Is this some sort of straw-man? I am not by any means insisting on "all members of our main fleet being 'balanced' designs". Read up a couple of posts, where I defended our unbalanced Constellation class Carrier designs. Or take our Storm class Gauss PD vessels, for instance. Or our Peeping Tom class Battle-Management vessel. Or our reliance on Ammo Tenders.
I said that I want our battle fleet to contain a multi-role core.
Nope, just probing to see what you meant by 'multi-role core.'
Blue Emu said:
Yes, I can. In our first, very confused battle against the Prix, we ended up at one point facing an enemy vessel that could spot fighters and kill them with massive 19-missile salvos of 68,000 kps size-1 missiles, firing from tens of millions of km away. It killed 49 of our Fighters, all by itself. Suppose we run into three or four of them? Wouldn't it be better to attack them with heavily shielded, armored multi-role warships, led by Rock-class Decoy Vessels with 20 layers of armor... rather than sending a wave of Fighters out to get massacred for no gain?
That's not really a good example for your cause though. The weapons fired at the fighters were not interceptible by ANY of our fleets point defence at that time. It was a blessing that the Prix shot at the fighters instead of the fleet itself. Not to mention the fact that that fleet HAD heavily armored Rock class decoy vessels in front and shielded, armored multi-role warships. We almost lost the Agincourt (the heaviest armored and shielded vessel of our fleet save the rocks), the only vessel capable of jumping us out...because the AI didn't just shoot at the Rocks.
The benefit of this still hasn't changed. I would ALWAYS much rather have my opponent firing at the fighters, because they are cheap and dispersed. The amount of effort required to destroy a several hundred fighter attack force is much greater in time and ordinance than the effort required to destroy a few fleet units.
In the best world, our fleet ships should never come under direct assault. This not being a best world, we need point defence (I.e. ships capable of shooting down missiles and or fighters/FAC that come our way). If we encounter ships which have the potential to close to beam range AND are capable of surviving our fighter strikes...than even the combined power of the fleet will be unable to save the fleet.
In short, our offensive strike must be optimized to be utilized by our fighters. Our defensive capabilities should be a combination of distance (our flexibility in launching our strike force (speed / range of our fighters)), fleet speed, and combined fleet point defence (missiles, FAC, beams?).
I see no point in attaching anti-bigship missiles to our fleet units, unless those fleet units are designed or expected to be operating independently from a carrier.
Of course, this is all idealized. Given our resource situation, I can see where our point defence fleet units are actually anti-missile and anti-ship armed, since they could potentially be detached from the fleet or attached depending on the needs of our empire.
Ok, I'm going to stop rambling now.