Spocks-cuddly-tribble
Remaining question:
Even if OB’s come in superior numbers, sometimes they won’t fire more than one OB-shot at a ship.
E.g. 6 powered OBs vs 1 ship - only one OB fires.
Predictor circumstances for this behavior, I wasn't able to determine.
i've tested around a little bit about that questions above and it seems that all the OBs firing at one ship together, if all OBs
-1 can destroy the ship in one turn with their firepower. that means: if you're going to attack a planet with a single ship and the planet has 5 OBs than the critical value is 4 x OB weapon strength (that calculation doesn't match exactly, but is quite near) (maybe auto-repair value for the hull of the ship matters also within that calculation) i've tested this only for a single ship. (
for fleet look further down this post)
it also seems that active OBs can be destroyed like a normal planet building during bombardment. bombarded a system with a ship that has not the power to destroy the orbital in "direct" confrontation, but the ship's bombardment damaged the planet and destroyed a building --> the OB. the message for this event used in the bombardment report was the normal message for a destroyed building through bombardment. ship recieved damage from OB, so it's clear that the OB was active. was able to repeat that.
tested it all with actual ECM 4.0. edited only the hull and shields of the ships with UE to make this behavior visible.
EDIT:
behavior of OBs if they outnumbering the attacking fleet:
the behavior for the OBs against fleet is somewhat stranger. sometimes the OBs behave like this:
if one of the ships in the fleet is weak enough to be destroyed in one turn by the surplus OB shots, than the remaining OBs will shoot at that ship.
for example: 5 OBs against a fleet of 4 ships (3 heavy, 1 scout) --> 1 OB per ship and the surplus fifth OB shoots at the scout, because it's the only ship that's weak enough to be destroyed in one turn if more than one OB firing at it. if the fleet insists only of the three heavy ships, than only 1 OB per ship is shooting and the surplus 2 OBs do nothing till the moment since their activation will destroy one of the attacking ships in one turn (in the case their is more than 1 remaining OB, you have to remember the roughly formula from above
all remaining OBs -1)
and sometimes the remaining OBs do nothing, regardless if they can destroy a ship with their additional firepower or not and only one OB shoots at one ship.
i hate OBs!