Small Afterburnner

[Q]

quote:

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Originally posted by Lupusman:
Actually, fighters with all engines, and no weapons ARE good for something.
Build a small amount on a planet. If the planet gets attacked, they get launched, and the attack ships chase after the fighters, ignoring the planet. The fighters run away as they have no weapons, and never get caught because they have lots of movement.
Doesn't always work, but if you get surprised, and don't have enough time to build a good defense, try it out. I've saved a number of planets this way.

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Brilliant idea! I have to try this.

[PvK]

Hehe. Clever! Was that on purpose or accident that you discovered that?

Another use I have for unarmed fighters is minesweeping.

If you can fleet them with ships, they could resupply ships that were out of supplies limping home.

PvK

[Lupusman]

Sort of on purpose.
An AI player which I was friendly with suddenly decided to attack me. I usually blockade my warp points, but it already had a fleet in one of my loosely defended systems. I had a fleet a few turns away, and I didn't want two or three of my planets to get bLasted.
I just had to hold them off just a couple of turns, so I tested in the simulator all sorts of things that I could build in one or two turns, including platforms and fighters. Nothing was working, but I noticed that the enemy was going after my fighters first. And Voila!

[Baal]

Here's how I see the usefulness of Afterburners. It takes 2 engines to get one combat movement point, a 2:1 ratio. Afterburners make combat movement points so at the second level of afterburners they become quite useful. Afterburner 2 makes 2 combat movement points for 20 kt, that would require 4 engines to get the same amount of movement. So, I make my fighters so they have an odd amount of strategic movement points and an afterburner 2 or 3.

I can get 8 combat movement points using 7 Quantum engines and an afterburner 3 on a large fighter. Quite impressive, considering it still is tough to kill and can deal damage.