Best setup for an orbital bombardment fleet?

[Blaze Shadowflame]

I'm planning to have a small, cheap fleet that runs on a supercharged mass driver just for orbital bombardments on Earth to save on costs for refueling the main fleet with water, as well as being something sacrificial for the aliens to destroy when I tick them off too much. Thing is, I'd also like to make sure this fleet has maximum effectiveness when bombarding. So, how does the bombard command calculate the damage the fleet inflicts? Does quantity of ships matter? Quantity of guns and their type? Do I want gunboats since the number of guns on a single craft is meaningless, or corvettes/escorts as the number of guns on a single ship does matter? Do I want green arc lasers for cost effectiveness, or coilguns if there is in-fact a damage difference? Would several ships be a waste of mission control, or a force multiplier? I can't find information on these things anywhere, either because no-one else has asked or the search engines just plain suck at finding relevant information.

[Fairin the Drakitty]

wall of text crits my eyes.

as of this writing, attempting to bombard an alien base is just like the scrap ship button without the boost cost.

bombarding an undefended infact incomplete base with my deathfleet didn't do anything.

turning it on earth to bombard some of my own stuff - blow up my space center for example.. shoot aliens terraforming from orbit and what... did nothing.

[corisai]

Originally posted by Blaze Shadowflame:

Would several ships be a waste of mission control, or a force multiplier?

Waste of MC. Just use Earth Defense Fleet (lol it's their task & they'd failed to stop invasion!) and have a refueling post somewhere on LEO1 - LEO2.

[fortydayweekend]

Originally posted by Fairin the Drakitty:

wall of text crits my eyes.

as of this writing, attempting to bombard an alien base is just like the scrap ship button without the boost cost.

bombarding an undefended infact incomplete base with my deathfleet didn't do anything.

turning it on earth to bombard some of my own stuff - blow up my space center for example.. shoot aliens terraforming from orbit and what... did nothing.

A ship with 1 nuke though will take out any non-atmosphere base

For earth bombardment, I'm not sure how well it works, aliens were bombarding my armies with no noticeable effect

[corisai]

Originally posted by fortydayweekend:

For earth bombardment, I'm not sure how well it works, aliens were bombarding my armies with no noticeable effect

Bombarding enemy army during a fight (for example when they're invading your region) is doing some serious damage.

[DigitalVulpine]

I've not had much luck getting results from bombarding Earth. For non-atmospheric targets nuclear torps are highly effective, but obviously not an option on Earth. I do know from looking through the game files that weapons that can bombard have a hidden "bombardment value" stat.

As a rule of thumb kinetics have about 5x the bombardment value of comparable lasers, so the fact that you have kinetics is a good start. While lasers "can bombard", they're kind of awful at it, so I won't even discuss lasers here.

The basic mk1 light railgun battery has a bombardment value of 1, and gains 1 per size category (so 2 at medium, 3 at heavy).

It also gains 1 per Mk level, so a mk3 light is 3 and a mk3 heavy is 5. Everything in between can be filled in with the rule of size+level-1.

The noseguns each have the bombardment value of their equivalent battery, plus 1. So noseguns are straight size+level.

Coilguns have the same bombardment value as their equivalent railguns, with yet another plus 1.

So, a dreadnought with as many mk3 light coilguns as it can carry is optimal if they stack linearly. It'll get you 4 for every light battery and 5 for every light nosegun. So if it's linear a dreadnought should get you 47 bombardment value. Unfortunately I do not know how the bombardment math is crunched under the hood.

For comparison, a Nemesis nuclear torpedo has a bombardment value of 500 and an antimatter torpedo has a bombardment value of 1000.

So, if you want to push the rough equivalent of a Nemesis through an atmosphere, 10 light coilgun dreads will put you a bit under and 11 a bit over. Double that if you're trying to imitate an antimatter torpedo.

Whether that is worth it is left as an exercise to the reader.