Hi, I have a few misc. questions about the less-commonly used weapons systems.
I'm a deep RPer, I like my ships to have cool weapons, even if they're not minmaxed to the max, but it's nice to know how this stuff works at the strategic level.
1: Are Particle Beams good for anything at all? I fail to see how particle beams can offer up anything a laser can't. My laser tech is only slightly more advanced than my particle beam tech, but it's doing 24 damage falling off at a range of 800,000 km, while my particle beams are doing exactly 6 damage throughout a range of 200,000 km. They are only slightly smaller and faster than a laser cannon. Is there any reason to arm a ship with them.
2: My close-in frigate fleets are going to mount 3 25 cm railguns and 2 30 cm plasma carronades. Is this functionally any better than just slapping 2 more railguns on there? Range isn't an issue with these guys, they're supposed to be fast and close the distance immediately.
3: Why are missiles on this forum so darn small? Everybody uses designs with missiles sized 3-5. I want my strategic missile cruiser to be able to project power nearly systemwide, with large vollys of super slow firing, very long ranged missiles. I have some size-10 designs that do pretty significant damage over long ranges, and the missiles still go pretty fast (20,000+ kps). Aside from the obvious and quite-flavorful downsides (missiles take forever to reach their target) is there anything about this strategy I'm missing?
4: I want a bomber. The best way I can think to do this is have a very large (size 12) box-mounted missile with a phenomenally short range (1 million km, tops) but otherwise high-velocity, high agility, high warhead properties. My tiny, thermally shielded bombers would get in close and drop 2-3 of these each, then pull away. Is this a viable strategy?
5: I'm a little unclear about how missile fire controls and missile attacks in general work.
a) obviously weapons need a target to shoot at. Can missile fire controls attack a target that's only been detected by thermal sensors, or do they need active scanners?
b) does the missile fire control provide its own active scanning power, or does it need to be supported by another active scanner?
c) can missiles be fired at things that show up on a scanner, but are below the resolution of the missile fire control itself (in my experience, the answer seems to be "yes", but i can't tell for sure
most importantly
d) how do missiles with onboard sensors work? Every time I've tried this, it's been a dud. Surely there's a way to fire a missile blindly at a waypoint in empty space and have it lock onto an enemy craft with onboard senors. I like the idea of firing a cluster of heat-seeking or radar-guided missiles at an enemy fleet and having the missiles break and do the work, but every time I try that, the missiles either blow right past the fleet (toward a waypoint behind them) or just sit their while the fleet rolls past (if fired at a waypoint in front of them). I've even tried deleting the waypoint and the events stream says something like "the missile will find a new target"...and it doesn't, while enemies sit within sensor range.