocky bodies close to stars. DeltaV is a concern for everyone because physics is physics. If the gate builders had cheap FTL they wouldn't have built gates. If they had economical inertialess drives the gates would be in low stellar orbit to minimize transit distance rather than deltaV requirements. They aren't.

The most efficient method of placement by human standards is to put all of a system's stargates in the same orbit, close to each other. Granted, some are set up this way, but most aren't.

This doesn't make sense at all. If stealth is practical then patrols and guards at important stations are hopelessly inadequate. I can't even tell what you're trying to argue here.

Stealth is good for scouting out systems, but not economical for major attacks. Patrols and guards are present to prevent major attacks in non - capital systems. Scouting is rarely worth putting in the resources to completely prevent.

You're not understanding how the map is supposed to work. The location of minor stars is not defined canonically. Charon is marked in two places because while it is near St. Kat's in D&O that is explicitly not its canonical location and it could be anywhere in that end of the New Beyond.

The indication of the map, from what I can make of your interpretation, is that the Charon pirates control systems "above" the early New Beyond.

To be realistic there should be a delay of one second per light second distance on events being displayed to the player. Because of time compression that's 1 frame per 2 light seconds. Since that is the rate at which beams propagate they would not be visible when fired at the player. If you can see them you've already been hit. This would be a lot of work and not conducive to good gameplay, but precisely because there are good doylist reasons not to go through the trouble the absence of a display delay is not proof of FTL sensors.

It can be simply justified by the energy buildup before firing being detectable, but is nonetheless a minor gameplay mechanic. The changes you argue for are a complete remaking of the entire game that contradicts most of the available lore.

It's not logical but it is balanced. They are on the same side as the player so making them stronger makes the game easier. They are required to exist for commerce, but are required to be weak to avoid making the game too easy. It's not logical for them to be in the same system at all. Whichever was constructed first would prevent the other from ever existing unless it's a CSC or similar station-ship.

That's outright wrong. There are many reasons enemies can share the same system. They could have been neutral when the stations were built, one faction could have built their stations covertly(not applicable in this case due to the crowded and militarized nature of the system and the scale of the stations, but feasible in less populated or patrolled areas with less major stations), or the earlier arriving faction could be less aggressive. The Ringers appear to generally leave others alone, and do not even possess any ships, let alone warships, at the moment. It's perfectly feasible for them to not have launched attacks on a major power that began constructing stations in one of their systems. In addition, it's possible that the Ares and Ringers are hostile because of the Ringers' trade with the CW, which may have began after the Ares had settled in the system.

They're not related. Honoku-Tomashi, of which Bushido is a subsidiary, has always been a Commonwealth company and has no relation to either the Sung or APD. It got its start in import/export on Incandescent.

Intellectual property theft's still quite possible. The Sung are the types that would gladly download a car.
PM
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JohnBWatson wrote:There's also the fact that, given that projectiles take time to travel, anything that can't move and is built near a stargate is cripplingly vulnerable to anything that gates in, fires, gates out, repeats.
I have done this before... mostly against the Kronosaurus, when my ship was underequipped. I would probably do this against enemy stations that are more powerful than me too (and I do not yet have long-range weapons and higher powers).
Download and Play in 1.9 beta 1...
Drake Technologies (Alpha): More hardware for combat in parts 1 and 2!
Star Castle Arcade: Play a classic arcade game adventure, with or without more features (like powerups)!
Playership Drones: Buy or restore exotic ships to command!

Other playable mods from 1.8 and 1.7, waiting to be updated...
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shanejfilomena
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PM wrote:
JohnBWatson wrote:There's also the fact that, given that projectiles take time to travel, anything that can't move and is built near a stargate is cripplingly vulnerable to anything that gates in, fires, gates out, repeats.
I have done this before... mostly against the Kronosaurus, when my ship was underequipped. I would probably do this against enemy stations that are more powerful than me too (and I do not yet have long-range weapons and higher powers).
I use the gates and gate Beacons as cover - the modern gates are slightly less cover then the older ones, but still good for getting in some shots. The fact that things take time works both ways - you can zig-zag your ship to avoid most weapon fire as you flee to a safer zone or simply get out of range - Years ago, One of the first things I got back for advice on how to deal with a hard enemy was to " circle and fire " - still works - in asteroid areas tracking weapons are not very effective if you use the rocks for cover and remember - every weapon has a range.

The Kronosaurus is a hard Pirate if your not ready for anything that refuses to retreat.
One Advantage a Player has with Pirates is that they are Pirates - they can not resist hitting / destroying your friendlies - make use of the wrecks as cover : I do this with patrolling Ventari at it's station and the Pirate Frigates that take up position while your escorting for Korolov ( on the way back if I see where the Frigate is and there are wrecks to use, I take the chance. Otherwise I stop escorting while I search for an alternative to get at it and stay alive )

"There are Always Alternatives.." - Spock ( The Galileo Seven - Season 1 , Episode 16 )
Flying Irresponsibly In Eridani......

I don't like to kill pirates in cold blood ..I do it.. but I don't like it..
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