Seeking Suggestions: Countering Satellites

Maybe simply because they are stored undeployed in the cargo bays?
Otherwise I think that fast drones/fighters rushing to destroy the sat layer would be quite effective at the job... (as soon as the current "drop" bug is solved)

Is this using Stock or BM?

"Don't Panic"

1) Although satellites are cheap, they are not free. You can pack lots of them into a ship but you still have to pay for them. Meanwhile, your enemy can spend just as much money on buying fighters to counter them.

2) Satellites cannot be used for offensive purposes. Just counter them with more satellites, and it's a standoff.

3) Satellites suffer the same drawback as every other stationary unit. If you outrange them, they cannot defend themselves.

4) Assuming you're using Balance Mod, one possible counter is to use swarms of fighters armed with Small Anti-Matter Torpedoes. These torpedoes have pretty good range (up to 100) which allows them to inflict heavy damage on stationary targets without getting too close.

are satellites prone to computer virus based weapons?

I doubt so. Would be a great game addition though!

Kamikase fighters targeting sat layers might be less expensive (both in ressources and research) than the sats. Did you test them?

What, exactly, is wrong with this? If the players in your group are so inflexible that they are unwilling to listen to good tactical advice, I say they deserve to be blasted into vapor. "Adapt or die" must be the first rule any good Space Despot follows.

Here are two tactics I have found useful when dealing with satellites:

If you are assaulting a warp point, use fleets. Fleets allow you to control the order that ships pass through a warp point. When faced with warp points heavily defended by satellites, I use a fleet composed of the following:

1st: A "bullet soak". This is a ship packed with shields and armor, and whatever weapons fit in the cracks. As the first ship through the warp point, it will be targeted by the satellites. If you didn't do adequate reconnaissance, you should expect to lose this ship, if not more, in the initial warp point crossing. You did do reconnaissance before the full assault, didn't you?

2nd, 3rd, and 4th: "Escorts" loaded with Flak Cannons and Bomblet Missiles. These ships get rid of the satellites.

5th and later: The rest of the assault force.

This strategy also works well against warp points defended by fighters.

In general combat (i.e. planet assault), I create a new strategy for my fighters that I call "Interceptor". Fighters are programmed to attack enemy fighters, satellites, and drones first, rather than targeting anything else. I did this after the umpteenth time I saw my fighters fly past a swarm of enemy fighters on their way to attack capital ships, bases, and planets. I want my fighters to act as a screen for my capital ships. You may lose a lot of fighters, but fighters are cheap and easy to replace; battleships are not.

Again: Adapt or die. The problem is not "Houdini" storage, but inflexible thinking.

You are confusing weight (or actually mass, but weight is a more common measurement of mass within our gravity) with space... components (including cargo bays) are rated in kT (kilo tons), that's weight and does not directly correlate into space. Basically, consider a 20kT cargo bay containing 200kT of cargo to not be a box with more space inside it that the outside should allow, but more like a frame that can support 10 times it's own WEIGHT.

SEV doesn't really bother itself with space (apart from the hardpoints during ship design that limit how many armor items you can put on or how many Inner and Outer Hull spots... and while armor is easy to max, hull spaces are seldom completely filled for me even on ONE deck). A destroyer and a small freighter may have the same weight in kT, but the freighter would likely have a larger volume to contain it's cargo.

Although I can see how the basic mechanics of planetary storage can tend to increase this confusion, since it limits cargo and facilities by weight which seems rather silly that a 1000kt superdense sphere would take up the same capacity on a planet as five 200kt weapon platforms...
but I've always tried to rationalize it as the method of storage - meaning the framework to keep said sphere from breaking through the planet's surface by dispersing the weight load would take up as much area as five platforms...

In ship design, I see cargo bays more as efficent means of distributing weight of cargo to limit impact on thrust ratios than dealing with the volume of the cargo.

I find that beam heavy ships rarely have serious issues with small number of sats. Giant swarms can be a serious issue, but realistically you'd send a fleet to deal with them.

A few ships loaded with bomblets and a strat forcing the rest of their fleet to ignore sats might be in order, bomblets will likely make short work of the sats. There's nothing that states that avery method has to be effective against every other so quite right that they can't counter with their current strategy. It'd be like you trying to fight against an empire that used 80% PD, an empire with which your opponents would have no trouble.

