Anybody kill a capital in a fighter yet?

[TangentialThreat]

So talk about post-shield-change PVP experiences here.



I built myself a fancy 500-mass stealthed and radar-jammed fighter and had zero success against a Titan-class ship that was big enough you could park a submarine in the landing bay (more on that later). I could survive indefinitely in a fighter by cloaking whenever he was about to get me into his sights and moving away for another pass but one fighter wasn't enough firepower to bring the shield down in a reasonable amount of time and you'd probably need two or three people in these fighters to ensure the big ship never gets any windows for shield regen. I would call that a draw.



I did beat this guy in round 2 when he attacked my faction's shipyards but it wasn't a fair fight at all. The planetary guns weakened him a bit and while he's shooting up our shipyards I circle around behind him in a 1:1 scale replica of a Los Angeles class attack submarine (about 1,000 mass and loaded with AMCs). I won only because this fucking guy didn't think to look behind him and thought all the damage was coming from the planetary guns in front of him. He backs up to get away from the strangely powerful guns and I back up, still behind him, and we keep backing up together until his shield failed and I fired ze torpedoez.

 

[Krazykat]

Not a fighter but my corvette class was able to drop the shields within a minute and pop in 4 missiles. However it was just a block of stuff, my asthetic Corvette was not able to

 

[ThiagoTGM]

I\'m not sure if the guy was stupid because he kept shooting at the planetary guns. If he zoomed out, he would he you was in a much smaller ship. And considering how slow those things turn, it\'s probably more worthy to try and shoot what he can shoot instead of turning to try and hit you, what is nearly impossible.

As for your first fight, yes, people exaggerate too much by saying a fighter can take out a capital, but who knows what the outcome may have been with a slightly bigger ship? A destroyer probably has enough speed to keep behind the Titan (and be untouched) even without camouflage, and depending on how it is built, take out the shields and destroy the ship by itself.

 

[MrFURB]

I just did a test with Doomsider, my 60 mass interceptor against his 2500 mass moderately-armed mining rig. His mining rig had okay thrust, decent forward weapons and shields, but no drones or turrets, and no missiles.

My interceptor had a 6:1 thrust/mass ratio, perma-stealth capability, two AMC cannons, and the ability to turn quite fast.

I ambushed him from behind, and the server we were in had no maximum speed.

With my radar jammer on I very slowly pounded his shields down while he struggled to first find me, then face me. Eventually I got through and got his core, but it look a few minutes of maneuvering around him.

He never got a change to turn and face me, but if the speed limit was set to something between 50-200 I bet he could have hit max speed and delta-vector\'d me, which would put me in his sights and dead. Also, turrets would have made me keep my distance to a minimum of 200 meters, and any support ships would make me disengage.



In the end, the current system doesn\'t support lone, unsupported capital ships. Always use turrets, and if you can have friends/drones available for defense, do that too. Bigger ships shouldn\'t rely solely on forward facing weapons for firepower when they have to worry about their soft rumps.

 

[epicbastion]

the ships most affected by the sheild change are the the destroyer to battlecruiser classes, so ships between 100 and 1500 mass. My 290 mass cruiser with 60k shields, power storage of 60k and power regen of 60k could withstand about 20 seconds of fire from 600 hp of amc\'s. Where as the 4000 mass battleship/borg cube with 260k of shields and 500k of power with no power storage could withstand about 5 minutes of continuous fire from 600 hp of amc\'s both of course were on rapid fire. Now of course in battle as long as someone is not kinda dumb if you are in a battleship class you are going to move off when your shields start to be reduced from fire. So the midsize ships can no longer fly indepently and expect to come out of an encounter in one pc. A battleship or above can just keep on moving and will most likely not take any damage at all.

By the way, the regen delay is .5 sec up to 256 shield blocks, 1 sec up to 1024, 2 sec up to 4096 3 sec up to 16384. I have not yet tested whether the 4 second line is at 65536 but if I were a betting man I would guess that is the case. Moral of this story if you are going to build a cruiser mass between 200 and 500 the first 1024 blocks should be shields. If you are going to go the next level and build a battlecruiser the first 4096 blocks should be shields. At the battleship and above first 16384 blocks.

