Fleet Dynamics

[Shadow Reaper]

They only mention the composition of their fleet at the beginning, and then fly the Carrack for the rest of the vid. There are however, a host of things to learn from what they're proposing and doing.

View: https://youtu.be/Ni04iWICja4


1) They're proposing the Carrack, HH, Retaliator and Andromeda for fleet composition. Half their proposed fleet is for torp and missile support.

2) They can't catch their quarry with the Carrack, because they don't understand micro-jumping. Five or six times they note their very fast ship is not fast enough to catch the MSR when in fact it most certainly is fast enough, had they used the Q drive. They have a TS-2 installed. They should have used it.

3) They mention three times that they don't have missiles nor torps and needed them. If they parked a Ballista on the hangar deck they would have had all the missiles and torps they needed. Fact is, they do not need a Tally nor Andromeda, both of which are too slow for these engagements. The Tally, Andromeda and M2 all have SCMs 75% of the Carrack, and Redeemer, which are the ships they should be flying in a fleet. The Hammerhead has an SCM 50% of the Carrack and Redeemer and is thus inadequate for pursuit missions. Of these, only the Carrack has room for a Ballista.

Conclusion: IMHO, best practice for fleets able to win in all circumstances should include only the Carrack and Redeemer and have fast military Q drives and Ballistas on the Carracks. This will likely remain so until release of the Polaris or Idris.

**Note Erkul is reporting alternately the SCM of the Redeemer as both 208 and/or 140. The later sounds broken, but if it is the case, there's little reason to use anything other than Carracks for fleet ops at this time. They're fast, hardy, powerful, have superior scan than all other large ships and med beds. If TEST wants to own the skies, they could do it simply by refining the proper use of the Carrack including micro-jumping and adding the Ballista.

Since I'm being so bold in response to this fleet post of another org, I should just end here with my simple recommendation. Until we know that Revenants don't supply enough staying power for lengthy confrontations, the Carrack should be wearing them. They offer twice the firepower, the ability to penetrate shields from the first moments of battle, enhanced power to shields and thrusters, and the 240 rounds is 160 seconds (2 and 2/3 minutes) of overclocked fire time. Put this in perspective. In 20 seconds with all guns blazing, a Carrack can lay down about 240k points damage which is easily enough to kill a Hammerhead. A single Carrack can do this 8 times without reloading, so people need to stop being afraid of the reloading requirement. That is a LOT of fire time. FR-86, Durango, Chill Max, TS-2 and a Ballista parked on the hangar doors should be able to completely dominate any/all other ships in game when handled properly. Likewise, we see in this vid, a Carrack piloted properly can indeed orbit (they called it "spiral") a Hammerhead and avoid virtually all incoming fire. The Carrack is the Hammerhead killer because the HH is too slow, which allows opponents to orbit it.

As mentioned previously, the effect of micro-jumping the Carrack across the battlefield rather than simply out of it, is a technique known as "maneuver warfare". By definition this is a military strategy which attempts to defeat the enemy by incapacitating their decision making through shock and disruption. People sometimes say WWII was the first war that leveraged this strategy, but it is well documented that Genghis Khan and Geronimo both used this strategy to great effect.

Also mentioned previously is the notion of adding missiles and torps to the Carrack with the Ballista. This is the military approach known as "Combined Arms", which seeks to obtain mutually complementary effects by combining different capabilities. In order to extend the capabilities of a Carrack beyond what adding a Ballista could accomplish, best is probably to add stealth support and more missiles. An escort of Shrikes is likely a top choice since these can keep up with a Carrack's SCM and attack opponents unawares, whereas ships like the Eclipse cannot move sufficient to keep pace with the Carrack. So final example: a dozen fighters would be a tough nut for a lone Carrack to crack, but if those fighters were disrupted by 2-4 Shrikes firing pairs of missiles on them repeatedly from unknown locations, the Carrack would then have a huge advantage over them as they would be unable to line up for attack runs. Orbiting a Carrack at 15 km, several Shrikes could lock and strike attacking fighters with 9k Thunderbolt salvos with relative impunity, as the only way to detect them would be active pinging, which fighters almost never indulge in. A single Shrike carries about 110k damage in Thunderbolts, so can make a serious contribution even against large vessels.

