Beam vs missile combat shenangians

[telegraph (OP)]

I am a beam guy. I love lasers, I love carronades, I adore railguns. I hate long range missiles.
So I am creating a fleet of beam warships. Big and beefy or small and agile, but still beam. I field a substantial taskforce against a missile-happy spoiler race. Now comes the trouble - even though I can easily shrug-off any missile volley they can throw at me - combat beomes a nightmare for the sheer length of it.
Here comes the math:
Unfortunately enemy throws at me a tiny volley of 4 missiles every 30 seconds.
Fortunately my systems can easily endure that ammount of damage or even shoot those missiles down as soon as they show up on scanners.
Unfortunately enemy starts shooting at about 100m km. and is trying to keep his distance.
Fortunately my speed is 1000km/s greater, so eventually I will still catch him.
Unfortunately that means that I will catch him after (100m km)/(30s*1000km/s), that is more then 3 thousand interrupts, even if I would not slow simulation down to actually target missiles and shoot them down. And that is just to dispatch one of the mid-ranged spoiler ship.

So hence the question: is beam weapons at all feasible in this kind of gameplay? How do you deal with the sheer boredom of shooting down the endless stream of sissy missiles?

[Barkhorn]

I would guess stealth and shields.   Stealth so you can get closer without them firing, and shields so you can ignore the puny volleys and just let the shields absorb the hits.

Fighters could work too, just rush in as fast as possible, zap them with the lasers, and leave.

[Erik L]

I would guess stealth and shields.   Stealth so you can get closer without them firing, and shields so you can ignore the puny volleys and just let the shields absorb the hits.

Fighters could work too, just rush in as fast as possible, zap them with the lasers, and leave.

You'd want enough shield regen to negate all of the damage between salvos.

Another tactic would be to play cat and mouse with them. Close so they fire, then retreat. Repeat until they are out of missile.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

It's the enemy's ammunition supply that limits them moreso than your ability to close.  There's very few situations where a beam warship could possibly close before a missile ship exhausts its magazines.   Even a well-cloaked FAC is visible for many millions of kilometers to RES-1 sensors.  They will run out of ammo eventually though at which point the interrupts will cease.

The biggest difficulty for a beam armada is actually size 1 missiles.  Missile fleets can stay outside the AMM envelope but beam fleets cannot. Nor can beam fleets deplete AMM supplies through offensive missiles.  Any beam fleet perforce must be prepared to endure possibly dozens of size 1 missiles impacting every 5-15 seconds for numerous turns.  This is nearly impossible to cope with without an overwhelming advantage in tonnage or technology. 

[Charlie Beeler]

Don't really need overwhelming tech nor tonnage to deal with a missile fleet that depends on using sz1 defensive missiles offensively.  The beam race just needs to limit it self to 10cm railguns with capacitor 3 and 40% missile tracking bonus.  As long as the beam tracking is at the same tech level as the engine tech the use of stdXrange and 4Xspeed means that beam player should be able to out last the missile player. 

This is assuming that the sz1 missiles are the designed defensive component of a missile fleet.  A fleet that is designed to use sz1 missiles offensively and exclusively present a different challenge.  Then it becomes a test of what magazine to launcher ratio and total hull space percentage dedicated to the missile suite. 

[davidb86]

To reply to the original question,  I have used pairs of beam ships armed with either 10 cm lasers or 10 cm rail (for the 5 second recharge) with active sensors off,  to bracket an enemy ship, limiting his ability to run.  I use a scout with massive passive sensors to track the beam ships close, and then turn on active sensors and  and charge.  since he cannot flee directly away the closing speed is much higher and I have generally (v.6.21) run him out of amm in 15-20 volleys none of which penetrate my beams.

[telegraph (OP)]

Oh, so you say that there will actually be an end to the AI missile capacity? That is reassuring. A pity there is no way to automate a simple defensive maneuver I have to perform every salvo: lock on the nearest salvo; shoot.

[sublight]

That can be automated.

Go to the Combat Assignment Overview window, click on each of your missile defense fire control(s) at left, and then set the point defense mode at right. Fire controls with an assigned defense mode will automatically fire on incoming non-allied missiles.

For beam point defense set the fire control to 'Final Defense Fire' with max range of '1.' The fire control will automatically fire on missiles as they intercept targets in the same location as the defending ship.

If the missiles are slow and your range is long you can instead set the fire controls to 'Area Defense' with a max range equal to the weapon range. This causes the fire control to automatically fire on missiles ending increment movement in range. This is less accurate, but usually worth it if you can fire at least twice against the same missile wave.


Now, there is an maddening issue where point defense occasionally fails to fire, but that is thankfully rare and has only happened to me twice.