Aurora 4x
VB6 Aurora => Bureau of Ship Design => Topic started by: Atlantia on February 11, 2012, 02:34:19 PM
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EDIT: New designs a couple posts down.
Here we are, the first generation of missile-based ships. I submit to you all for comment (or pointing out obvious things I've missed.)
First up is the workhorse, the Kirkuk. Note that I've designed the fire control to be of far longer range than the ASM, in anticipation of future improvements or alternate designs. Should I just those weak passive sensors? They're the same ones I've been using for a couple decades. I plan on having at least four of these, probably more, per group.
Kirkuk class Missile Cruiser 9,400 tons 772 Crew 1470.56 BP TCS 188 TH 800 EM 0
4255 km/s Armour 6-39 Shields 0-0 Sensors 16/16/0/0 Damage Control Rating 6 PPV 36
Maint Life 4.66 Years MSP 587 AFR 117% IFR 1.6% 1YR 44 5YR 663 Max Repair 63 MSP
Magazine 547
Internal Confinement Fusion Drive E5M (8) Power 100 Fuel Use 50% Signature 100 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 250,000 Litres Range 95.7 billion km (260 days at full power)
CIWS-160 (2x6) Range 1000 km TS: 16000 km/s ROF 5 Base 50% To Hit
ASML-6 (6) Missile Size 6 Rate of Fire 45
ASMFC 1 (50HS-98m, 20hs-15.7m) (2) Range 98.0m km Resolution 50
Cometchaser ASM Mk I (91) Speed: 20,000 km/s End: 35.7m Range: 42.9m km WH: 7 Size: 6 TH: 206 / 124 / 62
Active Search Sensor MR49-R50 (1) GPS 3150 Range 49.0m km Resolution 50
Thermal Sensor TH2-16 (1) Sensitivity 16 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 16m km
EM Detection Sensor EM2-16 (1) Sensitivity 16 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 16m km
Next is the fleet's AMM defence, the Sky Larrisa. Yay for Random Name. These will be at least four per battle group.
Sky Larrisa class Missile Frigate 8,050 tons 517 Crew 1475.16 BP TCS 161 TH 700 EM 0
4347 km/s Armour 6-35 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 8 PPV 6
Maint Life 5.02 Years MSP 916 AFR 64% IFR 0.9% 1YR 61 5YR 909 Max Repair 210 MSP
Magazine 517
Internal Confinement Fusion Drive E5M (7) Power 100 Fuel Use 50% Signature 100 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 250,000 Litres Range 111.8 billion km (297 days at full power)
CIWS-160 (2x6) Range 1000 km TS: 16000 km/s ROF 5 Base 50% To Hit
AMML-1 (6) Missile Size 1 Rate of Fire 10
AMMFC 1 (Missile-3m) (3) Range 27.7m km Resolution 1
Lightchaser AMM Mk I (517) Speed: 43,200 km/s End: 1m Range: 2.5m km WH: 1 Size: 1 TH: 374 / 224 / 112
Active Search Sensor MR23-R1 (1) GPS 210 Range 23.1m km Resolution 1
And here's the sensor ship, the Rakshasa. I've included a couple top-of-the-line lasers. Think they'll get any use? And I realised that I need to design a power plant that'll go better for them. If I actually keep the lasers, I'll slap on a basic Tokamak reactor and call it good. For now I'm dealing with lower tech.
Rakshasa class Fleet Scout 7,200 tons 573 Crew 1503.2 BP TCS 144 TH 600 EM 0
4166 km/s Armour 5-33 Shields 0-0 Sensors 55/55/0/0 Damage Control Rating 7 PPV 12
Maint Life 6.16 Years MSP 913 AFR 59% IFR 0.8% 1YR 41 5YR 618 Max Repair 210 MSP
Internal Confinement Fusion Drive E5M (6) Power 100 Fuel Use 50% Signature 100 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 200,000 Litres Range 100.0 billion km (277 days at full power)
20cm C4 Far Ultraviolet Laser (2) Range 256,000km TS: 4166 km/s Power 10-4 RM 5 ROF 15 10 10 10 10 10 8 7 6 5 5
CIWS-160 (3x6) Range 1000 km TS: 16000 km/s ROF 5 Base 50% To Hit
Fire Control S04 128-4000 (1) Max Range: 256,000 km TS: 4000 km/s 96 92 88 84 80 77 73 69 65 61
Stellarator Fusion Reactor Technology PB-1 (2) Total Power Output 12 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Active Search Sensor MR23-R1 (1) GPS 210 Range 23.1m km Resolution 1
Active Search Sensor MR200-R75 (1) GPS 15750 Range 200.1m km Resolution 75
Thermal Sensor TH5-55 (1) Sensitivity 55 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 55m km
EM Detection Sensor EM5-55 (1) Sensitivity 55 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 55m km
I'm sticking to 4000km/s+ because I like speed, though I realise it's hardly a blistering pace that these ships'll be traveling at. Just realised I oughta get some damage control, eh? Better start researching that.
