Wed Jul 02, 2003 8:57 pm by Sherlog
Patience, my dear, patience. IIRC the experimental battleships have 120k hitpoints, so this will take a while even if you fly a Barracuda or Dragon.
You can get a rough idea of the time needed for taking out one of these battleships if you determine the sustained damage rate that you can attain with your loadout. For gun damage, multiply the powerplant recharge rate with the gun efficiency (assuming you have enough guns to drain the plant). For example, a Starflier with Xenos particle guns will produce 95 e/s * 4.80 dmg/e = 456 dmg/s, a Drake with Farmers' Alliance neutron guns 290 * 6.00 = 1740 and a Barracuda with mediocre laser guns 345 * 3.20 = 1104.
Starkiller torpedos produce about 1200 dmg/s, Catapult/Moonstalker missiles 600 dmg/s, Driller mines 500 dmg/s. As a rule, a missile launcer produces roughly the same damage per second as a decent gun of the same class. Mines are way overpriced and produce a bit less damage (still more than a mediocre gun, though). They are a good option if you do not want to sacrifice a gun for a missile launcher and cannot mount a torpedo launcher because you don't fly a heavy fighter.
Optimal loadout: The class 6 FA guns drain 106 e/s, therefore you need more than three of these guns to fully utilize the sustained power output a Barracuda or Dragon. So, if you load four Vulture 3, two class 5 missile launchers plus Starkillers on a Barracuda or Dragon then you can produce a sustained damage rate of
345 * 6.00 + 2 * 600 + 1200 = 4470
but even so it would take almost 30 seconds of uninterrupted fire to destroy the target ...
If you park your fighter inside one of the battleships then the Rheinland fleet will help you destroy it - the fighters, gunboats and battleship will continue to shoot guns and missiles at you but they hit the battleship instead. When I did this in a Starflier it took less than two minutes two blow up the ship, instead of the three to four minutes indicated by the 456 dmg/s of my Starflier (could not use mines because of the blast radius).