Stealth with decoys

[SteelChicken]

Your ship looks unnecessary large.   Stealth ships work best if stealth is all they do.   No shields, no armor, no weapons.   Shrink it down, reduce engine size and give it more speed.

Small and fast is way more important for stealth ships used for scouting purposes.

[Rich.h (OP)]

Your ship looks unnecessary large.   Stealth ships work best if stealth is all they do.   No shields, no armor, no weapons.   Shrink it down, reduce engine size and give it more speed.

Small and fast is way more important for stealth ships used for scouting purposes.

All depends on your perspective, when you consider I tend to normally play with multi 100kt vessels and am currently looking towards getting a first million ton ship then these are small. In addition at my current tech level this is about as small as I can make this type of ship while meeting all the design requirements placed on it.

[Rich.h (OP)]

I had another idea on this front about how to make it something of a more offensive weapon too. By taking advantage of missiles with sensors I can effectively do away with a needed active sensor which is often a primary give away of your position (assuming you have already taken steps to reduce TH and the like). After seeing in another thread that you can just fire a missile at a way point I figured why not combine it with missile sensors. A quick play about gave me this concept for a bomber.

Hunt class Fighter-bomber    1 000 tons     3 Crew     554.9 BP      TCS 20  TH 34.56  EM 0
14400 km/s     Armour 1-8     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 1     PPV 11.25
Maint Life 11.9 Years     MSP 347    AFR 8%    IFR 0.1%    1YR 5    5YR 68    Max Repair 180 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 0.1 months    Spare Berths 1   
Magazine 75   

Powedll Class 3 Fusion Drive (2)    Power 144    Fuel Use 106.92%    Signature 17.28    Exp 15%
Fuel Capacity 30 000 Litres    Range 5.1 billion km   (4 days at full power)

Law Foundation Size 15 Box Launcher (5)    Missile Size 15    Hangar Reload 112.5 minutes    MF Reload 18.7 hours
Hellmann Missile Targeting R-100 (1)     Range 172.8m km    Resolution 100
Size 15 Spacial AST (4)  Speed: 24 600 km/s   End: 93.1m    Range: 137.5m km   WH: 13    Size: 14.967    TH: 90/54/27

Each bomber is armed with 5 of the following missiles in box launchers.

Missile Size: 14.967 MSP  (0.74835 HS)     Warhead: 13    Armour: 1     Manoeuvre Rating: 11
Laser Heads: 3
Speed: 24600 km/s    Engine Endurance: 93 minutes   Range: 137.5m km
Active Sensor Strength: 2.4   Sensitivity Modifier: 240%
Resolution: 50    Maximum Range vs 2500 ton object (or larger): 4 070 000 km
ECM Level: 4
Cost Per Missile: 14.14
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 270.6%   3k km/s 88%   5k km/s 54.1%   10k km/s 27.1%

My thinking is that a wing of these can launch from around 1bkm away from a potential target, then make their way instantly off to one side for a couple of 100mkm before then turning to the target. While the missile ranges are not that great the bombers themselves do not give out that large of a TH signature and so should be able to get within maximum firing range without detection. A single missile can then be launched at a way point located near the target vessel, while the missile is in motion the bomber wing then moves away and off to a second firing position, they repeat this for all five missiles before finally moving off in a random pattern before finally coming back to their home carrier. The bombers themselves have enough range to ensure they can enact a nice little dance around half of Sol before needing to come home and so the carrier should be able to always remain hidden.

The second part of the concept is in the missiles and their sensors package, once they reach a way point the missile activates it's own on board sensor and locates a target nearby (4mkm in this case). Since they do not move terribly fast by missile standards and the fact there is only a small salvo size, a careless captain could be fooled into letting their short range and CIWS defences deal with the threat. But then the laser warheads kick in meaning such defences are rendered useless and a vessel is left venting atmosphere unless it has a large amount of armour. Since there was no active sensor ping to locate, then all a ship captain has to look at is a number of small missile salvos coming at them from various directions that also happen to keep putting small holes in their ship.

Now granted unless I was to field a large or multiple wings of these bombers then they are not going to be bringing down battleships and the like all by themselves. But my main thinking is that they will turn smaller forces into a soft target that will likely have lost many of their internal systems, or in the case of larger ships a lucky hit may just cause secondary explosions. But most importantly of all is that with careful flying all of this can be accomplished without the enemy having an idea of my location. Thus my own ships can maintain the initiative in combat.

I am also toying with the idea of putting reduced size launchers instead of box launchers onto a stealth boat equipped with sensor buoys and cloaking abilities. This way it can simply act like a lone wolf in a system being able to both spy on the general forces, and make occasional strikes on high value targets. However I think this will need some work for both very high deployment times, along with large magazines which in turn will mean a bigger ship and so perhaps be limited with much weaker engines to keep the TH down.

