Gauss Cannon, Point Defense, and Missiles

[WCG (OP)]

The more I read in this forum, the more confused I get. I've got a few questions that are somewhat related.

After beginning with a conventional start, I switched over my Missile Defense bases to more modern technology, and created a small PDC with active sensors. I figured that I was all set. But I've already had one exploring ship destroyed by missiles from an unknown enemy (my ship didn't have an active sensor), so I've also been working on point defense. First priority is a small missile defense PDC to protect the Earth, and after reading the tutorial descriptions of various weapons, I researched Gauss Cannon for that role.

1) But I just stumbled across another thread where someone notes that "the gauss cannon are useless in any type of atmosphere." Huh? Is that true? There's nothing about this in the tutorial description. Is my missile defense PDC worthless now (and all my research wasted)? Please tell me that's not true!

2) Someone in another thread points out that you can only target one ship per fire control. How does that work for missile defense? Do I need a separate fire control for each point defense weapon then, so I can shoot at more than one missile at a time? I didn't think of this. If that's the case, it would not seem to pay to build dedicated missile defense ships then, since I'd still need multiple fire controls.

3) Since I needed to research missiles anyway, in order to use all those Missile Bases on Earth, I decided to use missiles as my anti-ship weapon. But with all my reading here, I'm still not sure I understand. Is it really true that a level 2 or 3 warhead does no more damage than a level 1 warhead? That doesn't seem logical.

And by "level 1," we are talking about the power of the warhead, not the size of the missile, right? When I try to design a size 1 missile, I end up with an anti-missile missile, not an anti-ship missile, apparently, though I suppose my tech level might just be too low. Or maybe it doesn't matter what the game calls it?


I appreciate the help I've been getting here. I seem to spend more time searching this forum than I do playing the game, but it's not always that helpful. Just when I think I understand something, I find out that I really don't.

Thanks,

Bill

[sloanjh]

The more I read in this forum, the more confused I get. I've got a few questions that are somewhat related.

After beginning with a conventional start, I switched over my Missile Defense bases to more modern technology, and created a small PDC with active sensors. I figured that I was all set. But I've already had one exploring ship destroyed by missiles from an unknown enemy (my ship didn't have an active sensor), so I've also been working on point defense. First priority is a small missile defense PDC to protect the Earth, and after reading the tutorial descriptions of various weapons, I researched Gauss Cannon for that role.

1) But I just stumbled across another thread where someone notes that "the gauss cannon are useless in any type of atmosphere." Huh? Is that true? There's nothing about this in the tutorial description. Is my missile defense PDC worthless now (and all my research wasted)? Please tell me that's not true!

"Beam" weapons (which include projectile weapons like gauss cannon and rail guns) are degraded by atmosphere - they have zero effect for pressure >= 1.0, and proportional effect for pressure <1.0 (0x for 1.0, 1x for 0.0).  But all your research isn't wasted - you can change your PDC design to an Orbital Weapons Platform design (a ship w/o engines) and it should do just as well.  Of course those take SY to build....

2) Someone in another thread points out that you can only target one ship per fire control. How does that work for missile defense? Do I need a separate fire control for each point defense weapon then, so I can shoot at more than one missile at a time? I didn't think of this. If that's the case, it would not seem to pay to build dedicated missile defense ships then, since I'd still need multiple fire controls.

You need a separate fire control for each missile salvo you want to target in a single time slice.  So let's say you've got 4 launchers with a 10s cycle time and 20 incoming missiles arranged in 10 salvos of 2 missiles/salvo.  If you had only one fire control, you'd be able to target a (potentially different) salvo every time you fired.  So the first time you fired, you could shoot 4 missiles at salvo1, the second time (10s later) you could shoot 4 missiles at salvo2, etc. - it would take you 10 launches to engage all 10 salvos.  If you had 2 fire controls, you could assign two launchers to each one, and on the first launch you could fire 2 missiles at salvo1 and 2 at salvo2, on the second launch (10s later) you could fire 2 at salvo3 and 2 at salvo4, so it would only take 5 launches to engage all the incoming missiles.  I tend to have a 3:1 or 4:1 ratio between PD weapons and fire control, i.e. 3-4 fire control for 12 missile launchers, or 1 fire control per triple- or quad-turret.

3) Since I needed to research missiles anyway, in order to use all those Missile Bases on Earth, I decided to use missiles as my anti-ship weapon. But with all my reading here, I'm still not sure I understand. Is it really true that a level 2 or 3 warhead does no more damage than a level 1 warhead? That doesn't seem logical.

And by "level 1," we are talking about the power of the warhead, not the size of the missile, right? When I try to design a size 1 missile, I end up with an anti-missile missile, not an anti-ship missile, apparently, though I suppose my tech level might just be too low. Or maybe it doesn't matter what the game calls it?

I think you got that from one of my posts.  I tried to be careful and say "strength" everywhere when talking about warhead power and "level" when talking about the thickness of armor.  A strength-3 warhead does 3x the damage of a strength-1 warhead, but it only does it to the outermost layer of armor, so level-1 armor (which all ships have) will prevent a single hit from doing interior damage.  The strength-3 warhead will still destroy 3x armor squares, however, making it much more likely for the second hit to penetrate.  A strength-4 warhead will penetrate to the second layer, doing 3 points of damage to the first (outermost) layer it hits and 1 point (in the center of the hit) to the second layer.  This means that the first hit by a strength-4 warhead will do interior damage to a ship with only level-1 armor.

