Active Sensors and Fire Controls

[DizzyFoxkit (OP)]

I have a couple of designs for ships that  I was working on (cheating so I can figure out the game).  The only problem is that I can't seem to keep them under 15,000 tons w/engines.  I thought it might be the Active sensors so that leads me to my question, do you need one active firecontrol per missile launcher and do you need one active sensor per firecontrol?

[Andrew]

You need 1 Active sensor to detect the enemey with . Once the enemy is detected on active sensors any of you other units can shoot at it.
Each Missile Fire control can control any number of launchers on the same ship which can engage 1 target per salvo, changing targets between salvo's.
Each Beam Fire control can control any number of beam weapons on the same ship firing at only 1 target .

edit I Originall managed to post this with only the first 3 words

[Hawkeye]

To expand on this:

You need only one active sensor, able to light up the target(s). That sensor can be anywhere in the system, as long as it has the range to light up the target.

You can put as many missile launchers on a single firecon as you like (on a single ship/PDC).
There are advantages to having several MFCs though (saturation of enemy PD, engaging several targets simultaneously,...)

[DizzyFoxkit (OP)]

oh, well that gets rid of my ridiculose notion of having 4 500 ton AS per ship with a matching number of FC for 1 launcher size. 

[Girlinhat]

A good number of Firecon will help your point defense as well, allowing you more flexibility of fire.  For my Anti-ship weapons I usually pack 2 firecon per ship, more for  heavily armed or specialty ships, or less for very small ships without much weaponry.

You can get away with 1 active sensor in an entire fleet, but that's an eggs and baskets argument.

The average squad for me might be:
4 ships - fire control, weapons, engines, armor.
1 ship - point defense (gauss, sometimes missiles), many fire controls, engines, armor, more armor, yet more armor, jump drive, active sensor.

Being that it's the most visible ship in the sky, it'll soak a lot of fire, so that armor will help.  Shields if you've got the tech.  The sensor ship may have a large thermal sensor, but many times that's used on nearby scout ships that are packing engines, thermals, and nothing else.  The size of my squads is often limited by jump tech, intending for one complete squad per jump drive.

[blue emu]

My standard set-up is one active sensor of each resolution (res-100, res-18, res-7 and res-1) per fleet of ships, and one FC per three (PD) or four (anti-ship) missile tubes.