Armored missiles

[Nibelung44 (OP)]

do you make them, under which circumstances, with how many armor? If we take for granted that most AMM have only a 1 strength point warhead, would it be good to have at least 1 armor per missile, so that you need 2 AMM for each?

I was thinking of big armored missiles as anti ship killers. Not very fast, but tough. Don't know if it makes any sense. First damages the ships, then fire the big puppies on them when they are slowed down.

[Narmio]

Conceptually the tradeoff is pretty easy to think about.  Consider your standard volley weight.  Would it be more effective against an enemy as size N unarmoured fast missiles or size N+1 armoured missiles? Assuming you keep range constant, your total damage capacity goes down along with your speed. Will the increase in number of intercepted missiles, the decreased volley damage and the decrease in overall hit chance of the armoured missiles outweigh the decrease in successful intercepts?

Typically it only takes a few hits from big missiles (for me that's WH16 and 25, I usually use WH9) to cripple most ships, but they're a lot easier to intercept, mainly due to reduced volley size.  It's a difficult tradeoff to calculate mathematically, because you need to make a huge number of assumptions about your enemy. You also need to consider the reduced economic cost of armoured missiles - armour is significantly cheaper per MSP than other components.

Personally I like big, armoured, fast shipkillers because it's just so damned satisfying when you hit with them. But that's really only viable in the mid-game. I've also experimented with missile ECM on them too, but my feelings there are more mixed.

[SteelChicken]

I've occasionally used them to breach enemy homeworld defenses where they have massive anti-missile waves.
A few salvoes of big armored and ecm'd missiles work really good to soak up AMM count.

I find though at med-tech levels, multi-warhead missiles are more effective by mass.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

I too am a fan of big armored missiles.  It's unfortunate that anything over size 6 has extended exposure to AMM fire, though.  It makes it that much harder to  penetrate anti missile defenses. 

I just do them as my general purpose missiles though. If you really want to leverage armor, i'd probably stack it on at the expense of significant warhead for a size 6 "defence penetrator" design. 

What really kills armor is the speed loss....  Missiles benefit defensively from speed, so sacrificing speed for armor generally isn't that helpful.  Especially since sacrificing speed makes your missile worse at everything else too - less accurate, gets to the enemy slower, less effective range against maneuvering targets.

[TallTroll]

I've been wanting to try a doctrine where missile waves have 3 layers; first armoured ECM missiles, next pure armour slugs, and last as many waves of standard ASMs as seem necessary. The theory is that all 3 have the same basic speed, so the targets should see the slug wave first, and start expending AMMs, then see the ECM equipped slugs pop up, and suddenly switch targets to counter the new "threat", all of which should (hopefully) allow the real ASMs a relatively quiet run in, as the armour soaks up all the hits. Of course, this suffers from the same limitations as any missile doctrine, overwhelming PD of any sort makes the composition of the wave irrelevant.

For a relatively balanced fight though, it should allow the first few waves of ASMs to get to roll to hit their targets, at least. Whether they score damage is perhaps another matter