Mil-tech bard wrote:And note, centuries of combat experience in Arcanian versus Arcanian dragon combat has taught the exactly wrong combat instincts to existing Battle Dragon Pilots than what is needed versus Sharona.
For instance, climbing only works versus the limited engagement range of Arcanian cross bows and "infantry dragons."
You need to be a accelerating, maneuvering, crossing target versus Sharonan anti-aircraft fire. And you have to limit your exposure to automatic weapons.
You don't climb under Sharonan anti-aircraft fire, you dive for speed, jinx, and make yourself a crossing target.
You don't dive on prepared positions with fire breathing Reds, the traditional way Dragons limited their exposure to cross bows and "infantry dragons."
You use blacks at a distance on a lateral/crossing course and spit lightning at Sharonan heavy crew served weapons. Only after you have suppressed the Sharonan heavy crew served weapons with lightning do you go after a position.
And carefully note, very few battle dragon pilots have survived thus far to even begin to develop such tactics.
Frankly, the best bet with battle dragons is as a raiding, as opposed to a main combat, unit.
Battle Dragons are magical battlecruisers, expensive sledgehammers with eggshell protection facing radar directed (Sharonan predictive far-viewers) coast defenses.
Battle Dragons need the equivalent of WW2 "Flak intelligence" on every Sharonan position prior to a battle Dragon attack.
The problem with that thought is that the Sharonans are going to be far better at overhead camouflage than the Arcanians very quickly given the Distance viewer talents. Asking such talent to look down on a position from above and comment on how well aerial camouflage is done will make the delay in recon-griffin imagery a deadly disadvantage.
The Sharonan AA fire we've seen to date has all been light to medium automatic weapons. I can't recall if they have the equivalent of time fuzed artillery, but they certainly wouldn't be expected to have VT AA rounds.
(Don't know how effective the predictive spotting Talent would be at AA with time fuzed artillery; it's possible that their pre-cog could iron out both target movement
and shell to shell time fuze variations. But I tend to doubt it. And without a home-universe airborne threat to worry about they probably haven't put any work into high angle + high velocity guns suitable for AA work)
The relative short range / low altitude nature of the current AA makes me think that Arcana might be better off looking at transport dragons as high(er) altitude level bombers to just stay out of the AA envelope entirely. Of course do to that you need a bomb that's worth dropping...
If they develop expendable crystals/spellware for trans-portal bombardment then you could utilize them for bombs as well. But then you're back to wondering how many crystals they can afford to lose without creating a production or logistics bottleneck.