If you'd like to see and haven't gleaned from the designs above, here are my two missile designs:
AMM:
Missile Size: 1 MSP (0.05 HS) Warhead: 1 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 26
Speed: 43200 km/s Endurance: 1 minutes Range: 3.6m km
Cost Per Missile: 1.37
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 1123.2% 3k km/s 364% 5k km/s 224.6% 10k km/s 112.3%
Materials Required: 0.25x Tritanium 0.87x Gallicite Fuel x25
AMM:
Missile Size: 6 MSP (0.3 HS) Warhead: 7 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 31
Speed: 20000 km/s Endurance: 50 minutes Range: 60.0m km
Cost Per Missile: 4.275
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 620% 3k km/s 186% 5k km/s 124% 10k km/s 62%
Materials Required: 1.75x Tritanium 4.95x Gallicite Fuel x2500
I'm eager to test these out because the custom system I'm in is surrounded by Swarm in one system and Precursors in the other two. I want to smash them all. (I'll be designing fighters for the Swarm, probably.) This means I'm working on a jump escort. Fortunately these ships aren't huge. Then I just have to deal with the problem of not having senior-enough officers to command them.
Thanks in advance for your input!
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Your ASM's sre way to slow for your drive tech. It looks like your have too much space allocated to warhead and manouvering.
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Overall, they arent bad at all. There are a couple of things that you could do to make them more effective though.
Fleet as a whole,
Your carrying a LOT of engineering sections. 4 to 5 years is a lot of maintenance to be lugging around. Fuel is going to run out first. If your intending them to operate away from a base for long periods of time, it makes sense, but if they arent going to be out for years at a time, its weight and space that might be better spent elsewhere.
The Kirkuk;
Other than the points mentioned above. Your FC being overpowered is actually a good thing. It gives your growth as well as burn through capability against enemy ECM. Thats a good thing against Precursors!
If the Kirkuk isnt your primary sensor platform, I would pull the passives. They are really to small to be effective. Your Thermal signature on that ship is going to get you spotted LONG before your passives are going to do you any good. If the Kirkuk is your primary sensor platform, you need to look at upgrading them.
Your active Sensor is definitely too short. You should be able to see out as far as the FC, or your FC being long ranged is wasted.
The Sky Larrisa;
1st, your AMM ships have 6 launcher and three FC? Are your going for 2 AMMs per enemy missile for your defense doctrine? If it is, then your combo works well with it, if your doing 3 per missile, your wasting a FC.
The Rakshasa
If you are going to have 4 res 1 sensors in the fleet on the Sky Larissas, then having one on the Rakshasa is a bit redundant. You may want to shave that off for some space savings.
With only two 20cm lasers firing every 15 seconds, the ships isnt going to be doing that well against other NPR's with beams ESPECIALLY the swarm! You might want to swap out one of them for a couple of 10cm lasers. Big slow beams are great for offensive punch, but having something firing at 5 seconds is very very important in most beam combats. Especially against small fast ships like the swarm. You need some distance to counter their mesons and a decent ROF.
The missiles:
Your AMM missiles are good. The speed is good, the agility and accuracy are both good. Good design. For ICF level drives though, you may want to tinker with them and see about nudging the speed up higher though.
You ASM's are WAY too slow for your tech level. 20,000 km/s is pokey for ICF tech, you should be at least at 30,000 or more with them. At size 6, and 20,000 km/s they are going to be pretty easy to spot and intercept. Thats not a good thing. Agility and range are ok, so you may want to look at shaving down the warhead a point and putting that into speed.
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Thanks to both of you so far! I've made a bunch of changes, with more coming down the line.
Let's start with missiles. I've since researched the next level of missile upgrades, so now I'm ACTUALLY running ICF on my missiles. I've written in parentheses points-value ratio for each attribute.