I appreciate the help I've been getting here. I seem to spend more time searching this forum than I do playing the game, but it's not always that helpful. Just when I think I understand something, I find out that I really don't.

One thing you might try is to do some "war games" using SM model.  Create 2 races, give each one a reasonable level of tech (e.g. 3-4) design some ships using various design philosophies, then use instant-OOP to create some squadrons to fight each other (which can be positioned through the F12 screen).  Actually running a few battles gives one a really good feel for a lot of these things.

John

[Brian Neumann]

1.)  All beam weapons with the exeption of mesons have their damage reduced by the atmospheric pressure.  The amount of reduction is the % of atmospheric pressure up to 1 atm.  At 1 atmospheric pressure no beam weapon will do any damage.  The problem with using gauss cannon on a planet is that any atmosphere will reduce the damage below 1 point.  As all of the damage is rounded down this means that gauss cannon do not work in an atmosphere.  It is one of the reasons that I like mesons as they are usefull anywhere.

2.)  You can only target one ship per fire control, however with missiles what is targeted is the salvo of missiles.  A salvo is defined as all the missiles that a single ship fired in one 5 second phase.  As most beam weapons have a fairly poor success rate against incomming missiles (15-30%) having one pd fire control per turret or two is probably more than you need.  Typically a quad turret of anything exept gauss cannon is going to shoot down 1-2 missiles, most salvo's are going to be larger than this.  A gauss cannon quad turret might get 4-5 missiles but that is about as good as it will get for quite some time.  Also note that a CIWS system has a self contained search radar and will automatically engage any incomming missiles.  They can also be mounted on a civilian ship so a geo survey vessel can have some self defense ability from missiles.

3.)The larger warhead is doing more damage, but it is not digging any deeper into the armour.  Basically 3 size 1 warhead (yes that is damage output of the missile) and 1 size three will have the same basic effect.  A size 4 warhead will however do 3 points of damage to the surface layer of armour and 1 point to the next layer down.  If the target only has a 1 point thickness armour then the size 4 warhead will automatically be doing 1 point of internal damage.  The smaller warheads will need to have a second missile hit on the same spot to get any internal damage.  Check the tutorials for ship design.  It has a description of the weapon damage templates there.

For point defense work my prefered weapons at lower tech are railguns for ships, mesons for planets/ships, then lasers then gauss cannon.  At around 25000 rp level the gauss cannon move up and replace railguns on ships as they can be mounted on turrets and have the rate of fire to replace the railguns.  At higher tech levels the gauss cannon are the very best for purely point defense work.  I prefer to keep my Meson tech going for point defense in a lot of cases for smaller ships as it is longer ranged than the gauss cannon, and in effect the point defense is a dual use weapon for shooting at any ships in closer range.  The gauss cannon is just to short of a range for this purpose.  I will usually mount the gauss cannon turrets on dedicated escorts, and large capital ships.

For anti-missile missile fire control, I have found that having 1 fire control per 5 launchers works fairly well.  It is a bit of extra redundancy in case of damage, and allows for engaging small salvos fairly efficiently. Also note that with recent changes in fire control for missiles it is no longer possible to have the missiles change targets in mid flight unless they have an onboard sensor.  If they do, then they fly to the targets last position and hunt for a new target.  This does not work well with anti-missiles as they are small and do not have the capacity for a large sensor.  The result is that a new missile salvo is probably going to cross their small sensor coverage to fast for the missiles to lock on.  This is because the missiles move independantly and all of the movement for a particular pulse will happen for 1 salvo before the next is activated.  If the incomming missiles do not stop within the sensor coverage of the other missiles then they will never be detected and targeted.

Hope all of this helps you.

[WCG (OP)]

Thank-you both. This is all very clear now.

Bill

[Father Tim]

2.)  You can only target one ship per fire control, however with missiles what is targeted is the salvo of missiles.  A salvo is defined as all the missiles that a single ship fired in one 5 second phase.

Not quite.  A salvo is all the missiles in a single place, at a single time, with the same speed, traveling in the same direction.  So a ship firing different-speed missiles (perhaps old tech and new tech), or on multiple, wide-spread targets (a fleet and its escorts) will generate multiple salvoes, whereas a squadron of six fighters firing identical missiles at a single target will generate only a single salvo.

[Hawkeye]

2.)  You can only target one ship per fire control, however with missiles what is targeted is the salvo of missiles.  A salvo is defined as all the missiles that a single ship fired in one 5 second phase.

Not quite.  A salvo is all the missiles in a single place, at a single time, with the same speed, traveling in the same direction.  So a ship firing different-speed missiles (perhaps old tech and new tech), or on multiple, wide-spread targets (a fleet and its escorts) will generate multiple salvoes, whereas a squadron of six fighters firing identical missiles at a single target will generate only a single salvo.

I´d like to throw in another °Not quite° here

If I´m not totally off, each missile fire control used will generate its own salvo. In your example, as each fighter will use its own firecon, each figher will also create its own salvo. If you have a missile cruiser with, say 10 launchers and two missile firecons, you can either assign all 10 launchers to a single firecon, creating a single salvo with 10 missiles, or divide the launchers between the two firecons, creating two salvos of 5 missiles each.

So, basicly, your sentence above should read:
A salvo is all the missiles in a single place, at a single time, with the same speed, traveling in the same direcion, fired at the same time and from the same missile firecon.