Initial Combat Designs

[Gothmos (OP)]

Hello everyone, currently 33 years into my first game and have decided to finally start knocking out some of the NPR's I've found.
I am looking for advice on how to go about my frist designs for a combat squadron with regard to my known enemies. 

The available customers (in order of contact):

Uknown: These guys only announced themselved with a salve of 60 strength 6 missles heading towards explorer 005 at 48888 km/s.
This is the only data avialable on them, Alpha Centauri was quickly designated offlimits.   (I beleive them to be precursors)

The Illiterates (So called as they were the first I found to be impossible to communicate with)
3 enemy ships (2 Harrington class and 1 Reliant) were detected on thermals going at 6504 Km/s with 1600 thermals.  At 5500000 Km, a S72/R75 active sensor was detected from the Reliant Class.  Contact was lost with explorer 006 shortly after this with a report of 18 streength 4 explosions.

My Last contact with an enemy race was the Point Blanc
These guys engaged explorer 007 with 39 Swordsmanster class ships.  These ships moved at 1194 km/s and I believe each of them to be armed with a single meson cannon capable of firing at 60000 km.  (The intelligence report gives them a RoF of 1 and a range mod of 12, interpretation?) They each had a thermal of 160.  I beleive these folks to be the star swarm given their numbers and small ship type.  Either this or Fighters.



Now, with these opponents in mind, I have begun tooling for war.  My tonnage range is anywhere upto 20k (I have 5 slipways split between 2 shipyards at 20k and 3 slipways at 15k) I am capable of building upto 100k tonnage civillian support shps.

First to missle designs:

This is my first attempt an ASM:
Size 5 Dick-punch Missile
Missile Size: 5 MSP  (0. 25 HS)     Warhead: 4    Armour: 0     Manoeuvre Rating: 20
Speed: 44900 km/s    Endurance: 4 minutes   Range: 10. 0m km
Cost Per Missile: 4. 9913
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 898%   3k km/s 280%   5k km/s 179. 6%   10k km/s 89. 8%
Materials Required:    1x Tritanium   4. 6913x Gallicite   Fuel x485

Given their high speed at first contact (roughly 20  years ago now) and my likely closing speed (I'm on magneto-plasma engines currently so I'm assuming a net velocity of 14000 km/s), I wanted time for atleast 8 salvoes.  This required a range of 10million km given my level 4 reload tech.  I was never too sure what agility did, it seemed to increase the %chance to hit of the miss, but so did the engine so I just beefed it up and left one point in agility.  (beefing the engine also increases its speed which makes it harder to hit so agility does what??)


I've also been mucking around with AMM's but I'm not to sure what an appropriate range on them is.  (I am rather lacking in any other form of PD)
I'm trying to design them able to take on the Unknown's missles.  Would i need time for more then one salvo on each enemy slavo? Are their missles likely to pack ECCM/ECM?

Just going through the war design in stages first, starting with missles as I'm they're the actual striking part that my launchers and hence ships need to be built around (I have effectively no beam techs).

My only actual battle ships are 3 Juggernaught Class flying tanks (54 armour layers moving at 1000 km/s (inpsired by blue emu's rocks), would these be effective in draining the enemies missles actually negating the need for anti missle ships?)

[Theokrat]

Your range is substantially too short if your enemy has any missiles. Ideally you would want to gather some intel on their range first and then create a design that goes slightly further. I.e. take a note how far the enemies are when their missiles hit, find out the speed of the missiles and calculate how far the enemy must have been when he launched the missiles. At any rate, in the absence of better information I would try to go to a 50.0m km range for ASMs.

Maneuver rating increases the chance to hit. Let v_M be the velocity of the missiles, v_T the velocity of the target and MR the maneuverrating, then a missile will hit with p = v_M / v_T * MR / 100. So If the enemy ship goes 6500 km/s and your missiles go 13,000km/s then you would have a 20% chance to hit with a maneuver rating of 10. Increasing the maneuver rating to 20 would cause a chance to hit of 40%. Blue Emu has put a thread out there that describes how the get the best hit chance. Personally I pretty much always go for a maneuver rating of 11 on ASMs, because the first maeuver rating point is much cheaper than the subsequent ones, and because speed is slightly more valueable for other reasons.

AMMs should have a range of a few million kilometers. Say 1-3m km as a rule of thumb. Usually the greater limitation is due to the low-resolution firecontrolls and active search sensors which tend to get rather bulky if you push the range to much.

