So I clicked on that “Create Empire” button that Steve left in, just to see what would happen.
And what it created has terrified me.
And the AI has 200x of these
I think I might back a backup of this save and play it later and see how long I last.
I was just designing my battleships aswell at 200,000tons
Shouldn’t that thing fall apart before it even gets to a jump point?
I don’t play with maintenance on.
Haven’t done so for about 10yrs
That thing will disintegrate the second it leaves orbit. I would ignore their existence, honestly.
But they are indeed monsters.
When I get back from my trip
I’ll try to find them and send the fleet in
See how my current fleet copes
Would be a good learning experience, considering I’m beam heavy with short range missiles (Torpedos) in this playthrough
You want to know how to kill that monstrosity? It’s actually fairly simple.
Fighters. It only has 8 fire controls, so at most it can only kill 8 ships per 5 second increment. It will likely have some of those fire controls assigned to the 45cm railguns, probably all of the slower, longer range DFCs, so it can actually only kill 4 fighters per 5 second tick. Each fighter carrying a 10cm railgun will do 4 damage per second, the shield only recharges 27*5= 135 shield per 5s increment. For the same tonnage as the target, you would have 1300 fighters, doing 5200 damage per 5s.
Or you use 10cm lasers and stay beyond the targets 90km railgun range, and only lose 4 fighters every 20 seconds, meaning it would take more than ten minutes to kill all your fighters.
I think it’s more correct to compare by cost than by tonnage.
And if we use the cost, there will be significantly fewer fighters, because each of them needs an engine and an FC - these are very expensive components at high tech.
But yes, it will be quite difficult for this ship to cope with a large number of fighters.
Boarding ships are a pleasant alternative to this. 
I have been meaning to create my space marines …
Maybe this is the excuse I need
For 1/10 the tonnage of the target, you could attack with 105 breaching pods each carrying 100t of boarding troops, and the target would belong to you less than 30 minutes later.
You have a TS50000 BFC, but you are using railguns. Since you can’t put railguns on the turret, this additional tracking speed is useless to you - the formulas use a lower value from the TS of the weapon and FC.
This is a AI empire design, not a player design
I would use some more boarding ships and troops… over 17 thousands crew members… some ship destroyed during approaching…
How much time could it take to breach the ship armour?
But, how much time would it take to build all these boarding ships and troops?
You will lose 4 pods during approach.
The pods move at least 5x the speed of the target ship. Let’s call it 90k kmps.
They cross the firing envelope of the long range DFCs in under 10 seconds.
They cross the firing envelope of the short range DFCs in 2 seconds and change.
You approach to 1101k. Then you give the order to board with all formations.
Next increment, you take fire from 4 DFCs at a range of 651k. Presumed losses: 4.
Next increment, you are at 201k and take no fire.
Next increment, you cross the firing threshold of the short range DFCs, launch your troops, and retreat to 249k. You take no fire.
Next increment, you retreat to 699k. You take no fire.
Next increment, you are out of the long-range DFC envelope.
The armor will take 6 minutes.
Assuming this is a tech peer, those 101 x 100t boarding formations (each one being 8x 12t troops) will defeat 17696 crew in about 20 minutes.
How long would it take to build 105 breaching pods (500t each)?
Right now, without prebuilding components, looks like about 110 days, times 105, divided by 17. Less than 2 years. If I prebuild the engines, it would take a month and a half. Though it would take 2 months to build those engines (using just the homeworld build queue).
Oh but my next slipway is done in another week and a half. So take 5.5% off of those estimates.
Dont forget the fighter factories on planet with the pods being <= 500t
Don’t forget they might send more then one ship at a time in a fleet
Still away atm, so havent tried it yet.
Looking forward to it
If you have the leeway to design a specific counter to a specific ship, the most effective anti pure-beam ship is and will always be another beam ship with slightly higher speed and slightly higher range.
Like, if you have the patience, or want to prove a point, a perfectly calibrated ~30kt ship could chip away their entire 100mt fleet in a battle of retreat fire without expending any munition or personnel.
I did that once against a bunch of swarm carriers with just a single 12.5kt particle lancer. Of course, not the most RP approach, but that is I think the theoretical optimum.
Don’t forget that you can also send more ships, send an empty decoy ship ahead of your fleet so that the enemy will discharge their main guns into one ship, use missiles to cover the boarders, attack near the LP, and so on.
It’s difficult to prevent a good boarding. But it can be defeated by simply putting several heavy tanks inside the ship.
I don’t think non-infantry unit types actually participate in boarding combat
So I actually took a look at Aurora v1.0.0 Launch Documentation - #32 by AuroraSteve
and I’m not sure anymore. Formations inside the ship participate and the attacking side is infantry-only but aside from support artillery etc. there isn’t an explicit mention of frontline vehicle units not helping with the defense.
So I don’t actually know.
