Missile-less fleet doctrine?

[Caplin (OP)]

Hi,
I'm just curious if something like this would have any practical possibility of working.  I wouldn't invest in missile research at all, if I could avoid it, and certainly wouldn't design any prototypes.  The biggest problem I foresee would be point defense: sheer numbers per salvo could be an issue, I imagine.  I think I remember reading that someone on here had tried something similar, but can't find the post in question off hand.
Curious and intrigued,
Zack.

[Hawkeye]

That would probably be waresky.
However, from what I remember, he still uses anti-missile missiles. Without a layered defense, it is probably very difficult to pull off.

Heavy armor, strong shields, lots and lots of anti-missile guns and rather large fleets could perhaps pull it off without AMMs. Small squadrons are probably dead meat though

[Brian Neumann]

I have tried this and it is doable, just very hard.  The fleet doctrine that I was working with came about because my race started off in a moderate density nebula.  No missiles/shields and all sensor/fire control ranges reduced to 20% of normal.  Because of this I had done a lot of reasearch on armour and fire control range.  Most of my weapons were mesons and I had never reasearched really big ones at that, just lots of short range rapid firing mesons.  Once I left the nebula and started to run into missile armed ships I built all of my ships with 15cm/C6 mesons in turrets and pushed my fire control speed as far as I could.  It did work, except when a large FAC missile salvo would come in.  Then a lot of missiles would get through.  Against typical targets I could stop about 80% of the incomming missiles, assuming I had a numerical parity with the missile ships. 
Things to note with this were that my turret tracking speed and fire control speed were higher than would normally be the case.  My ships were slower and had massive armour from operating in the nebula.  I had good ecm/eccm also which helped a lot.  A typical destroyer was around 120hs had 6 points of armour and went about 3000km/s.  At that tech level the speed would probably have been more like 5000km/s normally.  Because of pushing my fire control speed my base tracking speed was around 6250km/s instead of 4000km/s.  Against missiles moving around 50,000km/s I had about a 50% chance to hit per shot.  Each quad turret could stop 2 incomming missiles which means roughly 1 missile per 14 hull spaces by the time you include the fire control and power plant.  A typical missile ship firing size 6 missiles uses about 11 hull spaes per launcher after adding in the magazine and fire control. As you can see it is doeable if your fleet matches the oposing fleet.  The major drawback I faced was that a lot of beam armed ships also outranged me.


Brian

[Charlie Beeler]

Something that helps thicken the missile defense is gunboats.  Arm them with single quad 10cm meson turrets and high speed short range beam firecontrol.  They will be a little faster than the ships they escort and will be much harder for the missile fleet to engage at ship-to-ship missile ranges.  A few ships outfitted as gunboat tenders will aid in extended deployment support. 

[Kurt]

Hi,
I'm just curious if something like this would have any practical possibility of working.  I wouldn't invest in missile research at all, if I could avoid it, and certainly wouldn't design any prototypes.  The biggest problem I foresee would be point defense: sheer numbers per salvo could be an issue, I imagine.  I think I remember reading that someone on here had tried something similar, but can't find the post in question off hand.
Curious and intrigued,
Zack.

It can be done, although it is difficult.  A layered defense is best, but that includes anti-missile missiles.  If you want to avoid those then you'll need lots of point defense.  The key thing, though, is that your ships will have to be faster than any potential enemy.  After all, you are almost certain to have shorter ranged weapons than most enemies, many of whom will be using missiles.  To engage you are going to have to close to weapons range, and to do that you'll have to be faster.  Of course, if you use gunboats or fighters, you can usually guarantee that you are faster. 

Kurt

[UnLimiTeD]

Alternatively, if you have massive armor, you can just outlast the enemy and then follow him to his home planet.
In which case, a few orbital bombs would surely help....

[Decimator]

I was trying this.  I designed a 300 kiloton monster able to throw 1600 gauss rounds every 5 seconds.  I figured that would be enough to stop most salvos cold.  If it didn't, the 40 layers of armor would absorb the leaks.

Unfortunately, my game crashed and corrupted the database before I ever got the chance to use it.   

Now, in a new game, I'm trying to make ships that can fight with no support.  They have shields instead of armor, gauss cannons for point defense, and meson cannons instead of bombs for anti-planet capability.  We shall see how well they work.