Aurora 4x
New Players => The Academy => Topic started by: Gothmos on July 17, 2012, 02:07:42 AM
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Hi, I've recently been experimenting with laser warheads recently and have been less then impressed with the results.
From what I'd heard, they were an AoE weapon, I took this to mean they were best against mulitple lightly armored opponents (FACs/fighters/swarm)
With this in mind, I designed one to be used for my AMM cruisers for use in an AMM or anti-fighter role. However, in combat these performed less well then nuke AMM's of the same tech level. Perhaps this was because i had to dedicate more hull space of the AMM to payload to get 1 laser head then it takes to get 1 nuclear power. (I'm using gammer laser warheads and 6 missle strength/MSP) and so, the AMM's were slower and had a lower hit rate. Another thought I had at the time was perhaps 1 Laser Warhead can hit 1 target, but a missle with 2 laser warheads could hit 2 targets in the same location (What would the maximum AoE be?)
With that in mind, I Upsized the missles ot my standard ASM size of 5, gave it 2 laser warheads and gave it the stats to be used by my ASM ships.
Against my current precursor race, a full salvo of 56*Size 5 strength 9 warheads is enough to break a 16kton enemy ship in one load. When I fired a full salvo of Laser warheaded ASM's, they didn't even have a noticable effect on a precursor 8kton warship (No speed change, my warships have no passive sensors). (There had been 2 enemy ships in the fleet, but as soon as the warheads got into attack range, the other ship immiedielty ran at the warheads (they were targeted at its partner) so that it was out of range of the ASM's when they exploded.) I can only take this to mean that the enemy can differentiate Laser heads form nuke heads and is afraid of the carnage they can wreck even if I am underwhelmed.
(Side note: I had also assumed the laser warheads to deal laser damage templates, but I would have thought a gamma ray had enough power to deal some internal damage to a 8kton ships, thoughts?)
So my questions are: What is a practicle use of Laser warheads, and what tech levels are required for this?
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This has been rehashed quite often. Laser heads were implemented with placeholders and never finished. The damage templates are triangles, just like missiles, and they have no standoff or AoE capability.
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Welp, sorry for making you repeat yourself :3, searching for "Laser warhead" before gave no relevant results.
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If I remember well, they do have the advantage of detonating BEFORE the final defensive fire, thus having a much higher chance of hitting the target than standard missiles. But I never used them myself, I just search info on them a while ago.
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The last post from Steve about laser warheads was that he didn't recall exactly how they worked, and was looking to revisit alternative warheads sometime in the future.