Kurt,
Looking at the Reichraummarineschiffbauart I'm a tad confused about their fighter and AMM designs.
I'll address your specific points below, but the general answer to most everything will be to remember that 1 - these are the Reich's first attempt to create a fighter, and 2 - this is really my first attempt to create a fighter using this version of Aurora, so the result was intentially clumsy, as it probably would have been in real life.
Making one fighter with only a search sensor may be sensible for pure search tasks, the arguements can go a lot of directions there. The attack fighters; however, have no search sensor, and an extremely long range fire control. But only against ships, against other fighters its range is largely crippled and against missiles basically non-existant. More sensible would be to give them a sensor and firecontrol range of about 3-5 million km (double or tripple the resolution 1 range of the AMM sensor/fire control) and give the carrier very long range sensors. Not giving the fighters their own sensor system is a dubious mass saving to me, but I frankly admit that is a personal taste. But a size 1 or size 0.5 fire control plus search sensor would fit on those birds, best with a resolution of around 10-15.
To be honest, this is the design decision that I was most uncomfortable with. And the inadequacy most likely to be addressed in the Mk II version of the fighter, whenever it might be produced. As noted above, the Reich, and I, are still feeling our way towards a realistic fighter deployment strategy and, linked to that, the best design to match that strategy.
As for their box launcher I would think a size two missile or a size three one would be better (5 or 3 missiles respectively), and make the missile more like a torpedo...big warhead, high speed, limited endurance, good manuever rating. You could also make a 2 stage design with a second stage that carries AMMs design to allow them to deploy in a "thicken the defences" mode or even better to engage other fighters.
The Reich is very concerned about salvo sizes. While larger missiles would be better all-around, as you note above, the fighters would be able to carry fewer, and thus would be much more vulnerable to point defense interception. Launching larger numbers of smaller, cheaper missiles makes it more likely that they will overwhelm point defense and get some hits, which, even if they are individually devastating, will at least do some damage, which the bigger missiles might not if they don't overwhelm point defense and get destroyed short of the target.
The AMM designs also makes very little sense it has no manueverability and 39 min of endurance, yet the AMM sensors have only a 1.7m km range. So you only need 2-5 min at most endurance, the rest can go into manueverability. Even as a dual mode missile is 75m km range necessary?
This one is easy, and not my fault
. The 6P campaign was created with Aurora v 3.11, which means that the missile design sequence is different than 4.0b's. Specifically, you can't specify the amount of fuel, all you can do is decide to devote either 0 missile size points (MSP's) to fuel, or increments of a quarter point to fuel. The result is one of the reasons Steve made the changes that he did for 4.0b, because in small 1 space anti-missiles you have no choice but to devote a full quarter of the available space to fuel, giving you a totally ridiculous flight time and range.
Lastly none of the warships carry EM sensors...why not? This probably goes back to my personal taste but sensors both passive and active are a key to victory generally. Win the sensor game and the fight is half done. "Scouting and Counter Scouting" in naval speak.
That is a hold-over from the earlier days of the Raumarine, when it was only intended to act in the inner solar system, usually under cover of the planet-bound sensor network on Earth. It has always been their intention to remedy this weakness, but this intention has been caught up in the realities of other demands on R&D and construction resources.
Kurt
