Torpedo Bombers

[Spartan-228]

So for all of you who have been looking for a way to even the odds between small ships and large ships I have your answer. Its actually quit simple really, warheads, but how can the week nearly pointless things even the odds between strike craft and titans you might ask. Well they can't, not in there default setting that is.

You see we at Galaxies Aflame have decided to do some tweaking of the warheads. We razed the damage to 1,000,000 and set the blast radius to 50. Now this sounds like a big adjustment and I guess you would be right, but against advanced armor one warhead dose little damage, its when you combine warheads that they become useful.

Now of course there are disadvantages to caring such weapons on your ship, foremost of witch is that if your torpedo magazine is hit your ship is history. There is also the problem of hitting your target, AI wont ram it, and that workaround that used push effect and a weapon to point it in the right dereliction doesn't work any more now that AI are shooting for subsystems. So that just leaves you with dumb fire torpedoes, but that's okay because that's where the torpedo bombers come in.

So a torpedo bomber is a small craft that is fighter sizer or a little bigger and can carries one or more torpedoes. Now because the torpedoes are dumb fire it means you want to get as close as possible to your target before you fire. This is for varies reasons a bad idea with a large capital ships, but is a job well suited to small strike craft. You also don't loos a expensive ship if your warheads are hit by enemy fire, very unpleasant to have your capital ship killed by your own weapons.

Now torpedo bombers are not going to just be capping titans left and right. If the designer of the ship you are tiring to kill is at all competent he is going to have good turret coverage. And the closer you get the more effective his guns are going to be, not to mention missile turrets. But lets say you make it through all that, and you launch you torps, and they hit. If your target has thick armor say 6 meters thick even a torpedo with ten warheads will have a hared time against that.
So its not an ultimate weapon that wins every time, but it should give you small craft pilots something to fight back with.

 

[papachabre]

1. Cloak
2. Get close to large ship
3. Release giant warhead
4. ???
5. Profit

 

[Valck]

1. Cloak
2. Get close to large ship
3. Release giant warhead
4. ???
5. Profit

Scan early, scan often...

 

[Edymnion]

I've said it before, I'll say it again.

Small individual fighters should not be a threat to large capital ships. Period. Full stop.

If you want to threaten a large ship using small fighters, you should need a large number of them. Remember Star Wars, they didn't send Luke up in an X-Wing all by himself to destroy the Death Star, they sent an entire fleet.

 

[Spartan-228]

I've said it before, I'll say it again.

Small individual fighters should not be a threat to large capital ships. Period. Full stop.

If you want to threaten a large ship using small fighters, you should need a large number of them. Remember Star Wars, they didn't send Luke up in an X-Wing all by himself to destroy the Death Star, they sent an entire fleet.

Your right and a squadron of torpedo bombers would be best, but with default settings it wouldn't mater you could have twenty fighters and not do shit. The reason you need large numbers of small craft is because you are likely to loos some before you reach the target, and some will miss their target, but its still those one or two torpedoes fired by that lucky pilot that wins the day.
So yes one small bomber can be a threat to a large ship with the damage it can do. Will it reach its target an kill it before being blown to bits? Probably not, at lest not without back up, but it is now at lest possible.

 

[Edymnion]

Well, if you're happy with it, thats all that matters.

I know that if I were on that sever, I would leave. The very idea that someone could take down a capital that took a month to build with a little fighter that took 20 minutes to slap together is honestly offensive to me.

To me, it honestly sounds like "Waah, this other guy worked his ass off to get something good. I don't want to put in that level of effort, so he shouldn't be allowed to have it either!"

 

[Eosian]

Well, if you're happy with it, thats all that matters.

I know that if I were on that sever, I would leave. The very idea that someone could take down a capital that took a month to build with a little fighter that took 20 minutes to slap together is honestly offensive to me.

To me, it honestly sounds like "Waah, this other guy worked his ass off to get something good. I don't want to put in that level of effort, so he shouldn't be allowed to have it either!"

I've been on this server for a few months now, and you are forgetting something incredibly important about small ships.

Just because it can kill you, doesn't mean it will kill you. These torpedo bombers, which took upwards of an hour to build in such a way that they didn't self-detonate whenever they moved, are only really effective against stationary targets in an individual level. The torpedoes don't have any guidance and move no faster than any other ship, meaning that they have to effectively charge down the throat of the enemy's defenses in order to even get the torpedo off the rack.

Then, they have to hit the actively maneuvering, actively fighting target. In order to hit even the largest of capital ships, you would have to bracket them in with multiple runs covering over a dozen different vectors. Worse still, the torpedoes themselves are fragile, to the point that conventional point defense has a very good chance of stopping them before they could actually hit the target.

This is, of course, totally ignoring what would happen to the bomber itself if a torpedo was hit. Suffice to say, bombers are much squishier than you give them credit for.

Honestly what it comes down to is that at present, the only thing that can kill a titan is, you guessed it, another titan. This would be fine, except for the fact that nothing smaller can kill one. So if you only have frigates and they have a titan, well, sucks to be you.

It also means that the devs will continue to try nerfing said titans, who don't care because they have enough volume to simply brute force the issue. Meanwhile, anything larger than a fighter and smaller than a titan is screwed. With this, small ships now have an effective, if extremely difficult to master weapon that can do damage to a titan regardless of how many shields it has.

