[Nebulous: Fleet Command] I've created a monster and I don't know how to defeat it.

This battleship has SEVEN adaptive radar receivers, a Parallax radar system, and a Scryer missile ID system; it STILL can't see these things approaching. The capabilities of this missile are horrifying, I have no idea how to defeat it. As long as its approach is covered by a blanket jammer, your point defenses will be completely unable to react to it before it enters sprint phase and becomes unstoppable. To make matters worse, these missiles have electro optical guidance so they're also impossible to fool with decoys and chaff. Even if you know they're coming your only option is shooting them down, but how can you shoot what you can't see?

[@mattsgrungy]

I'm gonna need you to show me the design of that missile....

[@322wongamos]

same, waiting here

[@Chimerathon]

It's nothing super complicated. Make a size 3 hybrid missile with double stealth coating and an optical guidance tip. You can make the warhead a disturbingly big HE head, just make sure the sprint fuel is enough so that the second stage starts at 3km. Then just launch at a jammed target, they won't see it coming unless they have a teammate outside the jammer cone that's within 6km of the missiles. Oh yeah, and they're pretty cheap too at 36 points a pop. I made a special 3000 point fleet to deploy them that can bring 40, 36 on a light cruiser with 7 missile volleys, and four more on a spotter/jamming frigate just as a surprise. I bet they'd be really good to just take a couple of too though, for hunting spotters perhaps since they're more likely to be isolated away from PD and it usually only takes one shot to hollow out a corvette.

[@MENTOR_PICTURES]

@@Chimerathon i cant make it chepper then 45pts (

[@Chimerathon]

@@MENTOR_PICTURES you might be using the wrong warhead? It's just a standard HE warhead, no need for the kinetic penetrator one.

[@MENTOR_PICTURES]

@@Chimerathon Oh, really? Thx ))

[@Calacorm]

After much testing I found a solution. First off the auto defense will not save you. I used a BB to test with a mixed forward arc of PD consisting of the new rail gun, an aurora, two defenders and 2 rebounds. The ship is also designed to be a practical ship so this limited me. I made an H3 missile with a Top speed cruise, Sprint: 800ms 3.6k range and 20G turn, double stealth Penetrator payload and the eo sensor. Under a jammer blanket that is under 5k away the missile will not be picked up by a paralax with 3 arr until around 1.5 - 2k range if I recall. Your Auto missile defense wont even get a missile out of the tube most of the time, the PD defense may get lucky. I have not tested this from a more realistic range of 10 to 8k, the single jammer may not be strong enough to cloak the sprint stage all the way to 1.5k from target. I attacked the defender with 6 simultaneous launched H3 torpedoes from a single launcher causing a string of them. They are devastating running nose to tail, just two or three will knock a BB out. The defense test is a success if we sustain 0 or 1 hit with non-critical damage. I did not test a swarm style attack and the missile did not weave or cork; the single stream was tough enough! I did not test the cheaper HE variant. While I experimented with H2 type defender missiles with the large frag payload, I settled on a type 1 missile. The type 1s launch the fastest and you need them to go quick; my defender ship had a big bonus to launch speed. The missile is a 330 m/s 3k range 7.5 G minimum size engine. It uses direct flight in defense mode vs type 3 missiles and a salvo of 2 (doesn't matter since auto launch wont work). I launch them cold with resume search and minimum angle. The seeker is not cmd, I use Steerable Extended range active radar targeting smalls; very key distinction from riposte. Note your own chaff can mess them up. The BB needs to be flying away from the inbound torpedoes as fast as it can to give more time for PD defense and auto defender launch if able. If the sprinters are not double stealth and you see them at around 3 k the auto missile defense may score some kills more often then not as well as pd, if they show up at 1.5k to 2k you are already dead , auto launch wont be able to fire fast enough. SOLUTION: You can manual launch the defenders in packs of at least 2 by using your eyeballs to see the inbounds missiles before they get tracks at the 4k range, or by using burn through to see the purple hits and know what direction to launch. This is HIGHLY effective but requires manual skill and situational awareness to know you are being attacked. Note if you burn through and the ship sees a missile track the audio should say "...spiker..." (something like that) to clue you in. WHY: The defender missile having an active radar lets you (POS) manual launch and kill missiles that have NO track. The traditional CMD type defenders must have a track hence why the double stealth Hybrid is so deadly under a jammer blanket; nothing to lock. Active Radar defenders will even work well if the auto launcher is able to send them since we have minimum angle and cold launch, they go directly for the head on missile intercept with no flight path curves which causes a max velocity intercept and higher PK. I like to send them in pairs to up the PK chances so you need to make sure your ship has a few prog. channels; at least 2 and maybe two launchers. Another cool thing is the missiles are resume search so if PD takes the target out the defender can get the next one in the chain! TLDR; A very deadly missile, tough to counter and very effective but it can be defeated!

