OBT Forum

And this is why the Taurians fail if the TCS Albatross wasn't bad enough some WarShips have a single weapons bay that matches the entire arc!!  Only good thing is its capable of a continuous stream of fire which would be a bonus if surrounded

Well, it was deliberately designed as a Boondoggle, Dragon Cat.  But it isn't nearly as bad as you make it out to be.  I'd use it in a heartbeat.

770,000 tons, 3/5 acceleration, decent armor (although a tad on the low side for modern games), sixteen fighters, four docking collars.  And those guns (albeit low damage per capital bay) have a maximum range of 40 hexes!

Sure, other WarShips can put out more raw damage; other WarShips have greater range (out to 50, a mere 10 hexes of difference) . . . but few have the ability to fire the sheer number of capital bays that this ship can.

Fifteen capital-scale naval laser bays in the broadside arc; ten in the fore- or aft-quarters; five both directly ahead and dead astern.  This gives the player (and the Warship) the ability to literally smother its target in fire and have a much greater chance of actually landing a shot against high target numbers.

Second, sure the bays only inflict 14 points of capital damage each.  That manages to threshold units with less than 131 points of capital armor.  Each bay will have a chance at a threshold critical if your target has 130 points of armor or less in the location you hit.

That means (out of the WarShips that still exist) only the Kyushu (forward facing only), Avalon (all facings), Conqueror (all facings), Volga (all facings), Kirishima (all facings), Black Lion (all facings), Liberator (fore and aft facings only), Thera (all facings), Feng Huang (all facings), Nightlord (all facings), Mjolnir (all facings), Potemkin (all facings), Texas (all facings), McKenna (all facings), and Leviathan (all facings) are immune to threshold criticals.

Fifteen classes . . . all but one larger than my cruiser.  The rest?  Well, the rest will be eating threshold criticals all day long with up to fifteen rolls each and every turn!

Third.  Each of the NL-35 bays are in a four-gun mount.  So that means that, if necessary, this cruiser can use bracket fire to improve her chances to hit (albeit reducing the damage per bay to as low as SIX POINTS for the largest to-hit bonus).  Still, six points per hit at long range will threshold any ship with less than 51 points of capital armor . . . and you are getting up to FIFTEEN SHOTS (each at -3) to hit.

It is death by a thousand cuts, but dead is dead, right?

Fourth.  The ability of naval lasers to engage in Anti-Aerospace Mode makes this WarShip extremely lethal to hostile ASF.  Able to engage at 40 hexes, dealing 14 capital per hit, having as many as FORTY chances to hit (if they are kind enough to swarm from all vectors) incoming fighter formations (because our little cruiser has enough heat sinks to fire all one hundred and sixty of those NL-35s simultaneously!!) . . . she's a buzz-saw and fighter squadrons are the PLANK.

Yeah, I'd take one of these into battle any day of the week.  Would she be my 'ship of the line'?  Not a chance.  But as a support ship, a heavy escort, the escort flotilla leader?  Sure.  In a heartbeat.

MA