Forming a group of about a dozen players that can field a Carrack for complex multi-player missions, and call up a few Shrikes when necessary, also gives the Carrack reason to practice the very important skills of a comms officer needed for larger group engagements. So treating a single ship as a fieldable entity, but short of a "battle group" makes good sense, and partnering several of these can then make a battle group. This is a vastly more capable plan then adding Retaliators and Connies to a strike group, as both these can be easily dispatched by Shrikes and cannot be targeted by them.

 

[Dirtbag_Leader]

Good writeup, but leaves me with two questions:
1.) How does one go about 'microjumping?' Do you need someone in like a Herald that can quickly fly to the point you want, and then you jump to that player? Or is there a different way?
2.) Though I've seen it done, how in the heck does one go about maneuvering a Balista INTO the Carrack's hangar?

 

[Shadow Reaper]

I have never seen anyone put a Ballista on the Carrack hangar, but if you can spawn a Ballista on an elevated pad and back the Carrack up to the edge, you can likely drive the Ballista where you want it from fore or aft. It appears the Ballista will then be in the way of some of the dorsal turret's fire arc, but that is not much sacrifice to make for all the firepower the Ballista offers. I'm guessing the Ballista will be in the way of the dorsal turret firing directly forward, which is a significant sacrifice. To avoid that, one supposes you could stack boxes in the Carrack hangar bay, leave the doors open, and drive the Ballista down onto the boxes so that most of it is actually inside the bay. That doesn't sound like something that could be done quickly before each tour, but who knows until you try? The solution needs to be something simple since you probably cannot store it this way. Probably. . .we don't really know. No one has done this that I know of. Failing all of this, you could simply find a way to drive the Ballista down into the hangar, and fire missiles and torps dorsally. They don't have to fire forward. Measure how long it takes your Carrack to pitch down 90*. That's not published info but is something any good Captain will want to know.

I suppose too, one could try to drive the Ballista off the ramp of a Herc and onto the Carrack, on the ground or in space. In space it would be interesting to see what the multi-tool tractor does to a Ballista. Can you move it at all?

Micro-jumping relies upon the same waypoints as any other jumping. You merely exit the jump early by measuring your jump in seconds. (Alion Nova Guard mastered this in SWC.) You won't have any idea how many seconds to jump until you have practiced this at length and recorded how far each jump is with a particular drive, overclocked or not. Jumping is very nonlinear because there are different stages of jump that move at different speeds. It's a very complex process to master. It's important to note here though, that in general, military drives are good for this because their spool time is about 1/4 to 1/5 that of other drives. You're waiting 4 seconds minus whatever the overclocking subtracts, instead of 20 seconds. However, slower drives will provide much more precision in jumping, so they're worth consideration too. Certainly small ships hugely benefit from drives other than military, because they are so limited in range with a military drive.

So to give an illustration. Katie is above lamenting they can't catch the MSR they're chasing. At time index 11:00 they realize they're about to lose their prey. At time index 11:06 their target crosses a celestial object the Q Drive can lock onto. Had they jumped just for a few seconds, they would then have been in front of the MSR. MSRs are fast, but they turn like shit. It would have flown right into the Carrack's gaping maw. End of target. Now to be more precise: the jump target at 11:06 was below the trajectory of the MSR. When you exit the jump, you will need to pitch up to center your target so all batteries can fire at once. Of course you could simply use what turrets come to bare when you're faced another direction. However, best practice is all turrets fire. If you jumped past your target, you'll need to pitch almost 180*, but if you jumped less than this, you'll need to pitch less. You can actually plan to lock and fire on the target as it passes, if you're really good. You can do this with targets that are to left or right of your jump, and approach them from the side. You can position yourself for missile shots this way, and much, much more. The key is always surprise, and if you can jump and not have them see where you went, all the better to rotate and fire before they can react. Maneuver warfare is the art of surprise.

To master this, you load something like the TS-2 onto a Carrack and overclock it. Go out 50 km from a station and start making practice jumps toward the station and clock them with a stopwatch so they are as precise as can be. Note how far you moved and how long that movement took. Do this enough and you'll be proficient in micro-jumping. That's a serious combat skill to learn.

Overclocking the drive does not shorten travel time. It only shortens spool time, which is important in combat. If Q drives were not intended to be used in combat, they would not have an overclock option and military drives would not have reduced spool times.

I once watched a pilot micro-jump his Eclipse perhaps 15 times in half that many minutes. I suppose that's one way to grow proficient at it. Go out for an entire evening with your bridge crew and jump until the Q drive dies on you. Find out what it's like when it dies on you.

