munroburton wrote:Well, the biggest issue with sublight parasites is that they can't retreat easily - it's even worse than LACs from the Honorverse, as the parasites can't just sit inside a larger ship's hyper generator bubble(Separated objects in Dahakverse hyperspace fare poorly).
Another thing to consider is there was an Imperial civil war. Any kind of planetoid could easily blow planets up and they thus preferred to place military bases on airless rocks, but civil war changed this, as that practice was to prevent aliens from blowing their planets up. The Imperial factions, however, couldn't very well go around blowing up planets with humans and they started basing around civilians. So that called for planetary assault specialisation, something that they wouldn't have bothered with against the Achuultani.
In that vein, what would have compelled the construction of heavy parasite carriers?
On the other hand, even with that one system surviving the Third Imperium's fall(Birhat?), it appears they didn't learn very much about the Achuultani. Particularly the highly static nature of the AI domination of their culture. So they did not know the Achultaani wouldn't be even stronger on their next visit, which might allow the scattergunning of design specialities.
It depends how they planned to use the planetoids. Just as with naval combat, working in fleets allows more specialised individual units whilst singletons have to be able to do everything.
I can see those points, but that very lack of knowing what weapons their enemy used may have led to platform proliferation wouldn't it? The Imperium military would have been lucky to follow the old Sun Tzu proverb (even if they predated him by millenia) of
If you know others and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know others but know yourself, you win one and lose one; if you do not know others and do not know yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.They knew themselves (or damn well should), but nearly nothing about their enemy except they like to use many big rocks on planets in their genocide.
That should have provoked at least a partial inclination to accept almost any form of military weapon, if only because due to the size of the Empire (and population base) they could afford to shotgun weapons designs into thousands of concepts as long as they can be properly weaponized, until they could acquire hard data. Once hard data is obtained, they would then have been able to properly streamline production to effective designs.
The presence of a beam heavy design by the Imperium for example, is very shocking. The all-rounder Asgard-class seems incredibly good, and like you pointed out, by the civil war they had civilians on planets to either assault or defend so a planetary assault planetoid also makes sense.
The possibility of a missile-heavy opposite of the beams should actually have been even more powerful than the beam-heavy. The Imperium was heavily oriented around the hyper missile, and Imperial technology only needs a source of raw material (such as asteroids) and they can replenish their missile supplies very easily. Spend a month at any asteroid belt, and you've replenished thousands of hyper missiles nice and easy without even needing to return to a shipyard or arms factory.
I don't doubt for a moment that the Asgard all-rounders made up the bulk of the Fourth Imperium fleets, simply because that allowed them to handle virtually anything. But the fact they were also specifically building to resist future Achuultani threat (with my above mentioned lack of data), they couldnt or shouldn't have relied on a one class pony fleet.
