The more I read in this forum, the more confused I get. I've got a few questions that are somewhat related.
After beginning with a conventional start, I switched over my Missile Defense bases to more modern technology, and created a small PDC with active sensors. I figured that I was all set. But I've already had one exploring ship destroyed by missiles from an unknown enemy (my ship didn't have an active sensor), so I've also been working on point defense. First priority is a small missile defense PDC to protect the Earth, and after reading the tutorial descriptions of various weapons, I researched Gauss Cannon for that role.
1) But I just stumbled across another thread where someone notes that "the gauss cannon are useless in any type of atmosphere." Huh? Is that true? There's nothing about this in the tutorial description. Is my missile defense PDC worthless now (and all my research wasted)? Please tell me that's not true!
"Beam" weapons (which include projectile weapons like gauss cannon and rail guns) are degraded by atmosphere - they have zero effect for pressure >= 1.0, and proportional effect for pressure <1.0 (0x for 1.0, 1x for 0.0). But all your research isn't wasted - you can change your PDC design to an Orbital Weapons Platform design (a ship w/o engines) and it should do just as well. Of course those take SY to build....
2) Someone in another thread points out that you can only target one ship per fire control. How does that work for missile defense? Do I need a separate fire control for each point defense weapon then, so I can shoot at more than one missile at a time? I didn't think of this. If that's the case, it would not seem to pay to build dedicated missile defense ships then, since I'd still need multiple fire controls.
You need a separate fire control for each missile salvo you want to target in a single time slice. So let's say you've got 4 launchers with a 10s cycle time and 20 incoming missiles arranged in 10 salvos of 2 missiles/salvo. If you had only one fire control, you'd be able to target a (potentially different) salvo every time you fired. So the first time you fired, you could shoot 4 missiles at salvo1, the second time (10s later) you could shoot 4 missiles at salvo2, etc. - it would take you 10 launches to engage all 10 salvos. If you had 2 fire controls, you could assign two launchers to each one, and on the first launch you could fire 2 missiles at salvo1 and 2 at salvo2, on the second launch (10s later) you could fire 2 at salvo3 and 2 at salvo4, so it would only take 5 launches to engage all the incoming missiles. I tend to have a 3:1 or 4:1 ratio between PD weapons and fire control, i.e. 3-4 fire control for 12 missile launchers, or 1 fire control per triple- or quad-turret.
3) Since I needed to research missiles anyway, in order to use all those Missile Bases on Earth, I decided to use missiles as my anti-ship weapon. But with all my reading here, I'm still not sure I understand. Is it really true that a level 2 or 3 warhead does no more damage than a level 1 warhead? That doesn't seem logical.
And by "level 1," we are talking about the power of the warhead, not the size of the missile, right? When I try to design a size 1 missile, I end up with an anti-missile missile, not an anti-ship missile, apparently, though I suppose my tech level might just be too low. Or maybe it doesn't matter what the game calls it?
I think you got that from one of my posts. I tried to be careful and say "strength" everywhere when talking about warhead power and "level" when talking about the thickness of armor. A strength-3 warhead does 3x the damage of a strength-1 warhead, but it only does it to the outermost layer of armor, so level-1 armor (which all ships have) will prevent a single hit from doing interior damage. The strength-3 warhead will still destroy 3x armor squares, however, making it much more likely for the second hit to penetrate. A strength-4 warhead will penetrate to the second layer, doing 3 points of damage to the first (outermost) layer it hits and 1 point (in the center of the hit) to the second layer. This means that the first hit by a strength-4 warhead will do interior damage to a ship with only level-1 armor.
I appreciate the help I've been getting here. I seem to spend more time searching this forum than I do playing the game, but it's not always that helpful. Just when I think I understand something, I find out that I really don't.
One thing you might try is to do some "war games" using SM model. Create 2 races, give each one a reasonable level of tech (e.g. 3-4) design some ships using various design philosophies, then use instant-OOP to create some squadrons to fight each other (which can be positioned through the F12 screen). Actually running a few battles gives one a really good feel for a lot of these things.
John