B-52 Bomber
Hull types in Stars! | |
---|---|
Colonizer | Mini-Colony Ship · Colony Ship |
Bomber | Mini Bomber · B-17 Bomber · Stealth Bomber · B-52 Bomber |
Scout | Scout · Frigate · Destroyer |
Warship | Cruiser · Battle Cruiser · Battleship · Dreadnought · Nubian |
Freighter | Small Freighter · Medium Freighter · Large Freighter · Super Freighter |
Armed Freighter | Privateer · Rogue · Galleon · Meta Morph |
Mine Layer | Mini Mine Layer · Super Mine Layer |
Fuel Tanker | Fuel Transport · Super-Fuel Xport |
Remote Miner | Midget Miner · Mini Miner · Miner · Maxi Miner · Ultra Miner |
Starbase | Orbital fort · Space Dock · Space Station · Ultra Station · Death Star |
The B-52 bomber hull is the last and most advanced iteration of the bomber ship in the game. Doubling the capacities of the previous B-17 bomber without doubling the cost and able to mount shields, it is a perfect late game bomber.
The only negative trait of this hull would be that gathering so many weapons on the same hull effectively prevent you from being able to split your bomber fleet precisely enough to prevent total destruction of a planet you would otherwise wish to preserve for capture via population dropping. Since late game bombing often turn around bombs versus fully defended worlds, the time factor usually become prevalent in design creation process and then render the problem moot.
Some players like to use the B-52 bomber hull to mix smarts bombs with more conventional bombs on the same hull. As defenses are less effective to counter the smart bomb family, doing so make a bombing run that much more deadly against fully defended planets. Gathering all the bomb types on the same hull in turn allow a player to have the same hitting power than a combined fleet of the same load-out would have while saving on design slots. One need to be fully aware of the slot id numbers to be able to guarantee which bomb type will strike first.
Specifications
Base Fuel ― | Base Armor ― | Base Ini ― | Base Mass ― | Base Resource | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
- Require Construction 15
- Only bomber in the game able to mount shields
Slot layout
- 3 Engines
- 4x4 Bombs
- 1x2 Shield
- 1x2 Scanner/Elect/Mech
Slot IDs
___ │1·1│___ 0 = Engines ___│1·1·3·3│___ 1&2&3&4 = Bomb x4 ╡0·0·6·6·3·3·5·5│ 5 = Scanner/Elect/Mech x2 ╡0·0·6·6·4·4·5·5│ 6 = Shields x2 ¯¯¯│2·2·4·4│¯¯¯ │2·2│¯¯¯ B-52 Bomber ¯¯¯
Common Designs
Smart Bomb Bomber
The smart bomb family can completely ignore planetary factories and mines while wiping out the planet population. As such, many players prefer to use bombers sporting only smart bombs in the hope to (re)claim a fully developed planet for their own profit.
As smart bombs require a significantly higher research contribution than conventional bombs to make available, players using this design simply mount the best smart bomb available at the time of creation.
Smart Bomb/Cherry Bomb Mix
A common B-57 bomber design is the mix of the best smart bomb available in slots #1 and #2 along with the best conventional bomb available (usually cherry bombs) in slot #3 and #4. Doing so allow the smart bombs to strike first and bypass planetary defenses more easily and then in turn allow the conventional bombs to be more effective against a smaller number of defenses once it is their turn to drop. Such designs also usually use the scanner/elect/mech slot either for cloaking or for increased fuel capacity.
This design simply mimic in a single hull a commonly used strategy of combining two fleets of B-17 bombers or mini-bombers to do the exact same bombing run.
As it is possible to do exactly the same thing with two different designs of bombers after ensuring that the smart bomb bomber is of a lower fleet number than the conventional bomb bomber, the main use of this design is to save on design slots which can then be better used as counter-designs.