I mentioned some years ago but it can't hurt noting again, that the door is open for any enterprising player to build a micro-jump calculator. It should in principle be possible to build a macro where you tell the ship in voice command to jump a specific distance, and the ship will simply do it. That is a macro players would pay handsomely for.

Back to Fleet Dynamics for a moment. Skunk says they plan "Battle Groups" composed of Carrack, Hammerhead, Tally and Andromeda. (They said this before the introduction of the Redeemer so one supposes they're adding them.) Those ships vary in SCM so much that they're either going to sacrifice the speed of their fastest ships, or get spread out all over. My guess is they'll leave the Tallies and Connies behind, where they will be easy pickins from short range. A Carrack that knows micro-jumping well can literally cut such a fleet to ribbons all by itself. It's that important a capability. Tallies cannot target torps below 2.6km and they need 5 seconds to lock. Jump on top of the Tallies first and kill them with guns, while you kill the Connies with S5 missiles and the HH and Redeemers with S7 torps. That leaves the Carrack with no escorts and if you have Revenants, you can deliver twice the DPS your opponent can, because everyone is still afraid of running out of ammo.

Add Shrikes orbiting at 15 km to confuse the enemy.

 

[maynard]

what I came away with is that being a crew member on a well-run ship will be as engaging as piloting your own small ship - and likely more survivable

and there is a lot to learn to be an effective combat crew

 

[Richard Bong]

In Star Citizen microjumping doesn't help. If you can jump so can your target. If your target jumps, they are gone.

Putting a Ballista on the Hangar Doors of a Carrack is interesting, but shouldn't work, especially long term. With few exceptions, like the pads on a Kraken or Liberator, or a balcony, exterior surfaces aren't supposed to have gravity.

The Carrack is the long range eyes and ears of a fleet, not the teeth. You need a mix to cover various missions and targets. What works to keep fighters off a mining operation is different that what is needed for a ground assault or a strike against an escorted Idris.

Kate likes ground missions, they use the Carrack over other ships because of the respawn capabilities.

What this does show is that cooperation, and communication on a large ship, a ground operation, squadron and/or a taskforce are the keys to success.

 

[Richard Bong]

To put a Ballista on the hangar doors of a Carrack. Get close to the Carrack with a Hercules, open the Hercules ramp and back the Ballista onto the Carrack.

 

[FZD]

Well, I'll throw in my 2cents as well:

Right now, 3 players flying their own ships is just straight up better than 3 players sharing a ship. The best fleet composition is, therefore, a mix of light, medium and heavy fighters. If you have couple people who absolutely want to sit on turrets, then Redeemer with 3 people isn't that much worse than 3 solo.

Anyhow, heavy fighters like Ares' make short work of large and capital ships. Medium fighters are very versatile, typically capable of going after large ships, heavy fighters, other mediums and even light fighters. Meanwhile, light fighters are just incredible against heavy fighters and do pretty well against mediums.

And the best part about fighters is that they got just insane amounts of damage mitigation. The only form of damage mitigation in the game currently is simply not getting hit, and small ships excel at that. Each small ship (and medium-sized fighters?) can easily negate tens if not hundreds of thousands worth of damage by just being agile, so for example putting 7 people behind (200k/4 shield faces + 80k hull)/ 7 people = 19k hp per person in a hammerhead is just all sorts of stupid right now.

Do I hate how absolutely lopsided the balance is currently? Yes. Is it likely to change? Yes. But that's how it is currently, and we don't know what direction the balance would shift when it eventually does.

 

[Shadow Reaper]

I think CIG is forcing fleet design to require a rock, paper scissors solution. Too much variety and you lose either speed or fleet cohesion. Too little variety and you have the troubles you're noting. Certainly CIG is going to force real fleets to fly fighter screens. They're already set up for this.

I doubt that groups like Skunk will stay with the Connie, Tally, HH, Carrack solution they mentioned in the vid. Rather, my guess is they'll go for a slow group (Tally, HH) and a fast group (Redeemer, Carrack) with the Ares between and lose the Connie now that the Ares and Redeemer are in. I think if you can mount Ballistas on Carracks, flying just Carracks and Shrikes should be enough to kill such fleets, and you have the benefit that all of your ships are in the fast category, which can be extremely important. The faster fleet usually gets to dictate terms of engagement.

