And yeah, I think everyone had no idea on the scale of the battle. I too thought you had a much smaller fleet at Teth than it turns out to did. Maybe this is why we should at least post numbers at the bottom of each thread for how many ships are there, even if we don't keep full fleet manifests.

There is no reason to post fleet manifests in these threads; the point of the rule-change was to avoid exactly that thing.

Write it into your epic. How long does it take for a commander to survey his fleet? A paragraph, maybe? C'mon guys, there's no excuse for not making it clear to your partner, rival or opposition.

Well, as for the missile, the thing about Pulse shielding is that it isn't actually what we consider shielding - it's a temporary (couple seconds) field that bounces things back, wheras shields try to absorb or otherwise collide with it. Since there's no impact, per se, then there's no chance for detonation. As for wether it's got some sort of special proximity device, I guess I'm just assuming otherwise. If it has got such a thing, then there's no practical way to guess wether the missile would have exploded or not before it reached the Pulse, but I'd like to think not (no surprise there!) since so far as I know most missiles are meant to explode on their target.

By the way, on the topic of scale I'm going to have to agree that no more than a couple dozen a side would be reasonable. The Coalition would probably have a smaller force, but Teth is an industrialized, populated, and militiristic world which would probably afford it enough forces. Your armada would have been sitting in dry-dock for a while now, wheras mine went through the upgrades and retraining of the Military Restoration and the addition of White Knight leaders, probably balancing the strength of each force.

As for the reprecussions, I'm sure this loss for the Black Dragons will factor into their strength in later engagements, but that can be discussed if and when we get there.

Ok the other thing that needs clarification. You keep insisting that I sent my forces in piecemeal. That's not the way it went down.

Ok, here, let me describe it to you in easy detail.

Ship A = Gunships, Pickets = Fast Speed
Ship B = Battlecruisers = Medium Speed
Ship C = Star Destroyers = Slow Speed

Ship C is deployed at front and has 1x Distance to your fleet.
Ship B is deployed at middle and has 2x Distance to your fleet.
Ship A is deployed to rear and has 3x Distance to your fleet.

Ship A has 3x distance to travel, but with fast speed can travel that distance in the time that it takes
Ship B to travel 2x distance with it's medium speed, which in that amount of time, it takes
Ship C to travel the 1x distance, with it's slow speed.

So, by the time my forces arrive at your ships, it is a combined force rather than three strung out sections of formations like you assumed.

Therefore, your Dominators attack my starfighters and pickets. They suffer casaulties. My unmolested Tions and Battlecruisers in turn plow into your Dominators. Your starfighters make attack runs on the Tions, and Battlecruisers, making them perfect bait for the surviving Pickets and Fighters.

As a result of this roundabout way, I would say that my support, gunships and pickets, suffer at least 75%, but not 100%, casualties at the hands of the heavy weapons of the Dominators. In addition, runs made by your starfighters at my ships, would incur substantial damage, the ones that got through, that is. I would say that all of my Tions incurred 50% shield damage, and many of them would have sustained hull damage too as a result.

But in turn, due to the microwave beams, heavy hitting weapons, and etc, inflicted by the Tions and Battlecruisers, in addition to the heavy pounding their shields have already taken by a salvo of one thousand proton torpedoes and sustained turbolaser fire and the PIMs, the Dominators would finally suffer casaulties. The engines on some of the ships would be disabled or impared as per my ordered actions, and others would suffer hull breaches, etc. And your starfighters would suffer casaulties too, from my remaining support ships and the wyvern cannons of the battlecruisers and star destroyers. Say somewhere between 25-50%ish.

Then, my Battlecruisers, and remaining picket vessels run into a barrage of Projector Cannon volleys, from the Claymores, and Longswords, even though you never made a mention of the latter in your initial fleet formation. The pickets would suffer still more, but the Battlecruisers, which have still not taken a shot, would merely suffer big time shield lossage. The Tions as per my orders pulled to port and starboard after clearing the Dominators in order to pour more fire into their rears.

The Battlecruisers and remaining Pickets and Starfighters, mostly Starfighters, pull away from the Claymores and head torwards the planet.

Then, the other two Task Forces arrived.

Any counter-arguements up to this point?