[@Chimerathon]

I've more or less come to the same conclusion, that you'll need to manually launch some type of self guiding amm in the direction you think the missiles will come from, which is a tall order because you can't just be throwing out PD missiles at every ship that throws up a blanket at you, and manually firing PD missiles is subject to restriction by missile programming channels. My other conclusion is that jamming is OP and needs better counterplay. I want adaptive receivers to be way more effective at filtering through jamming for one. I'd also like an ewar mount that's like the pinard except for jamming, so the jammed ship can see the approximate direction of the jammer and broadcast the assumed cone of affect to teammates sensors so that they can respond with lock-on-jam missiles. If I want to make a specialized anti-jamming picket ship, I should be able to do that with the right design, but there's just not enough tools atm. After a ton of testing, I'm actually afraid jammer cloaked stealth missiles are going to become meta if enough people figure it out. It's such a cool premise and presents an interesting tactical challenge but it's not fun to deal with since there's so little counterplay that not even a hyper specialized counter can beat it without a ton of guesswork.

[@Calacorm]

@@Chimerathon I want to test at a more realistic range 8k to 10k with a single jammer and see if the double stealth H3's are still invisible up to point blank 1.5k 2k range. In Test Arena the ships start really close and I didn't bother controlling the AI ship. If the jammer cant keep them cloaked and they do appear at 3K+ the auto defense may be able to get em! - Lets not imagine multiple jammers :P

[@Chimerathon]

@@Calacorm I've finally hit a breakthrough, I figured out a comprehensive countermeasure that can defeat this while taking no hits and destroying the attacker in the process. It requires a fairly specialized loadout, but the ship only costs about 2.5k and is also fully practical in the event the enemy isn't using stealth missile tactics. It can't protect your teammates from getting blasted though, I think that will require some new ecm toys from devs. Expect another video explaining how I did it, though I will say it uses the blind fire AMM tactic, with a slight twist.

[@KoishiVibin]

@@Chimerathon I love how this resembles the R&D of a LockMart dept

[@Calacorm]

So I tested at a more maximal range where the shooter was at around 9k from the targeted ship, the double stealth missiles will get tracks at around 3k with a paralax and two ARR. This gives the automatic missiles time to launch and intercept! Range is a big factor in the jammer ability to cloak the missiles. Still deadly but does not require manual fire of the defenders. You still need to be flanking away from the attack and have a quality defender missile on board with good PD as well.

[@jeffjr84]

the space version of an Atlanta class cruiser, a dedicated air defense ship, with most if not every version of CIWS available, that way you will engage vampire tracks ( missiles) at all ranges, and even have proximity fuse ammo for your main guns so you can manually target the sky in front of them to increase your chances..

[@ArmoredNeko]

Possible solutions: 1. mass stonewalls which is what I'm packing on most my ships. Missiles will be visually IDed once they get into 3km range and stonewall only has 1km range anyway. Aurora still works at this reduced range but it can't deal with mass missiles so stonewall is the better bet imo. 2. Illuminators. Maybe the missiles can be seen when radar waves are strong enough. Need to test it with a friend though. 3. poor utility ships as meat shields. If it has PD it can also contribute as it will see missiles within 3km with or without jamming. I've used similar design myself but I admit it's probably better to get a second coating rather than a back-up active sensor to make the sprint happen at 5km. The only problem is that S3 VLS has such limited capacity so you will have to find other ways to finish off damaged ships.

[@prophetsspaceengineering2913]

Agreed, except on Auroras. They work quite well if you use Battleshort. Sure, it's going to melt your turrets by the time the 50th missile comes around but until then you're close to invincible. The important part seems to be surviving the initial volleys since expensive sprint stages are the meta atm.

[@ArmoredNeko]

@@prophetsspaceengineering2913 They work well when they have 3km range, under jamming they can only shoot 1.6 and letting too many missiles through. You have to either have A LOT of them or find other ways to defeat the jamming. Also mass stonewalls don't really work after some games and really the only working solution I have rn is to have your poor picket ship staying in front of you and taking the blunt. The bright side is most missiles will still be distracted by your picket ship even if it exploded.

[@juliusEST]

We're fucked, aren't we?

[@PhantomW100]

Impressive, very nice. Now let’s see the design.