Lightchaser AMM Mk II: (0.167-1, 0.573-2.865, 0.01-25, 0.25-20)
Missile Size: 1 MSP (0.05 HS) Warhead: 1 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 30
Speed: 57300 km/s Endurance: 1 minutes Range: 3.6m km
Cost Per Missile: 1.705
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 1719% 3k km/s 570% 5k km/s 343.8% 10k km/s 171.9%
Cometchaser ASM Mk II: (1-6, 2-10, 1-2500, 2-160)
Missile Size: 6 MSP (0.3 HS) Warhead: 6 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 37
Speed: 33300 km/s Endurance: 30 minutes Range: 59.9m km
Cost Per Missile: 5.5083
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 1232.1% 3k km/s 407% 5k km/s 246.4% 10k km/s 123.2%
Now, I built up a large stock of the first gen missiles, so I'll use those up before switching over to this gen or later ones.
And now for the ships: I've gotten up a couple tech levels of armour and increased slightly the armour on each ship, moved speeds up to 5000+, reduced maintenance life to around 2 years, maintained operational range at about a hundred billion km, dumped the weak passives on the combat ships, added one damage control unit to each. All are a little leaner and meaner.
Kirkuk:
At Arwyn's suggestion, I've upped the strength of the active sensor (took the one off the Rakshasa sensor ship, designed a new one for that).
Kirkuk class Missile Cruiser 9,300 tons 818 Crew 1660.36 BP TCS 186 TH 1000 EM 0
5376 km/s Armour 7-39 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 13 PPV 36
Maint Life 2.12 Years MSP 335 AFR 230% IFR 3.2% 1YR 100 5YR 1501 Max Repair 147 MSP
Magazine 547
Internal Confinement Fusion Drive E5M (10) Power 100 Fuel Use 50% Signature 100 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 250,000 Litres Range 96.8 billion km (208 days at full power)
CIWS-160 (2x6) Range 1000 km TS: 16000 km/s ROF 5 Base 50% To Hit
ASML-6 (6) Missile Size 6 Rate of Fire 45
ASMFC 1 (50HS-98m, 20hs-15.7m) (2) Range 98.0m km Resolution 50
Cometchaser ASM Mk I (91) Speed: 20,000 km/s End: 35.7m Range: 42.9m km WH: 7 Size: 6 TH: 206 / 124 / 62
Active Search Sensor MR114-R50 (1) GPS 7350 Range 114.3m km Resolution 50
Sky Larrisa:
Realised that it's better to be safe than sorry in terms of launchers-to-FC ratio, made it 3-1. I don't need to worry about missile shortages.
Sky Larrisa class Missile Frigate 7,350 tons 493 Crew 1422.36 BP TCS 147 TH 800 EM 0
5442 km/s Armour 7-33 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 13 PPV 6
Maint Life 1.82 Years MSP 363 AFR 144% IFR 2% 1YR 138 5YR 2067 Max Repair 210 MSP
Magazine 517
Internal Confinement Fusion Drive E5M (8) Power 100 Fuel Use 50% Signature 100 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 200,000 Litres Range 98.0 billion km (208 days at full power)
CIWS-160 (2x6) Range 1000 km TS: 16000 km/s ROF 5 Base 50% To Hit
AMML-1 (6) Missile Size 1 Rate of Fire 10
AMMFC 1 (Missile-3m) (2) Range 27.7m km Resolution 1
Lightchaser AMM Mk I (517) Speed: 43,200 km/s End: 1m Range: 2.5m km WH: 1 Size: 1 TH: 374 / 224 / 112
Active Search Sensor MR23-R1 (1) GPS 210 Range 23.1m km Resolution 1
Rakshasa:
Removed the redundant Res 1 sensor, upped the range of the ship sensor.
Rakshasa class Fleet Scout 4,700 tons 315 Crew 938 BP TCS 94 TH 500 EM 0
5319 km/s Armour 6-24 Shields 0-0 Sensors 55/55/0/0 Damage Control Rating 12 PPV 0
Maint Life 2.57 Years MSP 249 AFR 88% IFR 1.2% 1YR 53 5YR 792 Max Repair 210 MSP
Internal Confinement Fusion Drive E5M (5) Power 100 Fuel Use 50% Signature 100 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 150,000 Litres Range 114.9 billion km (250 days at full power)
CIWS-160 (3x6) Range 1000 km TS: 16000 km/s ROF 5 Base 50% To Hit
Active Search Sensor MR200-R75 (1) GPS 15750 Range 200.1m km Resolution 75
Thermal Sensor TH5-55 (1) Sensitivity 55 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 55m km
EM Detection Sensor EM5-55 (1) Sensitivity 55 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 55m km
What say you all? And thanks again for the input!