 

[TangentialThreat]

Still no luck, although I got much closer with the stealth fighter with practice. I saw the shields go down for a second and tried to missile it but by then my ship was half-gone.



Ambushing ships that are molesting the faction shipyards is a winning tactic. I blew most of the back end off one of the server\'s largest capitals with a Los Angeles class again, although the colossal front end managed to wheel around and destroy my ship before limping home to base.



Basically, 1v1 the big ships win. If you can hide your signature with a jammer or by being in the middle of a crowded battlefield then you stand a good chance of living long enough to inflict a decisive blow. Next I\'m going to try sticking a bunch of even-smaller Bobby fighters to a midsize ship and hope that distracts them.

 

[Trollerbobman]

im pretty sure the disintegrator explosives arent stopped by shields.

 

[Nootau]

They are

 

[Aryl]

I\'ve never had shields interfear with the explosives. I\'ve blown capital ships apart with my fighter, a long poker rod and a 10x10x10 box of explosives.

 

[Trafalgar]

They work like missles. If you\'re poking a ship with dis-integrators, either you have enough to overcome the shields and cause blast damage to the ship, or you don\'t and it (and its shields) seem to be unaffected. But you need an absurd amount of dis-integrators to overcome shields, and considering that it is one use only, it is more sensible to directly place one dis-integrator on your target so that it ignores their shields, and then ram it with something shielded. Of course you can only do that when the target is not factioned.

 

[TangentialThreat]

Maybe my definition of a typical capital ship is different, but absolutely nothing happens when I ram 10x10x10 cubes of explosives into the mostly-intact remnants of a ship that once tried to attack the faction base. This tactic obviously does a lot of damage all at once but not enough damage to break the shields by itself during a typical Monday assault on our server. It is also kind of a pain to buy that many consumables.

 

[HaViC is Chaos]

Isn\'t there currently a glitch that allows 2 near simultaneous missiles to pierce shields? From my experience if you have 2 missile computers. and rapidly fire both at a ship, the second one ot hit will go throught the shields. This means that currently a fighter can kill a capital quite easily. Especially a stealth fighter.

 

[vernes]

Digging into Capitals quickly become a bad choice as soon as there are turrets with AI involved.

I was chewing into one of the turrets, soon as you get through the shield the AI gets pissed.
since the turret was 4 times the size of my Grand Theft Spaceship, it singleshot killed me.

Tried to move out of the way but not fast enough.

Turrets, they are manditory now.

 

[vabese]

not only are turrets good because of them shooting, but if your smart, you\'d cover some of the weaker parts of your ship in them, they don\'t need actually need to be on to get some benefits, since they will have a separate shield generation, and can act as additional plated armour. or escape pods for that mater.

 

[Mr Anderson]

I like doing the best of both worlds; capital ships with lots of turrets and missiles, plus a large fighter bay with AM cannon fighters. Use the fighters to take down their shields while the capital ship soaks the damage and its turrets deter smaller enemy ships. Have the capital ship finish it off with missiles or launch bombers after shields are down.

 

[Vii]

I managed to use a small squad of AI in similar 50 mass \'corvettes\' alongside me. The ship we were fighting was decently large, a real tank more than anything. It had six giant guns on it that was tearing apart our fighters in one or two hits. So i just kept popping AI at it. The turrets had much weaker shields than the rest of the boat, so i managed to pick off it\'s faction module underneath them while they would point at other ships.

While the Ai distracted other turrets, i would plop faction modules of my own on the floating dead turrets, and start shooting up the larger ship with its own guns! It was awesome, and eventually blew the thing outta the sky

 

[TangentialThreat]

So it can be done, even if it takes tactics that sound like they came from a space anime (you stole a turret?).

Swarms of Bobby fighters sound like a good way to keep the enemy distracted. My next build may be a carrier.

 

[MikeV37]

Is there a way to order little fighters to dock in your ship? How do you go about doing that?

 

[Nootau]

Not yet

 

[TangentialThreat]

A way to turn AIs on and off and a way to make fighters try to return to base would make those features feel more complete.

Right now you\'d have to find the survivors, dock them manually, and reset the AIs. Also, *never* build a carrier, set the faction module on the main ship, and log out without setting the faction modules on the little ships.