Phoenix Space Combat System for Dummies - Part Twelve Test Battle Beta The Poor the Bad and the suckiest


The last blog post covered a full days battle with two relatively crap warships hammering each other.

For the next series of posts we are going to get more nuanced which has the plus side of me not blowing up quite so much of my own expensively acquired gear in the process.

My  two warships used in the last engagement are refitting post battle so to continue the test I have temporarily changed my starter exploration vessel and scout ship into ships at least capable of fighting. They both have normal/heavy hulls and some armour so I made one (without even a naval officer) have lots of shields and the other will endeavour to attack with a single weapon.

Considering the amount of defences it is unlikely to do much if anything to the attacked ship but will allow us to ascertain how the defences cope with different weapon types.

This test will cover two of the weakest combat ship weapons in the game - the Light Photon Gun Mark IV and a Photon Scatter Gum

The Attacking Ship

This is basically a slightly re-purposed starter scout. It has 50 Heavy Hull Mark I's and Korondite Plate Mark I which we have not mentioned yet but is basically the armour of choice for sneaking around (it gives bonuses that make the ship harder to see) and as this is a scout it gets the basic variety. This plate is not intended for heavy combat and only provides an armour depth of 20 which (as we all now know) will only block a mean of 10 incoming damage which is more pathetic than medium armour on a normal hull ship. It currently has the distinctly underwhelming armament of ten Light Photon Gun IV's. This is like the previous blog posts Photon Gun except worse. It has very little use versus dedicated combat ships and probably only has a niche bullying freighters and unarmoured ships.

Let's look at how the weapon is described on the battle report.

SPACE WEAPONS                                                                |

|                                                                             ACC  AF   HP        DMG      |

| 10      Light Photon Gun mkIV (303)             +9      1    10          340      |

So ten of these mighty weapons do a total potential damage of only 340 (and if you think that's bad why not try equipping the Mark I !). It also has a substandard accuracy of +9. The AF indicates it does nothing special (or worse) against the standard defences and it has HP of 10 matching its MU size so 10 is essentially its defence.

The Defending Ship

This is the defending ship by virtue of the fact its officer is not a naval officer so he/she/it cannot deliberately attack anyone and so can only defend. It's defences are reasonable though. The starter exploration ship has 50 Normal hulls but carries standard medium armour plate so its armour depth is 40 blocking a mean of 20 damage each shot. I have gone slightly overboard on shields with so many Mark I Shields it has a starting Shield depth of 64. I did not add scintillators (it is an exploration vessel after all) but did give it a single Photon Scatter Gun which sounds less effective than the Light Photon Gun.

SPACE WEAPONS                                                                |

|                                                                        ACC  AF   HP    DMG      |

| 1       Photon Scatter Gun (2255)               +3   3    1         2        |

Wow. I complained about the Light Photon Gun but this thing does a sterling 2 damage a shot with a horrible accuracy of 3 and only one defence (the weapon is the same size as a Light Photon Gun at 10 Mus yet blows up on 1 point of damage).  The damage is actually better than that as it does 10 attacks per hit basically a wider beam with lower strength with the actual damage per gun being 20.

Note though it has a high AF of 3 which means that armour and shields is much more effective at blocking shots. If the scout ship above (with armour depth of 20) takes a shot from this weapon then its armour depth is multiplied by 3 to 60 meaning it actually blocks a mean of 30 as opposed to 10 damage. When looking at how many plates are burnt off that figure blocked by the armour is then divided by 3 so it also does less damage.

The attack

Let's look at the attacking ship first and the more interesting bits of the battle report

Attacking NHS Tousa - sh - Daidokoro (#####)

--------------------------------------------

Round 1:  10 Light Photon Gun mkIVs

               - 10 hits - 11 (305) [340] damage - 99%

Round 2:  10 Light Photon Gun mkIVs

               - 10 hits - 13 (278) [340] damage - 99%

Round 3:  10 Light Photon Gun mkIVs

               - 9 hits - 8 (251) [306] damage - 99%

Round 4:  10 Light Photon Gun mkIVs

               - 10 hits - 16 (293) [340] damage - 99%

Post Battle Summary

-------------------

Combat stress caused 0.5% integrity loss.

