Aurora 4x
VB6 Aurora => Advanced Tactical Command Academy => Topic started by: jseah on January 01, 2013, 04:32:55 AM
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To continue from the Active Sensor Design thread which turned into a missile design thread:
It seems that our research priorities are totally different once again. I see agility 64 and warhead 6 when you still have Ion Engines, which is um, high for me. At first, I couldn't work out how you managed to fit in such powerful warheads into the missiles (seriously, I looked at warhead 12 and went wtf; I haven't actually designed any missile with a warhead bigger than 6)
Well, let's just say, my usual balance of technologies has me get agility 64 at around magneto-plasma or internal confinement drives and warhead 6 one engine generation later. So that has affected my missile design (I find large warheads very hard to fit in). I had always tended to build fast missiles with 1 damage per MSP and I haven't had the chance to try out MIRV missile designs in the new version.
Still, I have tried to intercept a size 4 MIRV before in v5.X. The problem of putting a picket is that the picket gets shot at first and the bus outruns fighters (I dunno about your designs, but getting a missile speed out of anything lower than internal confinement seems pretty impossible). There is also that the fighters can't see the missiles unless its getting to fusion drive tech levels so that your ships can see them, but then that's why the separation range increases as tech increases.
But perhaps our relative technology priorities have made our tactics differ again.
Also, I have worked with fighters... one time. And beam fighters were a considerable disappointment as well as AMM ones.
--- Additionally, I normally put warhead 1 on my MIRV "heads", but you have 6 WH per MSP so perhaps you can afford 2
EDIT, RE missile ships vs beam ship cost:
Perhaps again, this is tech levels. If you look at the old thread about the battle of kagoshima and two stage missiles, my dual-role laser frigates are 6000 tons equipped with two more levels of armour and 15cm 5s reload twin laser turrets, with 4x range 4x TS firecontrols. So perhaps my laser tech was higher than my missile tech.
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In regards to shooting down the picket this is usually not as easy if they are small enough. It obviously tends to come down to what type of sensor platforms used (we should not turn this one into a sensor discussion now should we? ;) ). But even a 250-500 ton early warning craft can detect missiles with its resolution 1 sensor as they pass by.
If you have them follow your task group at a threat vector of the enemy task group they should pick them up. Once a MIRV is detected (easy to see since they are much slower than other missiles) you can send your fighter after them or have your picket engage them. A picket could basically be anything from 1000-5000 tons depending sensor configurations. I usually start my picket squadrons at about 3000-4000 tons before I know anything about the enemy. Nothing is clear cut. I'm just saying that MIRV has a clear weakness that is not so hard to counter with the right means. I'm not saying it has to be easy either. There is always roads to take to make sure that the MIRV reaches its target. Being able to fire beyond enemy active range is one option since they don't know where the missile comes from.
Fighters in the current version can become ridiculously fast now since you can put multiple engines on them. An ION engine fighter can quite easily get up to 10000km/s in speed and still carry a light gauss cannon to shoot down missiles with. Let's just assume that a fighter can get a speed about half (2/3 is more reasonable though) that of your missiles if you tack on enough engines and still have some room for weapons. They will have an awful range, that's for sure. But better range than missiles in most cases anyway. A MIRV missile will have lousy speed, perhaps about half that of the fastest fighters. That is before they deploy their munition of course.
In the current game one race has a 500 ton interceptor with two 25mm (25% size) Gauss cannons and two levels of armour and a speed of 7500km/s with Nuclear Pulse technology. Granted they have pretty high armour technology.
Note: The reason for the relatively high missile techs are because the race who use them has been in war for a very long time and both sides have concentrated on technology that is easy to integrate once researched. So this has mainly meant weapons and armour technologies. Most of their ships use Nuclear Pulse engines while most of their smaller ships (fighters, gun boats and missile boats) use Ion Engines.
So there is a reason why the tech is researched the way it is.
I have not actually used MIRVs in 6.x yet... I don't know what to do about the slow approach if and when the enemy decide to counter it, which they obviously will try to do.
In my current campaign I also have this idea of a race with a radical new approach to warfare who is not going to use mobile ships other that small platforms 3000 tons and below. Their "ships" is only going to be huge slow moving battle-stations... at least 100.000 tons each. It's going to be fun and see how missile technology advance to counter this menace. You will not have any real ships to fire at. Either stationary (more or less) objects or really fast attack crafts.
This will also reflect the dangers of standardizing your missiles and think that they are suitable to combat everything. Sure you can fire your missiles at anything, but at what cost?
In general I usually have to worry about several categories of ships. Slower but very powerful and armoured/shielded large ships, faster more lightly armoured escorts/attack ships and finally fighter craft.
At Nuclear Pulse technology this means that a large capital cruiser at 20-30 ton would have a speed of perhaps 2000-2300km/s a Destroyer or heavy attack ship would have speeds between 2600-3200km/s while fast attack craft could have anything from 3000-6000km/s. I would no be economical to just produce one missile to counter them all. I either would have to make it too fast and agile with a too small yield to make much use against a large ship. Or to slow to hit a fast target with any reliability.
Sure I could just pack my ships full of one type of missiles and one size and have a go at it, but it would not be efficient for my economy and if I face an opponent that also has an economy to think about and resources to use and who uses them more wisely I could be in serious trouble eventually.
I must say that most of this obviously stem from the fact that I don't face the AI. The AI don't care much for economy and just build stuff based on templates. The AI don't really adapt to changes or gives a damn about the configuration of my ships or my methods of ship composition.
Anyhow...
I tend to have at least three categories of missiles (not counting AMM). Those that are suppose to target fighters and fast attack crafts, fast ships and regular capital ships.
My general missile design revolve around the speed they intend to target and do so with about 80% certainty. If my target speed is 3000 my missiles should have a speed of 24000km/s. I would also like for my missiles to have at least twice the speed of my enemy tracking speed of their beam weapons if I can. First of all I might not know what this is or it is too high. But I would like to do that if possible.
The range should be as far as possible so I can fire my missiles outside my opponents active scanning range or at least a good deal before my opponent can fire his missiles.
Armour is included on all missiles at size six and above or else they are just too easy to shoot down and too expensive given their size.
Size four and below are generally regarded as light missiles and intended for smaller ships with weaker armour and who are faster than the regular capital ship. Larger and slower missiles could obviously be used but would not be economical since they would not hit as often as a faster more agile missiles. And since the armour belt on smaller ships usually also is weaker a smaller yield is not as bad.
It is my experience that sandpapering away strongly armoured ships is a good way to tank the economy when using missiles, it would generally be a last resort or an act of desperation on my part. Therefore I like to use a mix of small, medium and large yield missiles. On a size eight capital missile I usually dedicate at least 2 MSP worth of yield or 1 MSP for a heavily armoured one. If I face an enemy that has very good missile defences then I need to mix my regular missiles with heavily armoured ones. Or perhaps even completely use heavily armoured ones to saturate their defences, especially their AMM capability.
A smaller medium sized missile such as a size four I usually put 1 MSP worth of yield and as much engines I feel is necessary to get my target speed and then the rest is fuel to gain as much range as I can.
Against smaller crafts such as a fighter I like to standardise my yield at four since that means I penetrate down one level. Many smaller craft only have one level of armour (or maybe two) so I can start damaging them on the first hit. I also like to reduce the size of the missile instead of increasing the yield with technology progression on missiles intended to destroy fighters.
When it comes to launcher philosophy I like to miniaturize heavy and capital launchers as much as possible and rely on large salvoes. I have found out that these are much more effective than many smaller salvoes on large missiles. Missile launchers at size four might also be miniaturized depending on what they should be used for I guess. Smaller launchers are either box launched on attack crafts or not miniaturized in smaller frigates. Most targets they shoot at have very little to no missile defences.
I currently have not used box launchers on larger ships. I view them as a one trip pony and a liability since big ships don't have any hangars to reload from. A 25% miniaturized launcher is as good as a box launcher most of the time and can be reloaded in the field. Though, I have toyed with the idea to put an equal number of box launchers and reduce the magazines and/or defences on my chips some. I normally only have about three full salvoes of missiles in ships storage, sometimes about three and a half to have some flexibility in missile types. This would provide me with the option of having one extra large and powerful salvo if I really need it.
In general most dedicated missile cruisers has about one size 8 missile launcher per 1000ton or slightly more and missile storage for three full reloads. The rest go to ship defences such as armour, shields and beam weapons. Some cruisers also fit AMM launchers, but I mostly fit AMM launchers on dedicated missile/escort frigates.
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EDIT, RE missile ships vs beam ship cost:
Perhaps again, this is tech levels. If you look at the old thread about the battle of kagoshima and two stage missiles, my dual-role laser frigates are 6000 tons equipped with two more levels of armour and 15cm 5s reload twin laser turrets, with 4x range 4x TS firecontrols. So perhaps my laser tech was higher than my missile tech.
I can understand why this particular build is expansive since most of the cost stems from the huge fire-control and relatively few cannons in relations.
The pure final defence laser PD ships is not going to be more expensive than a missile ship but an area defence ship are probably going to be quite expensive I presume depending on the number of turrets you use per fire-control.
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Oh right, forgot that you can get really fast fighters now. I had kept trying to design a fighter with a gauss cannon and well... one engine wasn't ever going to cut it.
RE shooting escorts:
I'm not entirely confident about relying on small size 1 sensors to detect incoming missiles, especially MIRVs. The problem of seeing MIRVs is that they're slower than standard ASMs and so their angle of approach isn't going to be the exact same as the attacking ships (unless they were doing a head-on approach. I learnt to do an approx. right angle vector when using missile to attack an enemy who is approaching to obfuscate the direction of my missiles' approach).
Additionally, a size 250ton sentry craft has... well, IMO unacceptably small active sensor range for anti-missile work. Also, I never seem to have problems seeing sentries but again, perhaps that is my use of size 50 sensors.
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RE shooting escorts:
I'm not entirely confident about relying on small size 1 sensors to detect incoming missiles, especially MIRVs. The problem of seeing MIRVs is that they're slower than standard ASMs and so their angle of approach isn't going to be the exact same as the attacking ships (unless they were doing a head-on approach. I learnt to do an approx. right angle vector when using missile to attack an enemy who is approaching to obfuscate the direction of my missiles' approach).
Additionally, a size 250ton sentry craft has... well, IMO unacceptably small active sensor range for anti-missile work. Also, I never seem to have problems seeing sentries but again, perhaps that is my use of size 50 sensors.
Anyway you need to be able to hit the scouts as well, not just detect them?!?
And I agree that a small 250-500ton scout is only useful if you can get them up very close. I don't know what resolution and size you keep on your destroyers. But I figure that you would use your AMM fire-controls and fire a couple of size four missiles at them or just blast them with a bunch of AMM, but at what range could you actually engage them with your AMM fire-control?
This is where missile design comes into the picture. And I still regard MIRV as something you can counter if you so choose to do so.
I prefer to have missiles, sensors and fire-controls being more purpose built than generic to save my resources. Small platforms is also cheaper and faster to modify or build completely new versions of when necessary.
Personally I don't see much point in scanning an opponent with active sensors unless I intend to fire at them or just to know about their strength and composition.
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Anyway you need to be able to hit the scouts as well, not just detect them?!?
And I agree that a small 250-500ton scout is only useful if you can get them up very close. I don't know what resolution and size you keep on your destroyers. But I figure that you would use your AMM fire-controls and fire a couple of size four missiles at them or just blast them with a bunch of AMM, but at what range could you actually engage them with your AMM fire-control?
Good point.
Due to the way sensors scale with resolution, my AMM fire-control is some 30mkm range or something (10mkm targeting on size 6 missiles is what I generally aim for). At some points, I actually considered dual-roling my fire-controls but it turns out that isn't too cost efficient unless I use my 6000 ton offensive/defensive missile ships.
Personally I don't see much point in scanning an opponent with active sensors unless I intend to fire at them or just to know about their strength and composition.
Ah, another difference. My actives literally never turn off unless I'm being sneaky.
You know when I said scout sensor? I meant that. I use my active sensors to find things... >.>
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Good point.
Due to the way sensors scale with resolution, my AMM fire-control is some 30mkm range or something (10mkm targeting on size 6 missiles is what I generally aim for). At some points, I actually considered dual-roling my fire-controls but it turns out that isn't too cost efficient unless I use my 6000 ton offensive/defensive missile ships.
That is a decent range, although getting a 10m km range to fire at missiles must require very advanced technology or huge fire-controls. Should be pretty expensive with such huge fire-controls for each five launchers you have.
I don't think that your ships are bad or anything like that. I just feel that you are talking from a perspective of being the most superior power in the area to begin with who has the means and resources to build luxury ships with advanced sensor systems and in enough quantities to simply overwhelm the opponent.
I'm talking from the perspective of actually going up against an opponent that is often bigger and have better technology or in best of circumstances slightly weaker. If I attack I would have to fight hard for every inch of space I would like to conquer. Every mining colony I take would need more resources than it would produce for at least 20 years or so...
As an example, in my last campaign where I tried just these different tactics against each other it simply did not work. The standardization if ships/engines and large sensors are just too resource inefficient to an enemy that quickly adapt and will outperform resource wise in a very short time given the same amount of R&D, factories and such from the start.
When you are at war with an equal empire you don't have the luxury of conducting large expensive research on luxury equipment, you just need what is good enough to get them out quickly on new ships or refit some of the old ships that you have.
Ah, another difference. My actives literally never turn off unless I'm being sneaky.
You know when I said scout sensor? I meant that. I use my active sensors to find things... >.>
Again, we are talking from vastly different positions. This strategy only works if you know you are superior to the enemy. Doing this against an enemy that you think or fear have equal or even greater power than you can be a bit foolish. It feels for me that you like to put all your eggs in one basket, which can become quite a gamble.
From the standpoint that I know (I'm 99% sure) that my forces is way too much for the enemy then going in hot is still a somewhat unnecessary risk, why take it?
What would you do if you were the opponent against such a fleet and you had the means to both combat it and the technology to match it, but be a little sneakier and resource efficient?
In my opinion your fleet are seriously vulnerable to two quite common strategies.
1. Carrier based heavy fighters/FAC. Fighters/FAC have a range way beyond your size 50 sensors (and can launch before your resolution 1 fire-control can lock on to them) and since you broadcast your position you can be simply smothered to death by someone with deep pockets and eventually you lose the whole fleet.
2. Since you broadcast your position you can simply be charged by a faster anti-missile and beam armed fleet of appropriate size.
If the enemy don't have the means to combat you the point is moot anyway. But I claim that any fleet composition either you or I make have a counter that is both cheaper and/or more efficient against just that type of fleet configuration.
That is why I have started to look at creating fleets that are highly adaptable and who easily can change from one tactic to another with small measure of time and resources.
If I find a new hostile race the first thing I do is to probe them with recon element, these include surveillance, scouts and smaller cruiser squadrons. This is basically to get a feel for their defences. Once I'm confident that I have the upper hand I would assemble some form of strike force and raid some poorly defended system, this would hopefully entice the enemy to send a larger defensive force to meet me. This would obviously only be a rouse to see my enemies full potential and I would be ready to withdraw if that is the best option.
