Tow-Stage Missile

[Cinnius (OP)]

have you ever created two-stage missiles with long range?

What do you need to make them work? Do you have any advice for design?
Thanks in advance for the help ^^

[Seolferwulf]

Not sure what exactly you're looking for.

Recently I've designed a two-stage missile which consists of a slow and long range engine as the first stage and a size 6 sensor buoy as the second one.
I use this to place sensor buoys at jump points (both sides) and also to check planets for alien life, when I don't want to risk a scout.
The "Separation Range (k)" parameter is the distance to the target in kilometers at which the second stage starts.
In my case, since a buoy can't move, I had to set the separation range to 0 km.
For a two-stage ASM the separation range should probably be a bit longer than the enemy's point defence range.

Not sure what else to say.
Be a bit more specific with your question.

[Cinnius (OP)]

I would like to design a two-stage missile to be used in defensive stations around the planets, the intent is to give it a lot of range and then release anti-ship missiles.

since the enemy ships are in the planetary sensors, do I need the active sensors in the first or second stage?

[Seolferwulf]

Without any on-board sensors a missile needs a target painted by an active sensor.
If that's not an option you can also put some active or passive sensor on the missiles, put a waypoint near the enemy ships and then fire your missile at the waypoint.
Though hitting an enemy this way might be tricky, since they will be moving around.

[Cinnius (OP)]

So, if the ship is within an active sensor, the missile don't need an active sensor, correct?

[CowboyRonin]

So, if the ship is within an active sensor, the missile don't need an active sensor, correct?

Correct, although if the original target is killed before the missile impacts, the missile will self-destruct if it doesn't have its own active sensor.  In the case of a two-stage missile, this applies to both the "bus" missile (if the target is destroyed before the submunitions separate), and the submunitions (if the target is destroyed after separation).

[Cinnius (OP)]

okay this already helps me a lot!

another question, the first stage only need an engine and fuel or is agility also needed?

[Jorgen_CAB]

It is commendable to try and use two stage ASM missiles and they can work but they are not the best choice, most of the time. They can still be intercepted before releasing its sub-munition if there are any advanced scouts about and once you fire them there is nothing you can do to react to a changing scenario.

You either have a very powerful active sensor at the planet, send out a few fighter scouts to paint the target or as suggested above to have a sensor on the missile itself. The problem with having sensors on the bus and/or missile is that your missile will start to get VERY expensive... both to research and build.

Stationing missile boats or fighters at the planet are probably always going to the best solutions to almost all situations as it is much cheaper and they can react as a situation change and they will get back so you can rearm and attack the target again. It will probably be the cheapest but perhaps the most boring solution to the problem...

Since you are talking about a planet then it obviously can't hide and try to move away from an enemy, as such I rarely bother using long range missiles but tend to focus on attacking anything that get close and defending against enemy missiles first. If I need to protect other colonies or mining operations in the same system I generally rely on either fighters, missile boats or some other smaller ships.

The other problem with the multi-stage ASM is the speed of the first stage, it tends to be very slow, usually much slower than sending in a fighter and firing a much faster missile at more of a medium distance. This means that the enemy might actually strike you before your missiles reach the intended target, if you fire at a way point you also might risk the enemy fleet stopping and reverse course once they detect your missiles which they might do quite early if you are unlucky, or they just reverse course for some complete other reason.

I find that using long range multi-stage missiles work absolutely best AGAINST planets or jump point defences or other points in space with immobile resources or against a stationary enemy that don't know your even exist. So they are certainly useful but in my opinion highly situational.

To talk more about specifics then I would use about half the missile for the bus if you use an active sensor there and half for whatever sub-munition. The release range have to be highly depending on your sensor technology and the size of the missile. If you guide the missile with a sensor from the planet or a scout I would first just see if there is any possibility to just produce a larger slightly slower missile instead of a multi stage one, if that is still not practical then use at least 40% for the first stage perhaps as much as 50% to get as much speed on it as possible, if it is too slow it might be useless at the distances you wan't to fire it at, so much can happen before the final stage is released. It also depend on if you have a good technological advantage against the possible enemy or not.

