The EX is really not good at blowing stuff up, but the Eclipse is, if she gets her chance.
I get what you’re saying about the busy flight deck. Consider though. . .
The 3 Eclipse take up 60m of deck length parked wings across. They were designed to fit this way.
The EX is 8m across. Parked 3 side by side the rear wing of the EX is much wider than the rest of the ship, so this is the only portion that the ships come close side by side. You might have to walk around the wings, but there’s room on the sides of the bay between the bulkheads. Just don’t line up the wings next to the bulkheads. So 3 rows of 3 is 36 meters of flight deck.
The Fury is tiny and should fit at one end or the other. 10 meters of flight deck.
106 meters out of 200.
The Gladius isn’t a bomber. Its missiles aren’t going to hurt an Idris. Not even the shield. If you’re fighting another Idris with your Idris, you want something that can really hurt them. 3 Eclipse can do up to 3.7M damage. The Idris shields are 2.3M, so really 3 Eclipse are just about enough to kill the shield and maybe if you are spot on, kill the spinal mount (~750k health) too. After that it’s S12 torps, S10 laser or that dread S10 mass driver. Gladius need not apply. (This is worst case. The Idris has 2 shields and you only need to knock down the fore to get to the spinal mount. Just we don’t know how the shields are split: fore and aft or port and starboard.)
I don’t know the damage of the bomb racks but I can’t believe they’re giving bombs hundreds of thousands points of damage.
IMHO, you don’t want your Idris in range of another Idris until their shields are gone missing, and killing the opposing big gun or the shield gets you bonus brownies. Also, we need to know the rearm time of the Eclipse. It’s possible they can be rearmed in sequence, return and continue to knock down the shield. If so, they should launch from the stern so the bow is not opened to receive them.
BTW, erkul is not displaying the details of the S12 torps, so there’s no way for me to compare TTK for the three weapons. I’m curious what people think about the three options. I know for sure serving on an Idris against another Idris, I would want a fighter screen just to kill incoming torps. Their range is many times that of the other weapons. You could take a lot of torp salvoes just trying to close in to use the railgun or laser.
The SC Ship Performance calculator says an Idris can see another Idris at 60km. Rail and beam weapons have a range of 10km, but the S12 torps likely have a range of 60km. This means a gun equipped Idris fighting a torp equipped Idris needs to approach through fire for 50km before it gets into the fight. Actually, we should expect the torp boat to reverse, so the distance will be about 50% longer—75km. This possibility is why you have to have an effective fighter screen and means to attack at distance, other than from the Idris itself. You really need the bombers and stealth bombers need stealth escorts and distractions for the turrets and PDCs.
Long story short, if your carried ships can knock down the shield and destroy the spinal mount without your own Idris taking hits, you can manage the distance and kill it with your own spinal mount, whatever it is.
So to be more explicit: I think (we don’t know the exact length of the flight deck—just “about 200 meters”) I think you can park 3 rows of 3 EX facing directly forward in the bows, 3 Eclipse facing aft directly behind them, and 4 Fury side by side facing aft just aft of the Eclipse. This puts your bow closed before the fight starts and allows Eclipse to rearm one at a time, if there’s time.
Last couple fine details
3 S9 Typhoon torps have just slightly more damage than 1 of the Idris shield’s health. It is possible to deplete 1 shield with the first Eclipse Salvo, and destroy the spinal mount with the second. However, the Idris has 15.5M hp, so you can’t kill it with the third Eclipse salvo. Not even close.
The Idris has S5 missiles with a range of 30km. You could maybe finish off a job with that, but they’re only 17k damage each and it’s a single launcher. Not much help when we’re talking about million point shields and components.
I really do agree with Ayeteeone, though it may not sound like it. If you didn’t care about overcrowding the beds and deck of the hanger, and it really is 200 meters long; you could put 6 Eclipse (120m) and 15 EX (60m) and have room for a Pisces Med and/or Turtle. With 6 Eclipse you can knock down both shields and the spinal mount with one salvo, or completely obliterate twin Void Bombers. Depends how much art you can get out if your pilot parking just how much you want to squeeze in there. I do recommend anyone who puts 3 squadrons of EX in there, code name them Red, Gold and Blue and get the appropriate livery. There’s 7-8 to choose from.
IMHO, it is worthwhile to focus on how to ensure you are landing torps. If it proves too untrustworthy or difficult then fall back to the railgun. The extreme range of the torps makes them attractive since you can theoretically kill an opponent without taking any hits. Seems worth it to me, despite torps are very easy to shoot down. That means focus on putting fighters against turrets, PDCs, torp shepherding fighters, torp chasing fighters and incoming torps.
