Hello everyone, currently 33 years into my first game and have decided to finally start knocking out some of the NPR's I've found.
I am looking for advice on how to go about my frist designs for a combat squadron with regard to my known enemies.
The available customers (in order of contact):
Uknown: These guys only announced themselved with a salve of 60 strength 6 missles heading towards explorer 005 at 48888 km/s.
This is the only data avialable on them, Alpha Centauri was quickly designated offlimits. (I beleive them to be precursors)
The Illiterates (So called as they were the first I found to be impossible to communicate with)
3 enemy ships (2 Harrington class and 1 Reliant) were detected on thermals going at 6504 Km/s with 1600 thermals. At 5500000 Km, a S72/R75 active sensor was detected from the Reliant Class. Contact was lost with explorer 006 shortly after this with a report of 18 streength 4 explosions.
My Last contact with an enemy race was the Point Blanc
These guys engaged explorer 007 with 39 Swordsmanster class ships. These ships moved at 1194 km/s and I believe each of them to be armed with a single meson cannon capable of firing at 60000 km. (The intelligence report gives them a RoF of 1 and a range mod of 12, interpretation?) They each had a thermal of 160. I beleive these folks to be the star swarm given their numbers and small ship type. Either this or Fighters.
Now, with these opponents in mind, I have begun tooling for war. My tonnage range is anywhere upto 20k (I have 5 slipways split between 2 shipyards at 20k and 3 slipways at 15k) I am capable of building upto 100k tonnage civillian support shps.
First to missle designs:
This is my first attempt an ASM:
Size 5 Dick-punch Missile
Missile Size: 5 MSP (0. 25 HS) Warhead: 4 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 20
Speed: 44900 km/s Endurance: 4 minutes Range: 10. 0m km
Cost Per Missile: 4. 9913
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 898% 3k km/s 280% 5k km/s 179. 6% 10k km/s 89. 8%
Materials Required: 1x Tritanium 4. 6913x Gallicite Fuel x485
Given their high speed at first contact (roughly 20 years ago now) and my likely closing speed (I'm on magneto-plasma engines currently so I'm assuming a net velocity of 14000 km/s), I wanted time for atleast 8 salvoes. This required a range of 10million km given my level 4 reload tech. I was never too sure what agility did, it seemed to increase the %chance to hit of the miss, but so did the engine so I just beefed it up and left one point in agility. (beefing the engine also increases its speed which makes it harder to hit so agility does what??)
I've also been mucking around with AMM's but I'm not to sure what an appropriate range on them is. (I am rather lacking in any other form of PD)
I'm trying to design them able to take on the Unknown's missles. Would i need time for more then one salvo on each enemy slavo? Are their missles likely to pack ECCM/ECM?
Just going through the war design in stages first, starting with missles as I'm they're the actual striking part that my launchers and hence ships need to be built around (I have effectively no beam techs).
My only actual battle ships are 3 Juggernaught Class flying tanks (54 armour layers moving at 1000 km/s (inpsired by blue emu's rocks), would these be effective in draining the enemies missles actually negating the need for anti missle ships?)