Federation Commander

I'm told in SFB they had to come up with purpose built ships for this, but then I gather bases back then were tougher nuts to crack.

This seems to be the justification for the Klingon dreads, which seem less useful to me otherwise than an equivalent weight of cruiser and battlecruiser sized ships. The extra hull and system boxes make them harder kills, which is necessary when closing with something armed with phaser 4s, and the extra power is useful for suicide shuttles, which you will want.

Kzinti, who can put out a blizzard of drones, would seem to be well advised to come in with or behind a drone wave, to occupy the enemy's weapons. Klingons can't put out quite as many drones, so with them an approach under EM seems more promising, in order to mitigate the damage caused by the phaser 4s on the way in. You can't dance around with a base, the phaser 4s out you on the clock, so you have to close, and disruptors aren't the best thing to close with. The C7s and up have large banks of phaser 1s, which are very useful at close range and hit more reliably than disruptors. So get to range five or less, where you can transporter raid, accept that you're going to get bloodied, and get to work. It looks to be a simple and brutal problem.

I think what you're referring to is the apocryphal tale of the G.O.D in his Klingon Commander role assaulting a Tholian Base hidden behind webs. Many of the conventional tactics don't pan out here, so it is rumoured that the mighty Mauler was born to trash the base in a single devastating but glorious burst of energy!There are some playtest rules for Maulers somewhere, but i think they are a definite BoM product.

In rough terms, a mauler ship replaces the majority of its weapons with batteries that are tied into the mauler weapon. It then packs further batteries into whatever space is available,and for a final bit of fun, ties the engines into the mauler as well. The batteries discharge in groups to the weapon, and some of the engine boxes used to actually fire the mauler would be destroyed. In SFB, the mauler was often targeted by enemy fleets in an attempt to get it to explode in the middle of your formation for a fair bit of damage. However, if you got close, you could trsah your tagret with a single shot of mauler fire.

In SFB the Klingons, Romulans, Lyrans and Andromedans use Maulers. The WYN built one as part of the Usurper's plan to reclaim the Kzinti throne.

Klingon of Gor wrote:This seems to be the justification for the Klingon dreads, which seem less useful to me otherwise than an equivalent weight of cruiser and battlecruiser sized ships. The extra hull and system boxes make them harder kills, which is necessary when closing with something armed with phaser 4s, and the extra power is useful for suicide shuttles, which you will want.

The C8 and other dreadnoughts are for command and control of larger forces - the extra boxes are the "padding" necessary to have the admiral on board. In SFB and FC, the C^3 aspects are not included but are present in spades in FnE.

Now, as to base bustin, the Klingons appear to be at a disadvantage over other empires as they don't really have the crunch power in their heavy weapons or enough seeking weapons. The Klingon fleet is very good at saber dancing and wearing away an opponent's systems. You really can't do this kind of dance against a base due to its heavy weapons and PH-4.

To address the problem, the Klingon ship yards created all those lovely variants (most of which haven't made it to FC yet) - drone ships, troop ships, maulers, and SFG ships. These special ships make it much easier for the Klingons to pull down a base. It appears all of these (except the drone ships) are BOM critters.

New Light Cruiser Drone ships are available in a Booster, along with Escorts for Empires without Drones ---