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Those look substantially better, and your speed came up considerably as well. :)
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I sent them against three Precursor ships and took heavy damage, though I didn't lose any ships to the missiles themselves (even though my PD was overwhelmed by the waves of 25-30 missiles. Fortunately, I ran them dry. Need more AMM ships, at least double.). After the missiles were all gone, I accidentally hit 5 Days instead of something reasonable, so I got in ramming distance and lost three ships to ramming. Ugh. Well, at least I beat them and liberated one system.
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Personally; increase the speed of the fleet scouts still further with additional engines. 5000 km/s really isnt that fast for ICF vessels - 1 engine per 1000 tons is usually my baseline slow speed for military ships. If you look at NPR designs, they tend towards 1.2-1.5 engines per 1000 tons. NPR ships are what you need to outrun, but right now your fleet scout is basically only going to be able to run away from Ion Engine-tech NPRs, maybe Magneto-plasmas. I do not think it is too much to double the current number of engines on it, if you intend on it to ever do detached duty VS staying with the fleet in Empire State formation.
Now, I built up a large stock of the first gen missiles, so I'll use those up before switching over to this gen or later ones.
I'm always tempted to do this, but I find in practice its best to use the latest missiles you have stocks to arm your combat group. Newer missiles equals more efficiency equals less ships lost. You can always use the old missiles for PDCs and groups on picket/defense duty.
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Personally I tend to keep ASM's with around 50% MSP used for engine, 25% for warhead, and the rest balanced between fuel and maneuverability for best hit chance. Your missiles should be able to reach 50,000 kps with a slightly smaller warhead and still have a reasonable chance to hit fast warships and still have have kind of range they currently have.
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One thing to consider: You are mounting a lot of CIWS in ships, that are aparently intended to work in a fleet.
If you could replace every two CIWS with a single Pd-turret, your fleet would have PD coverage of 9 turrets (4 Kirkuk, 4 Sky Larissa, 1 Rakshasa), as compared to the two/three CIWS each ship mounts individually.
CIWS only protects the ship it is mounted on, turrets protect the entire fleet!
Note: Having a CIWS on the Rakshasa is ok, as it is your sensor ship and will be a prime target for the enemy.
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One thing to consider: You are mounting a lot of CIWS in ships, that are aparently intended to work in a fleet.
If you could replace every two CIWS with a single Pd-turret, your fleet would have PD coverage of 9 turrets (4 Kirkuk, 4 Sky Larissa, 1 Rakshasa), as compared to the two/three CIWS each ship mounts individually.
CIWS only protects the ship it is mounted on, turrets protect the entire fleet!
Oh really? Thanks! I didn't know that! All righty, laser-based PD for the next generation!
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Assuming roughly equal tech levels, Gauss PD is more effective than Laser PD, in my experience.
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Gauss has the added bonus of not requiring reactors. I won't use them for offensive weapons, generally, sticking to lasers there. I've not gone with meson, PB, carronade, or rail for offensive weapons yet-- however another civ that I conquered did go for those, so maybe I'll be giving one or two of them a try soon.
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In my current game, PD is all Gauss, since I had that and railguns.
In my last few games, it was a mix.
AMM for distance
12cm laser turrets for mid range (area defense)
Gauss for point blank (final defensive fire)
Once you get the 12cm lasers to 5 second fire times, they make good offensive/defensive weapons, and they have a lot more range than the Gauss.
The way it was working AMM's would take down most of the incoming birds, once they hit around 70,000 the lasers would open up, at 30,000 the Gauss would finish them off. Worked very well.
The trick was making sure that it took more than one 5 second impulse for the enemy missiles to cross the engagement threshold. Gauss are so short ranged, they are only going to get one shot. So, having the lasers there got an extra buffer.
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The way it was working AMM's would take down most of the incoming birds, once they hit around 70,000 the lasers would open up, at 30,000 the Gauss would finish them off. Worked very well.
So *most* is the question I have-- what settings do you use to get AMM to *just* thin the pack? Generally, i've seen two situations:
1: I have enough AMM. The AMM saturate incomings and the missiles are destroyed 3-4 million km from my fleet.
2: I do not have enough AMM. The AMM clean out the front edge of the incoming salvos, and are then expended. The rest of the missiles come in at full force, and are too much for just my beam defense, saturating beams and striking home.
My solution so far has been two fold: First, I never even bother to turn on the AMM unless there are scary quantities of incoming. Second, one idea I've recently had is to get the AMMs to start heading out at less than their maximum range, with only 1-2 amms per missile. The idea being that they won't manage to hit everything-- they aren't supposed to-- thus saving both additional missiles for later parts of the salvos and enabling the beam defense to pick up the slack.
