Good ol' kinetic artillery for ships. They launch an explosive payload with no/minimal guidance (Excalibur?) after firing to impact and detonate on a target. Can be turreted.

To differentiate from lasers, they can use ammo placed in a magazine like missiles. Can have bore size researches, barrel length researches (both could affect tonnage), and also reliant on missile warhead research for damage. They can also show up as interceptable like missiles do, but they move their full length for their first tick on spawn unlike missiles that spawn on top of your ships for the first tick.

They also don't use energy and are reliant on a reloading tech for fire rate.

Please, can you share some examples of stations that you place at DSPs (far from planets)?
Do you prefer one large behemoth, filled with sensors, missiles, guns, refuelling capacity, MSP, hangar, etc.? or few smaller bases, each one specialised for one or two missions (that can be built in parallel, and each one easily moved by one tug)?

Year 7 in the noob galaxy

Someone found out how to remove gas from an atmosphere. You just choose which one and make sure the "add gas"-box is not checked.
The guy was awarded a contract for a bunch of terraform stations which were hauled to Venus to stay there for a very long time. The last manometer reading was 92.894 atm and falling.

It also turns out to be a bad idea to upgrade your Academy to Level 60. After relocating two levels to Luna I finally understood why nobody wanted to take charge of the bureaucratic monster I had created.

Further misadventures are sure to follow.

Two suggestions for the Class Design window.
1. For each component type, could we have the possibility to order the components in different ways, e.g., from older to younger ones, or according to their capability?
The alphabetic order we have now can be confusing sometimes. E.g., for MFCs: I developed FC103-R20, FC103-R5, etc., up to FC164-R20 that are now listed before than FC17-R1, but they have much longer ranges than the last one, so I would like this last one be the first in the list.
Other examples are for missile launchers or for shields.
2. I don't remember which is the most capable between Advanced Damage Control vs. Improved Damage Control, and go to check them in the Research tab. Would it be possible to add the capability of the components in their description box (as already done for geo and grav sensors)?
Other modules could be terraforming one and orbital mining: the capability appears in the class description, when the module is added to the class.

Intuitively, I think players expect a decoy to "look like" the ship it's decoying from, i.e., to have the same signature. I can see why the actual mechanic is different, as its more flexible and less micromanage-y than requiring exact size matching (plus avoid issues with ship sizes that aren't nice, round numbers), but the fact that an infinite swarm of size-5 decoys is arguably optimal (same performance and cost as any other option, maximum flexibility) seems to eliminate what could/should be a gameplay decision point.

I don't agree smaller decoys are always optimal. For when your facing negligable missile threats smaller sized decoys mean ships with standard settings will always launch some decoys even against tricklefire from AMMs that your PD or Shields can shrug off which adds cost (or alot micro if you want to turn it off situationally).

For larger decoys it's much easier to have a sensible cut-off setting so that for negligable threats with fewer incoming MSP then 0 decoys will be launched, while still ensuring all decoys will be launched against that deadly alpha strike.