I want to discuss missile launchers in some depth, and I'd like to start out with an illustrative scenario. In the current version of the Space 1889 campaign (6.21) a Majestic-class Battleship mounts 12 size-5 missile launchers and 12 C80 magazines, devoting a total of 120 hull space to ordnance storage and launching. It carries 204 Whitehead torpedoes, launching 12 every 50 seconds, requiring a total of 800 seconds to flush its ordnance in 17 salvos. Meanwhile, the British have two escort designs: the Town class AMM cruiser and the River class beam destroyer. The Town is an anti-missile escort that can detect Whiteheads at 1.25 mkm and launch 15 of its 735 AMMs every 10 seconds. The River is a beam escort mounting 4 dual 10cm laser turrets that track at 16000 km/s, with 84% accuracy at 10kkm.
Please note that the below scenarios did not take into account crew grade, missile tracking boosts, or the intricacies of probability. In 'real life', British task force defence would be a good deal more accurate from tracking bonuses and grade. Thus the edge cases illustrated should be taken with a grain of salt. The idea is to demonstrate the wide sweeping trends of missile combat.
Diadems vs Escort Group
The Admiralty decides to start a blood sport gambling ring to fund its operations, and matches 1 Majestic-class Battleship (3464 bp) against 1 Town CL (2158) and 2 River DDs (1948 subtotal, 4106 bp total). The Town is a more modern Magneto-plasma design, but is still equipped with Ion drive missiles. All 3 designs are short-range combat vessels, with similar deployment and maintenance profiles.
Whitehead Torpedoes travel at 24k km/s. Typical Steve Tactics are to turn away from incoming fire to gain time to fire missiles. The task group will travel at 4k km/s, giving the torpedoes at 20k km/s closing speed. The Town has an approximately 18% chance to hit with its' AMMs, or 2.7 missiles per salvo. There are 12 incoming missiles , and futzing a little for AMM inefficiency it should take the Town 5 shots to destroy an incoming salvo. New missiles could appear slightly faster than the Towns can whittle them down, but we can safely assume the Rivers will take care of most leakers.
The Town can only destroy 132 incoming missiles however, which is ~11 waves. Approximately 72 torpedoes remain in 6 waves. The Rivers carry 16 lasers between them, which each stand about a 56% chance of hitting. This works out to 9 missiles destroyed per salvo on average. Thus only 18 Whiteheads will actually leak through.
Conclusions:
Standard launchers can only penetrate AMM screens through attrition. Bad enough as it was; If the Town only picked off half of each salvo, the mixed group would have destroyed every missile while still having some AMMs remaining. Trading the 2 rivers in for another Town would have destroyed every torpedo short of the escort group with AMMs to spare.
3-4 Rivers would have also have been effectively invincible to the Majestics armaments. However, a clever Majestic captain could hold fire against the beam group until he entered knife range; it would essentially be a contest of armor and DPS at that point. This doesn't work against Towns, because they can hurl AMMs from beyond knife range.
It's also notable that although the Rivers mounted advanced 10cm-NUV-C3 lasers with ROF5, basic Infrared-C1 ROF15 lasers would have been exactly as effective at anti missile duties while costing 1/20th as much. Missiles only arrived every 50s, and accuracy wholly depends on the MFC.
In fact, waves are spread so far apart that minaturized lasers would get off just as many shots. Applying a 0.75x size multiplier to the River's 10cm lasers would increase enable it to mount 12 lasers instead of 8, though the ROF would increase to 20. This increase in firepower would render the 2 Rivers effectively invincible, excepting the knife range exception noted above.
Reduced-Size Majestic vs Escort Group
If I give the Majestic half-size launchers, the salvo density is doubled to 24 while the refire rate goes up to 250s. The missile capacity increases slightly to 216.
The Escort Group can concentrate on one salvo at a time, but the Town can (in 6 salvos) knock down 16 of 24, the Rivers knock down 9, 1 leaker on average (likely to be more for several reasons). On wave 9 the Town runs out of missiles after knocking down a handful and several more leak through. Still, the Majestic's salvo density is on the verge of breaking the escort groups defenses.