Enemy ISR field stress caused 3 damage.

Ship hulls were undamaged in combat.

So though the guns can do a max of 340 damage per round (34 per gun) the defending ships default Photon Cannon Damage rate of 84 means an average of 42 damage should be blocked. It is actually interesting that this did not occur in practice. We can break down the damage

So the magnificent damage that got through per shot was between 0.88 and 1.6 damage per gun. In reality most of the guns did not cause any damage at all and the odd one of two got lucky on the damage reaction probabilities to let more damage through. If the defending ship has scintillators then I would expect only 1 or 2 damage in total to get through for the entire attack (and that's with scintillators Mark I).

Defending Ship

Targeting MRC Sekkou - Tanuki (#####):

    Returning fire.

Attacking MRC Sekkou - Tanuki (#####)

-------------------------------------

Round 1:  1 Photon Scatter Gun

               - 0 hit - 0 [0] damage - 16%

Round 2:  1 Photon Scatter Gun

               - 0 hit - 0 [0] damage - 16%

Round 3:  1 Photon Scatter Gun

               - 0 hit - 0 [0] damage - 16%

Round 4:  1 Photon Scatter Gun

               - 1 hit - 0 [20] damage - 16%

Post Battle Summary

-------------------

Combat stress caused 4% integrity loss.

Naval Damage:    1 Shields (115)

Ship hulls have taken 13 damage.

Total ship hull damage 13 (0.3%)

Hmm so the ISR engines (a one off attack at the start of battle) was the only shot that actually hit and in return the combat stress of the engagement hurt the defending ship more than the physical weapons. This is not a designated combat ship and does not carry (as an example) any targeting computers so its accuracy sucks. All potential 20 damage in the single hit was absorbed by the armour. This actually brings up an unanswered question. Are the 10 attacks per hit handled individually (in which case that is 10 attacks of 2 to be dealt with) or are they added together to make one total of 20 (if the second then the Korondite Plate used by the scout has an armour depth of 20 multiplied by 3 due to the Photon Scatter Guns AF to 60 so the mean damage blocked would be 30. Easily enough to cope with the entire attack as a group).

Also note that of the 48 damage that hit this ship only one shield was destroyed (and was the sole reason the shield depth dropped slightly).

Battle Summary for both

---------------------------------Battle Summary---------------------------------

NHS Tousa - sh - Daidokoro (#####) - Ship

    Survey Cruiser Class Destroyer [G] {Light Armour}*

    Armour: 40.0   Shields: 6041(62.5)

    Hull Damage: 0.3%

    Targeted by MRC Sekkou - Tanuki (#####) - 44 [1326] Damage

    Attacking MRC Sekkou - Tanuki (#####) - 0 [2] Damage

MRC Sekkou - Tanuki (61557) - Ship

    Courier Class Scout [G] {Light Ablative Armour}

    Armour: 20.0 

    Targeted by NHS Tousa - sh - Daidokoro (#####) - 0 [2] Damage

    Attacking NHS Tousa - sh - Daidokoro (#####) - 44 [1326] Damage


Curiously the Korondite Plate is listed as 'Light Ablative Armour' in the battle report. Even more curiously the Daidokoro has its armour described as 'Light Armour' though it is the same type (Armour Plate) as the 75NH used in the previous engagement which listed it as 'Medium Armour'. This might be due to the hull difference or potentially the class difference (as this ship is 'not' a warship whereas the 'Taka' from the previous report certainly is.

Conclusion

This has fairly convincingly shown that light Photon Guns and Photon Scatter guns are really bad choices for dedicated ship to ship combat. In the next post we will switch from 'weak' weapons to the current favoured weapon of choice for many warships - the missile.







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