Certainly, you need light fighters to kill the Ares. I like the Shrike because it is nearly invisible. You can fly a lone Carrack and make it appear alone when it is not. Three pair of Shrikes orbiting a Carrack would kill virtually any Ares contingent. In a single salvo, a pair of Shrike can kill the shields on an Ares, and on the second salvo kill the Ares itself. I would fly Shrikes in pairs for this reason. Though NPC fleets will probably ping, PC fleets probably not. They would start to ping once they discovered stealth on the field, but by the time that happens you might well eliminate all the Ares. You would certainly start your opponent out confused.

Since the capacitor, magazine and shield changes in 3.14, it really is not better to fly a fighter than sit a turret. Large ballistics rule, and small fighters seldom get them. Small ballistics have very small magazines so fighters won't fly them. Only ships that carry S4, S5 and S7 will bother much with ballistics. Turrets have larger capacitors than fighters, so they don't run out of shots so quickly and large ships have large shields which make medium shields pale in comparison. Since 3.14, we are looking at the details that will give rise to real fleet engagements. Large ships are coming into their own.

If you field Carracks with Shrike escorts, you can field them in more places than a single large fleet, and combine them for real fleet engagements. Compared to a more mixed fleet, you have superior sensors, superior speed, you have stealth, and if you have Ballistas on the Carrack decks, you have missiles and torps surprise. I think I would take that over the what you see is what you get mix of multi-SCM ships Skunk seems to want to field.

If Ballistas fit on Carracks, it will be very interesting to find out whether the Ballistas come up on sensors. Carracks have such a bright EM sig that Ballistas on their decks might not show up even when fully powered, and since they don't use propulsion, are sitting under the Carrack's shields and don't need power to launch missiles, you can wait until the opportune moment to power them. Big surprise. And I hope I don't sound too repetitive, but if you load ballistics on your Carracks, they will be faster, more maneuverable and have better shields than Carracks with energy weapons. They and their Shrikes will in fact be overwhelmingly faster than their opponents.

 

[FZD]

The Ares just does not have the shields and is too slow to evade Revenants.

Well, let's say you got the same number of players on each side. 5 people in the carrack vs 5 Ares' (And then whatever number of escorts the Carrack has is engaging equal number of escorts the Ares' have), those Ares attack in a well coordinated manner hitting just one side of the ship. This means that you effectively have only two turrets fighting against 5 Ares', those turrets do 2064 dps each with Revenants. Meanwhile each Ares inferno is hitting Carrack with 4740 dps. Assuming nobody manages to evade anything, Ares can have 17250 hp bubble + 10k hp body. Ballistics on average penetrate 25%, so to destroy the body you'd need to hit 40k damage worth assuming you couldn't get through the shield, but since the shield+body is less than 40k hp, you'll just need 27250 damage per Ares, or with 2 of those ravenant turrets, 13.2 seconds per Ares, or just over a minute for all of them.

Meanwhile, Carrack can have 230k hp quadrant shield with 93k hull hp. That is to say, 57.5k on the shield face and then 93k on the hull. Those Ares will destroy the Carrack in just 6.35 seconds. Even if the carrack somehow managed to bring all guns to bear on the attackers, which would be quite the blunder on the attackers side, the Carrack would be lucky to destroy one of the 5 with concentrated fire before being blown up itself (6.6s is still longer than 6.35). And while Carrack has higher top speed than the Ares, it is less agile, not to mention a vastly larger target. So realistically, if anybody is dodging anything, it'd be the Ares'.

Does a 5 player carrack win against a solo Ares? Yes, absolutely. But once you bring in the same number of players, no.

 

[Raven_King]

This is fun theorycrafting, and a lot of what everyone's saying makes sense, but it feels like at least some of it could be tested to see if it works now, as predicting what will work after release (or in the medium-term) after CIG rebalance and rework stats feels a little like reading tea-leaves.

Get close to the Carrack with a Hercules

Anyone know what other ships can take a Ballista? We can surely try this out in-game now; it only takes three players who between them need a Carrack (common) a Hercules (common enough), and a Ballista (no idea how common, maybe not very, I wonder if you can rent one?). The Carrack and Herc spawn wherever, and I guess travel (with the Ballista driver, if they even need one), to a ground facility with pads to spawn that. Then it's just ship jenga, take it to quantum, fire some missiles at the Herc to see what that's like, and home for tea and medals. I'd be up for trying this, and have a Carrack and a Herc C2. Don't have a Ballista.

