Based on the advice of legendary Discord user Oafsalot, I have begun deploying breaching pods as a primary combat tactic against small-to-medium enemy fleets.
The design principles are simple: get as much speed as possible on a 500t ship with a 100t drop bay.
As of mag-plas engine tech, it looks like this:
The troop design is also simple:
Transport Size (tons) 12 Cost 1.2 Armour 24 Hit Points 12
Annual Maintenance Cost 0.15 Resupply Cost 6
Crew-Served Anti-Personnel: Shots 6 Penetration 15 Damage 15Boarding Combat
Vendarite 0.48
Development Cost 34
Infantry, heavy powered armour, boarding combat, CAP weapon.
Oafs work best, of course, when deployed in large numbers.
You may have heard the saying “One ant is no ant.”
For us, it’s “Ten Oafs is no Oafs.”
I use military carriers with 21kt capacity to carry 40 Oafs and a couple fighter-scouts.
Each such collection of Oafs is a “cloud.”
One cloud can comfortably handle an enemy fleet with many times the cloud’s tonnage.
The short fuel range (just over 500m km) means that optimal success requires at least one of the following three things:
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Your cloud delivery vehicle is faster than the enemy, and the enemy’s missile range is less than the Oaf’s fuel range.
In this case, you can get as close as you dare (usually based on enemy missile range), deploy the cloud, and keep your distance until the enemy fleet becomes your fleet. -
Your cloud delivery vehicle is invisible to the enemy at close enough range to deploy the cloud.
If the enemy doesn’t see you, they won’t attack you. Closing to within half of the Oaf’s fuel range is ideal, since that allows the Oafs to return to the carrier at full speed.
Somewhere between half and full Oaf range is doable, but that does mean the cloud runs out of fuel on the return trip and must wait to be picked up.
Don’t forget to account for the enemy’s own movement vector, especially if moving away from your cloud. Nothing sucks worse than running out of fuel while still on the chase. (Ask me how I know.) -
You can attack via ambush.
Defensive JP ambushes are okay, but require either waiting around at a JP with your vulnerable delivery vehicle (or with some other vulnerable method of keeping your Oafs’ clocks zeroed, like a commercial station with maintenance modules and commercial hangar space).
LP ambushes are great, if you can set it up.
You wait at one LP until the target is close enough to another LP for the Oafs to jump and attack in the same increment.
Even better is waiting until the target is close enough that the Oafs can jump, attack target, and jump back in a single 5s increment.
Note that in such a case, the target will usually still continue to the LP and perform whatever jump they were intending when they arrive (a few increments after your attack).
So you don’t want your delivery vehicle to be waiting at whatever LP is the enemy’s destination.
If there are lots of LPs in the system, you should station at whichever one is the least likely destination for the enemy.
If there are only two LPs in the system, or you aren’t highly confident that your choice of station will not be the enemy’s destination, you can always execute your own jump in the same increment as the enemy, choosing as your destination the same LP that the enemy is jumping from. Two ships passing in the ether.
There’s not much to tweak on the Oaf design, but those tweaks can make a big difference in specific scenarios.
You can trade a bit of fuel and engine tonnage back and forth to maximize the speed possible for the operational range you need (based on your enemy’s capabilities).
You can reduce engine power to trade speed for more range.
You can trade some fuel to increase deployment time. At my specific tech levels, I can reduce fuel by 2t (2kL) and increase deployment time to 1.2 days (0.04 months).
Other thoughts?