[Gothmos (OP)]

Welp.  This seems to be the best I can do for an AMM

Missile Size: 1 MSP  (0. 05 HS)     Warhead: 1    Armour: 0     Manoeuvre Rating: 20
Speed: 43200 km/s    Endurance: 1 minutes   Range: 2. 5m km
Cost Per Missile: 1. 22
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 864%   3k km/s 280%   5k km/s 172. 8%   10k km/s 86. 4%

Is this a good AMM Fire Control for my AMM?

Active Sensor Strength: 84   Sensitivity Modifier: 110%
Sensor Size: 150 Tons    Sensor HTK: 1
Resolution: 1    Maximum Range vs 50 ton object (or larger): 27,720,000 km
Range vs Size 6 Missile (or smaller): 3,018,708 km
Range vs Size 8 Missile: 4,435,200 km
Range vs Size 12 Missile: 9,979,200 km

[Brian Neumann]

Your missile and fire control look to be about right given your tech level.  You might also want to build a size 1 missile with a longer range less maneuverability and if possilbe (not likely) a bigger warhead.  You may find yourself fighting npr's where a warhead 1 just doesn't help or they don't use missiles.  In that case the extra offensive missile range could be helpfull.  Also make sure your active sensors can see a size 6 missile out to 4.5m km.  You don't need every ship to have that sensor, just 1 or 2 in your fleet for maximum chance to intercept enemy missiles

Brian

[Gothmos (OP)]

Those were my AMM's, my ASM's have got a 50M km range as suggested by the previous guy, I have fire controls to match them as well.  What would be an appropriate number of tubes/firecontrols/magazine space for a 15000 ton Point Defence Ship?

[Erik L]

Those were my AMM's, my ASM's have got a 50M km range as suggested by the previous guy, I have fire controls to match them as well.  What would be an appropriate number of tubes/firecontrols/magazine space for a 15000 ton Point Defence Ship?

15-20 tubes, 4-5 firecontrol and enough magazine space for around 1000 missiles.

[Gothmos (OP)]

Thanks

[HaliRyan]

Those were my AMM's, my ASM's have got a 50M km range as suggested by the previous guy, I have fire controls to match them as well. 

One thing you may want to consider is to over-engineer your missile fire controls. Having them able to shoot about 50% farther than your missiles will let you upgrade your ordinance without having to refit the ship to make full use, and also help offset any ECM your opponent might have.

[Theokrat]

One thing you may want to consider is to over-engineer your missile fire controls. Having them able to shoot about 50% farther than your missiles will let you upgrade your ordinance without having to refit the ship to make full use, and also help offset any ECM your opponent might have.

This is certainly a very good idea for ASMs. Fuel makes up a noticeable proportion of the missile, and range can really be a limiting factor for ASMs, so better technology allows further ranging missiles. Missiles are produced much faster than ships, so "upward compatibility" is very beneficial.

However it is not really relevant for AMMs. Even at very early technology one can build an 2.2m km AMM where fuel is just 1% of the total weight. One could easily increase the range to 10m km, and it would only have a very limited impact on the missile performance. The reason that its not done is the atrocious costs of resolution-1 sensors and firecontrolls. If the firecontroll is the limiting factor in the first place, there is not point in overengeneering it in the first place.

[Brian Neumann]

Those were my AMM's, my ASM's have got a 50M km range as suggested by the previous guy, I have fire controls to match them as well.  What would be an appropriate number of tubes/firecontrols/magazine space for a 15000 ton Point Defence Ship?

What I was saying was to design a missile to fire out of your amm launchers when you are dealing with an npr that doesn't do missiles.  Have the design and a small production run ready, if you need them you will have them, and you can quickly build more.  It is mostly a backup plan for dealing with threats that don't use heavy missile tech.

Brian

[Havear]

Another good reason to over-engineer is since enemy missiles are racing towards your ships, you can launch AMMs while they're beyond maximum range and let them come to you.

[HaliRyan]

This is certainly a very good idea for ASMs. Fuel makes up a noticeable proportion of the missile, and range can really be a limiting factor for ASMs, so better technology allows further ranging missiles. Missiles are produced much faster than ships, so "upward compatibility" is very beneficial.

However it is not really relevant for AMMs. Even at very early technology one can build an 2.2m km AMM where fuel is just 1% of the total weight. One could easily increase the range to 10m km, and it would only have a very limited impact on the missile performance. The reason that its not done is the atrocious costs of resolution-1 sensors and firecontrolls. If the firecontroll is the limiting factor in the first place, there is not point in overengeneering it in the first place.

Yes, I was referring to the ASM's from the bit I quoted, I guess I should have been more specific.

Also - Hey, my advice wasn't that bad, who -karma'd me!