What strategies and ship design philosophies would you use if you chose to restrict yourself to plasma carronades as your primary offensive weapon?
I’m thinking you’d need to have a big speed advantage to ensure you can close the distance quickly. Because of that I thought maybe put them on fighters, but those are fragile and carronades aren’t cheap. You can create walloping big spinally mounted plasma carronade, so maybe… fast ~3k to 5k ton heavily armored parasites with spinal plasma carronades and either 10cm railguns or AMMs for PD, launched from carriers?
Barracuda class Corvette 2,000 tons 34 Crew 968.4 BP TCS 40 TH 768 EM 1,590
19200 km/s Armour 2-14 Shields 53-331 HTK 16 Sensors 0/0/0/0 DCR 1-5 PPV 9.5
Maint Life 3.97 Years MSP 302 AFR 32% IFR 0.4% 1YR 31 5YR 458 Max Repair 273.6 MSP
Racer Control Rating 1 BRG
Intended Deployment Time: 5.9 days CDE 20% Morale Check Required
Siphon Drive (4) Power 768 Fuel Use 871.42% Signature 192 Exp 30%
Fuel Capacity 114,700 Litres Range 1.18 billion km (17 hours at full power)
Wave Projector Field (1) Recharge 331 seconds (0.2 per second)
Disintegrator (1) Range 384,000km TS 19,200 km/s Power 94-6 ROF 80
Synaptic Node (1) Range 384,000 km TS 19,000 km/s ECCM-5 97 95 92 90 87 84 82 79 77 74
1-Point Furnace (1) Total Power Output 6 Exp 50%
Clicker (1) GPS 3 Range 3.5m km MCR 317.9k km RES 1 ECCM-5
These are from a recent campaign I was experimenting with. Functions sort of like a bomber - squadron dives, tank light damage with shields, engage close-range plasma volley, retreat for ROF and shield recharge. Works for system defense and with commercial/military carriers.
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You said you experimented with them… how’d it go?
I was plasma only for the first 70 years or so of my current campaign. You are correct that you need a speed advantage so you can get in and do damage. Generally because of the damage fall off, I prefer lots of 15cm cannon over fewer larger ones for maximum dps.
You also want robust armor and probably shields. Decent shields will absorb hits while you close in. Armor helps for when you can’t pack enough shields.
This design worked for me up until I started seeing small fleets of ships with 19x35cm laser cannon and 400-1400 shields. Even with a 10k kms speed differential the cost of closing was immense.
So… it’s doable. And it’s fun. You just need to get girded for the cost of closure and pour out damage fast enough you pay that cost as little as possible.
I’ll post my designs when I get back home later today.
That sounds super fun! What did you do for point defense though? Just go really, really fast, pack missile jammers (and focus on that tech getting high up) and hope you get there and blow them away before you take too much missile damage?
Oh. Well. I also permitted gauss in my designs so I had point defense available if I wanted. My NPRs didn’t seem to favor missiles so I mostly didn’t bother til I hit a spoiler and got smacked.
Even then I opted to focus on shielding over point defense due to tech disparity (my tech is quite a bit better than this particular spoiler).
Never really ran into NPRs in that game - the campaign’s been shelved for a while.