BTW, I thought I had to be missing something in relation to the PDS/Redundant Shielding combo, and obviously I was. Okay, so the Redundant Shielding just protects your Shield value from taking damage on a *Shield Hit*, not *Shield Roll*. Okay. The two terms were close enough I was thinking they were the same thing. But one is PEN related and one is damage allocation related. Okay.

That makes me feel better.

-Tyrel

oh, and for some reason I cannot download the ship sheet...

Well, the idea rubs me the wrong way, as it smacks of min-maxing, but you COULD load up on weapons that are poor against shields. This allows you to get more for your 'buck' and hopefully overwhelm the PDS.

For example:

ROF 2 / PEN 1 / DMG 2
RNG 15 / TH 3+
Must re-roll PEN dice
Total = 27 SUs (2 arcs)

Thanks.

Nice ship, but pretty undergunned for 335 points.
The defenses are clearly your bane.
Get hull damage into these things, so even when they win they will be limping away crippled.

And I see security forces at work, so the marine option probably isn't there.  :cry:

It is nice to have a tactical system directly integrated, and one with a tight ship construction system to boot I thought this would probably be the only way I would get well-aquainted with the S:X rules

So the vote seems to be for the deployment of an Extra Hull Damage + Increased PEN weapon with high ROF. Unfortunately for mounting options, a heavily refitted Sun Quan CL is looking like the only legitimate prospect, which isn't a good sign. I think prototyping a new ship is going to be in order to get this done, especially if I want to slip a Stealth Generator onboard, too.

As for stripping off hyperdrives... well, you see, that is another problem with my fleet now. Only my Repulse BCs, my Prometheus EXs, and one old class of CA have hyperdrives. Which is going to make things dicey, as that means that the only travel is now by jump gate, unless I can get Mitch Pileggi and the UES Daedalus back from exploration in Ross 154 (or wherever it is he is out passed Alpha Centauri).

I have loaded the chart with all of the options, so in three months I should (crosses fingers) hopefully have at least one of them, which will help me out immensely. Though prototyping a new ship with the weapon is probably out of the question, and building refits of other classes can get extremely expensive (and I am even using a modified version of the VBAM: SX refit rules, so things are a bit costlier besides).

The situation with the Altairians would be funny if not for the fact that it is happening to me. As far as AIX statistics go, they are AG 32, IN 26, XE 73 (stats are Aggressiveness, Integrity, and Xenophobia in that order, for those without the Companion). So at AG 32 the Altairians shouldn't be all that hostile towards me. They really should love me. But I ended up with a starting relationship of 16 with them, and then the Altairians rolled a negative Critical Diplomatic Shift and instantly declared hostilities and decided to come and gobble me up. Our current relationship, influenced solely by the NPE rules, is -2. Yes, a negative relationship. Sigh.

I have a feeling that is going to be the case. I had hoped to find a backdoor into their empire so that I could open up another front, but that is looking unlikely. It is just really sad that Barnard's Star was my largest, most heavily populated system outside of Sol itself (5 Census in Barnard, which based on population densities would be about 150,000 to 200,000 people).

Did I mention that the Altairians have jump-capable stealth fighters?

Oi.

As for the other suggestions...

Yes, min-maxing is bad, but I am weeping for the security of Earth so I just got desperate! So a large number of less effective weapons (as Dan posted) might be preferrential to loading up on smaller numbers quality weapons? I might have to give it a try on the Tribal Hull and see what comes out of it. I might even prototype a new Tribal successor with some of those technologies onboard. I also have a newer frigate design, but I am not sure how well it would have faired since its nearly-complete final prototype was destroyed by the Altairians when they took Gibraltar.

Yeah, the Eagle CA is undergunned, but its defenses have made it extremely difficult to crack, especially for our largley Energy beam armament coming into the war. We are transitioning towards a Kinetic/Ballistic mix at the moment. But with the PDS systems even that doesn't help us out all that much.

Bombers? Yeah, that would be nice. But I don't have any *weep* I have Arrow light fighters that, while minimally effective, have suffered outrageous attrition rates against the enemy Nighthawk Stealth fighters. I am just waiting for the Altairians to go all Strak'ha on me and develop a successor Nighthawk that adds Ballistic capabilities and can load some sort of killer torpedo weapon as special equipment. Then I most assuredly will cry.

I will see what I can do with these options. The Repulse will likely be refitted heavily and outfitted with some of the weapons that have been proffered on possibilities.

-Tyrel

Ouch. That blows...

Despite the best efforts of Earth, the campaign has largely played itself out at this point. The Solar League was able to repel the Altairians from Barnard's Star and began pursuing them to Cygni... only to have the fleet cut to ribbons -- again. Without any real resistance remaining, the Altairians rolled back into Cygni. I didn't fight the battle, but the Solar League just didn't have anything left to really fight with. The Repulse had been rebuilt as a Renown-class Battlecruiser, but that ship alone wasn't going to turn the tide. With Barnard's defenses destroyed for a second time, the Altairians were free to hit Earth.

Before the end, humanity found another species, but they were not overly friendly, so it would taken "an act of CM" to have them appear as allies and friends. Too bad, we could have used their ships to help defend Sol.

I think I am going to restart the campaign and see what happens a second time around. Hopefully my luck will be much better this time! It was incredibly poor luck that I got killed this time, but such things happen.

So off to an alternate reality we go!

I will take the lessons learned this time around, though, and apply them to the next campaign. One thing I think I will do for this next campaign is make individual weapon systems (sans ROF) into separate Micro tech advances, just to make them more interesting. I will also be increasing the research cost for Macro tech investments considerably, since otherwise I could see a race going from crap-tech to super-tech within only a decade or so, if left alone to its own devices.

-Tyrel