I havn't found an alien angry enough to allow me to test this idea.
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Basically you run 1 AMM/missile at ranges that get you enough repeat attacks to do like 60-80% kill rate on incoming. The primary downside of a thin-the-herd strategy is that if your AMMs are slower than the incoming missiles you will suffer a lot of wastage on the interdiction - faster missiles move first, so if your AMMs are slower then the incoming missiles will hit the fleet before the last launched AMMs do.
Another option, depending on incoming, is to activate 1 AMM ship at a time on the theory that a single ship cant handle the incoming and will generate leakers.
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Assuming roughly equal tech levels, Gauss PD is more effective than Laser PD, in my experience.
I agree with this, but with a caveat - At high tech levels for range Laser PD can be much more useful as it can be effective in area mode. Extra shots on inbounds outweighs the superior number of shots of the Gauss (especially in the case of large numbers of small groups of missiles). This also means it can help defend your planets.
Related - In my experience the most useful PD method depends heavily on the ship and the goal. If you're willing to go 2-tier defense then a combination of Gauss and AMMs until your tech is high enough to replace the Gauss with Lasers. If you want a single large ship that runs around solo CIWSs are by far the best option. For general fleet defense and ease of use in a single system, AMMs all the way.
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The are several problems with using laser turrets in area mode in place of gauss turrets in final mode.
First is that you need at least a tech parity with op-for to have laser and fire control tech that gives you enough range to engage. To have a regular chance to even fire in area mode your weapons suite needs to have a range to is close to matching the incoming missiles 10 second movement. This is because you should not rely on the incoming salvos stoppin inside their 5 second movement range (or even closer). Remember that area mode PD beam fire occurs during the normal weapons fire phase and not during movement like final fire. Beams that have this kind of range are very slow firing unless you have invested nearly all your research into capacitors so that your large beams have 5 second cycles. Another issue is that the chances to hit at these ranges will suck before the modifiers kick in for having a tracking speed that is inferior to the missile speed.
The only way these issues are negated is by having a significant tech advantage.
In the current game environment beam area point defense is not really viable because of how fast missiles move. A main defense of AMM's and fast firing beams in turrets for final defense is the best you can hope for.
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Cometchaser ASM Mk II: (1-6, 2-10, 1-2500, 2-160)
Missile Size: 6 MSP (0.3 HS) Warhead: 6 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 37
Speed: 33300 km/s Endurance: 30 minutes Range: 59.9m km
Cost Per Missile: 5.5083
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 1232.1% 3k km/s 407% 5k km/s 246.4% 10k km/s 123.2%
A few points on the missiles: It is important to realize that all characteristics of an unguided missile (i.e. without sensor) scale with the size of the missile.
So if you double all stats you will have a missiles that is just as fast (except minor rounding), has exactly the same range, and the same Manoeuvre Rating (and thus the same chance to hit). It does however have twice the warhead and is twice as expensive (to build and to research). The launchers for a missile also scale with the size, so the launcher gets twice as large, or put differently, you could only have half of the launchers on a given ship ceteris paribus. Equally the space a missiles takes in the magazines is proportional to its size, so you can pack half as many of the twice as large missiles.
The important implication is that the damage that you can expect to do to an enemy without PD is independent of the size of the missiles that you choose. Both in terms of one salvo, and in terms of your entire magazine capacity: You can either launch n missiles which do x damage each, or 2*n missiles which do x/2 damage each, while both are equally likely to hit.
Of course most enemies do have PD defences, and interestingly enough PD defences allow to engage a certain number of missiles, independently of their individual size (actually smaller missiles can be a bit harder to engage, since they are detected later by radar). So the expected raw damage you can project on an enemy massively favours a large number of small missiles, rather than a smaller number of large missiles: Suppose they can intercept m missiles every round, then you could deal raw damage of (n-m)*x, or (2n-m)*x/2=(n-m)*x+m/2. Note the later term is always larger than the former. Furthermore the reload time of a launcher scales with the size of a missile, so using the smaller missiles also allows you to launch them much more rapidly, increasing the damage dealt per second, and potentially even increasing enemy PD penetration further, as he might still deal with the first salvo, when the second shows up.
