"Wild Weasel" ships or fighters

[seinwave (OP)]

I have been thinking about specialized Wild Weasel ships or fighters and how they could be designed. Pretty much, a Wild Weasel is a fighter designed to destroy or bait enemy radar emplacements. In Aurora, if you knock out the enemy's active sensors (or major actives, at least) they are heavily limited in range and effectiveness, unless they have a bunch of backups. So, how can we design a ship to perform just that?

One way involves specialized carriers and stealthy fighters. A carrier mounts a large EM sensor array to detect active sensor outputs. Once it finds a suitably major signature, it launches it's small wing of specialized fighters. The fighters are optimized for stealth (like, crazy optimized) and mount very, very small active sensors. Their armament consists of a bunch of small box launchers firing mostly-warhead missiles. They close to very short missile ranges, paint the target with the largest active sensors, and launch their giant salvoes together, hopefully cutting through CIWS and impacting before anti-missiles can be launched. Then they fly away, turning off their actives, and reload for another go.

[Vanigo]

Knocking out enemy sensors is a very viable strategy, but there are several issues with this plan. First, there's a "minimum stealth size" tech line, and to make a useful stealth fighter, you pretty much have to max it out. If you do that, at a cost of (IIRC) several million RP, you could make a fighter with the radar profile of a size 6 missile, which is pretty sweet, and would easily get you within missile range undetected by enemy active sensors, but I don't think I've ever gotten that many RP total in a game. The second problem is that NPR ships all have sensors. It could be useful against some player race fleets, but I for one always put small backup sensors on every warship for exactly this reason. The third problem is that there's no way to stealth through an enemy countermissile envelope. You can't reduce your sensor signature below that of a size 6 missile, so if you're close enough to cut down on his countermissile fire, you're close enough that he can shoot you with countermissiles - which is deadly to fighters. The fourth problem is that knocking out sensors with missiles generally means maiming the ship, which tends to take a lot of missiles. You might get lucky from time to time, but a small force of stealth fighters generally isn't going to do the job.
The only way to take out sensors without needing to blow up huge chunks of the target ship first (or getting lucky) is to use high-power microwaves, which specifically target electronic systems - sensors, fire controls, and ECM/ECCM. It's a great way to keep enemy ships from shooting you, but high-power microwaves are expensive and short-ranged beam weapons, and, while they ignore armor, they are stopped by shields. A strike group of stealthy FACs with HPMs could potentially stealth in, rush through countermissile range, and cripple an enemy fleet, but you'd have to expect losses. Can't put much armor on an FAC, especially if you need to keep the radar signature down. Plus, you'd still need a lot of minimum cloak size tech to work, albeit not as much as for stealth fighters. HPMs can be a very viable complement to a more conventional beam armament, but getting small ships to beam range is a tricky and inevitably casualty-heavy proposition. (Well, unless the enemy fleet has no countermissile or anti-FAC ships, which does happen sometimes.)

[jseah]

An equivalent RP expenditure on missiles/engines would net a fleet that runs a tech level higher than yours on every account, if they don't have stealth. 

Much easier to just use missile ships that use box launcher swarms to overwhelm PD.  A reloading ship with a hangar to carry 6kton ships and 5x 6kton ships with all box launchers could put out an ungodly number of missiles. 

Upwards of a thousand maybe?  If the missiles are actually size 20 drones that diverge into size 2 warheads with insane evasion engines, they could rapidly turn into a nightmare to defend against. 

Well, at least for one salvo.  You'll take literally days to reload.  Days. 

[Gidoran]

I was doing some research and I think you're slightly mistaken on what Wild Weasel loadouts were supposed to do.

Yes, they had the effect of targeting radar installations, but it was more to take out SAM emplacements. Quote from wikipedia on this: "In brief, the task of a Wild Weasel aircraft is to bait enemy anti-aircraft defenses into targeting it with their radars, whereupon the radar waves are traced back to their source allowing the Weasel or its teammates to precisely target it for destruction."

Ergo, Wild Weasel is not anti-sensor, it is anti-anti-aircraft defenses. Ain't that a mouthful? Anyway, in this case WW Loadouts should be specialized to sneak in as close as possible and then dump enough firepower into a platform that can successfully target the friendly fighter-based platforms so as to eliminate it. You could make the argument that in a combined arms fleet, this would be a specialized craft for killing PDCs, or it could be a craft dedicated to killing enemy point defense.

So a focused stealth craft would be good, maybe equipped with Mesons if you feel that ballsy, or maybe equipped with a short-range high damage missile. I'd say this is the kind of thing where I'd want a maybe 500 ton FAC instead of a fighter, but I think you could pull it off in a 250-300 ton platform if you really squeezed.

[Erik L]

I think some of the confusion arises from SFB's use of Wild Weasels as anti-sensor/jamming platforms.

[Charlie Beeler]

To truely implement a "wild weasel" fighter like the US Air Force deployed in Vietnam and later Aurora is missing a critical ability, a fire control that can target passive emissions.  This can be somewhat addressed with missiles that have EM sensors and are targeted on a waypoint close to the intended target.  To take it a little farther the game also needs a meson or High Power Microwave warhead for the missile to complete the package.

The Star Fleet Battles "wild weasel" is a means of equiping a shuttle to function as a decoy that can redirect the targeting of seeking weapons that have already been launched.  This is a function that currently does not exist in Aurora.  The closest I'm been able to come is the "game" the AI by presenting a target that the AI will engage in favor of what I consider a higher value tactical or strategic target.