If Ballistas fit on Carracks

Close enough that neither the Ballista nor the Carrack take damage during the dropoff. Would be interesting to try landing the Herc (or smaller Ballista-carrier if we can find one) on top of the Carrack, and see if we can do that without damaging either (too badly).

But once you bring in the same number of players, no.

For all the fun of @Shadow Reaper's combo, and all the potential it brings to improve a team's lethality and ability to surprise, our most valuable asset in a fight is surely skilled and cooperating players, not ships. It seems to me that the current balance doesn't make N players in one ship more potent than those same N players in N ships. It seems to me they are always less potent right now, irrespective of what large ship they are using. That doesn't seem intended long term, and I hope it's not true long term.

I just hope that at some point game balance is adjusted, and is also constantly tweaked to keep it in a state where, with the current meta at the time, for a given group of N players, against an equal number of opposing players, those with greater coordination and skill as both individual operators and in a group will almost always win.

I don't think that it is just now, but if that was the case, the single most useful piece of information you would want radar/sensors/scans to reveal would be how many players were on board an enemy ship. Next most useful might be ship type, then whether players were actively using voice comms (can 'radar' or some other sensors detect radio traffic occuring in target ships?), and some sort of org/team affiliation beyond 'friend or foe'. And somewhere low down the priority list, how many NPCs or AI blades were operating on the ship. Without that information, the opposition should have a huge margin of doubt about how capable the ship will be in combat.

 

[Richard Bong]

This is fun theorycrafting, and a lot of what everyone's saying makes sense, but it feels like at least some of it could be tested to see if it works now, as predicting what will work after release (or in the medium-term) after CIG rebalance and rework stats feels a little like reading tea-leaves.

Anyone know what other ships can take a Ballista? We can surely try this out in-game now; it only takes three players who between them need a Carrack (common) a Hercules (common enough), and a Ballista (no idea how common, maybe not very, I wonder if you can rent one?). The Carrack and Herc spawn wherever, and I guess travel (with the Ballista driver, if they even need one), to a ground facility with pads to spawn that. Then it's just ship jenga, take it to quantum, fire some missiles at the Herc to see what that's like, and home for tea and medals. I'd be up for trying this, and have a Carrack and a Herc C2. Don't have a Ballista.


Close enough that neither the Ballista nor the Carrack take damage during the dropoff. Would be interesting to try landing the Herc (or smaller Ballista-carrier if we can find one) on top of the Carrack, and see if we can do that without damaging either (too badly).

For all the fun of @Shadow Reaper's combo, and all the potential it brings to improve a team's lethality and ability to surprise, our most valuable asset in a fight is surely skilled and cooperating players, not ships. It seems to me that the current balance doesn't make N players in one ship more potent than those same N players in N ships. It seems to me they are always less potent right now, irrespective of what large ship they are using. That doesn't seem intended long term, and I hope it's not true long term.

I just hope that at some point game balance is adjusted, and is also constantly tweaked to keep it in a state where, with the current meta at the time, for a given group of N players, against an equal number of opposing players, those with greater coordination and skill as both individual operators and in a group will almost always win.

I don't think that it is just now, but if that was the case, the single most useful piece of information you would want radar/sensors/scans to reveal would be how many players were on board an enemy ship. Next most useful might be ship type, then whether players were actively using voice comms (can 'radar' or some other sensors detect radio traffic occuring in target ships?), and some sort of org/team affiliation beyond 'friend or foe'. And somewhere low down the priority list, how many NPCs or AI blades were operating on the ship. Without that information, the opposition should have a huge margin of doubt about how capable the ship will be in combat.

Currently, in game, the only ships that can carry a Ballista, Spartan or Tank is the Hercules series and, I think, the 890J.
The Carrack can not, the vehicle bay isn't tall enough.

There is a video of a guy using a tank on the 890J mission, by dropping it into the landing bay using a Hercules. It is pretty funny, but not as effective as you would think.
You don't land the Herc, you back out off the ramp and fall the short distance. :) It shouldn't work, but it does.

 

[Raven_King]

by dropping it into the landing bay using a Hercules

I think this is what @Shadow Reaper meant, but either in the top landing bay meant for the Pisces - doors open if necessary, or simply on top of the closed hangar doors. Interested to try it if someone else has a Ballista or we can rent one, and the calendars/time zones can work. I'm in the UK, UTC (=GMT), free some evenings but a busy family life can make it hard to schedules stuff that's just for fun. Anyone else up for trying? Maybe someone could do much of the experiment solo, but I think it would take a lot of time and attempts.