Yet there is also a reason to use larger missiles, which is due to the damage profile of missiles. When a missile hits it will leave a triangular shaped damage profile on the enemy armour, with the total penetration depth depending on the size of the warhead. For instance a 4-Warhead missile will destroy three tiles of the outermost armour layer, and one tile of the second layer when it hits. A 9-Warhead missile will destroy 5 tiles of the outermost layer, 3 tiles one layer below, and one tile on the third layer. If the respective layer does not exist its applied as internal damage. If the original missile had a warhead of 2, then the double-sized missile would have a warhead of 4. The later would be able to penetrate deeper and thus be more likely to do internal damage towards an enemy earlier. E.g. if the enemy had only 1 layer of armour then the large missile would deal internal damage from the first hit on, while at least two the smaller missiles would need to hit the same spot to do internal damage. There are twice as many, but its unlikely they hit the same location. For unguided missiles this is the only reason why you would want to use large missiles rather than smaller ones (except rounding effects).
Why did I enter into this lengthy debate? Simple, because it allows you to easily spot that something about a missile might be somewhat off when its large and does not have an optimal damage profile (spell: the warhead is not a square number). And that is the case for your missile: Size 6, Warhead 6. What damage profile would this cause? 4 tiles of the first layer of armour, 2 tile of the second. Now suppose you decreased all the allocations of the missiles by 1/3. You would get a size 4 missile with the same speed, same range, same hitchance, but warhead 4. This would have a damage profile of 3 tiles on the first layer, 1 to the second – so the penetration depth would be the same. In essence you would get a design that is harder to intercept, can be launched more rapidly, and would cause the same damage on the enemy.
Another thing is that your hitchances are very high. Your missile has a 123% chance to hit an enemy traveling at 10k km/s. 23 percentage points of that are wasted (assuming average crew grade), as of course hitchances are capped at 100%. Unless you are very certain that you will be facing very very fast enemies, this is a suboptimal design. It could be improved by diverting space from “agility” towards other categories, increasing the damage, speed or range of the design, without losing anything that is not superfluous to begin with.
Lastly, its often a good idea to arm with a mixed of obsolete and up-to-date missiles, not just because it saves resources, but also because they have different velocities. If done properly they can be launched at different times such that they arrive at the enemy at roughly the same time, saturating his PD defences.
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Why did I enter into this lengthy debate? Simple, because it allows you to easily spot that something about a missile might be somewhat off when its large and does not have an optimal damage profile (spell: the warhead is not a square number). And that is the case for your missile: Size 6, Warhead 6. What damage profile would this cause? 5 tiles of the first layer of armour, 1 tile of the second. Now suppose you decreased all the allocations of the missiles by 1/3. You would get a size 4 missile with the same speed, same range, same hitchance, but warhead 4. This would have a damage profile of 3 tiles on the first layer, 1 to the second – so the penetration depth would be the same. In essence you would get a design that is harder to intercept, can be launched more rapidly, and would cause the same (actually a bit more) damage on the enemy.
Nitpick: In my experience, warhead 6 has a damage profile of 4-tiles on the first layer, 2 on the second: so warhead 6 inflicts twice the layer-2 damage as a warhead 4. This makes the square + depth numbers 6, 12, etc almost as good as the true squares 4, 9, etc.
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Nitpick: In my experience, warhead 6 has a damage profile of 4-tiles on the first layer, 2 on the second: so warhead 6 inflicts twice the layer-2 damage as a warhead 4. This makes the square + depth numbers 6, 12, etc almost as good as the true squares 4, 9, etc.
Yeah I noted the slight error after posting, so I already edited it. Extremely nitpicking myself, a warhead 4 inflicts 33% less layer-2 damage per warhead that hits, compared to warhead 6. However, warhead 9 would inflict even 33% more layer-2(onwards) damage, and be able to do layer 3 damage.
In other words: If is a viable trade-off to increase the missile size by 2 points in order to get 1 more point of layer-2 damage (exchange rate 2:1), would it not be sensible to increase the size by 3 points in order to get 2 more points of layer-2(+) damage (exchange rate 3:2=1.5:1? Technically speaking, the marginal return of "deep damage" is much higher when moving to square numbers. Of course I accept that the marginal return of more missiles is also highly non-linear (i.e. doubling the amount of missiles more than doubles the amount of missiles which will get through).
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Another point worth noting is that smaller missiles reload more quickly, so a ship-load of half-size missiles will actually inflict more damage per unit time (assuming that the same displacement is allocated to launchers).
Still... I have a personal preference for size-6 strength-9 missiles despite the bulkier ammo storage and slower reload. I find that weight of alpha-strike is just as important as weight of sustained fire in most engagements, since the first side to land a really devastating hit will usually win the engagement.
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the reload rate is kind of the nail in the coffin for going up in missile size. Basically you might as well go box launchers/ 0.25x launchers at that point and ALPHA LIKE MAD.
the difference between 20 seconds and 30 seconds stacks multiplicatively with the difference in quantity... this is also why AMM sandblasting is so ridiculously effective. Honestly, for missile size to be more effective, the reload rate difference would have to largely go away... though that would have interesting implications for AMMs!
