Lepton:
If I were nutter enough to afford it, I have a fleet that's easier to use than the Z-DF fleet.
I-BCV, I-CVZ, I-CVDZ. By pressing the "launch all fighers" button on my keyboard, I am sending 9 4-packs of Caveat III fighters, carrying 108 gatling phasers, into the belly of the beast. K-B11Ks and Z-DF or Z-DWD fleets would wither in seconds under the sheer firepower of that many gatlings. Then toss the Cav's 36 phaser 2's into the action, and I wouldn't expect any ships, or fleets, to make it to strike range of my force, so I might not even need to go to red alert.
For the totally lazy, I could just let the computer do it for me. 7 packs of Cav IIIs are launched from the CVZ and CVDZ by the AI. That's still enough fighters to wipe out many a lesser fleet.
At least the Mirak have to hit the fire button for each wave of drones...
OK basic Math 101 (jeez I hate Math 
)
Heavy fast drones cost 5 PP on LB5
80 slots on a DWD
free reloads taken into account means load out costs 264 (thats what the ship yard tells me).
Average Mission payout 300 PP
average Droner mission requiring full loadout nets 36 PP or 10% a none droner total for the same mission. That's paying for it.
Use a fleet and you are rapidly running out of cash, (792 per mission if full load out)
Use a none stock mission and you use more drones so more likely to need full load out.
That's the basic math on current server settings and you want to tweak it more! Jeesh.
Who else pays for their primary weapon, and has that weapon have so many countermeasures, and has a finite supply of ammo?
Okay. 792-300=492. Say -500 PP per mission lost with your fleet.
Set aside 20k of your 120k bank account for ship replacement.
That leaves you with enough cash to fully resupply your fleet 200 times.
Question: How does the Z-DWD get 80 drone slots? 4xB 2xC racks = 32 "rack drones", reloads should be in multiples of 32 (64 with 2 reloads, 96 with 3 reloads, and 128 with 4 reloads).
I'll work with what I know. Z-DWD has 128 drones. 64 get replaced for free each mission. You need to burn 64 drones to completely use up your purchased reloads and force resupply at the maximum PP payout rate.
Every 30 seconds you can launch 6 drones. At that rate, you burn through your 64 bought drones in 5 minutes 20 seconds.
Taking and adding 2 minutes to each mission for travel time, you need to spend 7:20 in each mission just to burn all your bought drones.
200 missions @ 7:20 each = 24:26:40 of time spent "in mission" to burn 100k PP supplying your fleet. That's a full day's worth of being in mission. After adding the time spent to travel to base, resupply, travel to front, find mission, accept mission, wait through briefing, and all the other waits that goes with SFC, and you're looking at closer to 36 hours of playing to burn through 100k of your PP stock.
Playing 12 hour days, that's still 3 days of playing. Playing 8 hour days, that gives you 4 days of playing. You could just about finish off LB5 at this point in a fleet and still not go bankrupt.
And this time frame assumes that you're needing to fly 5:20 in combat every mission, and burn through 64 drones per ship each time. While I've never flown a DWD fleet, I don't think you're consistently spending this much time and drones each mission. So, the bank account will stretch longer, from cheaper resupply. Putting into practice drone conservation, like only resupplying to full load every 2 missions (turning loss per resupply from 500 to 200 PP each trip), or even banking money by running a few missions with only your free reloads (assuming conditions are allowing you to use less than 64 drones per ship per mission, and you aren't at high risk of being hit with a 2-ship PvP), can suddenly stretch a 100k bank account into a fund able to supply a 3 ship fleet for a week or 2 of "average" 12 hour nutter-like days.
Bankrupcy takes quite a while to kick in for a nutter. Perhaps longer than you thought. Too long, in my opinion, to be the crux of an argument that PP will limit the time a fleet remains active.
Thank you for the reminder I've desperately needed. We've been focusing on Drall's old master plan without considering all the facets of what we're doing here. Once we have at least the drone ships onto a Plasma-type buy schedule, then we need to argue that the drone ships should be able to operate on a plasma-type operations style, to include large amounts of free reloads for their ships. If possible, I'd like to see carriers and tenders get the same treatment, perhaps with a mandatable CnC, sadly I don't think that's possible.
Being a soapbox here, if you're tired of being picked on whenever people discuss consumables, and their effect on the premier consumable-user race, why don't you shift over to a non-consumable race and let those who are willing to experiment play Mirak for a while? At least you can judge the effect of the tests and we don't have to delete Mirak in a knee-jerk reaction...
Topic: Discussion document Dyna development (Read 10467 times)