I'm not going to run 0.33 launchers, though they'd probably leak through the defenses like crazy.
Box Majestic vs Escort Group
The British don't possess box Launcher technology, but if they did the Majestic could mount 160 box launchers in lieu of standard launchers and magazines. They would also save 216 crew, granting them another ~9.5 HS for other purposes. OTOH it would lose about half of its internal HTK.
If the Majestic fired this titanic salvo, the Town would get about 6 salvos off destroying 16 missiles. The Rivers would destroy a further 9, leaving 135 to impact and likely completely destroy the escort group.
2 Towns would destroy 32 missiles total, while 4 Rivers would nail 18 total.
Conclusions:
Box launchers obliterated the conventional task force defence. Beams are almost useless against box attacks and the AMM design did not have sufficient firing time to do any better than the beam ships.
The Town is clearly not designed with box launchers in mind; A theoretical Town II with 50% larger sensors, an additional 13 launchers and reduced magazines would detect targets at 2.1mkm, firing a total of 10 salvos of 280 missiles total destroying 50 missiles. The mixed group would get about 59, leaving about 100 potential hits. 2 Town2s would leave only 60 potential impacts, almost certainly survivable. However, the Town2s would be worse off against the standard Majestic, since they only carry 508 anti-missiles. In a mixed group the town2 would run out of AMMs long before the Majestic runs out of ASMs, leaving the Rivers to deal with over half of the incoming waves by themselves. This shows the tradeoffs ship designers must make in anti-missile escort design, though I believe the 'more launchers' theory to be generally better.
The Rivers could intensify their firepower by using minaturized lasers, but the difference that makes is far less noticable than in the case of the Town 2.
Towns vs Escort Group
Another important combat scenario is defence against size 1 missiles. Generally thought to be the fate reserved in Hell for naughty beamship captains, this still happens with unfortunate regularity in Aurora's conflicts. To simulate this we'll scrimmage 2 Towns against the escort group.
The Town hurls 15 antimissiles every 10 seconds at a speed of 36k km/s. Closing speed is 32k km/s, Town accuracy is 12%, River accuracy is 37%. The defending Town gets 1 salvo for every incoming salvo, which an idealworld neverhappens situation would thin them out evenly rather than in splotches. 1.8 hits per salvo, we'll call it 28 that break through to the rivers just to be generous. The Rivers get 6 hits, knocking it down to 22 AMM potentials per salvo. Most will probably hit, even! Over 1100 AMMs will connect; the escort group is pretty much pissing into the wind.
Conclusions:
There's no effective way to combat size1 missiles using missile defence. They fire in both extreme quantity and far more quickly than any other missile. A groupof 4 rivers would knock down an appreciable number of each salvofrom the Towns, but most would still get through. And even a slight revision of the Town to add more launchers would be unanswerable by the Rivers.
The Rivers 5s ROF does shine (relatively speaking) in this situation, but not enough to make any sort of meaningful difference.
The AMM escort can't do anything no matter what you do, countering size 1 missiles with very inaccurate size1 missiles is a sucker's game.
The best way to counter AMMs - aside from staying far far away - is to force them to be used up by attacking with missiles.
What does it all mean?!?!
1.) The conventional perception of point defense being rapid firing is actually way off in Aurora's setup. Rapid fire is more useful for anti-shipping work than for anti-missile. Here's what really blows my mind: a miniaturized 20cm laser (250s refire, 3 HS) is exactly as good at countering box salvos as a 10cm rapid fire.
2.) Antimissiles counter both Missiles and Beam Ships. O_o ... though they don't counter *Spoilers*, and they'd have a rough time with *Spoilers!* And of course, if you don't damage the missile ships in return they can just run away.
3.) Reduced size launchers are great too, for the most part. You get some improvement in your ability to penetrate beam PD at the cost of attrition speed.
Post 2, involving actual suggestions, to follow soon.