For the first time, you can hurt those behemoths, even if you don't have one yourself. Sure, it will take numbers. No individual bomber will pose a threat to even the slightest aware titan. But together, in coordination with others? The wasps now have stingers.

So, your claim that this move is stating that "Waah, this other guy worked his ass off to get something good. I don't want to put in that level of effort, so he shouldn't be allowed to have it either!" is patently false. Instead, a more correct message would be thus:

"No longer can you shrug off the attacks of fighters; of drones, and of carriers. Titans you may be, but gods you are not. Best watch your step."

PS: Bombers, for God's sake remember to pull up at the end of your run. Don't want to melt the front end off your ship off like those idiots did, now do you?

 

[Edymnion]

Doesn't matter if the torps are fragile. If I were a griefer that wanted to just screw people over, I wouldn't build a torpedo launcher, I would make the ship itself the torpedo and do kamikaze runs. A radar jammer and a max efficiency overdrive engine and I could get through any defense even a titan could muster and detonate my payload.

All I would lose is some credits, and they would lose a titan.

It still boils down, IMO to "The other guy put more work into his stuff than I did, and I don't like that I have to work too."

 

[lilheartless]

i'm going to have to agree with edymnion there is no small ship that should be able to damage a titan by itself the whole purpose of a fighter is to deal with smaller craft and then apply the dps of multiple fighters onto a titan along with the cruisers and destroyers the fighters were protecting to slowly whittle it down while using their superior manuverability to dodge its slow clunky albeit powerful fire

 

[kiraen]

Frankly, I don't understand why warheads are in the game.
torpedo == dumb fire missile.

 

[Rixit]

i'm going to have to agree with edymnion there is no small ship that should be able to damage a titan by itself

I am going to have to disagree.


Fairly sure even in Wing Commander smaller ships carried big payloads that were able to completely destroy ships when the shields were down.

 

[sayerulz]

What people see not to understand is that A fighter, frigate, or whatever, should not and will not be able to combat a titan. That is the way it should be. But a FLEET of frigates, or a huge amount of fighters, can.

There should not be a way to harm a vastly superior ship with a single fighter. You need multiple.

 

[Rixit]

What people see not to understand is that A fighter, frigate, or whatever, should not and will not be able to combat a titan. That is the way it should be.

According to who?

As I pointed out a historic example of space ships and battles shows other wise... called Wing Commander.

 

[Spartan-228]

i'm going to have to agree with edymnion there is no small ship that should be able to damage a titan by itself the whole purpose of a fighter is to deal with smaller craft and then apply the dps of multiple fighters onto a titan along with the cruisers and destroyers the fighters were protecting to slowly whittle it down while using their superior manuverability to dodge its slow clunky albeit powerful fire

There is no reason for fighters if there are no bombers. Fighters can't hope to do anything to capital ships, but bombers can. Fighters are used to chase down and destroy bombers, that's their only use, their sole reason for being. Without a bomber that can threaten capitals, fighters have no place in this game.

 

[sayerulz]

According to who?

According to common sense.

 

[Rixit]

According to common sense.

You mean like common sense like the movie Wing Commander that is one of the most influencing scifi movies?

Not to mention the countless video games?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wing_Commander_(franchise)

 

[sayerulz]

I have never seen wing commander, but I doubt that a single fighter or bomber takes on a dreadnought all by iteslf and wins. And if one does, then it should not have. If you spend a thousand times the time and resources building a titan then someone with a fighter, you deserve to win. What small craft need is better AI so that fleets of them can be used on larger ones.

 

[Spartan-228]

I have never seen wing commander, but I doubt that a single fighter or bomber takes on a dreadnought all by iteslf and wins. And if one does, then it should not have. If you spend a thousand times the time and resources building a titan then someone with a fighter, you deserve to win. What small craft need is better AI so that fleets of them can be used on larger ones.

Just because a bomber can kill a dreadnought under perfect conditions ie. not being shot at and target not moving. Dose not mean a bomber will win in a fight. Also your augment has no real world merit. In WWII fighters were what killed most of the Battleships and carriers, and often it only took a few well placed bombs or torpedoes to kill the target.

 

[Rixit]

I have never seen wing commander, but I doubt that a single fighter or bomber takes on a dreadnought all by iteslf and wins. And if one does, then it should not have

You haven't seen a real space scifi movie and than demand that a nuclear missile not be able to fit on a fighter cause of some misguided illusion of firepower only being able to fit on titan class ships?

http://www.navy.mil/navydata/our_ships.asp
Ships have different sizes for different purposes just like planes.

Larger planes/ships/helicopters are usually for transport.
In starmade case mobile bases of operation.

Smaller ships usually carry larger payloads.
For faster insertion and extraction.

If your argument is common sense... than in the real world common sense actually shows carrier having the LEAST amount of payload.

While say a destroyer (small ship) has big payload.
http://s24.postimg.org/p8katkfwl/images_q_tbn_ANd9_Gc_Tqook_ZHEl_S7r_z9_QJ3_DTh_Btb9_EEu_Z.jpg

 

[Edymnion]

Okay, here.

I'll give you two Rwandan pirates with AK's in a fishing dingy, and I'll take a Nimitz class aircraft carrier. Now show me how a small fighter is supposed to realistically take down a titan on their own.

Although, in all fairness, a titan that even blinks at a million damage bomb going off isn't much of a titan.