What I meant was you might want to trim the design to better fill that specific role instead of being an all-purpose design that can fill any spot.
It you don't believe in muti-role ships, that's fine. But this ship fills the role you've described quite well with a mix of and is able to fill other roles with a fraction of its small hull size.
There is little difference in the warhead between the Slamhammer and Sparrow to justify the range difference.
Yeah, that's a fair assessment. The Slamhammer is faster and therefore has a longer effective range if I want to fire it only within a 5 second tic to avoid most anti-missile fire. It can therefore be paired with the Nova better. And it has better armor penetration. But I could trade 4 Slamhammers for 4 Sparrows, probably.
Because designing slightly larger ones that can detect 1,000 tons and smaller at 10m km+ is a lot better.
For the mission of providing sensor coverage on a jump point, there's little a big probe can do that a size 1 probe can't and there's no reason for my frontier escort ships to be carrying around giant probes. For 10.4 tons of collier space, I can permanently monitor 4 jump points and see anything moving through them in either direction as an early warning system. That sounds like a deal to me.
1) how is that possible? 1.5)What kind of res is it?
It's res 500 to detect only huge ships but again, mostly just to distract the enemy with a loud sensor or to flush them out, get them to turn on their own active sensors or to reveal the prescence of an enemy in a sector when they destroy the probe.
Here's the design:
Crybaby Probe
Missile Size: 1 MSP (0.05 HS) Warhead: 0 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 10
Speed: 10000 km/s Engine Endurance: 30.1 hours Range: 1 082.9m km
Active Sensor Strength: 0.51 Sensitivity Modifier: 240%
Resolution: 500 Maximum Range vs 25000 ton object (or larger): 2 730 000 km
Cost Per Missile: 0.941
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 100% 3k km/s 30% 5k km/s 20% 10k km/s 10%
Materials Required: 0.306x Boronide 0.51x Uridium 0.125x Gallicite Fuel x1150
Development Cost for Project: 94RP
Interestingly, it looks possible to create a buoy with even greater resolution than 500, so I might experiment with that.
But if it had a resolution of 200 or so, then you could see very large enemies at a very long range
If it had an identically sized backup sensor with res 200 instead of a res 1 senors, it could see 10,000 ton ships at 20m km. But I can already see those and then I wouldn't have a backup sensor to allow me to accomplish my key role of missile defense. It would also have a GPS of 1200 which would suddenly make this ship 9 times easier to spot with EM sensors. Not worth it.
And if a luck shot were to hit the sensors, the engines would already be taken out and it would already be helpless.
The engine makes up 8% of the Damage Allocation Chart and has 8 HTK. The primary sensor makes up 1.6% of the Damage Allocation Chart and has 1 HTK. Whereas it's certainly possible it will lose engines before sensors, it's strange to me that you think the opposite is impossible. 5 tons is a small price to pay to hedge that possibility.
You should be able to track you own missiles, that's how fast you need to keep your anti-missile turrets. You definitely did not put enough RP into BFC.
My last beam fire control tech level costed my 60,000 RP. My last engine tech cost me 80,000 RP. I think it's a profound waste to spend more on beam fire control than engine technology, but to each his own.
