[SOM] The Driftmaven is Bemusingly Powerful

[Metaphysician]

I mean, yes. Its a Tier 20 Supercolossal vessel, of course its powerful. However, I did some quick wargaming with it, and even against the other Tier 20 sample vessel, it utterly obliterates them. The ability to turn all weapons from all angles against a single target for a turn is just ridiculously effective, even if it immobilizes the ship and costs a -2 penalty to attacks.

Now, granted, the Driftmaven isn't just a giant vessel, its very heavily hinted to be a major investment and resource for Triune herself, possibly even an avatar. It makes perfect sense that this would be a "bonus boss" level opponent ( also, why are you fighting Triune in the first place? ). Still, it does make me wonder what kind of fleet you would need to put together to actually stand a chance of winning against the Driftmaven.

[Hanomir]

That's not what Drift Flower does. It lets you pick any one single orientation that round and fire as though you were facing that way without actually changing your facing. Each weapon has to bear in the right arc based on the orientation you picked. Mostly useful for letting you maintain your facing so you can move off in teh same direction next turn while you shoot at something on your flank or rear, or for making sure that your best guns are (temporarily) pointed at the target you want dead most. It is kind of clumsy, after all.

Mind you, it *is* a really strong ship due to its special rules, just not quite that good. Adaptive Shielding should let it reliably win almost any one-on-one fight - 20 points off many of the hits you take adds up quick even at tier 20.

[Garretmander]

A fleet of ships so small that they can evade their turbolasers.

There's still some heavy firepower in the laser cannons, but if you're fielding high tier shuttles and fighters you can avoid the major damage weapons.

[Xenocrat]

It's fairly vulnerable to a maxed out computers skill specialist using a digital raid node to take over its computers and turn it against it. Taking a -8 to six checks per round (including your checks to try to remove the effect) is a bad time. The TL 37 (31 + 4 antihacking systems +2 functional shields) is pretty easy to hit.

A 20th level computer specialist with +9 intelligence (techno, mechanic, or biohacker) would only need a 8 or 65% chance to succeed in the gunnery phase (assuming functional shields). Then the hack carries into the engineer phase next round with a -8 to up to six checks.

The Driftmaven can try to remove it as one of its engineering checks (+39 computers +4 antihacking -8 hack penalty) at a +35 against a DC 45 (tier 20 PC ship) with a 55% chance of success, but all other engineering phase checks can still suffer the penalty that round regardless of success as they're all simultaneous.

So 65% (or 75% if no shields) chance of (1) penalizing all engineering checks and (2) probably soaking up one ore more actions to remove it, and (3) a 29.25% (shields) or 33.75% (no shields) chance of carrying the penalty through to the helm and gunnery rounds where you can really inconvenience them. More realistically you probably penalize all the engineering checks and soak up 3-4 actions (of 15) making sure they remove it, but that's 3-4 fewer actions available to lock on, use defensive countermeasures, use various engineer actions, or fire some of its 14 weapons if its surrounded.

I don't see any reason you can't be hacked more than once by separate ECM weapons and gunners, forcing you to use more actions to remove all of the effects, so multiple ships with competent science officers and hacking weapons could steal a lot of actions from it or force it to accept the -8 to all the important stuff.

Garretmander wrote:

A fleet of ships so small that they can evade their turbolasers.

There's still some heavy firepower in the laser cannons, but if you're fielding high tier shuttles and fighters you can avoid the major damage weapons.

The DT 20 makes it pretty resistant to light enemies, more so as Adaptive Shielding reduces subsequent hits without missing for a round by 20. You need a linked coilgun (avg damage 20) to have a 43.83% chance of damaging it even if you hit, or linked light plasma cannons (avg 23) to have a 78% chance of beating the damage threshold. Tactical Nukes have a 64.77% chance to beat DT, but the BP cost is now pretty prohibitive and you're attacking a TL three higher than the AC.

Close range swarms of small ships with linked light plasma is the way. Hope you've got a lot of hot gunners to fire all those weapons, you'll need 52 hits in one arc to disable it if it doesn't boost or reallocate its shields or flee to the drift. And because of Adaptive Shielding you can realistically only damage it every odd round by not shooting at it on even rounds.

Good luck.

[Hanomir]

Linked plasma (average 26 dmg) from the small ship/tiny swarm is probably less effective than either using a mix of linked busters (average 27 against shields) to strip shields (making your hacking attacks more effective) and open up the hull to the other part of the swarm with linked chain guns (average 30 dmg - 42 if you're using adamantine alloy). That will put damage through every round - the DR doesn't apply to shields, so the busters are good for 7 each even with adaptive shields applying after the round where they're torn down initially, and even with -20 damage from adaptive the adamant chain guns will beat the DR reliably.

Alternately, linked orbital death knells hit even harder (average 33 dmg - 39 with adamant against downed shields), do the same base damage against both shields and hull, have better range brackets, and don't suffer an accuracy penalty against something this big. Why someone would build a bunch of interceptors with linked orbital death knells I don't know, but it probably involves attempted genocide.

I suspect a "balanced encounter" worth of specialized small-frame ram ships with turret-mounted melee weapons (aka Outlaw Star grapplers) and maybe autodestruct would also settle its hash pretty handily.

All of this is very silly theorycrafting, since the Driftmaven would either just leave if it felt threatened - but yeah, it's got plenty of exploitable weaknesses despite its bevvy of unique rules.