Missile design - so f...... complicate

[Kaiser (OP)]

Hi dudes, I'm trying to figure out how to design an anti - ship missile since some nasty aliens have sprung up in my solar system , but I really cannot understand how do it..so many parameter to take in consideration.
could anyone make me a simple example step by step?
Should I design missile engine first and the missile itself after? How much fuel?
Thank you so much

[TallTroll]

For AMMs, I think it is best to work backwards.

You know the final product needs to be Size 1. Deduct whatever space is needed for a 1 point warhead with your tech. Deduct another 0.1 or so for fuel and agility. Whatever is left is engine, since you won't be using Armour, ECM or sensors on an AMM. Personally, I find it comes out at a 0.7MSP engine early on, and creeps down as you can shrink the WH, get the agility required in less space etc

[icecoldblood]

Personally I use these steps:
1) determine the final size of your missile. This is important. For AMMs Size 1 is best.
2) Determine the warhead. For an AMM it should be 1 point of damage.
3)The engine. For missiles i generally use either 2x or 2.5 x EP engines, but again, depends on the role.
4)Fuel. AMMs generally don't need to be more than 6 million km range, while for ASMs its entirely up to you and you sensor range. Keep your missile engine's fuel use in mind.
5) Agility. For AMMs set this as high as you can, while for ASMs just relagate the reaming space. So long as your AMMs have >50% chance of hitting enemy missiles its fine. Same goes for ASMs and enemy ships.
6)Armor and sensors. Haven't really played with these much, so I can't speak for their usefulness.

Hope this helps.

[Kaiser (OP)]

Thank you both for the answer guys.
Just to be clear, because the section about missiles is very hard to understand.

1) I opened the missile design project and I created a 2 MSP size missile like this (1 warhead strengh, 0.8 fuel capacity, 0.2 agility, no sensors, armor or other stuff)

now, before I go to the missile engine part, I would like to have some explanations about what I just have done:
1) 1 warhead strengh has Value 3, does it mean that it will do a 3 point of damage if hit (triangular damage)?
2) 0.8 fuel capacity has value 2000, does it mean that my missile will carry 2000litre of fuel available for its travel toward the target?
3) 0.2 agility I cannot understand how the agility works, I think I should try during a fighting, but that's not a problem.

if everything is correct, how the engine missile should be setted now?

[icecoldblood]

When allocating warhead, fuel, etc. You are allocating the space given to that component. In your case, 1 point allocation gives 3 damage. Missile damage to armor is a pyramid like this:
###*###
##***##

If the missile hits an area where armor has been stripped, it will deal internal damage.

2) Yes
3) Its a little abstract, play around with it until you get your desired hitchance against your desired target speed. Agility is used to calculate (with RNG) whether or not you missile strikes the target.

Lastly, remember that the missile engine contributes to missile size  so with you current 2MSP engineless missles I reccomend a 2 MSP missile engine (My rule for ASMs is 50% engine). What is your engine/power boost tech?

[Kaiser (OP)]

When allocating warhead, fuel, etc. You are allocating the space given to that component. In your case, 1 point allocation gives 3 damage. Missile damage to armor is a pyramid like this:
###*###
##***##

If the missile hits an area where armor has been stripped, it will deal internal damage.

2) Yes
3) Its a little abstract, play around with it until you get your desired hitchance against your desired target speed. Agility is used to calculate (with RNG) whether or not you missile strikes the target.

Lastly, remember that the missile engine contributes to missile size  so with you current 2MSP engineless missles I reccomend a 2 MSP missile engine (My rule for ASMs is 50% engine). What is your engine/power boost tech?

Well, I projected and researched an engine like this, my techs are little primitive yet, nuclear pulse engine:

Code: [Select]

Engine Power: 1      Fuel Use Per Hour: 6.42 Litres
Fuel Consumption per Engine Power Hour: 6.422 Litres
Engine Size: 2.5 MSP      Cost: 0.25
Thermal Signature: 1
Materials Required: 0.75x Tritanium  0.25x Gallicite
Development Cost for Project: 50RP
2.5 MPS + 2 of the missile= 4.5 MPS

If I well understood, the lauchers should be at least the same size as the missle or more like this:

Code: [Select]

Maximum Missile Size: 5     Rate of Fire: 50 seconds
Launcher Size: 5 HS    Launcher HTK: 2
Cost Per Launcher: 30    Crew Per Launcher: 15
Materials Required: 7.5x Duranium  22.5x Tritanium

Development Cost for Project: 300RP
Maximum missile size 5 should be good for my missile, even if there's a little waste of space. No?

[Rolepgeek]

I'd boost the warhead size to 1.35 and change the fuel to 0.35, and agility to 0.8. That's just me though.

