I completely agree that the methods that I outlined address the tactical scale only. It’s how a single ship can attempt to execute the task given to it by fleet command. How fleet command orchestrates and prosecutes a sector-wide defense is another matter entirely.
@admin: Let’s try a fleet-wide broadcast during a sim for ship orders and see if that gets too complicated during combat?
@davisn456: I don’t remember what the Viper was doing during the training sim but Phoenix wasn’t having trouble retaining tango on the bulk of the fleets approaching the stations they were guarding. This includes defending multiple stations against fleets coming from largely the same direction or a single station against fleets approaching from multiple vectors. How much time did you spend out of engagement range/5km? I know you can lose tango if the enemy fleet spends too long chasing you when you are too far away or if it’s only a comms soft tango.
By the same token, I tried to outline multiple ways of getting tango because I’ve noticed that occasionally delta-1 passes don’t work. And if delta-1 passes don’t work, then a single homing missile won’t work. That’s usually when I load and launch an EMP (I favor EMPs rather than nukes because you usually carry more of them). I also don’t know how well mines actually work for this tactic. It is certainly possible that if you lay a mine, then the damage reads as coming from the mine rather than from your ship so you don’t get tango from the ships as they try to obtain retribution.
And if you’ve tried all of this and nothing works then either someone else has tango most likely or they have scripted orders from the GM or are otherwise a little haywire with their AI and you just have to kill them.
Of the two stations that survived the sim, Phoenix was originally assigned to defend both. The other two stations Phoenix participated in the defense of were destroyed but they were destroyed after Phoenix was given orders to disengage from her current activities and defend another station or support a different ship. The data derived from the sim suggests that what Phoenix was doing did in fact work and that Phoenix appropriately defended her stations absent outside orders.
I don’t say this to brag or make this a “Phoenix vs. 4LD” feature. I say this because the entire point of what I outlined was that once you seize control then your time isn’t limited by how long it will take an enemy fleet to close on a defensive target. This doesn’t require an ideal circumstance, because it doesn’t need mine fields or black holes. It doesn’t even need asteroids to cut down the swarm of drones you’re going to be dragging. If you need to help cut down that swarm, then power impulse to increase the amount of time you can stay in full reverse without getting struck by drones and beams to help you shoot them down faster. When that time runs out, you kick into warp and pull away. You target support vessels and destroy them when you can so you thin out enemy fleets to something you can meaningfully approach and delta-2.
I’d also say that gaining control of enemy fleets in the sim we ran as soon as possible was critical, rather than simply conceding some bases. That lets enemy fleets group up, making it hard to obtain tango from their constituent battlegroups and harder to focus down and destroy once you decide to and you’ve run out of ordinance. If we had a smaller number of ships, only two or maybe three then I’d completely agree. Concede what you have to and keep the other bases protected by an active defense as outline rather than a static picket. But we had nearly the full fleet, and we didn’t have any other time limiting or environmental factor in that sim pressuring us to destroy fleets and secure bases at a pace faster than we were inclined to so if we’d have cared we could have lured them into the corners of the sector if we’d wanted. That was the most ideal circumstance in the sim, that we didn’t have anything pushing us to go any faster. I read your comments as somewhat dismissive of my outline, either as theoretical, ideal, or luck-based, and since this is my default approach to defending a target in Artemis I’d put that it most certainly works, even outside of ideal circumstances though it is admittedly enhanced by environmental hazards.