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Posted by: Gabethebaldandbold
« on: March 05, 2018, 02:38:05 PM »

Also higher speed means you end up getting more chances to engage the enemy missiles
Posted by: Gabethebaldandbold
« on: March 05, 2018, 11:13:45 AM »

In my experience, engagement range is one of the most essential parts in missile point defense, anlong with AMM Speed, with some decent sensor tech, I tell you its possible to engage size 6 missiles at 8 million kilometers range using just 10 HS of active sensors, and that just pumps up the efficiency of your PD way way up. when you get maximum engine boost, if you design your missiles just right they should get speeds of 40k kilometers per sec, and with your agility tech, you should be able to get at least 30% hit chance on missiles going at 33k kilometers per second. with your reload speed, if you can research your way through this engine boost, and make sensors and fire ontrol capable of engaging at 6-7 million kilometers, if you put 20-30 launchers, you could very well engage in frequent combat, firing 1vs1 PD and not even get hit by a single missile most of the time, essentialy wasting all of their ordinance while recieving 0 damage (provided that you carry engough missiles to do that of course)
Posted by: Titanian
« on: June 29, 2017, 10:52:06 AM »

Smaller missiles are faster.
Only if you keep the same engine, so that it has higher power per size/mass

And yes, missile design is super annoying with missile engines as components and no way to 'simulate' them before researching them.
Posted by: Iranon
« on: June 28, 2017, 01:56:04 PM »

I tend to calculate the agility tonnage I need to push MR up, then use the excess for fuel. If that results in excessive range, I consider my engine too small.
0.7 agility for a size-2 missile would be too much for me.. I prefer larger engines even if that results in very slightly lower accuracy: agility is expensive, larger engine slightly improves fuel efficiency, higher speed has soft benefits.
Posted by: Detros
« on: June 28, 2017, 12:25:53 PM »

How can using 'sub-sized' missiles improve anything other than making your missile worse and cheaper? Since the warhead has to keep it's size, you are packing less engine/agility/fuel, thus the missile should get slower/less agile/have less range.
Smaller missiles are faster.
Manoeuvre rating is higher for smaller missiles.
Chance to hit is higher for faster missiles and missiles with higher manoeuvre rating.

Compare Thuria mod with 0.697 MSP of agility:
Code: [Select]
Missile Size: 1.971 MSP  (0.09855 HS)     Warhead: 1    Armour: 0     Manoeuvre Rating: 33
Speed: 24400 km/s    Engine Endurance: 8 minutes   Range: 11.7m km
Cost Per Missile: 1.7422
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 805.2%   3k km/s 264%   5k km/s 161%   10k km/s 80.5%

with its modification that uses 0.726 MSP of agility to get to pure size 2 missile.
Code: [Select]
Missile Size: 2 MSP  (0.1 HS)     Warhead: 1    Armour: 0     Manoeuvre Rating: 33
Speed: 24000 km/s    Engine Endurance: 8 minutes   Range: 11.5m km
Cost Per Missile: 1.7793
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 792%   3k km/s 264%   5k km/s 158.4%   10k km/s 79.2%

Sonora IIs can get like +5 percentage points against 1k km/s targets if only they can be of only 0.993 size, by removing bit of agility.

I guess it may be possible to get better results with using bit bigger engine there but I am not going to design a dozen of engines with 0.01 MSP increment just to get missiles better by few percentage points. And using missile design tools to find the best design is not as rewarding as finding decent designs yourself. So I will design two or three sizes of engine, pick one of them and then tweak fuel and agility only.
Posted by: Titanian
« on: June 28, 2017, 09:54:01 AM »

How can using 'sub-sized' missiles improve anything other than making your missile worse and cheaper? Since the warhead has to keep it's size, you are packing less engine/agility/fuel, thus the missile should get slower/less agile/have less range.
Posted by: Detros
« on: June 25, 2017, 02:37:43 PM »

Thanks for the bug link, will take a look.