I would certainly not be producing any such missile unless I know what capabilities and types of ships I'm likely to face.

[S1mancoder]

Well, cruise-stage cluster missiles are seem like a no-brainer meta from my perspective, somewhat contrary to previous posters.    It allows you to create a missile that is capable of efficienty bypassing heavy PD/AMM protection at a relatively low cost.    It is indeed having rather low reaction time comparing to fighters and long time from launch to hit, but is more warhead/shipweight efficient than fighters (which need hangars, carriers, magazines etc.   ) and is more sneaky on approach (most fighters can be detected outside of their launch ranges if they use fast missiles, also fighter has to carry sensor and MFC which is hard to have big enough for out-of range hits).   

The general approach in design is that you want high range, higher than your sensor range as the missile flight time may be extedned by enemy moving out.    For example if enemy is 5k/s and cruise stage of your missile is 20k/s then for your sensor range you would want additional of about 5/20 or 0.   25 = 25% plus a padding for missle range 125%-150% of active radar range.    For faster targets you would need to manage your launch distance to ensure missile wont run out of fuel.   

The design examples are (made on on Magnetic Confinment Fusion, 0.   4 fuel efficiency, 8 wh strenght, 100 agility):

Cruise stage:

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Burya-IIIM
Missile Size: 6.00 MSP  (15.000 Tons)     Warhead: 0    Radiation Damage: 0    Manoeuvre Rating: 10
Speed: 25,000 km/s     Fuel: 2,065     1st Stage Flight Time: 3 hours    1st Stage Range: 264.6m km
2nd Stage Flight Time: 93 seconds    2nd Stage Range: 5,208k km
Cost Per Missile: 12.1668     Development Cost: 1,217
Second Stage: Zhalo-IIIM x3
Second Stage Separation Range: 3,750,000 km
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 250%   3k km/s 83.3%   5k km/s 50%   10k km/s 25.0%Submunition (3x):

Code: [Select]

Zhalo-IIIM
Missile Size: 1.1500 MSP  (2.87500 Tons)     Warhead: 4    Radiation Damage: 4    Manoeuvre Rating: 19
Speed: 56,000 km/s     Fuel: 230     Flight Time: 93 seconds     Range: 5,208,000 km
Cost Per Missile: 2.8056     Development Cost: 281
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 1064%   3k km/s 354.7%   5k km/s 212.8%   10k km/s 106.4%
This is a long range solution for sensor range of 200 mils.   


Cruise stage:

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Shkval-I
Missile Size: 6.0000 MSP (15.0000 Tons)    Warhead: 0    Radiation Damage: 0    Manoeuver Rating: 10
Speed: 20,000 km/s    Fuel: 1,000    Flight Time: 8,606 seconds    Range: 172.13 Mkm
Second Stage: 4.0000 MSP
Cost Per Missile: 3.00000    Development Cost: 300
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 200.0%   3k km/s 66.7%   5k km/s 40.0%   10k km/s 20.0%   20k km/s 10.0%   50k km/s 4.0%   100k km/s 2.0%
Submunition (4x):

Code: [Select]

Missile Size: 1.0000 MSP (2.5000 Tons)    Warhead: 4    Radiation Damage: 4    Manoeuver Rating: 16
Speed: 50,000 km/s    Fuel: 187    Flight Time: 101 seconds    Range: 5.09 Mkm
Cost Per Missile: 2.36020    Development Cost: 236
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 800.0%   3k km/s 266.7%   5k km/s 160.0%   10k km/s 80.0%   20k km/s 40.0%   50k km/s 16.0%   100k km/s 8.0%
This is a shorter range one (for about 120 mils sensor range), with more payload but slower cruise stage.   


All in all you have to remember this is a specialized anti-fleet weapon and wont fulfill all roles like shooting down enemy FAC's or fighters, also is very inefficient if enemy doesnt rely on PD/AMM's at all and instead invests into armor/speed/ECM.