In general I don't keep more combat ships than I absolutely need to have to defend myself and my colonies. This is mainly to spare my economy... I rather invest most of my resources into industry and developing technology if I can. This generally means that when I meet a hostile race I'm usually the underdog in terms of military technology but a powerhouse in production and overall research capacity. I usually keep enough defensive forces to defend against enemies that are way more advanced in tech than I am. I usually use lots of missile boats and scoot and shoot tactics and massive quantities of missiles on habitable worlds as well as point defence stations kept in ground hangars that I can deploy in space when the enemy knock on the door.
Depending on the circumstance when I meet a hostile race ships may be in various stages of completeness and readiness. But in general most of my capital warships use older engine technology while fighters, missile boats and scouts are updated much much quicker. I often find myself to skip engine techs on my capital warships altogether, most of the time to conserve resources. So when a war breaks out many ships can often have very outdated engines but state of the art missiles, defences, weapons and sensors. As long as they manage to stay outside enemy’s active sensor net they usually perform remarkably well.
Technology that I find important to excel at to have a good defence is missile tech and I also favour lasers for point defences early on. They are highly efficient against armoured missiles. But Gauss guns is a priority as well. Engine techs are of course also important and I usually like to keep lots of research into fuel efficiency and new engines, even if I don't equip my ships with new engines as fast as I research it my missiles sure like new engines. ;)
All in all I usually actually have at least as good missile tech as I have advanced engines if not even better missile tech at times. It is certainly not uncommon for me to have missile yields of 6 at ION tech engine as an example. But my research and construction tech are always miles ahead of my military techs. ;)
In my opinion the changes to missile construction in 6.0 has made the balance between larger and smaller missiles quite interesting. I could even see myself using extremely heavy missiles now such as size 12. When you have high enough engine power levels factors you could strap 5 MSP x5 power on a size 12 engine. You would get optimal range for your fuel and brutal yields and lots of armour. And this missile would actually be very cost efficient.
A missile like this at Magneto Plasma tech with x5 engine power. The missile are designed against ships with a ship speed of approximately 4500-5000km/s. Most of my firing platforms have a crew grade after fleet training is done 20-30.
Capital armoured size 12 missile
Missile Size: 12 MSP (0.6 HS) Warhead: 9 Armour: 4 Manoeuvre Rating: 10
Speed: 33300 km/s Engine Endurance: 67 minutes Range: 134.0m km
Cost Per Missile: 8.25
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 333% 3k km/s 110% 5k km/s 66.6% 10k km/s 33.3%
Materials Required: 3.25x Tritanium 5x Gallicite Fuel x3750
Capital high yield size 12 missile
Missile Size: 12 MSP (0.6 HS) Warhead: 21 Armour: 2 Manoeuvre Rating: 10
Speed: 33300 km/s Engine Endurance: 67 minutes Range: 134.0m km
Cost Per Missile: 10.75
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 333% 3k km/s 110% 5k km/s 66.6% 10k km/s 33.3%
Materials Required: 5.75x Tritanium 5x Gallicite Fuel x3750
Typical AMM at the same tech level
Missile Size: 1 MSP (0.05 HS) Warhead: 1 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 24
Speed: 48000 km/s Engine Endurance: 1 minutes Range: 3.3m km
Cost Per Missile: 1.1316
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 1152% 3k km/s 384% 5k km/s 230.4% 10k km/s 115.2%
Materials Required: 0.25x Tritanium 0.8816x Gallicite Fuel x32.5
It will require 14 AMM to intercept the armoured missile at a cost efficiency at around 2:1.
It will require 9 AMM to intercept the high yield missile at a cost efficiency at around 1:1.
The armoured missile still pack a pretty decent punch, but the high yield one will be very efficient once AMM defences is saturated by armoured missiles. AMM with a yield higher than one are not really feasible at this level of technology for the price you pay in speed reduction on the AMM.
You r could of course use a faster size four missile with comparative yield, but then you over engineering speed versus target speed it will be way more costly to produce in comparison with the end result. This is if industrial wealth and resources is a concern of course.
I could see dedicated torpedo boats armed with these giant size 12 missiles and deliver them at even shorter distances with even more yields.
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My AMM firecontrols are size 9 and don't decrease in size with increasing tech levels.
My ASM firecontrols start at size 7 and go down (missile range scales worse than firecontrols IIRC)
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Those are actually very good points you make. Although even with 30% of my population on ordnance production (and the ever-present tritanium shortage), I aim to keep wars as short as possible.
You mention taking mining colonies and whether I profit from that. I regard an enemy of near parity as an existential threat and don't bother with the hassle of taking and holding colonies. I'd find a way to get my ships into position to launch against the homeworld as soon as possible (this is where doing that recon and being sneaky comes in) and the launch will aim for total destruction of my enemy from the very first wave.
My wars don't usually involve multiple phases of re-construction and adjustment of tactics. The first engagement decides the war most of the time.
There was one short time I tried playing a multi-faction start on Earth. I don't consider that a real game since after a short year of expansion, when Sol started to run out of resources, everyone on Earth died. Like literally everyone. I don't recall the dust or radiation levels, but suffice it to say, Earth became a wasteland you wouldn't touch with a multi-light year pole. A pointblank missile exchange in LEO when everyone is aiming for the populations does that.
That was the reason why I don't play multi-faction starts anymore. Perhaps I will consider one where the two empires are in different systems.
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Those are actually very good points you make. Although even with 30% of my population on ordnance production (and the ever-present tritanium shortage), I aim to keep wars as short as possible.
Ouch... I don't think I have ever been even near those figures for ordnance production... no wonder you get tritanium shortages. ;)
You mention taking mining colonies and whether I profit from that. I regard an enemy of near parity as an existential threat and don't bother with the hassle of taking and holding colonies. I'd find a way to get my ships into position to launch against the homeworld as soon as possible (this is where doing that recon and being sneaky comes in) and the launch will aim for total destruction of my enemy from the very first wave.
My wars don't usually involve multiple phases of re-construction and adjustment of tactics. The first engagement decides the war most of the time.
I don't even know if I could ever do that in any of my games. First of all leaving my supply lines that far back is certainly dangerous for me. What if the enemy just let me pass a system knowing exactly where I am. They then fortify the jump point so I can't backtrack my fleet and I get trapped in a system where I just found a fleet that was able to withstand any of my missile attacks. I guess I'm not willing to take those kinds of risk, but then I like to be cautious and is not a great risk taker overall. :)
There was one short time I tried playing a multi-faction start on Earth. I don't consider that a real game since after a short year of expansion, when Sol started to run out of resources, everyone on Earth died. Like literally everyone. I don't recall the dust or radiation levels, but suffice it to say, Earth became a wasteland you wouldn't touch with a multi-light year pole. A pointblank missile exchange in LEO when everyone is aiming for the populations does that.
That was the reason why I don't play multi-faction starts anymore. Perhaps I will consider one where the two empires are in different systems.
I like this play-style more and more. Especially with no AI to control enemy factions.
Any way... about missiles.
One question to you about armoured missiles. What would you find acceptable as a missile design when it comes to armour and fairness and not gaming the game.
for example this one...
Missile Size: 12 MSP (0.6 HS) Warhead: 3 Armour: 5 Manoeuvre Rating: 10
Speed: 33300 km/s Engine Endurance: 67 minutes Range: 134.0m km
Cost Per Missile: 7
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 333% 3k km/s 110% 5k km/s 66.6% 10k km/s 33.3%
Materials Required: 2x Tritanium 5x Gallicite Fuel x3750
It would take a comparative AMM about 17 missiles to shoot down and give a economy of nearly 3:1 in production cost.
They way I see it is that the above missile can not be ignored if you have ships with little armour, but if you have larger ships with shield they will not pose much of a threat and you can practically ignore them.
The only armoured missiles I find to be unfair and "gamey" to use are the ones with no warhead at all. The same could often be said with MIRV missiles. It you take a size four and stuff it with three size one all with a yield 1 warhead they can often be ignored by larger ships because their total damage output is pretty small in total.
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That missile seems about fine although I have no idea of the tech levels involved. Of course, I'm still working off pre v6 rules of thumb since I haven't played much Aurora after v6 came out (it's nothing to do with the changes and everything to do with my schedules).
That missile has ridiculously low damage output for missile space. If you stocked that as your main ASM, you'd not even be able to kill a fleet of the same tonnage even if they were eggshells like my designs. It doesn't even have any penetration. I'd say drop one level of armour and put 1 MSP in warhead or raise warhead to 4 and the rest to engine.
So I'm going to say that our different strategic approaches give these different design philosophies. I do not customize my fleet to an enemy quite as much as you do, since I aim to win as soon as I encounter an enemy, pushing me towards logistical simplicity and fleets that are "reasonable against everything" but not being direct counters.
Clearly though, I ought to just play Aurora more in the new version.
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The above missile is actually rather effective against a heavy AMM equiped fleet despite its size. Although I agree that it should sacrifice some fuel for warhead to make it yield 4. This missile would force you to shoot it down and very quickly deplete your AMM stock. If you ignore the missile it do enough damage to start hurting your ships soon enough.
Even if the missile is size 12 it is still ridiculously cheap to build given that size. About the same as two size four.
The strategy would be to fire them until the enemy stock of AMM runs out (or starts to diminish due to combat damage) then hit them with missiles that has a yield of 21 and much less armour. In this case it is more about economy and the above missile will actually have a slightly higher chance of breaking through the AMM defences than a faster and smaller size four missile (adjusted for size difference) and would actually do more damage on average unless you manage to overwhelm the enemy AMM completely.
The missile use the biggest possible missile engine (5 MSP) so making the engine bigger means you need to put in two smaller ones so that is not an option here. In that case you need higher multiplier or smaller missile.
I'm using the same tech levels as before but with magneto plasma engine tech.
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As a counter point I don't find that large missiles are both tactically and economically sound.
Using the same tech base:
Magnet-plasma drive tech - .8 engine power per msp
Fuel consumption modifier .6
Missile engine power multiplier/fuel multiplier X5/55.9
Warhead of 6 per msp
I find a size 4 missile to much more practical. For the same launcher hull space usage 9 missiles in 3 separate salvos can be launched in the same time frame for 1 cycle of the size 12 missile. Said size 4 missile can use a 2.1msp engine producing 8.4 engine power for a speed of 42,000kps. 1msp warhead for 6 damage (25% of available msp for warhead is my design standard) and .9 msp for fuel providing 2,250 liters for a range of 133m/km. The example AMM above would average 4 missiles to insure intercept. It would take a little over 78 seconds for this ASM to cross the AMM's engagement envelope and require an active sensor res 1 of around size 25 and a missile fire control larger than size 8 to allow the AMM's first intercept at maximum range (detection/lock range would need to be around 6.3m/km).
Here is the part that most people appear to miss. The higher cyclic rate of the smaller launcher means that subsequent salvos actually have a higher probability of saturating the AMM defenses. This is achieved by having the salvo separation being closer than the defenders ability to get maximum coverage.
The individual salvo is actually more expensive with the sz4 vs sz12. But the buy back is on the time side of things. It will take much less time to overwhelm the defender if it's going to happen at all. This of course does require full size launchers.
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That missile composition you use are pretty identical to my standard size 4 missile that I use. Though, we use it very differently you and I... ;)
Here is the prime reason why I do not use small missiles for anti-ship purposes.
1. Smaller yield per missile means that I basically have to sandpaper away thick armour on large ships and it is a very inefficient use of resources.
2. Less fuel efficiency and thus general less range overall on missiles or more fuel needed per MSP in a missile.
3. None armoured missiles are weak (and expensive) against AMM but especially weak at beam PD.
3. Much worse industrial economic efficiency.
I do not in the slightest contest that it is easier to overwhelm AMM defensive fire with fast firing launching missiles. This is easily proven exactly as you state so there is nothing anyone can deny this.
If you use large missiles you either need insane amount of research into reload rate research or you go with miniaturization of the launches. Miniaturization is the more obvious and easy path. When you fire a volley of large missile you generally fire them in huge volleys to penetrate both AMM and beam PD of the enemy ships. Large volleys are the most cost efficient way to break both of these defences the way I see it.
The main reason why I dropped the use of small high frequency volleys was the "small volume volley killer gauss cannon". Small missiles can't use armour to very good effect without compromising speed/range or yield to be effective and thus gauss canons will eat them for breakfast. On the other hand Gauss cannon struggle hard against armoured missiles, even modestly armoured size 6-8 missiles.
Here is the economy I'm talking about...
Atago class Escort Frigate 3,250 tons 81 Crew 521.8 BP TCS 65 TH 258 EM 0
3969 km/s Armour 3-19 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 30.92
Maint Life 2.04 Years MSP 151 AFR 56% IFR 0.8% 1YR 49 5YR 728 Max Repair 128.8 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months Spare Berths 2
NPE-700-260-115 Magneto-plasma Stardrive (1) Power 257.6 Fuel Use 73.18% Signature 257.6 Exp 11%
Fuel Capacity 250,000 Litres Range 18.9 billion km (55 days at full power)
GCPD-16000-20-12 Phalanx 50mm Quad PD Turret (2x12) Range 20,000km TS: 16000 km/s Power 0-0 RM 2 ROF 5 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
GCFC-16000-64 Gauss Cannon PDFC (1) Max Range: 64,000 km TS: 16000 km/s 84 69 53 37 22 6 0 0 0 0
Takao class Missile Frigate 3,250 tons 102 Crew 534.3 BP TCS 65 TH 258 EM 0
3969 km/s Armour 3-19 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 2 PPV 20
Maint Life 2.95 Years MSP 154 AFR 56% IFR 0.8% 1YR 26 5YR 395 Max Repair 128.8 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months Spare Berths 2
Magazine 185
NPE-700-260-115 Magneto-plasma Stardrive (1) Power 257.6 Fuel Use 73.18% Signature 257.6 Exp 11%
Fuel Capacity 250,000 Litres Range 18.9 billion km (55 days at full power)
TLS-04-30 Torpedo Launching System (5) Missile Size 4 Rate of Fire 30
TLFC-153-100-80 Torpedo Fire Control (1) Range 153.6m km Resolution 100
AST-134-06-42 Vagabond Mk2 class Medium Torpedo (46) Speed: 42,000 km/s End: 53m Range: 133.6m km WH: 6 Size: 4 TH: 140/84/42
Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s
These are two equally large ships to prove the point of the bad economy of the small salvo versus a fleet with decent beam PD. The above Takao class Missile Frigate has the ability to launch nine salvoes each of five missiles of size four missiles. The Atago class Escort Frigate has two rapidly firing turrets of Gauss cannons.
If the Takao fires all the nine salvoes against the Atago frigate she will statistically inflict zero damage at a very hefty price because the Atago can destroy about 6 missiles (I assume a crew grade of 20-25 and a 20% turret tracking bonus) at final defence each 5 second cycle, all to the prize of zero resources and wealth (except maintenance of the ship of course). You always have to accept some leaker missiles though or more precisely about 5 missiles when you fired nine salvoes in average.
Then you have the price of the ships and missiles. Both ships use comparatively expensive techs research wise to make things as fair as possible.
The Takao has a total resource and wealth cost of (including one total load of missiles) of 700 and each reload of missiles cost you 164 additional resources and wealth. The Atago has a cost of 522. After about three loads of missiles you can afford to build a second escort frigate for the same price.
