Hmm, possibly I mis-read your earlier post. If you're talking about firing missiles at a waypoint near an intermittent contact, then I think it needs to be multi-stage. If you're talking about firing a big volley of missiles at one ship in a fleet and having them spread to other targets once the targeted ship is dead, that won't work, as they all hit simultaneously. Following saloves should re-target in that situation though.
Ah! I see. Thanks for explaining. That's tricky then as I am using short range missiles in box launchers, around the 1m km mark. So the reload mechanics dont come into play for salvos. I can see how that would be useful with a stream of long range missiles approach but it looks like it wont help me with the swarm.
I think its fair gameplay that salvos hit simultaneously. Makes sense from a mechanical perspective.
Thinking out loud, the problem with all missile salvos is PD attrition militates maximising simultaneous missile strike counts.
There is one situation where this might be discounted and that would be guarding a jump gate, where the enemy fleet has jump shock so you have a finite time to hit them without PD defences from hull or turret mounted beam weapons (not CIWS though which I understand will operate). You could launch kill salvos followed by mop up salvos for any lucky survivors consecutively from a range of about 3 missile flight intervals without having to worry about the targeting of the second salvo. This is less risky than from a closer range of one missile flight interval which you would need to use if you wanted to see the result of the first salvo before targeting the second without wasting time while the jump shock wears off.
One thing I have learned is its more useful for larger missiles as it takes too much warhead space away from smaller ones.
Feels like I have manufactured a not very useful missile design tbh but I will try them out to learn better strats.
Missile Size: 1.6993 MSP (4.24825 Tons) Warhead: 4 Radiation Damage: 4 Manoeuvre Rating: 25
Speed: 51,551 km/s Fuel: 142 Flight Time: 32 seconds Range: 1,649,619 km
Thermal Sensor Strength: 0.14 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 2,958,040 km
Cost Per Missile: 3.9068 Development Cost: 312
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 1288.8% 3k km/s 429.6% 5k km/s 257.8% 10k km/s 128.9%
PS another 2021 reference saying mines are bugged, still not clear when/if this was fixed, have not been able to find it in the update fixes
https://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=12300.msg146400#msg146400