As I understand it, the PIM's affect a ship through ion damage. The Dominators are heavily protected against such weapons. Not only do they have Defender Ion Shields, they also have the Diversity composite, both designed to prevent damage to a ship through ion weapons. So they wouldn't have been that damaged by the PIMs or any ion weapons (in comparison to a ship without said technologies).

Also, unlike for most ships, moving to go behind a Dominator isn't going to help you that much, seeing as all but the missiles can still hit you just as easily. And missiles (being missiles) can turn. How much that would matter, I just felt it should be stated.

Furthermore, the salvo of 1000 missiles would be reduced severely. How much, that's debatable, but there would be no where near as many missiles as there were to begin with.

One quick question that I will try to figure out myself, but might not have time for. Were the microwave beams being fired when the missiles were launched?

Okay, I've reread it and the thread, so let me give it a shot...

This is how I saw it.

Your fighters and pickets fly right into a bunch of heavy destroyers and ignore them to attack their fellow small ships and are overwhelmed by combined firepower.

Your destroyers then attack without fighter cover and focus on their fellow big ships, meaning my bombers can tear them to bits and are overwhelmed by combined firepower.

The battle began with a fraction of your fleet coming in close but they were driven off, so let's ignore that part for now. Then you describe how your fast ships arrive, and ignore the destroyers to go after the small ships like fighters and such.

I learnt fairly harshly in many of my previous battles that one of the golden rules of warfare is back-up. The destroyers might have a hard time hitting smaller vessels, but when a phalanx of them have nothing else to shoot at, it's like walking through a sharpened grate. Like riding calvery into spearmen, to use an old-timey example.

After you do that, you describe how your destroyers pass through the Dominator formation and wreck the place up quite a bit. This seems to assume that it's a battle only between destroyers, your support having defeated mine. I adjusted that and noted that if my destroyers had assisted my support in destroying your support, that'd mean I'd still have my bombers and you'd have no point-defence to cover you.

To be honest, I don't enjoy getting technical. All this stuff about the precise movements of ships and the microwave lasers and all that... If we're discussing tactics I like to stay either on the macro level of epic crashing lines or darting raids, or on the micro level of one heroic pilot shaking the pursuer on his tail into a canyon wall. The inbetween stuff about firing precision levels and the like just melts the brain, as it were.

Still, so far as I can tell your first wave is just a grind-job in the making. You say that the fighter screen hits the fleet first, meaning that it's going to be soaking up the fire. Then comes the destroyers (a nebulous term I use to include any ship bigger than a frigate but smaller than a death-star) and they're now without back-up. I mean, all you've got going for you is technology, and on that level we more or less equal out these days - ramming a formation directly into a force specifically designed for 'grinding' warfare without some sort of plan, or highly experienced troops, or a technical triumph, or some sort of heroic leader who commands his men with super-efficiency basically means you are walking into explosions. You just don't seem to have anything going for you.

Also, in the future could you use larger fonts in your battles? I know, they're yours and all that but it's really hard to read the tiny writing.

I don't know. At this point I feel minus about the three first posts that the whole thread needs to be re-written, but I don't feel up to doing that. I'll go ahead and finish it up with my forces being somewhat scattered and withdrawal, but I feel that my losses were too heavy as you stated, but I'll be ok with that as long as you accept that detachement of Dominators being destroyed, since their engines were disabled from the microwave beams, and being unable to join your wall formation, and being trapped and destroyed in between the one taskforce and the newly arrived one.

As to your statement of being my advanced force being repulsed, I'm not sure what you meant by that, because my other three Taskforces dropped out of hyperspace 10 seconds before Alpha did, so that would be like driven back 5 planetery solar systems. I thought that that needs to be clarified, and if it was I thought you meant, that it was merely bull. Dragons don't retreat, they withdraw. ;)

And to answer your question Jan, the microwave beams were fired during my reloading post. I fired the salvo, charged in and use the microwave beams, then fired another torpedo salvo the post after.

Oh, ok. Just checking. Thanks.

Oh! That makes so much more sense now!

Y'see, I thought you'd split that first taskforce into four quarters and sent a quarter of that forwards. Then the rest of the taskforce attacked and got blown up piecemeal. Then the other taskforces arrived.

I see the confusion now!

Let's wrap up the thread - the details are pretty much irrelevant at this point. The Dragons attacked, the Dragons suffered from explosion-itus, the Dragons left.

Oy vey...