Oops, my post above regarded beam weapons. Missiles are not affected by atmosphere.

Just to make this clear (I have also edited my post).

As for starbases:

They are just ships without engines and will stay in orbit over the planet they are build.
The only way to move them is with tugs (ships with a tractor beam). You select the target they should pull from a drop-down on the individual ship screen (F6, I think), miscelaneous tab.

PDCs are _not_ movable, after being build (they are supposed to be deep underground (think cheyenne mountain) but can be pre-constructed in parts. Those parts can be transported to the planet/moon/asteroid you want them to be and assembled there (some factory capacity, either actual factories or engineer brigades, _and_ some minerals are needed for this). After assembling them, they can not be moved again, just like a regular PDC

Except for mesons, all beam-weapons suffer reduced damage proportional to atmosphere density. Once the atmosphere pressure reaches 1.0, no damage at all is inflicted.
The exception are CIWS, which _will_ work inside atmospheres, as they are supposed to be extremely short ranged (i.e. a couple km at the most) and, as I mentioned, meson cannons, which are totally unaffected by the atmosphere.

I usually put some battlestations in orbit over my homeworld to circumvent this and put some f****g-big-a** laser cannons on them

I don't really play FACs, precisely because they're so easily pounded to a paste. Were this "starcraft", I'd have no problem sacrificing hordes of marines to the terran cause, but this is aurora, and I always become attached to my officers.



Regarding Particle beams, maybe you could have a particle beam cutter, a small long ranged gunship armed with small systems. Might be a good way to interdict fast attack craft or something.  

I'd say that depends pretty heavily on who your enemy is. I don't have much battle experience, but do enemy aliens always have good missile point defense?

No, not all do. But those that do not are easy to overcome anyway. A strategy that does overcome strong PD will also prevail when no PD is present, but not vice-versa. Since one is likely to encounter a spectrum of PD capabilities, I would go for the strategy that prevails in most cases.

The "Continental" class strategic missile cruiser is going to be among the largest ships in my fleet, along with its companion "Archipelago" class battlecruiser. We're talking 18,000 to 20,000 tons, jump capable craft built for extended operations in enemy territory. The idea I have here is for a cruiser with a primary weapon of 6-10 large, very slow firing missile launchers that can project firepower over a very large radius. Basically, I want to know the largest practical missile size for something like that.

The trouble is that 6-10 missiles are very unlikely to penetrate enemy defenses at all. It takes about 2-3 AMMs (of size 1) to destroy a single missile, so for every one of your size-10 missiles the enemy must expend maybe 3 missile space worth of AMMs. So attrition-wise it is unlikely to be a successfull strategy against an equal foe. Moreover, its also hardly possible to overwhelm the enemy. 6 missiles are just not enough, and salvos are ages apart...

I have made a bit of an analytical thread on optimal missile sizes, which can be found here if you are interested.

Thanks for clearing this up. So if I read you right, I can't detect an idling enemy fleet from across the system on thermal scanners, fire a massive bloom of missiles at a waypoint directly on top of them, and then have the onboard missile sensors blast the fleet apart.

In theory, you could. As long as the enemy fleet does not move, and your waypoint is close enough for the on-board scanners to see the ships.

2: My close-in frigate fleets are going to mount 3 25 cm railguns and 2 30 cm plasma carronades. Is this functionally any better than just slapping 2 more railguns on there? Range isn't an issue with these guys, they're supposed to be fast and close the distance immediately.

Plasma Caronade research is just cheaper, you only have to research the size of the gun, rather than anything else. That said, railguns divide their damage over multiple shots so the Plasma will do better vs certain targets and the railguns will do better vs certain other targets.

3: Why are missiles on this forum so darn small? Everybody uses designs with missiles sized 3-5. I want my strategic missile cruiser to be able to project power nearly systemwide, with large vollys of super slow firing, very long ranged missiles. I have some size-10 designs that do pretty significant damage over long ranges, and the missiles still go pretty fast (20,000+ kps). Aside from the obvious and quite-flavorful downsides (missiles take forever to reach their target) is there anything about this strategy I'm missing?

How big are your ships, small missiles can fit in smaller ships which are much cheaper to maintain. Likewise small missiles can overwhelm PD much better, since AOE options are limited(railguns and gauss, with their respective drawbacks).

4: I want a bomber. The best way I can think to do this is have a very large (size 12) box-mounted missile with a phenomenally short range (1 million km, tops) but otherwise high-velocity, high agility, high warhead properties. My tiny, thermally shielded bombers would get in close and drop 2-3 of these each, then pull away. Is this a viable strategy?

Only way to see is to try it out, against ships that can't resolve your bombers on grav pulse sensors you'll do fine, against anything with any AMM capability what so ever you won't.

5: I'm a little unclear about how missile fire controls and missile attacks in general work.
a) obviously weapons need a target to shoot at. Can missile fire controls attack a target that's only been detected by  thermal sensors, or do they need active scanners?
b) does the missile fire control provide its own active scanning power, or does it need to be supported by another active scanner?
c) can missiles be fired at things that show up on a scanner, but are below the resolution of the missile fire control itself (in my experience, the answer seems to be "yes", but i can't tell for sure

a)Active only
b)You need a scanner
c)only if they are close enough, a max size sensor can resolve a small enough object that is close enough, the exact formula is on here somewhere.

most importantly
d) how do missiles with onboard sensors work? Every time I've tried this, it's been a dud. Surely there's a way to fire a missile blindly at a waypoint in empty space and have it lock onto an enemy craft with onboard senors. I like the idea of firing a cluster of heat-seeking or radar-guided missiles at an enemy fleet and having the missiles break and do the work, but every time I try that, the missiles either blow right past the fleet (toward a waypoint behind them) or just sit their while the fleet rolls past (if fired at a waypoint in front of them). I've even tried deleting the waypoint and the events stream says something like "the missile will find a new target"...and it doesn't, while enemies sit within sensor range.

They have to start their life within sensor range of their target(and it has to be active range). Mines with equal separation range/submunition active range can target enemy ships.

what I had was a large, very low resolution scanner (5,000+ tons) which covered a very large area, for capitol ship destruction. The enemy precursors flew inside the sensor sweep area, and were larger than 5,000 tons, but the missile did not change course.


they must have been carrying ECM's or something. I just want to know if it works, and apparently it does so okay.