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[Snoopies]

Does anyone have ship builds that make short work of those starbases? Whilst I have some success with them I find the fights a complete grind, vs the nicely paced fights when it is fleet vs fleet.

[Network Pesci]

It depends if you're playing vanilla or modded.  Assuming you're only playing vanilla, my favorite thing to make stations trivial is a quad tachyon lance paragon, with hull mods to increase beam range as far as possible and with some kinetic in the universal slots such as Heavy Needlers or HVDs to break the shields.  A properly piloted quad tachlance can solo many stations.  Also, the Disintegrator (if you're lucky enough to get one early) obliterates station armor, making it far quicker to grind through them if you're trying to do it with cruisers or destroyers.

Once I have a Safety Overrides Aurora (hopefully with a Disintegrator in the left medium energy slot and Heavy Blasters in the other two slots) for my flagship and three or four of the Luddic variant Eradicators (I use two HVDs, one Heavy Mauler, and ITU for extra range) as line ships, I feel confident to take on all but the toughest stations.  Some players favor drowning them in missiles or bombers, but I don't really play that way, I'm more about the energy and ballistics in this version.

[Lawrence Master-blaster]

You probably need larger ships. Cruisers at least.

[Grievous69]

Having a decent amount of missiles and torpedoes really helps bringing them down. If you still have only a handful of ships try to engage stations alone, without their patrols. And if we're talking about battlestations here, then you just need bigger ships. Fighting them with only destroyers and a couple of cruisers is doable but miserable.

[BaBosa]

I found just adding one well-equipped Onslaught makes battlestations a lot easier. For the two smaller bases, piloting a Falcon P with two sabots pods and proxy launchers lets me solo them usually, and adding something else to keep the base's shields up makes them pretty easy.

[FooF]

Piranhas. I know they don’t do particularly well against moving targets but immobile stations? Their DPS against things that can’t get out of the way are well-documented.

Barring that, yes, bigger ships with deeper flux pools and/or heavy armor for a sustained fight are necessary. High Tech takes a lot of damage on shields on approach because of the range mismatch so sometimes you get within range already overfluxed. Low Tech can typically just slug it out and I find Dominators to be extremely effective station crackers for their DP. They have Capital-grade firepower and armor and their glaring weaknesses can’t be exploited by a station. The only thing they lack is the superior range of a Capital.

[Wyvern]

My experience with anti-station fights in vanilla is that your best option is an XIV-variant Legion. Load it up with hammer barrages, expanded missile racks, a mix of flak and cheap kinetic guns (maybe a heavy mortar to help once your missiles run out of ammo), and four wings of khopesh bombers.

Then - and this is critical - pilot it yourself, burn drive in, and unload with the hammer barrages - while their ammo lasts, they're the highest DPS large missile weapon, and the AI will try to conserve ammunition and look for 'good' shots, while what you want here is to just throw overwhelming firepower at the enemy.

Against a tier-one station with minimal supporting fleet, the Legion on its own should be able to win.

Against a tier-two or tier-three station, you'll probably only take out a couple of the station's sections before you run out of ammunition and armor, but that's still enough to swing the fight in your favor, and you can retreat the Legion once it's done its job.

Obviously, this tactic is better with missile spec - and if your character doesn't have missile spec, it is worth assigning a missile-spec officer to the Legion, fielding it, and then switching control to it yourself. (This is basically the only case where I bother with that sort of shenanigans, but the extra ammunition is worth it.)

[Candesce]

My experience with anti-station fights in vanilla is that your best option is an XIV-variant Legion. Load it up with hammer barrages, expanded missile racks, a mix of flak and cheap kinetic guns (maybe a heavy mortar to help once your missiles run out of ammo), and four wings of khopesh bombers.

I've found that Cyclone Reaper Launchers work quite well for this purpose, too, and don't require the missile specialization - while the raw DPS isn't as good, high peak damage is great for stripping armor, and the ammo holds out a lot longer.

You might need to be... choosier is the wrong word, you want to be firing them every cooldown, but you want to pick your targets so the torpedoes don't suffer too much point defense fire on the way in, though.

[Snoopies]

Thank you all, for giving me a load of options to test out, the help is very much appreciated.

[Vanshilar]

Onslaught XIV, with Proximity Charge Launchers in the Medium Missile mounts. Go in with whatever supporting ships you want, although artillery ships like Conquest work pretty well. Doesn't matter if you're fighting High Tech or Low Tech Star Fortress, or [REDACTED] station, they'll all fall pretty easily and quickly.

[Brainwright]

The best answer is just more.

Four eagles will handily take down a fully constructed station, and you’d need support ships to take down a battlestation.  Six eagles plus substantial support will probably wear down a fortress.

The usual style of singular, powerful ships is less efficient since stations will always outflux or out-armor them.

[bowman]

Not a build suggestion but a rule of thumb I use is to have a capital ship for every tier of station.

T1 station: 1 capital
T2: 2
T3: 3

Works pretty well, of course I also bring general supporting fleet but you can't really go wrong with it especially if you add on what others have said and get some typhoons to crack the armor. Generally having decent heavy armor break is a good move for stations because they have quite a lot of armor rating, and you can also generally sneak in AoE hits around their shields and potentially kill the sections without even overfluxing them.

Although I suppose it might be worth mentioning I've played with 1000 DP max for ages so how feasible 3 capitals + supporting fleet is in base 400 DP I'm not really sure.