The point I'm trying to make is that small missiles in low volume high frequency is very ineffective against a fleet with a balanced approach of beam versus AMM and especially against CIWS and Gauss turreted ships. Even laser beam ships will destroy enough missiles to easily survive and is also a good dual weapons in beam combat, gauss is less useful in beam combat but not entirely useless. Similar ships that instead is armed with 10cm laser turrets will on average shoot down about 4 missiles and will have a cost comparable with the gauss armed ship but will be better at shooting down armoured missiles.
If you want to penetrate decent beam PD you need more missiles in each salvo and you in particular need armour because that reduce the chance to bring the missile down faster than the increase in size weighs it down.
We could make a comparison from above. A size 12 missile with yield 9 and armour 4 would have about a 60% chance to hit above frigate while a fast size 4 missile as used above has about 17% chance to get through. This gives you a total chance of 43% chance for 3 missiles to get though. But you also need to consider that a size 12 missile has a 50% more yield, better fuel economy, and is about 25% cheaper to build then three size 4 missiles.
The same principles are more or less also true against AMM. AMM struggle very hard to be economically viable against heavy missiles with armour until your yield tech are high enough to put more than one point of warhead into the AMM, but even then it will not be very economical in the long run.
Make no mistake when I say that I'm not arguing that the tactic can't be used. As long as you have a bigger industry and better tech than you opponent I'm sure it will work. But when you are hard pressed for production and both wealth and resources start running out and your opponent have used theirs more efficiently and stocked many more missiles than you it is going to hurt.
I’m not going to answer to late tech missiles and how they look and interact with combat and industrial efficiency. I have not looked too closely on that, mainly because I don’t ever seem to reach the later stages of the game in my campaigns.
I will give my hat off to Steve that has managed to give this game this huge complexity and still managed to balance the benefit of combat efficiency versus economic efficiency so elegant. How every weapons system can be easily countered by something and that it all depends on so many factors. A really well balanced fleet will be very cost efficient in an economic sense but a fleet that is tipped in one direction can achieve great efficiency against the right opponent but be utterly crap against something else.
The problem with trying to be a bit good at everything can also be that you end up being good at nothing... but the increasing cost in research as it is means that a somewhat balanced approach is quite manageable in this game and I really like that.
In general I find the best strategy to be that you are pretty good at something and then about average in many other things. If you try to be exceptional at something you end up paying a very big price for focusing too much. But if you have a strong empire and your rivals are weaker than you, you might afford it, but don't let it get to your head... ;)
At least this is all my opinions. There might be some big flaw in my logic that I don’t know or fully understand.
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He's talking about using multiple smaller missiles because reload time and launcher size scale with missile size, meaning that for half the size of a missile, you have 4 times the DPS. It also soaks more AMMs per second.
Try the escort frigate against one of my ship designs. 33% reduced size launchers, size 4 bus with a size 3 speedy missile in front (3 warhead, rest to speed). I find energy weapon pd to be useless against that setup. Or alternatively, MIRV with size 1s with 1 warhead.
On the subject of sandpapering, I normally find that I overkill regardless. Or then again, I have too many ordnance factories anyway. >.>
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That was my point. I even said that is why I go for bigger salvos... since they penetrate beam PD better. Although over a period of time you can usually afford about two to three beam ships for every missile ship. And once you also figure in collier ships and replacement of spent and/or old missiles you can afford even more.
In general you can afford one 2000 ton beam ship for every 100 missile salvo of size four.
And yes, beam PD will struggle against MIRV exactly the same as AMM will. But as discussed above MIRV also have great weaknesses. Further more, shields can also be used to great effect of mitigating the effects of MIRV missiles if you have bigger ships. A 300 power strong shield can in principle allow a leak frequency of 100 size four 33% miniaturized launchers per salvo.
I would actually interpret your success with that you have overwhelming force to begin with. So you waste allot of resource without much reason... ;)
You said it well in another post. If you faced a mirror fleet you could not break it and the resources consumed in such an engagement would be huge. In my opinion I think you could afford to replace a good deal of your AMM launchers into beam defence. In general you could easily add twice the tonnage of beam weapons (if not more). This would greatly increase the resource efficiency against your old mirror fleet.
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Actually, I'm sorry, the mirror fleet experiment was only conducted with the full size 4 missiles. I never tried with two-stagers (which I expect to be not much better) and on paper at least, the MIRV will punch straight through it. Like 20-30% leak rate. (and when there are two to three thousand missiles, 30% leak rate is deadly)
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The only reason you are vulnerable against MIRV is because you don't have any active defence against it.
In your case you need one or two small 6000 ton carriers with Gauss armed fighters and a 3000-3500 ton scout with as big a res 1 sensor is what you need to deal with MIRVs. Gauss fighters is also pretty decent at PD duty.
But against the AI I presume its a waste since it does not use MIRVs.
As I said before, you can easily afford two to three times the tonnage of beam PD ship versus missile ships.
It is a tradeoff in efficiency. With AMM launchers you can defend against larger salvos in total that is true. Despite this the balanced approach is effective in the long run.
Look at it like this. By saving resources you can have a larger fleet in total and even larger in the future than you otherwise would.
My human fleets tend to have 30% Gauss PD, 40% Laser PD and 30% AMM defences. No hard rules and different task-groups differs allot.
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I might also add that I don't think that either tactic discussed here is unusable or directly bad. As long as they work and you are victorious over your enemy it does not matter. I also think that the issue between what someone think is more efficient depends more on practical experiences from the game and what enemies we face there. Some tactics are much more efficient against certain types of defences etc.
There is also a battlefield efficiency versus economic efficiency. Some strategies might have a good battlefield efficiency but dreadful industrial efficiency while some is mediocre in the field but have a rather good economic efficiency. I usually get the feeling that people like to talk about battlefield efficiency and not as much about the economical side where missiles in general can be very bad. After you fought a few wars using missiles only it will usually have costed you quite allot of wealth, workforce, resources etc.
As one example of something that is very resource efficient against the AI is to use small sensor scouts and thus save lots of research on sensors and even defensive measures on your ships. The AI can more or less not cope with it and as such you can build a very optimised and quite frank boring fleet. The scout usually carry a large sensor of appropriate resolution (80-120) or a smaller one (20-40). The scout is very fast and small, usually 500 tons. The enemy AI can never target it or catch it. Your missile fleet carry missiles with large enough range to avoid enemy active sensors, I have not yet met an AI that have extremely huge sensors (unless seriously out teched) and if they had I would have to switch to carriers and fighters instead. The main fleet will not even need any AMM or beam PD at all because they will never be detected (unless we talk about invading fortified worlds).
The only thing I have to worry about is to be caught by enemy listening stations...
Anyway... it is my opinion that missiles is very efficient on the battlefield if brought in enough volume. But rely on them exclusively is only a viable option if your industry and empire overall are much stronger than the enemy, unless they also rely exclusively on missiles as a weapon. I also find it very hard to create an efficient fleet that relies only on beam technology unless you have far superior technology than the opponent (about two levels ahead is enough I think).
Personally I look at my economy quite allot and try to use what is necessary to do the job. Missiles is a big part of it but in general I do not completely rely on them all the time.
I also hope I have (to some extent) proven that bigger missiles has their place in the game and actually can be effective. Both economically and on the battlefield, as long as you use some armour in them.
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I meant to have this reply done over the weekend. Funny how RL gets in the way. :D
1. Smaller yield per missile means that I basically have to sandpaper away thick armour on large ships and it is a very inefficient use of resources.
2. Less fuel efficiency and thus general less range overall on missiles or more fuel needed per MSP in a missile.
3. None armoured missiles are weak (and expensive) against AMM but especially weak at beam PD.
4. Much worse industrial economic efficiency.
1) 6pt warheads are a long way from sandpapering. Granted it will take a few more salvos to achieve the same penetration, but that is true no matter the armour levels faced.
2) Considering the may limiter to missile engagement range is active sensor/missile fire control suite, missile fuel efficiency to range is a minor consideration.
3) True to a point. This has been covered and addressed.
4) This is actually dependent on factors governed by missile platform design and tactical implementation.
If you use large missiles you either need insane amount of research into reload rate research or you go with miniaturization of the launches. Miniaturization is the more obvious and easy path. When you fire a volley of large missile you generally fire them in huge volleys to penetrate both AMM and beam PD of the enemy ships. Large volleys are the most cost efficient way to break both of these defenses the way I see it.
Actually the best way to overwhelm PD is with increased missile volume and increased salvo count. This is less effective against AMM defenses designed to intercept at maximum AMM range. It's a balancing act between total missile capacity (magazine space) and salvo density (launchers/MFC's) vs active defenses (AMM/Beam PD suites).
The std sz4 vs .33 sz12 offensive missiles are actually at a hs usage break even point. The std sz4 will have fired their magazines dry and headed for reload long before the .33 sz12 second salvo is even ready to launch. Worse, all of those sz4's will have reached their targets (assuming no intercept) before the sz12's second salvo is launched.
The above example sz4 vs sz12 missiles also favor the sz4 in speed. Yes, the sz12 has slightly greater range. Assuming both have sensor/MFC suites allowing maximum ranges the sz4's can reach their target over 5 minutes before the first sz12 reaches it's target (meeting engagement assumed).
The main reason why I dropped the use of small high frequency volleys was the "small volume volley killer gauss cannon". Small missiles can't use armour to very good effect without compromising speed/range or yield to be effective and thus gauss canons will eat them for breakfast. On the other hand Gauss cannon struggle hard against armoured missiles, even modestly armoured size 6-8 missiles.
This is actually quite easy to counter as stated above, more salvos per volley than there are BFC's. My smallest missile ships as a design standard have at least 2 MFC's for this very reason. Your example Takao just needs to drop a single launcher and add an MFC. All other things being equal in a 1v1 dual the Atago will die just before the Takao runs dry. Even at a full load the missiles are economically/strategically/tactically much cheaper than the ship they kill.
I am curious, how are you getting 2 32.64hs turrets into a 65hs ship? The Atago specs imply full size gauss cannon in 2 quad turrets with 1 sz BFC. Even before the sz14 engine that is larger than the ship.
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Obviously I'm going to disagree with a few of your points here... ;)
One thing that I get the feeling that you do not address at all are the industrial cost of producing all these missiles and missile ships. And I certainly do NOT advocate the absence of AMM equipped ships . Based on my experiences and observations I can easily afford about ten beam PD ships and five AMM ships for every ten AMM ships. A missile ship is about 30-40% more expensive of the assembly line when fully loaded with missiles (not counting the logistical support needed as well).
I'm a profound advocate of the balanced fleet approach and it is also much more inexpensive for your industry in the long run. In essence, over a period of time one single missile ship has the cost of approximately three beam ships. This obviously depends on how many wars you fight as well.
It should be pretty easy to ruin an enemies economy if they rely exclusively on missiles given that both empires have similar industrial capacity. It is generally also strategically more sound to spread you risks and use as many different resources as possible to build ships with, that will make each mine more efficient in the long run.
It is also flat out wrong to say that you can out perform a beam fleet with fire controls. Because beam fire controls are about 70% cheaper to build given the same tech levels and size and you generally have bigger missile FC (in my experience) unless they are mounted on fighters, but fighters can be dealt with in other ways.
I also don't find it hard to match my long range missiles with fire controls, but I probably use less FC per launcher than you do and overall bigger ship of the line. And I must also say that at a tech level of 6 per MSP I usually consider a yield of 6 to be sandpapering armour, especially against ships in 30k ton plus.
In my opinion it is very efficient (resource wise) to use large heavily armoured missiles to test the defences of the opponent. How many get through and how many don't get through, further engagements is calculated from that point on. They are cheap and do the job well and they have decent yield as well. It does not matter much how many missiles that is fired. If it does not get through it just mean the next volley must be bigger. As long as you manage to get over that break point its all over and the big armoured missile will be more economical even if they are slower. The industrial economy in a big armoured missile can be a huge as 3 to 1 against a faster size four missiles. I usually field them with an economy span of 2 to 3.
I also find that it is pretty easy to approximate the number of missiles I need if I fight against a know enemy. So once the enemy is found I can make a rather educated guess if the strength of my ASM ships is enough to bring down the enemy or not. If not I will have to either disengage or engage anyway and simply attrition their defences (unless their beam PD is too strong, then it's pointless)
I also try to keep my missiles ships (cruisers, fighters or what have you) away from enemy scanners and at least out range their missiles by a great deal with my missiles. That is why I separate the active scanner part from the main combat group. It is generally very easy to slip a small ship with a high resolution scanner under the enemies noses.
In general I think that my fleets are somewhere about 10-15% anti ship beam, 30-40% ASM, 15-25% AMM and 10-15 gauss PD, 10-15% laser beam PD, and 5-10% dual role anti-ship/PD. But this would only be when a real empire is established and I have the economy to diversify my efforts. We are now talking about production/maintenance cost of my industry and not the percentage of my actual ships.
In the early game I usually go for the overwhelming in force strategy (using missiles) that has very little defences at all, mainly to save military research for later. So this mean faster and smaller ships with long range missiles. My main research concern early on is offensive missile tech, some basic sensor tech and fuel efficiency. Decent engine tech is of course important. This is more of an offensive defensive strategy and by no means useful to invade anyone.
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I forgot to say that the ship in the example were using half sized Gauss cannons.
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On the subject of mirvs I've noticed that enemy ships with CIWS will engage the mirv released warheads before any others if they arrive at the same time, so if I put a few missile busses in with my asms that basically removes close in point defense as a viable measure. is there any way to get them to prefer bigger missiles? or should CIWS choose its targets randomly out of all the missiles arrayed against it?
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On the subject of mirvs I've noticed that enemy ships with CIWS will engage the mirv released warheads before any others if they arrive at the same time, so if I put a few missile busses in with my asms that basically removes close in point defense as a viable measure. is there any way to get them to prefer bigger missiles? or should CIWS choose its targets randomly out of all the missiles arrayed against it?
I think this can be a problem otherwise as well and not just with MIRVs. You could have different sized launches and stuff the smaller missiles with armour as one example. I just think one should avoid doing it and perhaps submit this as a bug or feature change or something.
Using MIRV against the AI are probably not really fair since the AI can never deal with them properly so should be avoided, at least I do. MIRV in general should not be abused to much at all, they are problematic to deal with. The biggest problem lies with how the armor model in the game functions where small damage cant be deflected by armour completely without damaging it. I think that the model Steve has though out for Newtonian Aurora will fix allot of these problems, if we could have that system now would be great. :)
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I think this can be a problem otherwise as well and not just with MIRVs. You could have different sized launches and stuff the smaller missiles with armour as one example. I just think one should avoid doing it and perhaps submit this as a bug or feature change or something.
Using MIRV against the AI are probably not really fair since the AI can never deal with them properly so should be avoided, at least I do. MIRV in general should not be abused to much at all, they are problematic to deal with. The biggest problem lies with how the armor model in the game functions where small damage cant be deflected by armour completely without damaging it. I think that the model Steve has though out for Newtonian Aurora will fix allot of these problems, if we could have that system now would be great. :)
The problem with the different sized launchers is that I don't think I could make a size 1 missile with the range of my bigger missiles, so that one wouldn't be as much of an issue. I'll make that suggestion though.
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Just for fun I drafted up a test environment where I began testing some different tactical maneuvers and ship configurations fighting amongst themselves.