 

[Shadow Reaper]

Yes, the whole Ballista notion came to be when the Skunk team noted the Carrack hangar doors lock down ships parked on top of them. The feature could allow Ecplise to be brought into battle as well, but since they fire from below they can't fire when parked.

 

[Raven_King]

they can't fire when parked

Not twice, anyway.

 

[Richard Bong]

I think this is what @Shadow Reaper meant, but either in the top landing bay meant for the Pisces - doors open if necessary, or simply on top of the closed hangar doors. Interested to try it if someone else has a Ballista or we can rent one, and the calendars/time zones can work. I'm in the UK, UTC (=GMT), free some evenings but a busy family life can make it hard to schedules stuff that's just for fun. Anyone else up for trying? Maybe someone could do much of the experiment solo, but I think it would take a lot of time and attempts.

On the Carrack, that is onto the hangar doors, not into the hangar. You can't fire the ballista from in the hangar, even it is does fit. (I'm not sure if it actually fits into the Carrack Hangar.) The 89J, unlike the Carrack, has a hangar lift. In theory, the 890J and the Polaris could, if you can get it there, put a vehicle on the lift and fire from there.

 

[Shadow Reaper]

This means that you effectively have only two turrets fighting against 5 Ares', those turrets do 2064 dps each with Revenants.

I think a Carrack pilot would try to chase down the Ares individually, and since it is much faster than the Ares it could be successful. Failing this, rolling the ship gets you a new set of shields, so the Carrack is harder to crack than seems. If it has ballistics, the shields will regen the full 3k/s and it can roll back and forth regularly. However, it is the Ballista that is the game changer. It carries 8 S5 torps, each of which will remove all the shields off an Ares. You could kill 4 Ares with them outright (and the Ares has no real defense) or just take down their shields and then kill them with guns.

Still, IMHO you cannot really theorycraft "fleet dynamics" without some kind of combined force, so you really do need to consider what fighters a Carrack would benefit from most. Lets suppose for argument's sake, a Carrack with 6 Shrikes (12 players) was attacked by a Carrack, Redeemer, HH, Tally and 3 Ares (24 players).

If the Shrikes targeted the Ares first, they could well defeat them before they were discovered and then turn their missiles on the Redeemer. The latter would have a terrible time chasing Shrikes since they don't need to get within range of the Redeemer's guns and are faster. (Control the engagement!) Just getting the Redeemer to chase them is all full of win for the Shrikes. 6 Shrikes need 5 missile salvos to kill the Redeemer and that could take a long time, but the Redeemer is out of the main battle. No matter how many missiles the Redeemer shoots down, I don't think it can survive 6 Shrikes. If the Shrike pilots are good and a little lucky, they might all of them survive because they don't need to get in the Redeemer's guns range and they're maneuverable enough to avoid the Redeemer''s missiles.

If the lone Carrack launched 1 S7 at the Tally it could instantly vaporize. It should probably launch 2 in case the first is shot down. The S5 torps can then all go at the HH, which cannot evade them. The Ballista has 280k points in S5 torps. Say 2/3 of them get through the HH turrets. It's shields are almost down when the Carrack closes with all 8 Revenants. It will not last long.

The end of the conflict is a 1 Carrack against a better armed Carrack and 6 Shrikes that can launch salvos of 12 Thunderbolt IIIs for 55k@. It cannot survive.

Personally, I would prefer to have a second Carrack jump in once battle is joined and that is a more fair comparison (18 v 24 players), but you almost don't need it if everyone knows who to target right away. Shrikes should know to target fighters first, Redeemer second. Carracks should know to launch S7s and S5s before in gun range. All of that is surprise attack and will greatly overwhelm.

It may sound like I'm cheating since I didn't even mention the firepower coming in from the other side. I am cheating. The larger fleet will have launched many torps and missiles as well, but without knowing what lands when, there is no way to theorycraft in greater detail. I'm just noting the Carrack should attack the Tally first, the HH second and the other Carrack last. Even position on the board should not disturb this sequence much since you really can't allow the Tally to fire torps over and over.