I can see the point there, but in cases like the Balance Mod where population mass is more accurate, less effective cargo bays would create serious issues in moving populations... I've always had issues with satellites in general considering their sizes - they aren't satellites so much as miniature bases. For my mod I'm reducing the sizes of satellites to slightly larger than fighters. The biggest ones will be able to mount some of the smaller ship scale weapons, but I'm denying them regular ship missiles, instead the largest satellites can get one shot versions of them (enough tonnage to mount a missile launcher and a computer core and the launcher only provides enough ordnance/supplies to fire once). This will drastically reduce the effectiveness of satellites, granted, but they are mainly intended as early warning or minor lines of defense. They'll still be able to pack PD to shoot down missiles/fighters heading for planets and some small ship scale weapons to confront smaller ships, but to truly deal with larger ships one will either need a full scale base, weapons platforms, mines or ships of their own.

Warp Point defense should be managed by mines primarily or defense fleets/fighter groups to picket.

On the subject of dealing with sats, a ship with lots of bomblet missiles, and a custom max range strategy with sats with working weapons as the main priority. Should work well unless the sats pack quantum torpedoes, or large mount wave motion guns... then 'safe distance' is wishful thinking...

Although, in some ways, drones suffer from a similar problem... biggest of which being the 'one shot, one kill' ability they pack. A sat can whittle a ship down slowly, a drone, if it lives, can likely pop smaller ships easily... and drones can be as easily spammed as sats...

On the subject of cargo space and whatnot...
One thing I noticed in the manual is it mentions the unit of measure is not 'ton' but 'tonnage'.
One of the earlier/generalized versions is a mixture of volume and mass, roughly '1 long ton (1 metrict ton?) and/or 100 cubic feet' iirc.
And since SE uses 'kilo-tonnage' as the base measurement... even fighters are 'big'...

An interesting idea I agree with is to have cargo bays hold less than their own kt. Perhaps increase their size, level increases amount of space.
For example, a cargo bay being 110kt, hold 80kt each at level 1, +2kt per level, to a max of 100kt at level 11.
Similar could be done to unit launching components, but with reduced capacity due to the equipment needed to launch (and recover) units.

In such a case as requiring a cargo carrying component to be a little heavier than its capacity, another thing that would make sense would be to increase the size of carriers, and greatly increase the size of freighters.
Toss in other factors, bring back engine per move from SE IV and make the cargo haulers need more engines, and also toss on a limit to weapons and even armor, moreso for freighters. As is, a freighter, even an 'armed' one, should not be able to slug it out with anything larger than a frigate and still have hopes of winning or at least surviving.

For a quick comparison of 'real' ships...
Iowa class Battleship, 860ft, 58,000 ton displacement fully loaded.
Nimitz class Carrier, 1,100ft, over 100,000 ton displacement fully loaded.
"Knock Nevis" (super tanker), 1,500ft long, over 200,000 ton displacement, can haul over 560,000 metric tons of 'dead weight'.

"As is, a freighter, even an 'armed' one, should not be able to slug it out with anything larger than a frigate and still have hopes of winning or at least surviving."

I'm gonna have to disagree there. The Germans managed to take out a light cruiser with one during WW2.

Enjoy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_auxiliary_cruiser_Kormoran

I said 'slug it out' and 'have hopes of winning or at least surviving;'.

Kormoran vs. HMS Sydney wasn't exactly a slug out, more of a surprise attack/ambush of sorts, and neither ship survived.
I stumbled across an interesting video with footage of the wreck of the Sydney and a 'recreation' of the battle.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NCF5c19pIA&feature=related

Overall, an armed freighter 'normally' cannot even survive against a warship. They lack the armor, the speed, and in many cases, the fire control systems, that a full warship has.

Under the entry of Auxiliary Cruiser on a page about Armed Merchantmen on Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auxiliary_cruiser
"This was the only occasion in history when an armed merchantman managed to sink a modern warship; in most cases auxiliary cruiser raiders tried to avoid confrontation with warships."

Pah, my rubber ducky sunk many toy boats in the tub!

Though in a sci-fi setting, where ships would have energy weapons, then the larger ship has a larger reactor, giving it a better energy output. Thus, it can field stronger weapons and better shields.

Hell, even with rail guns or whatever, the larger ship probably has a larger gun, which gives it better range, so even then size does make a difference.

Uh... Wouldn't a "Q-ship" need to have a powerful reactor just to make that enormous bulk go somewhere? But yeah, you'd expect a real warship to have better weaponry and armor. A true warship will be smaller, but pack more firepower in that space. The Kormoran was actually 33% larger than the Sydney, but it had half the firepower, if that much. However, unlike Sydney, Kormoran had the ability to deploy naval mines, and a form of rudimentary stealth capability.