Capital Ship Point Defense

[Tenacity]

Now if they aren't deterring folks form shooting up your ships, then yes, they aren't doing their job.

And here's the problem. On larger ships (the carrier as a cruiser example, or the RBS/juggernaut as a battleship example), solaris turrets dont even reach the other end of the ship, much less the target you're shooting at.

Bombers/fighters realize this, they know that against large ships, the best bet is to get in close. The same deal goes for flak guns - on the larger battleships, flak simply does not work. Solaris/Flak are awesome on the smaller battleships and cruisers, because the range is fine when you're not aiming from a platform the size of a small moon, and because your turrets can fire the length of your ship twice over and hit a target in front of or behind you.

On larger ships, the range is the issue. If I go for a fairly balanced setup on my carrier, I have generally 8 turret slots to choose between primary cruiser turrets, or solaris turrets. Those 8 hardpoints are spread out along my ship, most of them are on the underside of the ship because I need the heavy hardpoints for capship weaponry.

This leaves me with around 2 solaris at the rear, 2 at the front, and 4 in the middle. 2 of the turrets in the middle only fire up, 2 only fire down, neither can fire to the opposite side of the ship. This means that at any one point in time, regardless of where the enemy bomber is, the most i'll be able to hit him with is 4 turrets, and in most situations only 3.

3 solaris turrets will do around 700 damage each to the target with a 4.0 refire. That's 200-300 damage less than most fighter guns are capable of, taking same speed weaponry into account. Now, in a fighter vs fighter battle, tell me, how long does it take you to actually shoot down an enemy using 3-4 4.0 speed guns? A long freakin time, which is also why most fighters are STILL relying on explosive tracking weaponry to kill the enemy.

A bomber can sit there and take constant fire from 3-4 solaris turrets for almost a minute before bats/bots are out, and then probably 15-20 seconds afterwards, and that's if he's not dodging. At 1500m/s speed, cruiser solaris still arent all that difficult to dodge at ranges over 500m, and at that range a bomber will NEVER miss with a supernova shot. If he moves another 200-300m out, he's going to be out of range of the solaris turrets, and will be impossible to hit with any other cruiser weaponry.

Now, if solaris turrets did a few hundred more damage, and had an extended range out to 1500m for cruiser variants, THEN I might be able to deter a bomber from getting up close, and keep him at a range where I might stand a chance at avoiding supernovas, but right now that aint happening. I still dont expect to win against more than one bomber at a time (at least, regarding PLAYER bombers, npcs shouldnt even have bombers as far as i'm concerned), but at least I'd be able to hold enemy bombers off until I could get someone to arrive and help me out, or until I could get to friendly territory.

As it is right now, any decent bomber pilot could fairly easily kill that carrier solo. It's a huge target with minimal point defense, despite it's staggering number of turrets.

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