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.