In one instance I did some testing with regard to the above discussion about smaller missiles in high frequency and larger missiles in larger salvos.
Down below are two fleets with more or less equal tech levels, they differ slightly but both sides have invested more or less the same number if research point into building their respective fleets.
Build point numbers for the fleet are calculated with respect of what the ships cost to build including two full loads of missiles. The second load will represent the increased cost for missile ships on the industry due to logistics costs and the need for having reserves. Two loads might be optimistic, but I felt I needed some down to earth numbers to reflect each fleets fighting capacity in terms of industrial might.
There are two forces, the Terran Federation (Evil Empire!!) and the United Star Alliance (The Rebels!!). :)
The Terran Federation will use the more traditional missile oriented fleet while the United Star Alliance will use a slight variation of it, but still focused allot on missiles as well.
Terran Federation Task-group "Iron Fist"
Annihilator class Battlecruiser 25,600 tons 696 Crew 4843.8 BP TCS 512 TH 1920 EM 0
5000 km/s Armour 12-77 Shields 0-0 Sensors 11/11/0/0 Damage Control Rating 29 PPV 104.64
Maint Life 2.56 Years MSP 2247 AFR 275% IFR 3.8% 1YR 480 5YR 7197 Max Repair 400 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Spare Berths 2
Magazine 806
NPE-2000-640-036 Magneto-plasma Stardrive (4) Power 640 Fuel Use 36% Signature 480 Exp 10%
Fuel Capacity 1,000,000 Litres Range 19.5 billion km (45 days at full power)
LS-400-10-10 20cm Ultraviolet Laser Array (3) Range 256,000km TS: 5000 km/s Power 10-5 RM 4 ROF 10 10 10 10 10 8 6 5 5 4 4
LSPD-20000-120-12 Ultraviolet Laser PD Battery (2x4) Range 120,000km TS: 20000 km/s Power 12-12 RM 4 ROF 5 3 3 3 3 2 2 1 1 1 1
CIWS-16000-32-06 Guardian PD System (1x6) Range 1000 km TS: 16000 km/s ROF 5 Base 50% To Hit
CBFC-4000-128 Combat Beam Fire-control (1) Max Range: 256,000 km TS: 4000 km/s 96 92 88 84 80 77 73 69 65 61
PDFC-16000-32 Point-defence Fire-control (1) Max Range: 64,000 km TS: 16000 km/s 84 69 53 37 22 6 0 0 0 0
PP-03-00-05 Stellarator Fusion Reactor (1) Total Power Output 3 Armour 0 Exp 5%
PP-06-01-05 Stellarator Fusion Reactor (2) Total Power Output 12 Armour 0 Exp 5%
PP-24-02-05 Stellarator Fusion Reactor (1) Total Power Output 24 Armour 0 Exp 5%
ILS-01-10 Interceptor Launch System (6) Missile Size 1 Rate of Fire 10
TLS-04-30 Torpedo Launch System (12) Missile Size 4 Rate of Fire 30
TLCS-151-120-11 Torpedo Launch Control System (2) Range 151.8m km Resolution 120
ILCS-027-030-11 Interceptor Launch Control System (1) Range 27.7m km Resolution 1
AST-146-40-06 Harpoon class Anti-Ship Torpedo (156) Speed: 40,000 km/s End: 60.8m Range: 146m km WH: 6 Size: 4 TH: 133/80/40
AMM-066-38-092 Viper class Interceptor Missile (180) Speed: 38,400 km/s End: 2.9m Range: 6.6m km WH: 1 Size: 1 TH: 307/184/92
NSS-151-120-11 Naval Search Sensor (1) GPS 15120 Range 151.8m km Resolution 120
TH-011-11 Naval IR Sensor (1) Sensitivity 11 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 11m km
EM-011-11 Naval EM Detection System (1) Sensitivity 11 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 11m km
Spear class Missile Cruiser 12,800 tons 355 Crew 2369 BP TCS 256 TH 960 EM 0
5000 km/s Armour 8-48 Shields 0-0 Sensors 11/11/0/0 Damage Control Rating 9 PPV 45
Maint Life 2.51 Years MSP 1041 AFR 145% IFR 2% 1YR 229 5YR 3436 Max Repair 400 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Spare Berths 0
Magazine 717
NPE-2000-640-036 Magneto-plasma Stardrive (2) Power 640 Fuel Use 36% Signature 480 Exp 10%
Fuel Capacity 500,000 Litres Range 19.5 billion km (45 days at full power)
TLS-04-30 Torpedo Launch System (10) Missile Size 4 Rate of Fire 30
ILS-01-10 Interceptor Launch System (5) Missile Size 1 Rate of Fire 10
ILCS-027-030-11 Interceptor Launch Control System (1) Range 27.7m km Resolution 1
TLCS-151-120-11 Torpedo Launch Control System (1) Range 151.8m km Resolution 120
AST-146-40-06 Harpoon class Anti-Ship Torpedo (142) Speed: 40,000 km/s End: 60.8m Range: 146m km WH: 6 Size: 4 TH: 133/80/40
AMM-066-38-092 Viper class Interceptor Missile (150) Speed: 38,400 km/s End: 2.9m Range: 6.6m km WH: 1 Size: 1 TH: 307/184/92
NSS-151-120-11 Naval Search Sensor (1) GPS 15120 Range 151.8m km Resolution 120
TH-011-11 Naval IR Sensor (1) Sensitivity 11 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 11m km
EM-011-11 Naval EM Detection System (1) Sensitivity 11 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 11m km
ECCM-1 (1) ECM 10
Vindicator class Destroyer Escort 6,400 tons 177 Crew 1294.6 BP TCS 128 TH 480 EM 0
5000 km/s Armour 5-30 Shields 0-0 Sensors 11/11/0/0 Damage Control Rating 4 PPV 14
Maint Life 2.29 Years MSP 506 AFR 81% IFR 1.1% 1YR 131 5YR 1958 Max Repair 400 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Spare Berths 2
Magazine 328
NPE-2000-640-036 Magneto-plasma Stardrive (1) Power 640 Fuel Use 36% Signature 480 Exp 10%
Fuel Capacity 250,000 Litres Range 19.5 billion km (45 days at full power)
LS-060-03-05 10cm Visible Laser Array (2) Range 60,000km TS: 5000 km/s Power 3-3 RM 2 ROF 5 3 3 2 1 1 1 0 0 0 0
PDFC-16000-32 Point-defence Fire-control (1) Max Range: 64,000 km TS: 16000 km/s 84 69 53 37 22 6 0 0 0 0
PP-24-02-05 Stellarator Fusion Reactor (1) Total Power Output 24 Armour 0 Exp 5%
ILS-01-10 Interceptor Launch System (8) Missile Size 1 Rate of Fire 10
ILCS-027-030-11 Interceptor Launch Control System (1) Range 27.7m km Resolution 1
AMM-066-38-092 Viper class Interceptor Missile (328) Speed: 38,400 km/s End: 2.9m Range: 6.6m km WH: 1 Size: 1 TH: 307/184/92
TDS-013-015-11 Torpedo Detection System (1) GPS 126 Range 13.9m km Resolution 1
TH-011-11 Naval IR Sensor (1) Sensitivity 11 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 11m km
EM-011-11 Naval EM Detection System (1) Sensitivity 11 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 11m km
ECM 10
Battle Claw class Command Ship 6,400 tons 170 Crew 1559.8 BP TCS 128 TH 480 EM 0
5000 km/s Armour 6-30 Shields 0-0 Sensors 11/110/0/0 Damage Control Rating 5 PPV 0
Maint Life 2.24 Years MSP 762 AFR 65% IFR 0.9% 1YR 206 5YR 3085 Max Repair 630 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Spare Berths 0
Cryogenic Berths 400
NPE-2000-640-036 Magneto-plasma Stardrive (1) Power 640 Fuel Use 36% Signature 480 Exp 10%
Fuel Capacity 250,000 Litres Range 19.5 billion km (45 days at full power)
CIWS-16000-32-06 Guardian PD System (1x6) Range 1000 km TS: 16000 km/s ROF 5 Base 50% To Hit
TDS-069-075-11 Torpedo Detection System (1) GPS 630 Range 69.3m km Resolution 1
TH-011-11 Naval IR Sensor (1) Sensitivity 11 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 11m km
EM-110-11 Naval EM Detection System (1) Sensitivity 110 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 110m km
ECM 10
United Star Alliance Task-group "Freedom"
Liberty class Battlecruiser 50,000 tons 1216 Crew 8844 BP TCS 1000 TH 5200 EM 6000
5200 km/s Armour 10-120 Shields 200-300 Sensors 11/33/0/0 Damage Control Rating 51 PPV 220.8
Maint Life 2.65 Years MSP 4533 AFR 487% IFR 6.8% 1YR 917 5YR 13757 Max Repair 520 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Flight Crew Berths 0
Hangar Deck Capacity 3000 tons Magazine 640
NPE-2500-1040-048 Magneto-plasma Stardrive (5) Power 1040 Fuel Use 48.17% Signature 1040 Exp 13%
Fuel Capacity 3,000,000 Litres Range 22.4 billion km (49 days at full power)
SH-025-300 Delta class Shield Generator (80) Total Fuel Cost 1,000 Litres per hour (24,000 per day)
LS-240-06-10 15cm Ultraviolet Laser Array (8) Range 240,000km TS: 5200 km/s Power 6-3 RM 4 ROF 10 6 6 6 6 4 4 3 3 2 2
LSPD-20000-120-12 Ultraviolet Laser PD Battery (4x4) Range 120,000km TS: 20000 km/s Power 12-12 RM 4 ROF 5 3 3 3 3 2 2 1 1 1 1
GCPD-20000-070-12 70mm Phalanx PD Turret (2x12) Range 20,000km TS: 20000 km/s Power 0-0 RM 2 ROF 5 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
CIWS-16000-32-06 Guardian PD System (2x6) Range 1000 km TS: 16000 km/s ROF 5 Base 50% To Hit
CBFC-4000-128 Combat Beam Fire-control (2) Max Range: 256,000 km TS: 4000 km/s 96 92 88 84 80 77 73 69 65 61
PDFC-16000-32 Point-defence Fire-control (4) Max Range: 64,000 km TS: 16000 km/s 84 69 53 37 22 6 0 0 0 0
PP-24-02-05 Stellarator Fusion Reactor (3) Total Power Output 72 Armour 0 Exp 5%
TLS-08-8000 Torpedo Launch System (40) Missile Size 8 Rate of Fire 8000
TLCS-209-180-11 Torpedo Launch Control System (2) Range 209.2m km Resolution 180
AST-195-32-06 Vindicator class Capitol Torpedo (40) Speed: 32,000 km/s End: 101.9m Range: 195.6m km WH: 6 Size: 8 TH: 128/76/38
AST-195-32-12 Tornado class Capitol Torpedo (40) Speed: 32,000 km/s End: 101.9m Range: 195.6m km WH: 12 Size: 8 TH: 128/76/38
TDS-034-037-11 Torpedo Detection System (1) GPS 315 Range 34.7m km Resolution 1
TH-011-11 Naval IR Sensor (1) Sensitivity 11 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 11m km
EM-033-11 Naval EM Detection System (1) Sensitivity 33 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 33m km
ECCM-1 (2) ECM 10
Victory class Escort Frigate 4,400 tons 128 Crew 702.5 BP TCS 88 TH 460 EM 0
5227 km/s Armour 3-23 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 2 PPV 32.64
Maint Life 2.53 Years MSP 274 AFR 56% IFR 0.8% 1YR 60 5YR 897 Max Repair 230 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Spare Berths 3
NPE-1250-460-053 Magneto-plasma Stardrive (1) Power 460 Fuel Use 53.18% Signature 460 Exp 11%
Fuel Capacity 250,000 Litres Range 19.2 billion km (42 days at full power)
LSPD-20000-060-12 Visible Laser PD Battery (2x4) Range 60,000km TS: 20000 km/s Power 12-12 RM 2 ROF 5 3 3 2 1 1 1 0 0 0 0
PDFC-16000-32 Point-defence Fire-control (1) Max Range: 64,000 km TS: 16000 km/s 84 69 53 37 22 6 0 0 0 0
PP-24-02-05 Stellarator Fusion Reactor (1) Total Power Output 24 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Resolution class Escort Frigate 4,400 tons 114 Crew 762 BP TCS 88 TH 460 EM 0
5227 km/s Armour 3-23 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 2 PPV 10
Maint Life 2.82 Years MSP 271 AFR 61% IFR 0.9% 1YR 50 5YR 746 Max Repair 230 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Spare Berths 1
Magazine 426
NPE-1250-460-053 Magneto-plasma Stardrive (1) Power 460 Fuel Use 53.18% Signature 460 Exp 11%
Fuel Capacity 250,000 Litres Range 19.2 billion km (42 days at full power)
ILS-01-10 Interceptor Launch System (10) Missile Size 1 Rate of Fire 10
ILCS-020-022-11 Interceptor Launch Control System (2) Range 20.8m km Resolution 1
AMM-066-38-092 Viper class Interceptor Missile (426) Speed: 38,400 km/s End: 2.9m Range: 6.6m km WH: 1 Size: 1 TH: 307/184/92
Fireblade class Gunboat 2,500 tons 48 Crew 604 BP TCS 50 TH 416 EM 600
8320 km/s Armour 3-16 Shields 20-300 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 12
Maint Life 2.24 Years MSP 151 AFR 50% IFR 0.7% 1YR 41 5YR 610 Max Repair 208 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 0.5 months Spare Berths 2
NPE-0650-416-246 Magneto-plasma Stardrive (1) Power 416 Fuel Use 246.08% Signature 416 Exp 20%
Fuel Capacity 50,000 Litres Range 1.5 billion km (48 hours at full power)
SH-025-300 Delta class Shield Generator (8) Total Fuel Cost 100 Litres per hour (2,400 per day)
LS-240-06-10 15cm Ultraviolet Laser Array (3) Range 192,000km TS: 8320 km/s Power 6-3 RM 4 ROF 10 6 6 6 6 4 4 3 3 2 2
CBFC-8000-96 Combat Beam Fire-control (1) Max Range: 192,000 km TS: 8000 km/s 95 90 84 79 74 69 64 58 53 48
PP-03-00-05 Stellarator Fusion Reactor (1) Total Power Output 3 Armour 0 Exp 5%
PP-06-01-05 Stellarator Fusion Reactor (1) Total Power Output 6 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Tribal T180 class Recon Craft 500 tons 4 Crew 185 BP TCS 10 TH 96 EM 0
9600 km/s Armour 1-5 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 0 PPV 0
Maint Life 1.36 Years MSP 23 AFR 20% IFR 0.3% 1YR 13 5YR 201 Max Repair 126 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 0.1 months Spare Berths 6
NPE-0050-0032-280 Magneto-plasma Stardrive (3) Power 32 Fuel Use 280.02% Signature 32 Exp 20%
Fuel Capacity 10,000 Litres Range 1.3 billion km (37 hours at full power)
NSS-186-180-11 Naval Search Sensor (1) GPS 22680 Range 186.0m km Resolution 180
The tribal class recon craft comes in three variation Type-60 and Type-1, the difference is only in the resolution of their scanners.
