Welcome Plasticpanzers, hope you enjoy the game. Its annoying at times, and the learning curve is really more of a sheer cliff... with people shooting down at you as you attempt to climb.
But if you stick with it, it's great in ways that so many other games simply are not.
It took me a while to find the right gamma setting for my monitor, now I just need to reduce the brightness level for late night gaming :p
Yeah, getting the right monitor setting, this game does produce a lot of eye strain. I honestly wish I could change the system map to a dull red or orange color as opposed to the blue as its less straining for the eye. (at least in my experience. blues and purples give me crazy eye strain if I look at them for any length of time)
On the topic of Plastic and his adventures with missiles however.
As the wiki is down, you'll have to hunt around the forums for advice for ship designs and missiles and such. Bureau of ship design of course.
But general rule of thumb when it comes to anti missile missiles, 50% engine, "1 damage warhead", a tiny bit of fuel to get the range of your missile fire control, and the rest in agility. Your goal in AMM design is a missile with enough range, that has the highest "to-hit" chance possible (as enemy anti ship missiles can often be faster than your AMMs) but to-hit is based on your own missile's speed, agility, and the target's speed.
With anti ship missiles on the other hand, you can opt for close range or long range. But something important in the design, instead of tuning for agility to try and raise the to-hit (you only need to get ~100% to-hit against the enemy's common ship speed, plus a little bit for possibly faster enemies), you need to strike a balance between fuel load, damage, and engine size.
However, msot players seem to use size 3-6 for ASMs, as size 6 is the "smallest" with regards to sensor detection mechanics, and larger missiles take up more space on ships, and can't achieve the same "saturation" of the target as smaller missiles do.
Example: With say 4 hull spaces, on my ship, I can fit 1 size 4 launcher, 2 size 2s, and 4 size 1s.
The size 2 launchers fire 2x as often as the size 4, and the size 1s fire 4x as often.
So from the same hull space, over a set amount of time, for each size 4 missile fired, i could have fired 4 size 2s, or 16 size 1s.
And its a lot harder to intercept 16 size 1 missiles, than it is to intercept 1 size 4.
Not saying larger missiles don't have their place... but sticking to the 4-6 range is pretty common.
PS
A number of months ago I had started working on a comprehensive spreadsheet for tuning missile design, but when I started going back to school... well programming homework, kinda kills my wish to look at excel and work on math. I'll have to get back around to that some weekend when I don't have a project due and finish it. Hopefully it'll be helpful to people starting out once its done.