Also, the difference between size 4 and 9 warheads kind of disappears if you're hitting armored targets, like 8-9-10 layers. And obviously makes no difference against shields. Though curiously most all the NPRs seem to use thin armor.
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Though curiously most all the NPRs seem to use thin armor.
They sure seem to. its fairly early game for me to start getting 12-15 layers on, and the ai seems to not do as such.
For this reason, my warhead 32 size six missiles are brutally effective when they penetrate (which, since both races I have fought this game were unable to defend against missiles effectively, worked very well. All they had was CIWS and a few AMM corvettes).
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The are several problems with using laser turrets in area mode in place of gauss turrets in final mode.
First is that you need at least a tech parity with op-for to have laser and fire control tech that gives you enough range to engage. To have a regular chance to even fire in area mode your weapons suite needs to have a range to is close to matching the incoming missiles 10 second movement. This is because you should not rely on the incoming salvos stoppin inside their 5 second movement range (or even closer). Remember that area mode PD beam fire occurs during the normal weapons fire phase and not during movement like final fire. Beams that have this kind of range are very slow firing unless you have invested nearly all your research into capacitors so that your large beams have 5 second cycles. Another issue is that the chances to hit at these ranges will suck before the modifiers kick in for having a tracking speed that is inferior to the missile speed.
The only way these issues are negated is by having a significant tech advantage.
In the current game environment beam area point defense is not really viable because of how fast missiles move. A main defense of AMM's and fast firing beams in turrets for final defense is the best you can hope for.
I completely agree. Thats why I either use just Gauss and AMM's for a 2 layer, or Gauss, beam, AMM for three. The advantage to having a 3 layer as opposed to 2, is the slight chance of picking off a few additional missiles before the Gauss engage. It also gives you offensive beam capability if your not dragging around dedicated beam platforms, or augments what you already have.
Once you missile closure speeds start getting north of 40,000 km/s it starts becoming increasingly hard unless you pump points into laser wavelength. My experience was that 12cm and 15cm lasers worked the best, 20cm and above take prohibitively high amounts of RP to get down to 5 sec recycle times. 10 and 15 second cycle times DO work if the enemy reload rate is fairly long, but those cycle times hurt if the missiles reloads are the same.
Thats one of the reasons I stick with size 4 missiles for the most part, the reload speeds are fairly cheap in RP to bring you to a fast reload time compared to a size 6.
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Still... I have a personal preference for size-6 strength-9 missiles despite the bulkier ammo storage and slower reload. I find that weight of alpha-strike is just as important as weight of sustained fire in most engagements, since the first side to land a really devastating hit will usually win the engagement.
Last point by me on missiles in this thread (promise!), but using different missile sizes (or launcher sizes) does not represent a trade-off involving the weight of the alpha-strike.
Suppose you have designed a ship with 12 Size-6 launchers. These will weigh 12*300t=3,600t in total (for normal-size/normal reload). If you would be using size-4 missiles (and launchers), then for the same weight (and buildpoints?) you could have 3,600t/200t=18 launchers. Put differently, you can either launch 12*6=72 MSP in the first strike, or 18*4=72 MSP. Since the suggestion is to devote the same proportion of the missile to the warhead, the alpha strike has the same exact weight – regardless of the missile size.
Missile size is thus not a trade-off between sustained fire and first strike weight (that is exclusively for the size/reload rate techs-regardless of the missile size). The trade-off is between PD-penetration (more missiles in one salvo that need to be engaged, and more frequent salvos -> less time to deal with each) on the one hand, and armour-penetration (warhead size of the individual missiles).
You can advocate large individual missiles by stating that you want to achieve “deep damage”, and that this objective outweighs the drawback (to some degree) of dealing less total damage, as more payload is destroyed by enemy PD before reaching the target. However, the goal of having large individual salvos has little to do with the size of the individual missiles.