[@carson1223]

I want to see Paul Allen's S3H

[@user-cd4bx6uq1y]

As a non-player, this seems amazing

[@someolfellow1094]

Something I discovered, although stupidly expensive With a kinetic penetrator on a cruise missile, go 2 fuel and the rest the explosive on the sprint warhead, maximize menurvability on the first stage and use corkscrew. I used the steerable sensor Sure it cost around 80 points if I remember, but the damn thing can critically damage a battleship with just one missile, hit a full Salvo of 4 and the thing is gone. Good to keep on you for later in the battle after everyone's exhausted a good chunk of resources.

[@drunkoctopus6769]

Would love the actual specifications of the missile to play around with it myself. They're quite the awesome tool

[@henryhamilton4087]

Alright so after learning some of the game's mechanics a bit more, there is a way to counter this, which is by spamming the BRN command constantly (assuming you run the Parallax radar which....i assume 90% of anything bigger than a Vauxhall would run) as soon as you are jammed so that your PD can track the missiles as they come in. Ofc this won't stop a big volley of them, but thankfully double stacked missile components have massive diminishing returns, so this won't happen anymore.

[@ElTurbandito]

I don't know what you're doing differently than me but my test fleets detect this missile at 4k, even when jammed by 2x blankets

[@christopherthompson5462]

What was their PD solution? I run a CH/FF that would eat that up: I have a parallax with Scryer in the CH and a Spyglass with ARR in the FF for early target and missile ID. 10 chaff, 10 decoys, 49 S1 AMMs, 16 S2 AMMs, 4 Auroras and 2 Stonewalls. This BB hasn’t paid his PD tax.

[@christopherthompson5462]

Okay I stand corrected. After testing this, the only way to live is to have escorts outside the jamming that can feed you tracks.

[@prophetsspaceengineering2913]

So jamming and sprint missiles. That's the meta, isn't it? It's good, no argument there. I found Parallax on chain-Burnthrough and Auroras on Battleshort to be the best answer so far. Riposte-variants apparently also work.

[@barontv450]

most expensive hybrids have a near 100% hit rate on single targets anyways you could also have used decoys

[@Chimerathon]

Decoys are more expensive than this, and they are easier to detect from far enough away that they can be defeated in cruise phase. This battle ship can defeat decoy spammer hybrids really convincingly, but absolutely gets bodied by these stealth hybrids.

[@theomochlakis8237]

maybe a modyfied riposte missle with cold launch paired with that nitrogen bottle thingy? you could maybe give it a proximity warhead if they don't end up exploding to close to your ship.

[@KoishiVibin]

you.... you freakin designed the LRASM i ...wow.

[@Little1-1]

I recreated your stealth missile in a 3 ship destroyer fleet. I swapped the EO for CMD and cruise to direct making it even cheaper. The fleet is also stealthy with prowler engines and low emissions (radar off, xcom rcv) and carries 60 missiles. I don’t know how to defeat it! Too powerful 😂😂😂. Tried with a fleet of 7 tugboat and laser PD (aurora) but nah, they go through anyway.

[@Metal_Enjoyer]

What are the exact specs of these missiles? I'd love to terrify my friends with them.

[@PSC4.1]

You think that's bad? Try making a anti ship missile using a ballistic warhead. That stuff is so frigging dangerous. Did this with class 4s making a hypersonic missile design and it works to a certain extent. If you can make an impact from bow to stern it destroys everything in its way.

[@robro2214]

Is'nt the missile kinda of expensive to be useful?

[@regisb2865]

Offset scouts go brrrrrr

[@thatoneguywhodoesthatthing913]

Maybe add some of those new 15mm sand blasters, or some Rebounds? I mean, 3 aurora PDTs is pretty mean, but I think they’re slightly shorter ranged, and they definitely don’t have an area of effect like the flak guns. You could also EWar right back ASAP, and maneuver perpendicular to the missile. Or maybe I’m wrong, I’m just spitballing ideas... Either way, this does show an important element of Nebulous: The first one found is the first one shot up; and if you ride alone, you die alone.

[@henryhamilton4087]

the Sarissa can fire at 6km.....but as you can see here with the Parallax Radar + 7 Adaptive Receivers, the ship only detected the missiles about 2.5 seconds before impact. Imagine a ship with a regular build with no Adaptive receivers or just 1, you'd probably get less than a second reaction time. You might be able to get slightly better results with the Spyglass, but the reduced sensor track accuracy means your PDTs are less effective. The Electro Optical sensor is completely unaffected by EWAR. Although the tighter beam means the Spyglass has a better chance of burning through the stealth coating and getting a track on the missiles faster, but probably not before the Sprint phase, at least by itself. Your only option to detect it, would probably to pre-fire a Bullseye or a burn-through sweep to detect it and give your PDTs and Defensive missiles enough time to fire at it before it enters the terminal sprint phase. In which case the Sarissa is your best friend. Failing that, you can try to pre-fire the Stonewall Flak guns in the off chance that it at least reduces the amount of missiles that punch through.