EDIT:
Also for the purpose of stationary defensive stations there is indeed a caveat that you have to move with your missiles to keep target highlited by sensors and this cant be easily resolved with having missiles on sensors.  Since with new active sensor range mechanics extreme range sensors are becoming gigantic in size, you might want to have a hangar with a radar-equipped fast craft on your defence station to be able to highlight a target and a gigantic missile fire control on station to do the launch.  So your extreme-range line of defence would be: see passive sensor contact on planetory tracking stations -> send recon fighter / FAC to highlight target -> launch the missiles from defense base.

[Squigles]

S1mancoder, one thing to keep in mind, is the problem of having the cruise stage shot out of the sky before it can deploy. 

Take your first example, you're using a cruise stage with a speed of 25,000 km/s to deploy 3 submunitions from a range of 3. 75m km.   Your submunitions have a range of 5. 2m km and a speed of 56k km/s.   Assume you're fighting a tech equal target.   I'm just going to spit ball numbers, but look at your submunition and drop it to a WH strength of 1, it's now an AMM with a speed of 80k km/s or so.   

If the enemy is able to detect your cruise stage missiles by 5m km or so, those tech equal AMM's will shoot down your slow cruise stage before it ever has a chance to deploy, and because of the slower speed of the cruise stage, it'll be like shooting fish in a barrel.   It wouldn't be unexpected to see their AMM's bagging your cruise stage in 1 to 1 trades.   If the fleet is moving away from your missiles, that critical detection range begins to contract as well. 

Given Active sensor 36/EM sensitivity 18 (right on par for your specified technology levels) if the enemy fleet has a resolution 1 size 15 active in the fleet, your missiles are DoA before they deploy. 

[liveware]

have you ever created two-stage missiles with long range?

What do you need to make them work? Do you have any advice for design?
Thanks in advance for the help ^^

I have recently been building long range, 2 stage missiles in the early game for scouting and for providing the most basic of defensive capabilities to my colonies. Basically I use a size 1 missile with my smallest, most fuel efficient engine and as much fuel as it can carry for the booster stage and either a high speed size 1 warhead or engineless sensor satellite for the second stage. I've been able to scout out all of Sol a couple of times using this method (though it's a bit micro intensive).

I posted quite a bit about the aforementioned missile designs and how to use them starting in the second page of this thread: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=10790.0

[S1mancoder]

S1mancoder, one thing to keep in mind, is the problem of having the cruise stage shot out of the sky before it can deploy.   

Given Active sensor 36/EM sensitivity 18 (right on par for your specified technology levels) if the enemy fleet has a resolution 1 size 15 active in the fleet, your missiles are DoA before they deploy. 

You are right, that is a considerable thing, but for my designs I was just assuming noone going to install more than size 10 res 1 sensor as it is very expensive and also rather inefficient to go above that size.

Also I could've easily extend range of submunitions to 10 mils and separation to 8 mils for some final speed cost, and you can check what cost it is to mount 10 mil sensor on a ship - its pretty much never an option.

[Cinnius (OP)]

Do you think it's not convenient to drop size 4 missiles as a second stage?

[S1mancoder]

It depends on what you want to maximize as a result.  My designs are generally aimed at one specific thing: extreme range missile with excellent enemy PD/AMM penetration, so final submunitions are size 1 to increase amount of missiles needed to be shot down and they have maxed out speed to make shooting them down as hard as possible.  One of the example of what it can penetrate is v1. 11 bugged planetary STO pd that allows beam weapons shoot multiple times: a salvo of 60 base missiles with 180 final submunitions were able to pass through ~500 gauss shots made by planetary STO's with about ~20% of submunitions reaching its target.

You can focus other things, for example warhead/ton ratio and you would end with a different design.  Also if you are not ready to use ~1000 tons active radars for actually making use of cluster missile long range fuel efficiency then you might want a different solution.

So higher size, like size 4 submunition on a cluster missile is only usable if you have excessive salvo weight already (40+ launchers) so you have no need to optimise for PD/AMM penetration and enemy is using ECM so you can mount ECCM/ECM as they are cheaper for larger missiles.

[Seolferwulf]

Another question:
Is it possible to lay a carpet of mines or sensor buoys with two-stage missiles?
Is there some way to spread the sub-munition out instead of having them all concentraed in a single spot?