Dedicated Total Defense Ship

[Borealis4x (OP)]

I was reading about point defense on the wiki, and the point about having a three layered missile defense interested me.

"A widely used doctrine for combat fleet defense consists of a AMM-equipped missile ship (long range), Area Defense beam-weapons ship (medium range) and a Final-Fire-laser ship (short range).

You want your PD missile launchers to be able to fire at the incoming missiles multiple times before they strike, but not waste too much ammo. Anything that gets through the missile screen gets attacked by the Area Defense ship with long range lasers. Finally, your Final-Fire ships will fire one last time at 'leakers'."

Now in this example they are using dedicated ships for all three layers but I think that is overkill. I want to use just one 30,000 ton ship and stick one or two in every combat squadron to augment their existing point defense capabilities.

What do you think of this idea? Is it necessary even if I have point defense turrets (gauss weapons) on my combat ships?

[Sheb]

Depends on your doctrine, a PD ship can be very good. I've never liked long-range area beam PD though (I do assign my offensive beams as PD when they don't have nothing to shoot htough). Always seemed better to use the tonnage for weapons that will shoot at point-blank for max accuracy.

[Iranon]

I generally don't use AMMs as such, throwing the same value of ordnance at incoming missiles for the chance to negate them doesn't sound appealing.
Small missile spam works reliably and has no real counter, so large numbers of size-1 general purpose missiles works. However, you often have better options.
Preferred point defence depends on details:

Gauss turrets are generally the most effective solution by volume, but require a fair bit of tech investment and are of limit use elsewhere.
Base-tech railguns and commercial engines may be good enough and the combination is dirt cheap. Even if most shots miss, it's likely cheaper than the ordnance needed to take it down.
Some people use heavily armoured commercial ships with CIWs to absorb hits, I prefer the above even though it requires maintenance.
If you want fast point defence ships (maybe so you can chase down spent missile ships), small railguns can keep up with Gauss turrets and are better against ships at reasonable tech levels.
Midsize laser turrets are adequate at area defence and useful against ships at any beam range.
Long-range lasers on fast ships may allow you to get many shots off as you retreat, and can allow flawless victories when used offensively.
Mesons are an interesting alternative to lasers, and surprisingly cheap (costs don't scale with capacitor tech).

So... many different things work, and your choice may have more to do with what secondary role you'd like your PD vessel to fill.

[Garfunkel]

Dedicated ship is always more efficient on its mission than a multi-role ship. That does not mean that a multi-role ships are always crap or perform sub-par, just that it usually requires a pretty big ship and some advanced tech.

At TL0 to TL1, missile speeds are so low that building AMMs is pretty much a waste of resources and building area defence beams is really expensive too, so focusing strictly on final fire, ie 10,000 km range gauss turrets is in my opinion the best solution. So you want loads of little corvettes with a single turret - those are easy to research and cheap to build and will do the job pretty well. Then once your tech advances, you can reduce their number as you introduce AMM and ADC ships.

I mostly play early tech games, so I couldn't say at what tech level, exactly, a big multi-role defence ship could handle all 3 layers efficiently.

[Arwyn]

Multi-role is tough no matter the tech. It can be done, but you give up things to do it, or it becomes REALLY expensive.

For example, early on, an escort frigate can be setup with two 10cm railguns and escort orders, and three or four of them do a reasonably good job, especially against early missiles. In fact, until gauss tech comes up a ways, railguns are better. Once you get to three or four shots out of the gauss, the flexibility of turrets really starts to show.

I do use layered missile defense. At very low tech, I usually don't use AMMs, they are too slow, and too costly for a fledgling empire. Railguns work great, and are dual purpose, and are a starting tech.

Once I get up to Ion tech, I am usually fielding a class of AMM destroyer and light cruiser escorts armed with just AMMs. Then there is a class of light escorts setup with gauss and lasers. A single destroyer with one triple laser turret and two triple gauss pumps out a lot of shots.

Past that, its just upscaling the design. So a bigger escort cruisers still sticks with guns or missiles, just more of them.

Going multi-role, like AMMs and guns can be done, and can work well for small engagements, but will not be as efficient as a dedicated ship design, and will be way more expensive.

[Thanatos]

For missile defense, I prefer to use railguns when I have them researched fairly high- capacitor tech is the big stop-gap here, as you need it quite a bit high to get even the most basic use out of the railguns, when they do not function as PD. The other problem is, you cannot turret railguns. So you need fast ships. In the end this means that for it to be effective, you need crazy fast ships, with decent railguns- and four of those can function like a fully dedicated 30k ton PD ship, while having the offensive capability of... well, just about anything else you could think of. I often liken these ships to sharks. They absolutely devour enemies and rarely seem to get hit by missiles.

The other advantage is lasers, but they require investment into PP as well, and sometimes getting the ideal range is hard. Lasers you always need to upgrade, as they need to be as bleeding edge as you could possibly manage them, but otherwise function the same as railguns, except they can be turreted but you trade speed, and they can also engage missiles farther away.

My favorite method however is mesons. Mesons will one shot missiles at any tech level, and they will obliterate ships with no problem. Their range is short, compared to lasers, turreting them is also a requirement, which will increase your ship mass, and they will need some epic power plants to get it to work, as you need quite a few of them to make a good impact against large ships.