And just on the off chance because you probably know this already, are you entering "1" into the warhead MSP? The "value" is the actual WH strength ... scratch that, if you were doing that the WH size wouldn't be 1 in the specs you posted. It's just the boost you're missing; x3 or bust!
To finally clarify: I am at 0.2 MSP / 1 WH, 64 agility / MSP and am using 1x 0.5 MSP magnetic pulse engine with 350 % power for Sonora II. The generation I Sonora, Baranda and Thuria are all at 0.25 MSP / 1 WH, 48 agility and only 300 % engines tech level, with Sonora and Baranda only having different range and Thuria being size 2 PDC AMM.
Posted by: obsidian_green
« on: June 25, 2017, 02:31:06 PM »

Thanks for the bug link, will take a look.

And just on the off chance because you probably know this already, are you entering "1" into the warhead MSP? The "value" is the actual WH strength ... scratch that, if you were doing that the WH size wouldn't be 1 in the specs you posted. It's just the boost you're missing; x3 or bust!
Posted by: Detros
« on: June 25, 2017, 02:28:57 PM »

I have now checked that Missile Designer and found out my Sonora II design with 0.5 MSP size engine is the 4-5th best one can get with my current tech for targets at 20k km/s. My score is 40.6, the best one with slightly smaller engine and thus slower but with bit more space for agility has score 41.3.
Sonora II is the 4-5th best design against targets at 25k km/s and 30k km/s, too, being only 0.5, respective 0.4 percentage points after the ideal one (the order of other designs is different for different speeds).

That's close enough. I am satisfied.

For those interested how I got to my design: first I have designed max power engine of 0.1 MSP size. Warhead was easy. Fuel was just small amount to get to the demanded range. Agility was the rest to fill the size 1 missile. Then keep adding these 0.1 engines and lowering agility by 0.1 till you found the best amount. Design one engine of the summed size instead of those (here, 5) little engines and two more 0.05 size next to it (here, 0.45, 0.5, 0.55). Try these three engines, matching agility accordingly to stay at size 1, and pick the best one.

Posted by: Detros
« on: June 25, 2017, 02:08:23 PM »

My only AMMs that have seen action have a range of 2.5m km, but I'm not even getting active target locks on the AMMs the enemy is (currently) firing at me until ~150,000km despite a res-1 active I thought should spot small missiles at greater range ... so better sensors sounds very wise to me right now, lol.
Note resolution 1 active sensors can have few millions km range but small missiles are even smaller. There is "MCR" range of few 100k for missiles of size 6 or smaller. That's for seeing them via active sensors. For the problem of getting weapon lock from your missile fire controls note those missiles can be equipped with modules of electronic warfare that lower the range of your MFCs by few 10s of %.

Are you using the Missile Designer on the web? That Sonora Close AMM seems too slow to have a size-1 warhead and a range of only 1.2m km, but there are a handful of techs that increase the efficiency of missiles by bringing down the MSP you need to reach performance targets. Maybe you need better tech to get better bang for your MSP in WH strength, fuel efficiency, or agility.
I am not using any external tools, only checking wiki and forums from time to time. I am aware of techs that raise the stats of missiles and I don't think I am too low on most of them. I am mostly missing engine boost tech. Size 1, warhead 1 and range of ~1-2m km are intentional values, the rest of missile is filled with agility because there can't be missiles under size 1. I am not adding any sensors until I actually meet some enemy with missiles and I can see what sensor range I would need.

Zooming will corrupt the .mdb? I'd be grateful for tips on how I might avoid or minimize that risk ... I have to zoom some and it would be a relief to know what will or won't cause me problems.
I posted it in the main bug thread.
Posted by: obsidian_green
« on: June 25, 2017, 01:26:21 PM »

I am now working on better sensors to match the MCR distance with range of Sonora II.

My only AMMs that have seen action have a range of 2.5m km, but I'm not even getting active target locks on the AMMs the enemy is (currently) firing at me until ~150,000km despite a res-1 active I thought should spot small missiles at greater range ... so better sensors sounds very wise to me right now, lol.

Are you using the Missile Designer on the web? That Sonora Close AMM seems too slow to have a size-1 warhead and a range of only 1.2m km, but there are a handful of techs that increase the efficiency of missiles by bringing down the MSP you need to reach performance targets. Maybe you need better tech to get better bang for your MSP in WH strength, fuel efficiency, or agility.