[MarcAFK]

I usually design a size .1 maximum power missile engine for making my prototype missiles, then i adjust the quantity of fuel, agility and number of .1 engines  untill i get the range and speed i want, then i go and design an engine which is the same size as all the engines i allocated for that prototype missile, being one larger engine means extra range than lots of small size .1 missiles.
For example:
Size 3 Anti-ship Missile
Missile Size: 3 MSP  (0.15 HS)     Warhead: 5    Armour: 0     Manoeuvre Rating: 10
Speed: 24000 km/s    Engine Endurance: 18 minutes   Range: 25.9m km
Cost Per Missile: 2.15
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 240%   3k km/s 80%   5k km/s 48%   10k km/s 24%
Materials Required:    1.25x Tritanium   0.9x Gallicite   Fuel x625

Development Cost for Project: 215RP
Designed with 1.25 MSP of x4 Warhead tech, .25 fuel and 15 size .1 ION engines,

The same missile but with one size 1.5 MSP engine would be this:

Size 3 Anti-ship Missile
Missile Size: 3 MSP  (0.15 HS)     Warhead: 5    Armour: 0     Manoeuvre Rating: 10
Speed: 24000 km/s    Engine Endurance: 114 minutes   Range: 164.8m km
Cost Per Missile: 2.15
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 240%   3k km/s 80%   5k km/s 48%   10k km/s 24%
Materials Required:    1.25x Tritanium   0.9x Gallicite   Fuel x625

Development Cost for Project: 215RP
Notice the significantly larger range, also try to make your missiles whole numbers to take better advantage of the reload rate of your launchers, if you can shave that missile down to size 4 your reload speed will be 20% faster than a size 5. Or add more engine to raise your hit rate.

[Kaiser (OP)]

ahhhh yes now it's clear.
My doubt was that I thought that once I had researched the engine missile and the missile, these were fixed and I could not edit them anymore.

[Paul M]

To optimize your missile use the following formula:

num_engines = (10*missile_size + remaining_space*agility_factor)/(2*agility_factor*engine_size)

where:
num_engine = number of engines to install on this missile
missile_size = the size of the missile in missile space points
remaining_space = the amount of space left over after warhead, sensors and fuel (this can be approximate)
agility_factor = this is your current agility technology value (32, 48, etc)
engine_size = how big the engine will be (1 MSP, 0.1 MSP, etc)

[Rolepgeek]

On a size six missile with size 1 engines, 2.25 warhead, .25 fuel, and no armor or sensors, that formula tells me to use 2.375 engines. Or about 2.4 MSP of engines. Which leaves 1.1 Agility. That seems like a lot for an anti-ship missile.

[Bryan Swartz]

I'm messing around with missile design for the first time, and am curious about something:

Code: [Select]

Missile Size: 1.6 MSP  (0.08 HS)     Warhead: 2    Armour: 0     Manoeuvre Rating: 10
Speed: 900 km/s    Engine Endurance: 21.1 hours   Range: 68.4m km
Cost Per Missile: 0.5188
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 9%   3k km/s 0%   5k km/s 1.8%   10k km/s 0.9%
Materials Required:    0.5x Tritanium   0.0188x Gallicite   Fuel x1250

Development Cost for Project: 52RP
How do you go from 0% chance to hit at 3k km/s to 1.8% at 3k km/s?  Is there something wrong with the math calculations in the game I should be watching out for? 

[Paul M]

On a size six missile with size 1 engines, 2.25 warhead, .25 fuel, and no armor or sensors, that formula tells me to use 2.375 engines. Or about 2.4 MSP of engines. Which leaves 1.1 Agility. That seems like a lot for an anti-ship missile.

Agility becomes more useful as your agility factor increases and engines less so.  Size 1 engines are bad because of granularity issues but regardless your choice is now 2 engines or 3.  This issue is why I changed from size 1 to size 0.5 engines and also from size 0.2 to 0.1 because that allows a lot more fine tuning to the system.

The formula is for optimizing your to-hit chance and all my tests indicated that the deriviative (which is what it is) has found the maximum.

Basically you only need absurd levels of speed compared to your target when you need to use the factor (missile speed/target speed) to boost your crummy chance to hit to something half decent.  When your missile is agile enough to hit the target then speed is less critical; the missile only needs to be fast enough to hit the target in the first place. 

[Cocyte]

Basically you only need absurd levels of speed compared to your target when you need to use the factor (missile speed/target speed) to boost your crummy chance to hit to something half decent.  When your missile is agile enough to hit the target then speed is less critical; the missile only needs to be fast enough to hit the target in the first place.  

I'm not really sure about it...
Agility is indeed very useful in the case of anti-missile missiles to get the best possible interception rate in a size-1 package, but speed is more valuable for anti-ship missiles :
- With decent tech, missile speed will be easily far faster than the ships they're supposed to hit.
- the extra speed will makes them more difficult to intercept by ennemy anti-missile defenses.

Note that I'm NOT advocating to set the ASM agility to 0 - My latest ASMs have a 41800 km/s speed and 17 MR.
This gives them a (theorical) 100% interception rate for anything below 6500 km/s speed (and 65% for a 10000 km/s target), but the high speed gives them more than a 2 out of 3 chances of surviving one of my AMMs (40000 km/s & MR30 - 67.2% survival rate).

With my current tech level (MPDs & 64 agi/MS), the usual formula will lead me to build a slow 28800 km/s and MR32 (!) missile, with indeed a nice 92.2% interception rate for a 10000km/s target... but with a survival rate to the same AMMs reduced to 56.3%.

Furthermore, faster missiles leaves less time to react for the target.

[Edit : shameless auto-promotion]
If you're really confused by the missile design window, you might try my multipurpose aurora tool to try some missiles combination without having to waste research on a test engine.
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,5855.msg60061.html#msg60061
This is a old one however...

[Paul M]

The formula is a maximization of the to-hit chance experession and does not take into account other factors which may influence your design choice.  My statement was it needs only be fast enough to hit the target.  "fast enough" is determined by what experience says is "fast enough."  At some point you can say "fast enough" and go for agility.

Or put another way: a missile designed using that optimization is a good starting point for a new player.  They can then tweek the design as they choose based on experience.