Each Liberty cruiser will carry one Fireblade gunboat and one Tribal recon craft.
The setup was simple. I would take both these Task-groups against each other but also the same Task-group against each other and see the different results.
The above ships are not constructed with direct efficiency in mind, but should properly be a relatively fair representation of a real game with some role-playing thrown in. I just created both with what I thought could be a viable type of fleet anyone would build in the game.
So... the fleets are...
The Iron Fist TF
2xBC (Annihilator)
4xCG (Spear)
5xDE (Vindicator)
1xCO (Battle Claw)
Total tonnage: 140800
Total build points: 38591
The Freedom TF
3xBC (Liberty)
- 3xGS (Fireblade)
- 3xSC (Tribal)
5xFE (Victory)
2xFE (Resolution)
Total tonnage: 180800
Total build points: 38561
All tests were done three times and they all behaved more or less the same.
Test 1: Iron Fist vs. Freedom
In this test the Freedom would start the engagement by releasing their salvo or 120 size 8 missiles. It usually took about 55-60% of the AMM stock of the Iron Fist to deal with it but did manage t shoot them all down well before it reached the task-force. The second volley are fired before the Iron Fist is within range and most of it is stopped and some is stopped by PD but part of the salvo will be able to slam into one of the battle cruisers but don't do much serious damage. A few gaping holes in the armour though.
Once the Iron Fist is in range they fire all their missiles. Since they have intel of the shields (through spies) they concentrate all their effort on one Freedom battle cruiser. Each salvo is a total of 64 missiles and there are about twelve to fifteen salvos coming in. The Resolution frigates start thinning out the salvos by firing one missile on each ASM in each salvo as best they can, there are only two of them. Point defenses start to fire at the salvoes and about four to eight missiles will get through and start damaging the shields on one of the cruisers. This goes on until all salvos are gone. The shields hold and no damage is done to the cruiser. The leak without using any AMM at all would increase slightly to six to ten missiles.
Note: I have noticed that the "Missile Tracking Bonus" technology does not seem to work. The 20% you should get for tracking the missile does not seem to be added. The logs show the same numbers with or without this tech and the results are the same. So, if this is true the leaking of missiles would be brought down to near zero without the use of any missiles.
Now it was time for the gunboats. They were launched and started to nib away at the Iron Fist task-group. A few times they actually did manage to kill them all... but it is tricky. You need to go in... shoot and retreat as soon as the shields are down (individually per ship not as a group), regenerate and then attack again. This works as long as the enemy does not have any missiles left... ;)
But a few hits from those 20cm lasers is tough... :(
Test 2: Iron Fist vs. Iron Fist
The most boring test. Both fire all their missiles and shoot each others missiles down. They both head back home, neither have the nerve to engage in close combat being so reliant on their missiles, this has made them soft... ;)
Some missiles actually managed to get through at some tests, they were at their limit of their AMM stocks.
Test 3: Freedom vs. Freedom
Some slightly more interesting results. The large volume of missiles are much harder to deal with with only two AMM frigates. In most cases they manage to shoot down about 30-35 missiles with PD and another 40-50 with AMM. The rest will hit and devastate the shields and inflict minor damage to the armour. Sometimes they fared better and did no damage. But all in all at least some damage.
Being more courageous than the Iron Fists they close the distance and duke it out in close combat, obviously with heavy casualties... no... did not do that, felt a bit pointless really!! ;)
All in all I feel that either fleet is rather solid in its design, they all have good defences and reasonable offensive force. But they really need a weaker opponent to succeed and could face a more powerful opponent and survive most of the time. These a probably typical of my play style. The one with longer range could of course have more offensive power and destroy the opponent before they can engage, but who know if that is always the case?!?
The Iron Fist should bring more AMM missiles in its magazines and perhaps less launchers, don't know... just felt that their AMM storage was a bit shallow. Though, AMM is expensive. On afterthought I should have let some of the first salvo hit their targets, which would let the PD take care of them and risk a few leaks. This would save enough AMM to combat the second salvo just fine. One never cease to learn, that's good... :)
The Freedom look quite similar to what I usually run with. A few central large cruisers with strong shields, good PD and backed up by AMM. Although I would take a minimum of one AMM and two PD frigates per cruiser as a minimum in any game on any standard mission. The Fireblade was just fun, perhaps not very efficient in this context but fun to use.
I was only trying to prove that the game actually allow large missiles to have its niche in the game without being inefficient and that high frequency waves of missiles not always is better just because they are better at saturate AMM centric fleets. I also avoided Gauss gun spams in the Freedom fleet because the Alliance are equally worried about large armoured missiles as small ones.
Comments and discussion are welcomed... was it a fair comparison?!?
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Looks pretty fair to me. Maybe I'll do my own test, then we'll see the differences in our playstyles. =D
Also, I just thought of a tactic I could use against a mirror fleet of my own. Since I build swarms of glass cannon ships, and that AMM pd is pretty effective (even in your test), a launch against a mirror fleet will be directed at one or two ships, aiming to kill them.
So, if you spread out your fleet a little, you can tell whether the salvoes are dividing up or not. If you have a 400 missile salvo coming in and it's not dividing, then its targeting a single ship and you might be able to let it hit for massive overkill and save your AMMs. Might even cost you less. >.>
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That's a good tactic as long as you don't face the risk of mutiny as soon as you face some stiff opposition... ;)
If you role-play while you play it might be used when cornered and are faced with total destruction. Sacrificing a single ship is a cheap price to pay.
But otherwise it should work.
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Once you work out which ship it is, you hit the abandon ship button. >.>
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Once you work out which ship it is, you hit the abandon ship button. >.>
Figured that, but that usually still leave people trapped in the ship for some reason.
Annyhow...
I thought some on the dynamics of your fleet and since you use glass ships you are more or less forced to provide your fleet with a total coverage of AMM. The thing about beam PD is that you must accept some leaking to get through. Either through very thick armour or a combination of armour and shields.
The best tactic against your fleet would probably (without any gamey tactics) be to deplete your AMM capability with armoured missiles and then attack into beam combat or use missiles if speed is not enough, but gunboats with high speed is easy to come by.
A missile like this fitted to a missile boat or some fighters based on a carrier or planetary hangars would seriously deplete any AMM stock very fast.
Missile Size: 4 MSP (0.2 HS) Warhead: 4 Armour: 1 Manoeuvre Rating: 11
Speed: 33600 km/s Engine Endurance: 24 minutes Range: 49.3m km
Cost Per Missile: 2.9812
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 369.6% 3k km/s 121% 5k km/s 73.9% 10k km/s 37%
Materials Required: 1.25x Tritanium 1.7312x Gallicite Fuel x475Magneto Plasma tech, 6 yield per MSP, 0.6 fuel consumtion, x4 power modifier
Granted that any fleet with decent amount of armour/shields would just allow large portions of such ordnance to strike home, you don't have that luxury. ;)
The point is... if you have a slightly more balanced approach you might (in most situations) be able to escape with most of your ships intact even if you run dry of AMM or is overwhelmed since your ships can still fight with their beam weapons and have good armour/shields.
For me this is just a way to conserve what resources I put in to creating a fleet.
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All numbers are 3 s.f. Missile was designed to 4s.f. accuracy.
Missile Size: 1 MSP (0.05 HS) Warhead: 1 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 24
Speed: 38400 km/s Engine Endurance: 4 minutes Range: 9.8m km
Cost Per Missile: 1.0001
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 921.6% 3k km/s 288% 5k km/s 184.3% 10k km/s 92.2%
Materials Required: 0.25x Tritanium 0.7501x Gallicite Fuel x55.75
Development Cost for Project: 100RPThis AM missile is one I conjured up with the same tech (64 agility per MSP, which is one level lower than your warhead tech). It intercepts yours with a 27.4% chance (cost ratio of 2.44). It takes 3.65 AMMs to achieve one hit, so 7.29 AMMs to down 1 missile.
Against your missile, engagements start at 5.22 mkm, 2nd wave at 2.79 mkm, 3rd at 1.49 mkm, 4th at 793 kkm, 5th at 289 kkm and then a 6th at pointblank.
Assuming 3v1 and unsaturated AMM launchers, this is a leak rate of 7.03%.
With an equal tech level of 80 agility per MSP:
Missile Size: 1 MSP (0.05 HS) Warhead: 1 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 28
Speed: 38400 km/s Engine Endurance: 3 minutes Range: 6.4m km
Cost Per Missile: 1.0801
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 1075.2% 3k km/s 336% 5k km/s 215% 10k km/s 107.5%
Materials Required: 0.25x Tritanium 0.8301x Gallicite Fuel x36.25
Development Cost for Project: 108RPThis has a 32% interception chance (exactly!) for a cost ratio of 2.26. It takes 3.125 AMMs to achieve one hit, so 6.25 AMMs to down 1 missile.
Against your missile, engagements start at 3.41 mkm, 2nd wave at 1.82 mkm, 3rd at 971 kkm, 4th at 518 kkm, 5th at 182 kkm and then a 6th at pointblank.
Assuming 3v1 and unsaturated AMM launchers, this is a leak rate of 4.34%.
Missile Size: 3 MSP (0.15 HS) Warhead: 4 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 10
Speed: 49100 km/s Engine Endurance: 4 minutes Range: 12.2m km
Cost Per Missile: 2.84
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 491% 3k km/s 160% 5k km/s 98.2% 10k km/s 49.1%
Materials Required: 1x Tritanium 1.84x Gallicite Fuel x83.25
Development Cost for Project: 284RPI am kind of sad now that engine increments are in 0.1 MSP chunks. I can't actually drop the warhead to 3 since that results in a stupidly long ranged 2nd stage. (37.8mkm range and only 51200 km/s speed)
The full size 4 missile costs about 3.4 and travels at only 1/3 the speed of your missile.
The first AMM has a 18.8% hit rate (1.57 cost ratio), the 2nd has 21.9% (1.34 cost ratio).
1st AMM: Engagements start at 4.30 mkm, 2nd wave at 1.89 mkm, 3rd at 660 kkm, 4th at 324 kkm, then it's pointblank.
Assuming 3v1 and unsaturated AMM launchers, this is a leak rate of 4.42%.
2nd AMM: Engagements start at 2.81 mkm, 2nd wave at 1.23 mkm, 3rd at 561 kkm, 4th at 225 kkm, then it's pointblank.
Assuming 3v1 and unsaturated AMM launchers, this is a leak rate of 2.45%.
Congratulations, you've made an armoured missile that is strictly better than my standard 2-stage design by every measure. I guess the gracious thing to do is to concede now. =D
Heh, I swear my 2 stagers performed better, but it could be the engine changes. I used to make two-stagers that went twice as fast as my AMMs.
Time to look at AMMs, maybe there's a better way to do this.
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Hosho class Frigate 6,000 tons 132 Crew 1149.25 BP TCS 120 TH 624 EM 0
5200 km/s Armour 4-29 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 14 PPV 13.25
Maint Life 2.44 Years MSP 479 AFR 72% IFR 1% 1YR 111 5YR 1658 Max Repair 312 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Spare Berths 1
Magazine 534
624 EP Magneto-plasma Drive (1) Power 624 Fuel Use 80.93% Signature 624 Exp 13%
Fuel Capacity 540,000 Litres Range 20.0 billion km (44 days at full power)
Size 1 Missile Launcher (5) Missile Size 1 Rate of Fire 5
Size 5 Missile Launcher (33% Reduction) (5) Missile Size 5 Rate of Fire 500
Missile Fire Control FC92-R20 (1) Range 93.0m km Resolution 20
Missile Fire Control FC62-R1 (1) Range 62.4m km Resolution 1
Size 5 Missile Stage (20) Speed: 21,800 km/s End: 45.8m Range: 60.1m km WH: 0 Size: 5 TH: 72/43/21
Size 1 Anti-missile Missile (434) Speed: 38,400 km/s End: 2.8m Range: 6.4m km WH: 1 Size: 1 TH: 358/215/107I went ahead and designed this frigate based off my usual frigate design. The fallout of the engine changes is pretty massive, I think I will need to put tankers with my ships now.
But in other news, the ship costs 2,255 BP with 2 loads of missiles. 12-13 ships would be an approximate loadout for this fleet (leaving 8-10 000 BP for supporting sensors and other stuff I didn't bother to make, although this is rather bad ratio for me since I usually build 20 of these to 1 set of supporting ships). With 60-65 missiles per wave, this fleet cannot damage the either of your fleets. The Freedom Fleet might have a hard time due to the speed of the 2nd stage, but perhaps not.
Less depressingly, my AMM coverage can easily eat 2 waves of 240 size 4 armoured missiles each (at 6.25 AMMs per missile) with roughly 50% AMM stocks left. The Iron Fist has a slightly better time of it replacing with size 4 armoured missiles since a rough estimate indicates it will take nearly 100% of the AMM stocks to intercept them all (12.6 ship-worths of AMMs). A bit of crew grade (even something as small as 2 to 5%) will give a nice buffer for bad luck.
But no, basically, the fleet comes through undamaged and then runs away. The Freedom Fleet might lose the gunboats if the commander of my fleet decides to halt missile attack after the futile first wave (he has 3 more), and he does have a ton of AMMs left (~2000 of them). 's strategic loss though, since the AMMs cost more than the armoured missiles.
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Yes, any missile with armour becomes hard to crack for AMM and keep your economy safe. Not that it is very easy for beam either, but at least lasers and meson canons are pretty good at swatting down armoured missiles for a decent price. Shields are more effective as well since you often need to sacrifice some yield to get room for the armour.
I never created any MIRV missiles (or simple two stage missiles) with the new missile rules, but it is good to know they have been gimped a little by the new rules. Not that I think MIRV was a particular problem since you could combat them given the right tools, more like a nuisance. And it's not like you needed to use them, at least not against the AI, that is somewhat unfair.
This is why my main line warships are as big as my technology and logistics can muster. In general I use several types of ships. Smaller ships for scouting/vanguard duty and hunting enemy scouts, medium ships for recon in force and major warships to face pure battles and nothing else. The size and quantity of my warships are purely depending on circumstance such as technology progression, time, resources and industrial prowess.
The thing that I value most in missile duels are the range of missiles. If You can fire them outside the enemy active sensor net then even better. But, being able to fire first and keep doing so for an extended time period is key to any engagement. One other important factor on a missile ship (of any size) is speed to keep the enemy at bay and even retreat after you fired if you can't penetrate or drain their AMM stock, but also so you can replenish your missile stock and fire until you drained the enemies AMM stocks dry. Even if they can do the same they need many more tonnage of AMM missiles than I need for heavily armoured ASM.
My escort carriers always carry a few small very fast ordnance transport ships that may transport missiles from my main colliers to the missile cruisers if they are engaged with an enemy. This saves resources in a way that I don't have to equip my collier ships with expensive and fuel hungry engines.
Then comes the fun part of trying to find the opponents logistical support and blow that up. This is usually more important than taking out their main ships. This is usually why I also fit a large part of my fleets with beam PD and shields because that way I can use more space on my colliers for offensive missiles.
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Here are two missiles intended for my heavy torpedo fighter crafts.
