Do tactical officers affect the chance to hit of missiles, or only beams?
I want to believe yes
I'm fairly certain I have seen it have an effect, since I've seen missiles launched from identical ships have different hit% chances in the same fleet-wide volley, but I've not correlated this with Tactical skills explicitly.
By the way, I ended up testing this myself with some AMMs vs missiles. The answer is yes, tactical officers do affect the CTH of missiles. Learned some more about missile EWAR while I was at it. Here's some math.
The tactical officer bonus is applied multiplicatively. Let's say you have a base CTH of 25% and a Tactical Bonus of 20%. Your modified CTH will then be: (25%)(1.2) = 30%
I also learned that ECM/ECCM affect the CTH
additively.This has huge implications for AMMs. Let's say again that your AMMs have a base CTH of 25%, which in my experience is pretty reasonable assuming equal tech levels. Now let's give the enemy missiles ECM10. Since EWAR is applied additively, your AMM's modified CTH is 15%. Your total hits on the incoming missiles is thus reduced by a whopping 40%. Obviously that's devastating to the viability of your defense. So clearly it's
extremely important in C#, if you're going to use AMMs, to not be outclassed by the enemy ECM. You absolutely need to keep up in that tech, and you must put ECCM on AMMs if there's any chance of your enemy using ECM. Of course, fitting any kind of EWAR on an AMM is pretty tough since you need them to stay small. It's a pretty challenging situation overall!
In fact it affects weapons with low CTH across the board. If you're using some sort of turretless beam PD, such as railguns, that relies on volume of fire rather than a high CTH, then missile ECM will hurt you vey badly. Of course, it's far easier to fit ECCM on a ship than on AMMs.
Interestingly, EWAR effects seem to get applied after tactical bonuses. So if you have a base CTH of 25%, modified by a 20% tactical bonus to 30%, ECM10 will then reduce the final CTH to 20%.
