Component Suggestion: Offender Field/Flak Field/Interfering Barrier/etc
A variant on the energy shield, which automatically engages detected targets in a certain range. It does this by storing up charges (like a shield), and doing beam damage to all targets, regardless of quantity, only if charge is available and consuming charge in the process. Does not protect from damage like normal shields. Should be big enough to be useless on fighters (10 HS per module perhaps?), and still emit EM fields that broadcast both their strength and effective range.
Techs:
Capacity Per Module: Amount of damage points stored per module on a ship. Similar to shield strength tech.
[Mechanic]: If an enemy ship closes in with a projected field, it only gets engaged as hard as any other missile, but every 1 point of damage consumes 10 points of charge in the field generator. Engaging with an energy shield consumes 20 points of charge per damage point, instead.
Regeneration per 300: Works like normal shields, how many points of charge are stored over time.
Fuel Efficiency: Like shield tech, reduces fuel usage.
Damage Per 5: The threshold in which this field cannot engage a target, based on how many times it was already hit by a field this turn. This applies across all field sources, but field sources engage targets in order of lowest Damage Per 5 to highest, so if you have three ships with DP5 1, 2, and 3 respectively, a target will be hit by the ship with 1 first, 2 second, and 3 third. This should be a steep tech, such that 3 DP5 should be roughly equal to ROF 6 gauss cannons in research points.
This means that a ship or missile will only be take as much damage as the highest tech field it's in range of every 5 seconds, regardless of how many ships it's in range of at the time.
Consideration: Allow fractions of DP5, so a DP5 of 0.25 would be lowest tech and only allow the field to engage a contact that hasn't been engaged by a field in the past 20 seconds.
Field Range: Distance from the parent ship the field extends out from the ship. 60,000 km should be the tech-equivalent of 60,000 km gauss. Being able to engage anything requires an active sensor contact, and ECM reduces the effective range.
[Mechanics]:The field only engages contacts that either ends their turn in the AOE, or missiles that attempt to hit the ship it's mounted on (like final fire (Self) defenses).
What's the purpose of this design? Mainly:
-To incentivize missile armor.
-To quelch or at least make-sane AMM spam against large ships.
-To allow a means of taking the edge off of extremely large, quantitous salvos, where fire rate of weapons becomes nearly irrelevant.
-To allow more fancy formation options, and to allow environments where beam weapons are the best answer as a result. For instance, a mothership that may be in the center of a great citadel-ish formation which would be a surrounding or directional arrangement of support craft mounting these fields. Actually, this sounds like an excellent idea for the swarm, too! Have the swarm queen be protected by such a formation. Giving them a capability like this sounds like pristine grounds to nerf their mesons back to sane levels (focusing tech 12 why oh why ;-;), and it'll also give them another unique output of damage that actually makes armor somewhat meaningful.