Vortex class Heavy Torpedo
Missile Size: 6 MSP (0.3 HS) Warhead: 9 Armour: 1 Manoeuvre Rating: 12
Speed: 32000 km/s Engine Endurance: 48 minutes Range: 92.6m km
Cost Per Missile: 5.092
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 384% 3k km/s 120% 5k km/s 76.8% 10k km/s 38.4%
Materials Required: 2.5x Tritanium 2.592x Gallicite Fuel x875
Bulldog class Heavy Torpedo
Missile Size: 6 MSP (0.3 HS) Warhead: 4 Armour: 2 Manoeuvre Rating: 11
Speed: 32000 km/s Engine Endurance: 39 minutes Range: 74.1m km
Cost Per Missile: 3.964
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 352% 3k km/s 110% 5k km/s 70.4% 10k km/s 35.2%
Materials Required: 1.5x Tritanium 2.464x Gallicite Fuel x700
This would be brought in on the...
Tornado class Torpedo Bomber 500 tons 1 Crew 93.6 BP TCS 10 TH 64 EM 0
6400 km/s Armour 2-5 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 0 PPV 5.4
Maint Life 0 Years MSP 0 AFR 100% IFR 1.4% 1YR 9 5YR 130 Max Repair 25 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 0.1 months Spare Berths 9
Magazine 36
NPE-0050-0032-280 Magneto-plasma Stardrive (2) Power 32 Fuel Use 280.02% Signature 32 Exp 20%
Fuel Capacity 10,000 Litres Range 1.3 billion km (55 hours at full power)
TBL-06 Fixed Torpedo Tubes (6) Missile Size 6 Hangar Reload 45 minutes MF Reload 7.5 hours
TLCS-091-120-11 Torpedo Launch Control System (1) Range 91.1m km Resolution 120
Their main torpedo would be the Vortex while the Bulldog has to be used against large battle groups to drain their AMM capabilities.
They are somewhat slow, but you could easily remove one launcher and add another engine and reduce their range and add a tanker to increase their range. But 6400km/s are usually enough at this tech level.
The Vortex missile is actually both harder to bring down and packs a better yield than a regular size four missile. The bulldog has the same AMM draining efficiency as the size four I drafted above but with greater range and cheaper at the same time.
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Well, I might as well give my thoughts. You can't fight a war without an economy, so I like to minimize costs. What are the greatest expenses?
1: Losing a fight.
Losing warships is rather worse than losing missiles, by all means. Among other things, you want to survive if the fight isn't going your way. Jorgen suggested heavy anti-missile defense and armor, I prefer range and speed, which brings me to point 2.
2: AMM fire.
AMMs cost a LOT. Armor is frequently cheaper, until you factor in the cost of extra engines/SY size. Getting shot at is a bad proposition.
3: ASM fire.
Also expensive over time, especially if you aren't breaking through enemy defenses. In the tests above, most ships emptied their entire magazines for little effect. So here's what the designs from my current game look like.
Ships.
Invincible class Fighter-bomber 500 tons 12 Crew 91.4 BP TCS 10 TH 80 EM 0
8000 km/s Armour 1-5 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 0 PPV 1
Maint Life 9.16 Years MSP 23 AFR 10% IFR 0.1% 1YR 0 5YR 7 Max Repair 16 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 1.953 months Spare Berths 0
Magazine 34
20 EP Magneto-plasma Drive (4) Power 20 Fuel Use 138.35% Signature 20 Exp 12%
Fuel Capacity 30,000 Litres Range 7.8 billion km (11 days at full power)
Size 2 Missile Launcher (50% Reduction) (1) Missile Size 2 Rate of Fire 100
Missile Fire Control FC38-R100 (1) Range 38.4m km Resolution 100
Stealth Strike II (17) Speed: 8,000 km/s End: 1.3d Range: 886.2m km WH: 0 Size: 2 TH: 26/16/8
Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s
This design is classed as a Fighter for production, combat and maintenance purposes
Lion class Collier 500 tons 9 Crew 79.4 BP TCS 10 TH 80 EM 0
8000 km/s Armour 1-5 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 0 PPV 0
Maint Life 5.42 Years MSP 10 AFR 20% IFR 0.3% 1YR 1 5YR 9 Max Repair 10 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 10.97 months Spare Berths 0
Magazine 64
20 EP Magneto-plasma Drive (4) Power 20 Fuel Use 138.35% Signature 20 Exp 12%
Fuel Capacity 30,000 Litres Range 7.8 billion km (11 days at full power)
Stealth Strike II (32) Speed: 8,000 km/s End: 1.3d Range: 886.2m km WH: 0 Size: 2 TH: 26/16/8
Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s
This design is classed as a Fighter for production, combat and maintenance purposes
Audacious class Fighter-Scout 500 tons 13 Crew 115.4 BP TCS 10 TH 80 EM 0
8000 km/s Armour 1-5 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 0 PPV 0
Maint Life 14.83 Years MSP 72 AFR 4% IFR 0.1% 1YR 1 5YR 9 Max Repair 48 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3.64 months Spare Berths 0
20 EP Magneto-plasma Drive (4) Power 20 Fuel Use 138.35% Signature 20 Exp 12%
Fuel Capacity 60,000 Litres Range 15.6 billion km (22 days at full power)
Active Search Sensor MR38-R100 (1) GPS 4800 Range 38.4m km Resolution 100
This design is classed as a Fighter for production, combat and maintenance purposes
Audacious EM class Fighter-Scout 500 tons 11 Crew 88.4 BP TCS 10 TH 80 EM 0
8000 km/s Armour 1-5 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/8/0/0 Damage Control Rating 0 PPV 0
Maint Life 22.21 Years MSP 55 AFR 4% IFR 0.1% 1YR 0 5YR 3 Max Repair 10 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3.64 months Spare Berths 2
Cryogenic Berths 200
20 EP Magneto-plasma Drive (4) Power 20 Fuel Use 138.35% Signature 20 Exp 12%
Fuel Capacity 60,000 Litres Range 15.6 billion km (22 days at full power)
EM Detection Sensor EM2-16 Sensitivity 16 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 16m km
This design is classed as a Fighter for production, combat and maintenance purposesBroadsword class Tanker 400 tons 3 Crew 52.8 BP TCS 8 TH 32 EM 0
4000 km/s Armour 1-4 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 0 PPV 0
Maint Life 4.01 Years MSP 8 AFR 12% IFR 0.2% 1YR 1 5YR 12 Max Repair 8 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 4.629 months Spare Berths 0
16 EP Magneto-plasma Drive (2) Power 16 Fuel Use 79.2% Signature 16 Exp 10%
Fuel Capacity 250,000 Litres Range 142.0 billion km (411 days at full power)
This design is classed as a Fighter for production, combat and maintenance purposes
Black Hawk class Fighter Base 22,100 tons 305 Crew 2168.2 BP TCS 442 TH 0 EM 0
Armour 5-70 Sensors 1/0 Damage Control Rating 0 PPV 0
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months Flight Crew Berths 0
Hangar Deck Capacity 20000 tons
This design is classed as a Planetary Defence Centre and can be pre-fabricated in 9 sections
Missiles
Stealth Strike II
Missile Size: 2 MSP (0.1 HS) Warhead: 0 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 10
Speed: 8000 km/s Engine Endurance: 30.6 hours Range: 881.2m km
Cost Per Missile: 1.1509
Second Stage: Whee! II x1
Second Stage Separation Range: 8,000,000 km
Overall Endurance: 1 days Overall Range: 892.6m km
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 80% 3k km/s 20% 5k km/s 16% 10k km/s 8%
Materials Required: 0.5x Tritanium 0.0189x Boronide 0.032x Uridium 0.6x Gallicite Fuel x598Whee! II
Missile Size: 1 MSP (0.05 HS) Warhead: 2 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 10
Speed: 32000 km/s Engine Endurance: 6 minutes Range: 11.4m km
Active Sensor Strength: 0.032 Sensitivity Modifier: 80%
Resolution: 100 Maximum Range vs 5000 ton object (or larger): 20,000 km
Cost Per Missile: 0.9509
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 320% 3k km/s 100% 5k km/s 64% 10k km/s 32%
Materials Required: 0.5x Tritanium 0.0189x Boronide 0.032x Uridium 0.4x Gallicite Fuel x97.5
Using tech:
Sensors: 12,880 RP
6000 Active Grav 16
480 MR38-R100
160 FC38-R100
6000 EM Sensitivity 8
160 EM 2-16
80 EM 1-8
Power & Propulsion: 64,500 RP
46000 Magneto-Plasma Engines
~500 Drives
3000 Fuel Consumption 0.8
15000 Max Engine Power x2
Missiles: 25,320 RP
14000 Warhead x5
210 Missiles
2000 Magazine 80%
50 Capacity 16 Magazine
6000 Reload 3
3000 0.5x size
60 Size 2 launcher
Logistics: 19,000 RP
5000 Hanger Deck
1000 Large Fuel
1000 Small Fuel
12000 Fighter Engineering
Energy Weapons: 0 RP
Defensive Systems: 2,500 RP
2500 High Density Duranium
Construction: 0 RP
Biology: 0 RP
TOTAL: 124,200 RPSide note: I'm using somewhat less tech. An extra level each EM and grav sensors would make the range 69 mkm. Two would make it 117 mkm. That could then be doubled by dropping a magazine on the invincibles and changing the audacious to a 1 kton scout. (Have anything capable of fighting even normal sized ships at 230 mkm? I bet not. )
My typical squad is:
16xFB Invincible
17xCO Lion
1xFS Audacious
1xFS Audacious EM
6xTK Broadsword
For roughly 7300BP including two loads of missiles.
The principle is simple: Stay out of range. The worst likely scenario against an opponent with equal tech is just running away. With a first stage that has the same speed as your ship, you can fire an entire magazine such that it all hits at once, bypassing most defenses. The small active sensor on the second stage should allow for some retargeting in case of overkill. Perhaps the more interesting bit is that the outer stage is CHEAP. Larger missiles aren't always more expensive, which is important for your economics.
In my opinion, most of the designs here miss the point. To engage in conventional missile warfare is to spend a fortune. Beam warships, though cheaper in the long run, have major problems actually winning fights. The winning move isn't better optimized missiles, it's avoiding the problem altogether.
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Size 1 attack missiles are fun in a different way. You have ridiculous cost ratios like 3. With a size 2 bus, yours takes more AMM magazine space to intercept than it takes for you to launch it.
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Well, I might as well give my thoughts. You can't fight a war without an economy, so I like to minimize costs. What are the greatest expenses?
1: Losing a fight.
Losing warships is rather worse than losing missiles, by all means. Among other things, you want to survive if the fight isn't going your way. Jorgen suggested heavy anti-missile defense and armor, I prefer range and speed, which brings me to point 2.
If you read closely and followed the discussion then range and speed is my number one priority as well, and I agree completely with your assessment. ;)
I'm convince though that in the end large heavily armoured missiles will be much more economical when you consider the tactical and strategical applications.
You could also do the math of how much more efficient a larger yiled is compared to a smaller yield on a missile. It's not like a yield 12 is only double as effective as a yield 6. Its more like four (or maybe more) times as effective in practical terms because of how armour works.
2: AMM fire.
AMMs cost a LOT. Armor is frequently cheaper, until you factor in the cost of extra engines/SY size. Getting shot at is a bad propositio
As far as I'm aware I have factored in the total price per MSP versus smaller missiles.
All in all your tactic is interesting. The biggest problem I have with slow buses is that they can be intercepted and so can the scouts that use the active scanner (I know because I do that too). As soon as the active scanner is broadcast it will be hunted by frigates and interceptors and early warning crafts will be launched to intercept any slow moving missile targets if those are used.
I'm in no way saying that it's not a viable tactic but as everything else it is based on an enemy that have no direct defences against it. It is pretty smart though to collect all the missile salvoes in one big salvo. Might even go the stretch and say it is a bit too much to try and use the game mechanics to gain an unbalanced advantage, but that's only my humble opinion. ;)
Anyway all decent battle groups in my game include smaller frigates and/or frigate squadron whose job it is to hunt scouts, Fighter, FAC and/or missile boats etc... Some frigates may even have one or two small beam interceptors (125-250ton) to get rid of unarmed scouts. An interceptor at magneto plasma level can easily have 12000+km/s speed and will destroy any unarmed scouts before the missiles arrive at their target.
Or the frigates is armed with fast anti craft missiles. If you knock out the sensor platform you also knock out all the missiles. So sensor platforms will also need protection or you will need many of them in different places and just hope they are not all intercepted before your missiles reach their targets.
The most glaring weakness I can spot in your set up would be the very short range of your scanners and fire-controls. Most active anti fighter or FAC defence will spot them long before they can open fire on any main battle group.
All in all, I use similar tactics but instead use faster missiles and thus minimize the response time by the enemy screen to engage my sensor or attacking platforms.
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Obviously it's a rather specialized design. :D That's just the beauty of working with fighters, specialization costs nothing.
If you read closely and followed the discussion then range and speed is my number one priority as well, and I agree completely with your assessment. ;)
Apparently I didn't read carefully enough, I was mostly looking at the designs you posted.
But on to this point:
I'm convince though that in the end large heavily armoured missiles will be much more economical when you consider the tactical and strategical applications.
You could also do the math of how much more efficient a larger yiled is compared to a smaller yield on a missile. It's not like a yield 12 is only double as effective as a yield 6. Its more like four (or maybe more) times as effective in practical terms because of how armour works.
As far as I'm aware I have factored in the total price per MSP versus smaller missiles.
I've done some math on sandpapering. The very rough numbers:
16 WH = 22. 15 * 1 WH missiles
9 WH = 11. 25 * 1 WH missiles
4 WH = 4. 5 * 1 WH missiles
2 WH has basically no boost.
Here's your proposed heavy armor missile:
Capital armoured size 12 missile
Missile Size: 12 MSP (0.6 HS) Warhead: 9 Armour: 4 Manoeuvre Rating: 10
Speed: 33300 km/s Engine Endurance: 67 minutes Range: 134.0m km
Cost Per Missile: 8.25
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 333% 3k km/s 110% 5k km/s 66.6% 10k km/s 33.3%
Materials Required: 3.25x Tritanium 5x Gallicite Fuel x3750And here's a simple size 2, using slightly worse tech (5x warhead):
Missile Size: 2 MSP (0.1 HS) Warhead: 2 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 10
Speed: 33600 km/s Engine Endurance: 74 minutes Range: 148.2m km
Cost Per Missile: 1.34
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 336% 3k km/s 110% 5k km/s 67.2% 10k km/s 33.6%
Materials Required: 0.5x Tritanium 0.84x Gallicite Fuel x1000
Aside from slightly worse fuel requirements (that can probably be optimized away), 6x size 2 missiles is basically just better. Conclusion: smaller missiles are superior for sheer anti AMM ability. High yield is another story. But do we want high yield? I'll take your spear class as an example of balanced ASM and AMM capabilities. Assuming 40 internal htk (just how badly off is that??), I get:
~37 High yield capital missiles for a kill. (402 BP) (~450 MSP) (~half killed by AMMs)
~327 Size 2 missiles. (438 BP) (~750 MSP)
Barring enough launchers to penetrate AMM defense altogether (and maybe even then), I guess we do want high yield! Firing one type, then the other could work better, but we have no way of knowing if our opponent has kept some AMMs in stock just in case. I don't really know the mechanics of mixed salvos, so I won't get into that. Lets try shooting down your vindicator instead. (htk 20?)