Zooming will corrupt the .mdb? I'd be grateful for tips on how I might avoid or minimize that risk ... I have to zoom some and it would be a relief to know what will or won't cause me problems.
Posted by: Detros
« on: June 25, 2017, 08:53:49 AM »

As others have said, AMMs should probably be faster with magneto-plasma drive. I built my first missiles at internal fusion tech, but the slowest of those was a size-6 ASM with 100 million km range and a strength-12 warhead ... and it still clocked in at 33,700km/s, which you can probably match or exceed at magneto-plasma with a size-1, short-ranger.
I could get bit higher speed and hit chances if the AMM is made sub1 sized. But missiles need to be at least of size 1.

I could do this sub-sized trick for missiles intended for size 2 PDC AMM launchers which are 1.9414 missiles instead of pure size 2 ones. PDCs are twice as fast at reloading so with lev6 reloading tech you can have 5s reload on size 2 PDC launcher.

Here for the comparison all three missiles of generation 1:
Code: [Select]
Sonora Close AMM MSP1 CTH528-176-106-53  Speed: 24,000 km/s   End: 0.8m    Range: 1.2m km   WH: 1    Size: 1    TH: 176/105/52
Baranda Middle AMM MSP1 CTH528-176-106-53  Speed: 24,000 km/s   End: 6.6m    Range: 9.6m km   WH: 1    Size: 1    TH: 176/105/52
Thuria Middle AMM MSP1.9414 CTH667-216-133-67  Speed: 24,700 km/s   End: 8m    Range: 11.8m km   WH: 1    Size: 1.9414    TH: 222/133/66

I have then managed to corrupt my save file with too much zooming in System map so after I went back like half a year and had to redesign Sonora IIs, I gave them more range this time (2M instead of 1.3M):
Code: [Select]
Sonora II Close AMM MSP1 CTH812-261-162-81 (192)  Speed: 28,000 km/s   End: 1.2m    Range: 2m km   WH: 1    Size: 1    TH: 270/162/81I am now working on better sensors to match the MCR distance with range of Sonora II.
Posted by: obsidian_green
« on: June 24, 2017, 11:51:28 AM »

I'm impressed by folks' ability to build these lean warships instead of the expensive hefties that have been my first designs. (Though I'm not complaining too much; I did a lot of reading here [some of the advice coming from you, Detros] and at the wiki and built ships that perform exactly as I intended them and which proved extremely capable against a threat I didn't anticipate.)

As others have said, AMMs should probably be faster with magneto-plasma drive. I built my first missiles at internal fusion tech, but the slowest of those was a size-6 ASM with 100 million km range and a strength-12 warhead ... and it still clocked in at 33,700km/s, which you can probably match or exceed at magneto-plasma with a size-1, short-ranger.
Posted by: Titanian
« on: June 24, 2017, 07:36:55 AM »

Well, if you expect enemy ASMs to make 20kkm/s, then I guess your AMMs are fine. It's just that I have the following:

Code: [Select]
Admiral 2 ASM
Missile Size: 3 MSP  (0.15 HS)     Warhead: 4    Armour: 0     Manoeuvre Rating: 11
Speed: 19800 km/s    Engine Endurance: 128 minutes   Range: 152.0m km
EM Sensor Strength: 0.0198    Detect Sig Strength 1000:  19 800 km
built with a 330% boosted ion drive. If it had an magneto-plasma drive, it would make 26400 km/s and would thus be faster than your first generation AMMs, thats why I said they migth be too slow, as with bad luck with the increments, they might get jumped over by faster missiles and then never be able to catch up.
Posted by: Detros
« on: June 24, 2017, 12:12:27 AM »

I am curious that you got to 5 second reload tech for AMMs which is a pretty huge investment, compared to your other missile and drive tech.
Well, I am ~42 years in from conventional start and I am churning research labs all the time. I currently have ~80 together, with power and logistic branches moved to colonies with anomalies so other branches can now use more labs of Earth.

For long years I also didn't have energy weapons scientist and my kinetic weapon one was the first to reach +60% bonus. With rank high enough for 35 labs those ~38000 research points per year can make quick progress on starting techs. Currently he is with ~12 labs working on 75k Gauss Cannon rate of fire 5.

I am only starting with missile ships but having 5s reload seemed to me like a basic requirement for AMM ship. I have met several enemies who liked to fire streams of AMMs just 5s apart.