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I'd like to note that PDC beam fire controls make area defence practical in that limited context. For example:
Z200 class Planetary Defence Centre 7,500 tons 1200 Crew 1431 BP TCS 150 TH 0 EM 0
Armour 7-34 Sensors 1/32 Damage Control Rating 0 PPV 100
Anti-Proton Cannon (4) Range 200,000km TS: 4000 km/s Power 10-3 ROF 20 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4
EMC 150mm "Gustav" (12x4) Range 120,000km TS: 4000 km/s Power 9-3 RM 4 ROF 15 3 3 2 1 1 1 0 0 0 0
Cyberdyne RTT Defender (3) Max Range: 384,000 km TS: 5000 km/s 95 90 84 79 74 69 64 58 53 48
GCF Series 29 (6) Total Power Output 54 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Naval X-Band Scanner (1) GPS 32 Range 3.5m km Resolution 1
Commercial Radio (1) Sensitivity 8 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 8m km
ECCM-1 (1)
This design is classed as a Planetary Defence Centre and can be pre-fabricated in 3 sections
That's with 20,000 km range bands and 32kkm fire control tech. Neither weapon is particularly well suited to area defence, but the PDC-grade fire control is easily capable of adequate to-hits at long enough range to get off a single area defence salvo and that's all I really need out of it.
@Theokrat - I would say that large missiles at least mean you aren't suffering any opportunity cost from using miniaturized launchers. You aren't going to win the reload-rate game anyway so you might as well front load.
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I'd like to note that PDC beam fire controls make area defence practical in that limited context. For example:
Z200 class Planetary Defence Centre 7,500 tons 1200 Crew 1431 BP TCS 150 TH 0 EM 0
Armour 7-34 Sensors 1/32 Damage Control Rating 0 PPV 100
Anti-Proton Cannon (4) Range 200,000km TS: 4000 km/s Power 10-3 ROF 20 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4
EMC 150mm "Gustav" (12x4) Range 120,000km TS: 4000 km/s Power 9-3 RM 4 ROF 15 3 3 2 1 1 1 0 0 0 0
Cyberdyne RTT Defender (3) Max Range: 384,000 km TS: 5000 km/s 95 90 84 79 74 69 64 58 53 48
GCF Series 29 (6) Total Power Output 54 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Naval X-Band Scanner (1) GPS 32 Range 3.5m km Resolution 1
Commercial Radio (1) Sensitivity 8 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 8m km
ECCM-1 (1)
This design is classed as a Planetary Defence Centre and can be pre-fabricated in 3 sections
That's with 20,000 km range bands and 32kkm fire control tech. Neither weapon is particularly well suited to area defence, but the PDC-grade fire control is easily capable of adequate to-hits at long enough range to get off a single area defence salvo and that's all I really need out of it.
@Theokrat - I would say that large missiles at least mean you aren't suffering any opportunity cost from using miniaturized launchers. You aren't going to win the reload-rate game anyway so you might as well front load.
Unless the PDC is on an airless world it's useless, the only beam weapon that suffers no damage degridation from atmospheric density is the Meson Cannon. And unless the incoming ordinance is really slow the chances of actually hitting one is extremely low. The hull spaces are better spent on AMM suites.
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What about detached beam escorts 200k or so out from the main body in area defense mode? Isn't this the intent behind the escort formation controls?
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What about detached beam escorts 200k or so out from the main body in area defense mode? Isn't this the intent behind the escort formation controls?
It can work, but most times I've tried that the escorting beam defence boat ends up the first target, and since the only support it can get is AMM, it tends to die. I've worked Area defence laser boat + GC Escort boat pairings on it and it works better (or you could add both to the same boat).
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What about detached beam escorts 200k or so out from the main body in area defense mode? Isn't this the intent behind the escort formation controls?
If you have the resources for build fleets with that complexity it can work. Personally I try to stick with the KISS principal as much as possible.
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It can work, but most times I've tried that the escorting beam defence boat ends up the first target, and since the only support it can get is AMM, it tends to die. I've worked Area defence laser boat + GC Escort boat pairings on it and it works better (or you could add both to the same boat).
I wonder if it might be more effective if you wait until the missiles are incoming before detaching (i. e. targets have already been committed). Stop/reverse the main body for a couple of increments until you achieve the desired spread.
If you have the resources for build fleets with that complexity it can work. Personally I try to stick with the KISS principal as much as possible.
I don't see how that greatly complicates fleet design, assuming you have beam-armed PD escorts in the first place. I suppose you would need bulkier fire controls than one that is strictly limited to point blank. I guess it would depend if you wanted to dedicate a design to that specific role or one that could operate in either 'ring'.
I simply like to have options (for RP reasons if nothing else) for different fleet doctrines; including ones that might be sub-optimal. Optimal is easy (for me, that's carrier based missile strikes backed by a size 50 sensor).
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Unless the PDC is on an airless world it's useless,
A lot of generated systems have planets with moons rotating fairly closely. Also, it's expensive to stock distant worlds with lots of missiles, and not all targets worth defending have a lot of air pressure :)