And we have not talked at all about the Eclipse. Who would want a fleet without them? That's a whole 'nother discussion. Three men in Eclipses are much more dangerous than 4-5 men in a Tally since it is so hard to stop them, but they again require a light fighter presence. They can't move with a regular fleet because they are so slow, unless you get accustomed to micro-jumping. Also, my guess is we have a false scenario here because I can't imagine anyone flying a fleet with no light fighters. Killing light fighters sucks, because there is just no way to do that very quickly.

And there are other sneaky tricks to consider. Has anyone seen a match between the Raven and the Redeemer? Ravens are really fast. What happens if they pulse inside the Redeemer's shields?

 

[Richard Bong]

I think a Carrack pilot would try to chase down the Ares individually, and since it is much faster than the Ares it could be successful. Failing this, rolling the ship gets you a new set of shields, so the Carrack is harder to crack than seems. If it has ballistics, it will regen 3k/s and can roll back and forth regularly. However, it is the Ballista that is the game changer. It carries 8 S5 torps, each of which will remove all the shields off an Ares. You could kill 4 Ares with them ouright (and the Ares has no real defense) or just take down their shields and then kill them with guns.

Still, IMHO you cannot really theorycraft "fleet dynamics" without some kind of combined force, so you really do need to consider what fighters a Carrack would benefit most from. Lets suppose for argument's sake, a Carrack with 6 Shrikes (12 players) was attacked by a Carrack, Redeemer, HH, Tally and 3 Ares (24 players).

If the Shrikes targeted the Ares first, they could well defeat them before they were discovered and then turn their missiles on the Redeemer. The latter would have a terrible time chasing Shrikes since they don't need to get within range of the Redeemer's guns and are faster. Just getting the Redeemer to chase them is all full of win for the Shrikes.

If the lone Carrack launched 1 S7 at the Tally it could instantly vaporize. It should probably launch 2 in case the first is shot down. The S5 missiles can then all go at the HH, which cannot evade them. It has 280k points in S5 torps. Say 2/3 of them get through the HH turrets. It's shields are almost down when the Carrack closes with all 8 Revenants. It will not last long.

The end of the conflict is a 1 Carrack against a better armed Carrack and 6 Shrikes that can launch salvos of 12 Thunderbolt IIIs for 55k@. It cannot survive.

Personally, I would prefer to have a second Carrack jump in once battle is joined and that is a more fair comparison (18 v 24 players), but you almost don't need it if everyone knows who to target right away. Shrikes should know to target fighters first, Redeemer second. Carracks should know to launch S7s and S5s before in gun range. All of that is surprise attack and will greatly overwhelm.

If it has Revenants it only has 15 seconds of ammo.

 

[NoizeMaker]

One thing I'll be interested in concerning fleet dynamics is "ramming" derelict/dying ships into enemy capital vessels. Long, drawn-out battles will require contingency tactics built around impending death. It would be especially cool if capital-class husks of hull acted as effective cover for fighters which would bring an interesting dynamic to fleet battles concerning ship placement in the field.

What ships will be best for this, how much damage will they do, and is it a viable strategy to "Holdo" a near-death ship and its captain and/or crew? Also, if the armor of an explorer like the Carrack is tough enough, would it make sense to default to ramming with it in desperate situations against slightly smaller or less "beefy" opponents?

Either way, I find it odd folks have defaulted to using Carracks in these fleets. It indicates that balance is off when you have a military exploration vessel becoming a default member of a battle group.

 

[Shadow Reaper]

If it has Revenants it only has 15 seconds of ammo.

You're scaring me. My intel says overclocked Revenants have a 900 rpm rate of fire and 240 rounds is 2 minutes 40 seconds, or 160 seconds fire time. If that's true it is more than enough for any fleet engagement like we're considering. Did I make an ooops here? I hate when that happens.

 

[Shadow Reaper]

Either way, I find it odd folks have defaulted to using Carracks in these fleets. It indicates that balance is off when you have a military exploration vessel becoming a default member of a battle group.

This will change completely with release of the Polaris, Idris and Javelin. It is a very temporary situation. Richard is probably right that CIG will eventually remove the ability to park atop hangar doors. However, for now we have what we have and we have no Polaris, Idris nor Javelin. They would certainly make the Carrack obsolete, but the crews training in Carracks now will make the best combat crews later on.

If CIG leaves the Carrack hangar doors alone, the Carrack will remain a good fleet position as bait for fleets of Polaris, Idris and Javelins. Bait with fangs.