~45 High yield (480 BP) (535 MSP) (>35 killed by AMMs)
~220 Size 2 (295 BP) (440 MSP)
And a back of hand calculation suggests size 1 missiles would take 3/4s the cost and space of size 2s in this case.
Unsurprisingly, as the ratio of AMMs to armor goes up, small missiles improve. However, within common parameters (long range, high armor ships), it looks like you're right: Large armored missiles are superior. Good to know :)
I'll try to get some numbers for MIRVs tomorrow, but I'm out of time.
Oh, the python 2. 7 script I'm using, if anyone wants it:
import random
armorstrength = 5
armorlength = 30
htk = 20
iterations = 1000
print "missiles" + "\t" + "warhead"
hit = 0
hits = 0.0
for j in range(0,iterations):
armor = [armorstrength] * armorlength
damage = 0
while (damage<htk):
hits += 1
hit = random.randint(0, (armorlength-9))
armor[hit+0] -= 1
armor[hit+1] -= 2
armor[hit+2] -= 3
armor[hit+3] -= 4
armor[hit+4] -= 4
armor[hit+5] -= 3
armor[hit+6] -= 2
armor[hit+7] -= 1
armor[hit+8] -= 1
damage = 0
for i in range(0,armorlength-1):
if ((armor[i])<0):
damage -= armor[i]
print "WH 21:"
print str(hits/iterations) + "\t\t" + str(hits/iterations*21)
hit = 0
hits = 0.0
for j in range(0,iterations):
armor = [armorstrength] * armorlength
damage = 0
while (damage<htk):
hits += 1
hit = random.randint(0, (armorlength-7))
armor[hit+0] -= 1
armor[hit+1] -= 2
armor[hit+2] -= 3
armor[hit+3] -= 4
armor[hit+4] -= 3
armor[hit+5] -= 2
armor[hit+6] -= 1
damage = 0
for i in range(0,armorlength-1):
if ((armor[i])<0):
damage -= armor[i]
print "WH 16:"
print str(hits/iterations) + "\t\t" + str(hits/iterations*16)
hit = 0
hits = 0.0
for j in range(0,iterations):
armor = [armorstrength] * armorlength
damage = 0
while (damage<htk):
hits += 1
hit = random.randint(0, (armorlength-5))
armor[hit] -= 1
armor[hit+1] -= 2
armor[hit+2] -= 3
armor[hit+3] -= 2
armor[hit+4] -= 1
damage = 0
for i in range(0,armorlength-1):
if armor[i]<0:
damage -= armor[i]
print "WH 9:"
print str(hits/iterations) + "\t\t" + str(hits/iterations*9)
hit = 0
hits = 0.0
for j in range(0,iterations):
armor = [armorstrength] * armorlength
damage = 0
while (damage<htk):
hits += 1
hit = random.randint(0, (armorlength-3))
armor[hit+0] -= 1
armor[hit+1] -= 2
armor[hit+2] -= 1
damage = 0
for i in range(0,armorlength-1):
if armor[i]<0:
damage -= armor[i]
print "WH 4:"
print str(hits/iterations) + "\t\t" + str(hits/iterations*4)
hit = 0
hits = 0.0
for j in range(0,iterations):
armor = [armorstrength] * armorlength
damage = 0
while (damage<htk):
hits += 1
hit = random.randint(0, (armorlength-2))
armor[hit+0] -= 1
armor[hit+1] -= 1
damage = 0
for i in range(0,armorlength-1):
if armor[i]<0:
damage -= armor[i]
print "WH 2:"
print str(hits/iterations) + "\t\t" + str(hits/iterations*2)
hit = 0
hits = 0.0
for j in range(0,iterations):
armor = [armorstrength] * armorlength
damage = 0
while (damage<htk):
hits += 1
hit = random.randint(0, (armorlength-1))
armor[hit] -= 1
damage = 0
for i in range(0,armorlength-1):
if armor[i]<0:
damage -= armor[i]
print "WH 1:"
print str(hits/iterations) + "\t\t" + str(hits/iterations*1)
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Ok... first I will do a short disclaimer...
Me and probably many other players are regarding missiles smaller than size four for anti-ship duty to be a little broken, especially against the AI. At size four and up missiles are quite well balanced in capacity for different purposes. Size two and one missiles are especially broken against AMM which mean AMM will always be more expensive to use against them no matter what technology you use. Even at starting technology versus latest technology.
So, I will not argue the efficiency of a size two missile to saturate AMM. I think most (me included) don't go beneath size four for exactly that reason.
One good house rule could be that no ASM leave home with at least 1MSP worth of warhead and/or Agility. This would make size 2 warheads pretty gimped. I actually think I will use that in my current campaign. ;)
Note: In order to rectify the situation Steve might include some mechanic that the better armour technology a ship uses then there would be a higher certain chance a weapon would decrease in strength and do less damage on the armour matrix.
- At technology level 1 there would be a 10% chance a strength 1 weapon do half damage (rounded down to zero).
- At technology level 2 there would be a 20% chance for a size one weapon to do no damage and a 10% chance a size 2 weapon do 1 damage.
- At technology level 3 there would be a 30% chance a strength 1 weapon do no damage, 20% chance a strength 2 weapon do 1 damage and 10% chance a 3 strength weapon do 1 damage.
etc...
It will not satisfy the AMM aspect but a size two missile will practically do very little damage against later technology armour. Already at the fourth level there will be huge cost in damaging a ship with a size two with a low yield. Shields should probably get the same treatment to be on par with armour or perhaps even better at absorbing weapon damage this way
That aside there are still uses for the big missiles. I always use them in two versions as my first test actually showed and they are actually not that bad, just not exactly as good as a size two missile.
Here are three missiles I did some comparison with...
Missile Size: 8 MSP (0.4 HS) Warhead: 12 Armour: 1 Manoeuvre Rating: 12
Speed: 32000 km/s Engine Endurance: 8 minutes Range: 202.5m km
Cost Per Missile: 6.451
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 384% 3k km/s 120% 5k km/s 76.8% 10k km/s 38.4%
Materials Required: 2.575x Tritanium 3.456x Gallicite Fuel x2500
Missile Size: 8 MSP (0.4 HS) Warhead: 4 Armour: 2.15 Manoeuvre Rating: 12
Speed: 32000 km/s Engine Endurance: 8 minutes Range: 202.5m km
Cost Per Missile: 4.9807
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 384% 3k km/s 120% 5k km/s 76.8% 10k km/s 38.4%
Materials Required: 1.5375x Tritanium 3.4432x Gallicite Fuel x2475
Missile Size: 2 MSP (0.1 HS) Warhead: 2 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 11
Speed: 35200 km/s Engine Endurance: 17 minutes Range: 180.0m km
Cost Per Missile: 1.4056
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 387.2% 3k km/s 121% 5k km/s 77.4% 10k km/s 38.7%
Materials Required: 0.5x Tritanium 0.9056x Gallicite Fuel x1350
They all use the same technology levels. I obviously could added some more armour to the last size eight and reduced the yield even more, but that would make it very week and feels a little gamey.
The strategy is also to mix the missiles in the same salvo in a good mix in some manner or just fire one type if that is necessary. It will give you very good flexibility. A fleet would usually be equipped with about fifty fifty of these missiles but used very differently.
In the test below I only make about 20% damage on the ships, that is what I would aim for. 20% are usually good enough and mean the ship is severely damaged and usually quite unable to perform. Your script certainly made things much easier to see how really good these larger missiles really are.
AMM saturation
I counted that it takes 4 AMM to shoot down a size 8, just to have a number. That means it takes 4.4 missiles to down the size 2 missile.
The armour 3 size 8 missile (which is used to drain or overwhelm AMM/Beam defences) will take 12.9 AMM do shoot down while four size 2 will take 17.6 which means a space to efficiency ration of about 27% in advantage to the size 2. I could have reduced the yield to one since its purpose is not to destroy but saturate but U felt it a bit gamey. The efficiency ration would then be about 18%. The cost ratio is not so bad about 15% in favour of the size 2.
Hits with ASM against ships
When it comes to actually destroying things it becomes very interesting...
"1hit" in the test means how many missiles it take to start doing damage, this is also very important in my opinion.
4400 ton Frigate
3 layers of armour
23 width of ship
10 HTK (20% damage)
12 yield size 8 missile (yield 9 will actually be much more efficient)
1 Hit: 3 missiles (highly random)
20% damage: 4.4 missiles at 35MSP or 28BP
2 yield size 2 missile
1 Hit: 14 missilse
20% damage: 29.5 missiles at 59MSP or 41BP
6400 ton destroyer
5 layers of armour
30 width of ship
22 HTK (20% damage)
12 yield size 8 missile
1 hit: 4.1 missiles (33MSP)
20% damage: 9.5 missiles at 76MSP or 61BP
2 yield size 2 missile
1 Hit: 34 missiles (68MSP)
20% damage: 68.5 missiles at 137MSP or 96BP
12800 ton cruiser
8 layers of armour
48 width of ship
44 HTK (20% damage)
16 yield missile
1 Hit: 11 missiles (88MSP)
20% damage: 25 missiles at 200MSP
12 yield size 8 missile
1 Hit: 11 missiles (88MSP)
20% damage: 25 missiles at 200MSP or 161BP
2 yield size 2 missile
1 Hit: 92 missilse (184MSP)
20% damage: 182 missiles at 364MSP or 255BP
25600 ton battlecruiser
12 layers of armour
77 width of ship
67 HTK (20% damage)
16 yield missile
1 Hit: 20 missiles (160MSP)
20% damage: 42 missiles at 336MSP
12 yield size 8 missile
1 Hit: 29 missiles (232MSP)
20% damage: 58 missiles at 464MSP or 378BP
2 yield size 2 missile
1 Hit: 234 missilse (468MSP)
20% damage: 420 missiles at 840MSP or 588BP
The size 16 was just thrown in for good measure. As armour gets thicker and thicker on ships you will need better and better yield missiles to crack them, while lower yield missiles are better at cracking shallower armour while gaining other abilities (such as speed and smaller size).
It is also evident with using the script as technology increase the yield on a larger missile will continue to be more and more effective.
Regarding MIRV we all know they are very good at saturating AMM defences, but that is again because how good just a single point if damage is against armour/shields in comparison and how size don't scale well at size 1-3 as ASM.
Despite that MIRV in version 6 is very slow and not so hard to intercept if you know where the enemy are that fired them. So for MIRV its all about intercepting them before the munition is released. Something the AI obviously will not be able to deal with.
And by the way... that script was super nice... ;D
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RE missile sizes:
There was an old thread here (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,4926.0.html) about armour pen. and warheads. Called Optimal Missile Size and its still on the frontpage, so you may have read it before. Still, that was pre-6.2 so its good to have some new analysis.
This armchair is just too cosy to get out of. =D
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Hmm. We may have to disagree on what's gamey or unfair. From my point of view, in the cold war, MIRVs with dud warheads were designed for anti missile defense. If it was a good tactic in RL, why not in a game? It's not like you're required to use AMMs. They're just a good option. But if they're commonly used, why is it bad that specific anti AMM designs exist/would be used? Now, the AI IS kind of stupid, but it's just never going to be competitive with humans at tactics or design. Treat that fact as you will.
Are missiles broken because beams can't compete? If not, why are small missiles broken just because they can beat large missiles?
By both of our calculations, large armored missiles are still better unless you need to break through a LOT of point defense. Armor also lets you get through AMMs. Is armor broken?
Heh, if you check the numbers, it looks like ship armor is more effective than AMMs against the size 2 design or smaller.
On another side note, intercepting MIRVs requires knowing where they were launched from. MFCs can have rather better range than sensors, so the only defense is killing all the sensor ships before the MIRVs hit. Even that might not work if the missiles have their own sensors. I suppose you could guess where the missiles might come from, but such a tactic would never work if aurora wasn't simplified to 2d. That's what I consider gamey.
That old thread's kinda interesting. The extra fuel economy on larger missiles makes a huge difference.
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No I don't consider MIRV missiles to be broken. I only concider that using size one and two missiles as ASM is broken. I don't think they are broken as AMM drainers for MIRV.
I also mentioned that MIRV may be dealt with under the asumption you know where they are coming from. This is where your scouts come in and it is important that you have them. You need to take out enemyscouts and sensor platforms wherever possible. MIRVS can also be dealt pretty well with beam PD in combination of large shielded ships.
Allthough, personally I'm going to wait with using MIRVs until the missile tracking bonus is working for beam PD.
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The important part of the MIRV comment was the 'dud warhead' part.
I obviously could added some more armour to the last size eight and reduced the yield even more, but that would make it very week and feels a little gamey.
I was trying to say dud warheads aren't gamey -- they're a valid tactic if your opponent can't distinguish them easily.
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I have (in principle) no problems with duds either from a real life point of view. The major problem with the game are how mechanics work and that you can't prioritise to shoot down a bigger missile in favour of a smaller and that armour can't bounce small yield hits.
If you, for example, look at the changes Steve wants to include into New Aurora or Newtonian Aurora it is to prevent small yield weapons from being overpowered in comparison to the big weapons so that everything has its purpose.
What I mean is that a small missile such as size one or two (at the technology levels discussed) should carry yields far to weak to make an impact on armour and thus automated defences and AMM should be able to ignore them in favour of bigger more imminent threat.
The best strategy in the game would be to launch a bunch of size 1 missiles with the same speed as a big missile and add some armour to it. It is cheap and extremely effective.
Missile Size: 1 MSP (0.05 HS) Warhead: 0 Armour: 0.1 Manoeuvre Rating: 10
Speed: 32000 km/s Engine Endurance: 97 minutes Range: 186.8m km
Cost Per Missile: 0.425
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 320% 3k km/s 100% 5k km/s 64% 10k km/s 32%
Materials Required: 0.025x Tritanium 0.4x Gallicite Fuel x1000
Missile Size: 8 MSP (0.4 HS) Warhead: 12 Armour: 1 Manoeuvre Rating: 12
Speed: 32000 km/s Engine Endurance: 102 minutes Range: 195.6m km
Cost Per Missile: 6.754
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 384% 3k km/s 120% 5k km/s 76.8% 10k km/s 38.4%
Materials Required: 3.25x Tritanium 3.504x Gallicite Fuel x2025
The problem with game mechanics are that they can't be targeted individually and you will be forced to shoot down all the small missiles. In real life with advanced targeting system you could most probably concentrate on the big missiles first. To me this is a gamey tactic. Second I role-play that small yield are too small to hurt heavy ship armour, like shooting at a battleship with a 20mm gun. Therefore (in my opinion) the game breaks down when you use missiles such as size 1-3 as ASM. And you should never mix differently sized missiles since the game mechanics can't really deal with them. The game becomes one sided and you loose the nuances of all the combat systems. The game will just devolve into missile platforms and finding the opponent. Actually invading someone that is not the AI becomes pretty much impossible when you factor in ground listening posts.
I would have no real issues using dud missiles as long as they are the same size. It's pretty reasonable to say that it is impossible to tell the live ones from the duds.
I'm probably not alone on these forum to refrain from using smaller missiles as ASM for the same reasoning that I use.
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Ah. I'll admit to not really having known the mechanics of manually targeting missiles. I guess I'll agree with you on mixing different size missiles.