[@Chimerathon]

If your ship is maneuverable enough I think it might be possible to drastically change course right after you think the missiles have been fired and possibly just avoid the seekers if they were fired far enough away since the seekers only activate at 3km and can't be adjusted mid cruise; I tweaked the cruise fuel to a higher speed to help make that more difficult though, and the fact you can't spot the missiles early means you probably have no idea you're in major danger, besides being aware you're visible to something that's jamming you.

[@Chimerathon]

It's also worth noting that I've attempted to shine a floodlight into the jamming to overpower it and possibly detect the missiles at least early enough to fire a few pd missiles, but it just doesn't seem to do anything, which is why I forgot to switch it on in this video.

[@funkkymonkey6924]

Updated out

[@rzu1474]

Build the same thing. Misses all the time

[@paritybit2277]

1. If you put that large of an amount of jammers on your ship your radar sig will be massive enough for other fleets and ships to counter-jam, lock and fire on your missile cruiser. As well as each jammer having diminishing returns in terms of it's effectiveness. 2. If you have your missile cruiser forward with all those jammers and your missiles cost 36 each, you know your missile cruiser is made of glass that will get instantly destroyed by any other fleet. S3H missile cruisers are not used in forward attack for this very reason as even for for a 24-27 point S3H 2100hp missile cruiser setup you basically end up with a missile cruiser with no PD and no DC lockers. Not only that but the scenario you tested this in is also massively unrealistic in the sense that if you were to actually have your missile cruiser sub 10k distance from your target nearby friendly fleets of the target would likely also see your ship in sub 12k range. 3. The standard BB and HC radar config is spyglass + 2 radar boosters. And the optimal PD config is 2 auroras on HC, 3 auroras on BB and every other PD slot is rebound/stonewall for dealing with S2 spam. Auroras have infinite accuracy and deal constant damage to detected S3H missiles. That means no matter how hard you jam those auroras will always be dealing damage and your salvo is 3 - meaning that maybe 50% of the time only the last missile will hit. That's why salvo size is important for S3Hs. 4. In this scenario you retreated your BB which caused it to turn. If you left it standing face to face with the HC, the S3H would have hit the front of the ship and not taken out the reactors neccessary for your auroras to function. 5. Realisticly you would never have your missile cruiser this far forward, if you play games where you are allowed to do this unpunished - the game is massively unbalanced. To wit, the most amount of jammers you'll ever have on your missile target is 2-3. EO is also really ineffective against firing at targets far away (which is really what you'll be doing) since it often looses track. EO also has the downside of limiting your booster to 3k distance of firing. Meaning if a friendly ship outside of the jamming radius and direction sees your missiles that salvo is practically already dead. 6. S3Hs are massively effective against hitting single targets, but HC fleet tend to run 2 HCs, each with 1-2 auroras and flak means your S3Hs will be massively ineffective against that type of config. To test this use your fleet against TF Oak and see how well it works. This becomes even worse against fleets that consist of more than 3 ships, like for example beam DD groups where each beam DD should have atleast one aurora. Another disadvantage is that if the beam DDs are spaced let's say 400 meters apart, if your S3H locks on to middle or last one (from the perspective of your cruiser) that means your missile will be detected 400-800 meters closer.

[@edwardp4038]

Welp. Im never playing online

[@basedchaos7677]

Well you could start by adding some point defenses

[@jmkhenka]

active decoy and rebounds. Also, you dont even have a bullseye. But this is life of a single BB, if you had a single spotter outside the jamming cone you would see them.. EO is easily avoided if you just keep moving.. they dont account for speed only direction, so they can compensate if you move angular to the missile.

[@Chimerathon]

Decoy is definitely out, doesn't work against EO. It would be neat if there was an EO specific decoy though, like a hologram projector, optics blinding bouy, or inflating corvette shaped balloon lol. I'm also skeptical of flak being the solution, since you'd have to manually aim it and you don't know exactly where the missiles are because of the jamming. Having a nearby spotter outside the jamming cone is what you need, but the positioning for that is tricky because the stealth coating hides them until around 6km distance regardless of jamming. People also like to overlap jam wide areas just for the Intel advantage, so there's a good chance the spotters gonna be jammed too. It's a tough puzzle that feels imbalanced to me, the addition of a pricey decoy specific to defeating EO would make it much less complicated and more fair imo

[@nolongeravailable108]

this game is not bad, just to bad nobody is online

[@gusfring8451]

God the voice acting is atrocious. Good video tho!