[bean]

There's a couple problems here.  First, laser warheads, IIRC, don't actually work.  At all.  I experimented with them once, and they're basically just worse as currently implemented.  (It's been a while, though.)
Second, the missiles fire off their sensors as soon as they are launched.  If you want to activate near the WP target, you'll need to make them 2-stage, with the sensor in the second stage.  (This may not be a bad idea for other reasons, as you can make the second stage much faster than the first.) 

I tried something similar a couple times, and even used it in battle once or twice.  In that case, they were essentially submarines instead of being fighters, with lots of stealth and sensored missiles.  I'd jump them in to a system I was planning to take over before hostilities broke out and have them hide, then fire off their 'torpedoes' to open the JP.  But it wasn't really worth the work, because I had to be able to force JPs anyway.

The easy way to keep them from knowing about the launching force is to put your active sensors on specialized vessels that are separated from the missile units.  Build those as small as possible, and then scatter half a dozen around the enemy fleet.  I'd go with 2-stage missiles, as the current rules make them quite effective.  Switch between active platforms to keep the enemy from hunting them down.

[Rich.h (OP)]

Ah I see I was under the idea that missiles with sensors when fired at a waypoint would not activate until they reached said waypoint. Also can you be certain about laser warheads, everything I have read including recent posts said that they function in a way that means they fire at a short range, but outside of CIWS range and so they effectively skip CIWS, part of the balancing being that they also do less damage?

[83athom]

Laser warhead skip all final fire defenses so can only be engaged by AMMs or area defense.

[bean]

Ah I see I was under the idea that missiles with sensors when fired at a waypoint would not activate until they reached said waypoint. Also can you be certain about laser warheads, everything I have read including recent posts said that they function in a way that means they fire at a short range, but outside of CIWS range and so they effectively skip CIWS, part of the balancing being that they also do less damage?

I looked a bit, and it seems you're right.  I'm a bit disturbed that I didn't know that.  That said, they were so weak when I last tried to use them that I gave up in frustration.  But against the right enemy, it could be very useful...
<frantically starts redesigning missiles>

[Rich.h (OP)]

After looking at the damage template and how they laser warheads work I have found a flaw in this design though. Due to how they have their damage split it means these missiles will only punch into 2 layers of armour with 3 hits from each missile. So they will work more like railguns that appear to come from nowhere and skipping past close range defences. Not ideal for a lone wolf type craft as I would have to heavily increase the missile size to ensure it was able to do large amounts of single hit damage. but I think this bomber idea still has merit if it was instead use to target smaller craft that were likely acting as escort vessels. They should have less armour layers on them and so it could be viable as a means to strip away the defensive capabilities of an opposing fleet before moving in to strike at the larger craft.

[bean]

After looking at the damage template and how they laser warheads work I have found a flaw in this design though. Due to how they have their damage split it means these missiles will only punch into 2 layers of armour with 3 hits from each missile. So they will work more like railguns that appear to come from nowhere and skipping past close range defences. Not ideal for a lone wolf type craft as I would have to heavily increase the missile size to ensure it was able to do large amounts of single hit damage. but I think this bomber idea still has merit if it was instead use to target smaller craft that were likely acting as escort vessels. They should have less armour layers on them and so it could be viable as a means to strip away the defensive capabilities of an opposing fleet before moving in to strike at the larger craft.

I think laser heads are probably a bad choice for the role you're looking at here, actually.  You're talking about hitting soft targets, which means that they won't have heavy point defenses by definition.  Their PD efficiency is almost certainly going to be capped by their fire control situation.  Having, say, half a dozen of these fighters, all firing together would overwhelm the PD systems, and you'd almost certainly deliver more total damage, even after losing a missile or two, than you would if you used laser heads and none of them got shot down.

Or, if you want to be really tricky, use another kind of decoy.  Build a size 1 missile that's 100 km/s faster than the big one, and fit it with its own tiny sensor.  Then, replace 1 MSP of warhead with that, and set it to release at close to the target.  You'll have to be careful when doing this so you don't fire it at the WP you initially target, but it will end up ahead of the incoming missile, and draw off the PD fire.  You've just doubled the number of FC systems it takes to stop your salvo.

[bean]

Now I'm really confused.  I decided to try laser heads out again, so I fired up my 6.4 test game (I haven't bothered to update it all the way) and shot at one of my target platforms with laser-head missiles.  The CIWS was impotent, but the gauss turrets on final fire took out all of the missiles.  Clearly, something is wrong here.
Edit:
I decided to try again, this time turning off the gauss turrets, and discovered that the CIWS being impotent was bad luck.  It took out one of my two missiles, leading me to conclude that I was right and laser heads are basically useless at the moment.  I'm going to verify in 7.1, but I think we have a bug here.