I will point out that 'small yield' in this case involves nukes. You mention newtonian aurora, but, if I read correctly, even small missiles there could one shot ships.
The ability to add damage reduction sounds like a really cool idea to me, and should probably be brought up in the suggestions thread, as well as the problem with chaff missiles.
I think we may have exhausted the thread now. Any further arguing about which deliberately suboptimal design is the best seems kinda pointless. Within the restraints we've set, I think mixing cheap armored missiles with high yield of the same size is going to be best for most circumstances.
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Well, its still fun to discuss tactics, even if done with some restriction. It is also perfectly fine to discuss tactics using small missiles and so forth, they are after all part of the current game.
I still think that others may benefit regardless, any restrictions anyone uses are personal.
I hope we all agree that we play the way we all think is fun, there is no right way. :)
I might also say that there are obviously many tactics to combat heavy missiles. So making your strategy completely depending on them can become as problematic as anything else.
Yesterday I made two fleets. One who was more traditional very much like my traditional Freedom fleet. Then I made one with all 20000 ton assault destroyers. They all had large portion of their hulls using high powered engines, passive defenses, point defenses, some AMM and lots of heavy particle beams. They simply charged the freedom fleet and slaughtered it... this was using same tech levels and colliers to resupply the freedom fleet.
My learning from that is that beam combat is as important as missiles. The only defense I can't seem to find a proper method for is using missiles in the combination above. Such defenses do simply not exist in the game. :(
Now... I just have to start playing my real campaign again and not play around with combat testing. So, back to real life. ;)
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Hosho class Frigate 6,000 tons 132 Crew 1149.25 BP TCS 120 TH 624 EM 0
5200 km/s Armour 4-29 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 14 PPV 13.25
Maint Life 2.44 Years MSP 479 AFR 72% IFR 1% 1YR 111 5YR 1658 Max Repair 312 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Spare Berths 1
Magazine 534
624 EP Magneto-plasma Drive (1) Power 624 Fuel Use 80.93% Signature 624 Exp 13%
Fuel Capacity 540,000 Litres Range 20.0 billion km (44 days at full power)
Size 1 Missile Launcher (5) Missile Size 1 Rate of Fire 5
Size 5 Missile Launcher (33% Reduction) (5) Missile Size 5 Rate of Fire 500
Missile Fire Control FC92-R20 (1) Range 93.0m km Resolution 20
Missile Fire Control FC62-R1 (1) Range 62.4m km Resolution 1
Size 5 Missile Stage (20) Speed: 21,800 km/s End: 45.8m Range: 60.1m km WH: 0 Size: 5 TH: 72/43/21
Size 1 Anti-missile Missile (434) Speed: 38,400 km/s End: 2.8m Range: 6.4m km WH: 1 Size: 1 TH: 358/215/107I went ahead and designed this frigate based off my usual frigate design. The fallout of the engine changes is pretty massive, I think I will need to put tankers with my ships now.
Just a reflection...
I learned the hard way that you do not want your engines to be too big on a smaller ships. The problem is when the engine is damaged due to combat. It take you twice its cost in supply to repair and often they can't do that. So they will have to be tractored to safety. Often that is not an option.
Unless you don't care for damaged ships that is... ;)
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Jorgen_CAB
To your point about different approaches...
In the equivalent role of the " Iron Fist" TG I'd be using 6 25k ships. Using the research points I extrapolate from the test battle post my tech choices would have been very different. The result is a class that has armor 6, delta shieldsx36 (90), single 30cm C3 Plasma Carronade, 1 BFC 4xRange, 1 quad GC R1 (1x12) turret, 1 BFC 4xSpeed, 10 sz1 ROF-5 std launchers, 1 res1 4hs(3m/km vs sz6 msl) MFC, 12 sz4 ROF-20 std launchers, 4 res100 2.75(190m/km vs 5k/ton) MFC's, magazine capacity for 47 salvos sz1 48/kps wh1 m24 and 22 salvos sz4 40k/kps wh6 m10, 1 res100 8hs(184m/km vs 5k/ton) AS, 1 res1 12hs(3m/km vs sz6 msl) AS, 1 sz4 EM Sensor, 1 ECM-2, 5 conpact ECCM-1, 1m liters fuel. And 12 months crewquarters.
This is just the extrapolation using my prototyping worksheet not actual games stats. But does follow my design protocols for 25k/ton battlecruisers. On paper the AMM's should stop all 120 other either torpedo version and only expend about 70% of the on-board stock. Conversely the ASM's likely wouldn't penetrate a Liberty's armor belt. The ASM damage potential is do to having 1 more salvo per volley than the defending TG has defensive fire controls.
Though the missile bombardment version would be a very different result. It was developed to address the issue of heavy GC turret usage when they were introduced to Aurora. The above stat's drop the shields, PD turret, and offensive beam in favor of adding another 9 sz4 launchers and 3 MFC's. This configuration has a volley of 42 salvos of 3 missile each. That's 20 salvos more than the defending TG has the ability to intercept. It should only take about half the ASM's in the magazines to at least disable all 3 Liberty BC's.
Both of these standard TG's are vulerable to smallcraft swarms designed to using res100 1hs(69m/km vs 5k/ton) MFC's.
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In essence I would like to point out (as I did in that post with the test) that both fleets were suboptimal by design and that I intentionally avoided gauss cannon spam.
It is more than doable to counter missile fire-controls with gauss pd fire-controls they are roughly equal in cost but the gauss cannon are practically free in comparison with all the missiles that you need to produce to support the missile weapon system.
In a normal fleet I usually attach frigate escorts based on my intel on the enemy and what type of ordnance I know that they use. If I'm unsure I go with one AMM frigate, one laser frigate and one gauss frigate. There might sometimes be a few more beam armed frigates for every AMM. Gauss frigattes are between 4500-4800tons and have two 67% quad turrets each with a fire-control. They are specifically designed to combat fighter launched salvoes.
Even trying to compare is rather futile because any fleet composition anyone make here can be countered somehow. My balanced fleet composition can probably be beaten by any other composition but not easily by anyone in equal size at least. By providing a large compliment of beam PD I make sure that I free up my industry and naval yards for producing more ships or infrastructure instead of expensive missiles. When beams fire their ammunition is free. They are also complimented by AMM that can be used if I feel there is a need for them. It is possible to target AMM by hand. That way I can destroy entire salvoes instead of saturating every salvo with a few missiles. I just need to make sure I have a high fleet training level on my ships. ;)
You must agree that in the engagement between the Freedom and Iron Fist fleet the Freedom fleet came out on top in terms of industrial capacity in replacing their respective losses after the engagement?
Below are some comparison in cost of different systems using approximately the same technology levels.
70mm Phalanx PD System (67% miniaturized quad turret), size 20.61, Cost 119
Point-defence Fire-control, size 4, cost 77
This turret will on average shoot down about 4-5 equal technology fast missiles per turn.
Total space: 25 HS, 1250 tons
Total cost: 196 BP
3 size 4 missile launchers, size 12, cost 84
Missile Fire-control, size 3, cost 63
Magazine space for 21 salvoes missiles, size 15, cost 90
63 size 4 missiles, cost about 220
Total space: 30 HS, 1500 tons
Total cost: 457 BP
So, in general it is very hard to out perform a PD turret in terms of both combat and industrial efficiency when you use full size launchers. In my opinion this is a good thing because it is generally easier to attack then defend so defence should in general be slightly cheaper in comparison.
The above turret is the most common point defence system on my ships in general. My laser PD frigate only has one fire control but their role is engaging larger salvoes of heavy missiles. They generally come in waves of 10-20 in each salvo so one fire control is more than enough in one battery with two quad turrets.
All in all I feel that there are no direct point in saying you can't counter full sized launchers. Its only when you go below size four you will have a chance to beat them in combat efficiency but not in industrial efficiency. Size two beat them without question. But in my games I don't use ASM with size less than four anyway.
My suggestion could be to increase the number of launchers to five per fire control and include two armoured dud or yield 1-2 missiles and three high yield missiles. That would certainly make my defence much more dicier if countered with a great number of gauss PD systems. There would be allot more leaks from every salvo.
Weasel missiles help with AMM saturations as well. Lets say that your first three salvoes have three weasels and two regular missiles. The next three has three regular and two weasels while the next three are only regular. You then start with weasels again of you have to to make sure your regular missile hits home. Weasel missiles are also incredibly cheap to produce.
Something like this could work perhaps...
Missile Size: 4 MSP (0.2 HS) Warhead: 6 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 10
Speed: 40000 km/s Engine Endurance: 61 minutes Range: 146.0m km
Cost Per Missile: 3.5
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 400% 3k km/s 130% 5k km/s 80% 10k km/s 40%
Materials Required: 1.5x Tritanium 2x Gallicite Fuel x1250
Missile Size: 4 MSP (0.2 HS) Warhead: 0 Armour: 1 Manoeuvre Rating: 10
Speed: 40000 km/s Engine Endurance: 61 minutes Range: 146.0m km
Cost Per Missile: 2.25
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 400% 3k km/s 130% 5k km/s 80% 10k km/s 40%
Materials Required: 0.25x Tritanium 2x Gallicite Fuel x1250
When this method is used relying on AMM alone will be a very expensive proposition indeed. You will probably be force to start using a serious part of your PD duty to beam weapons.
And... lets not argue this as if it was a competition... (my fleet is bigger and tougher than yours) neither will win. ;)
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Here is another interesting approach I have been contemplating. It actually is reasonably cheap and I could produce this ship in my military auxiliary ship yards.
Broadsword class Strike Cruiser 20,000 tons 447 Crew 3433.5 BP TCS 400 TH 1920 EM 1500
4800 km/s Armour 6-65 Shields 50-300 Sensors 11/11/0/0 Damage Control Rating 12 PPV 100
Maint Life 2.17 Years MSP 1314 AFR 261% IFR 3.6% 1YR 374 5YR 5603 Max Repair 480 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Spare Berths 0
Magazine 1200
NPE-2500-0960-039 Magneto-plasma Stardrive (2) Power 960 Fuel Use 39.43% Signature 960 Exp 12%
Fuel Capacity 1,000,000 Litres Range 22.8 billion km (55 days at full power)
SH-025-300 Delta class Shield Generator (20) Total Fuel Cost 250 Litres per hour (6,000 per day)
CIWS-16000-32-06 Guardian PD System (1x6) Range 1000 km TS: 16000 km/s ROF 5 Base 50% To Hit
TLS-10-10000 Torpedo Launch System (40) Missile Size 10 Rate of Fire 10000
TLCS-557-180-11 Torpedo Launch Control System (4) Range 557.9m km Resolution 180
AST-470-072-XX Vindicator class LR Weasel Torpedo (40) Speed: 7,200 km/s End: 624.8m Range: 419.9m km WH: 0 Size: 10 TH: 24/14/7
AST-461-072-12 Tornado class LR Capitol Torpedo (80) Speed: 7,200 km/s End: 615.4m Range: 415.9m km WH: 0 Size: 10 TH: 24/14/7
TH-011-11 Naval IR Sensor (1) Sensitivity 11 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 11m km
EM-011-11 Naval EM Detection System (1) Sensitivity 11 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 11m km
ECM 10
AST-200-32-XX Vindicator class Weasel Torpedo
Missile Size: 8 MSP (0.4 HS) Warhead: 1 Armour: 3 Manoeuvre Rating: 10
Speed: 32000 km/s Engine Endurance: 104 minutes Range: 200.4m km
Cost Per Missile: 4.2
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 320% 3k km/s 100% 5k km/s 64% 10k km/s 32%
Materials Required: 1x Tritanium 3.2x Gallicite Fuel x2075
AST-195-32-12 Tornado class Capitol Torpedo
Missile Size: 8 MSP (0.4 HS) Warhead: 12 Armour: 1 Manoeuvre Rating: 12
Speed: 32000 km/s Engine Endurance: 102 minutes Range: 195.6m km
Cost Per Missile: 6.754
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 384% 3k km/s 120% 5k km/s 76.8% 10k km/s 38.4%
Materials Required: 3.25x Tritanium 3.504x Gallicite Fuel x2025
The missiles are not really optimised and could perhaps be reduced in range a bit but I just took the designs I had.
This would obviously be a highly specialised missile strike cruiser and be operated in independent squadrons of three to five ships attached to battle-groups in need of extra heavy artillery fire-power.
The ship is pretty cheap at about 3500 BP and its ordnance has total cost of about 800 BP
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can other players see two different types of missiles coming at them? or can they not determine which ones are armored and which ones have warheads?
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can other players see two different types of missiles coming at them? or can they not determine which ones are armored and which ones have warheads?
They can tell the difference, but you don't get a choice of which to shoot. You shoot all of them or none of them (or you manually target, which is 5s slower per salvo and subject to fire delay)
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I have a question about armored missiles. Do they work let's say with 0.5 armouring or the armor has to be exactly 1 or more?
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I have a question about armored missiles. Do they work let's say with 0.5 armouring or the armor has to be exactly 1 or more?
Acording to Steve they should work with fractions from an old post I found. But my investigations by testing seem to show that fractions below one does not work. Testing fractions above one is harder. I have reported it as a bug a while ago.
I stick with whole numbers for now.
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Thanks.
By the way after my experience with the swarm i decided to design a special missile for countering their high speed FACs. It is on ion tech and has a reduced range in the favor of speed and agility and IR sesnsors.
AS-52 Sidearm
Missile Size: 5 MSP (0.25 HS) Warhead: 4 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 17
Speed: 25200 km/s Engine Endurance: 13 minutes Range: 20.0m km
Thermal Sensor Strength: 0.0296 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 29,600 km
Cost Per Missile: 3.3036
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 428.4% 3k km/s 136% 5k km/s 85.7% 10k km/s 42.8%
Materials Required: 1x Tritanium 0.0174x Boronide 0.0296x Uridium 2.2566x Gallicite Fuel x475
Development Cost for Project: 330RP
I am not sure about the thermal sensors. Is their range ok for targeting FACs?
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They can tell the difference, but you don't get a choice of which to shoot. You shoot all of them or none of them (or you manually target, which is 5s slower per salvo and subject to fire delay)
Yes, and that is normally why you don't want to run with zero yield armoured missiles or those with very low yield. They can be safely ignored but it means more micromanagement to do so and you might loose some small efficiency since whenever you give them a new target you loose 5 seconds.
It should also not be used to saturate enemy PD with firing more salvoes. Because in essence you get two salvoes from each fire control for PD to engage and PD will engage every missile.
If you are playing against another player I would just make up some ground rules for how you want to play it. The easiest is probably that no manual targeting of AMM is allowed and that salvoes with mixed missiles has to be big enough so you don't saturate enemy beam PD fire-controls that way, or just a rule that you can't mix missiles in the same FC.
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Thanks.
By the way after my experience with the swarm i decided to design a special missile for countering their high speed FACs. It is on ion tech and has a reduced range in the favor of speed and agility and IR sesnsors.
I am not sure about the thermal sensors. Is their range ok for targeting FACs?
Well, those little buggers have a 160 thermal signature and a 10000 km/s speed...
Your thermal sensors seems quite weak for this purpose
(I think that you need to be able to detect the ennemy after a 5 second movement phase - so you'll need a 50000 km detection range for a thermal signature of 160 / more than 300000 km for a thermal signature of 1000 if the formula is linear)