Author Topic: Missile flak  (Read 4815 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline Varee (OP)

  • Warrant Officer, Class 2
  • ****
  • V
  • Posts: 51
Missile flak
« on: April 30, 2014, 08:55:39 AM »
I had an interesting idea the other day when i meet some ship with lots of amm. Putting many short range missiles inside a carrier to be release as "decoy" to allow the carrier warhead to hit. As when you use multi stage warhead i saw that the carrier also hit the taget. This might not be the best counter for the amm but with the range shorter than the release range, most the scrap also stick around which is kind of annoying to clean up but i wonder if anyone tried to use a similar startegy?
 

Offline MarcAFK

  • Vice Admiral
  • **********
  • Posts: 2005
  • Thanked: 134 times
  • ...it's so simple an idiot could have devised it..
Re: Missile flak
« Reply #1 on: April 30, 2014, 09:55:01 AM »
It used to be possible to make sub size 1 missiles and fill a missile with multiple submunitions which were nothing but an engine, they has good potential as decoys against AMMs.
I seem to recall that it's not possible right now, but i could be wrong.

Still you could make an amm carrying missile which has the same size, speed and range as your standard ASM. Set the bus to drop the AMM version just before the missile gets into your enemy's AMM range.
Just a quick analysis of how effective this might be using full size 1 AMMs.
Say you would normally launch a salvo of 12 size 6 ASMs, the enemy manages to intercept 50% leaving 6 to hit, perhaps one misses (16.67% miss rate) leaving 5 hits.
If you replace half your ASM's with the decoy variant you would need double the hit rate to make up for it.
The effectiveness of this strategy depends on a few factors, but mostly on interception rate and number of AMM salvos. Let's say the AMMs get 2 launches against the ASMSs. The last example had 50% interception so lets say 29.3% are intercepted per round. (times 2 rounds leaves about 50% of original missiles surviving.
Now launch 6 size 6 ASMS and 6 size 6 Decoy ASMS.
We'll assume that the enemy targets the ASMs with half it's AMM launchers, and targets the Decoy Buses with the other half, while the submunitions should have launched already, they probably won't have been targeted.
2-3 ASMs should have been shot down, and 2-3 Decoys should have been shot down, however the next round now faces 3-4 AMM decoy buses, and their submunitions, if the decoys were only 1/3 submunitions then you would have 6-8 decoys inbound.
Now rather than loosing an additional 2 missiles and having only 6 remaining, you'll find that there's now double as many contacts for the enemy to target, so the survival rate against the next wave is doubled. The end result might be 60% of missiles surviving to hit. Half your missiles would be full ASMs and therefore from those you make 60% of your original damage, in order to have any positive effect then your AMMs would need to produce 40% the damage as your ASMs.However since your AMMs are 16% the size of your ASMs then it's likely they would only be doing 16% of the damage.
So it doesn't look good, however if all the decoy buses manage to unload their decoys before being intercepted, and each attempt at interception gets divided amongst all missiles including the submunitions then it looks rather more effective, but i'm too tired right now to calculate this.

" Why is this godforsaken hellhole worth dying for? "
". . .  We know nothing about them, their language, their history or what they look like.  But we can assume this.  They stand for everything we don't stand for.  Also they told me you guys look like dorks. "
"Stop exploding, you cowards.  "
 

Offline NihilRex

  • Lieutenant
  • *******
  • N
  • Posts: 188
  • Thanked: 2 times
Re: Missile flak
« Reply #2 on: April 30, 2014, 10:37:51 AM »
Making your decoy 0.1-0.3 smaller than your primaries will make them a bit faster, and likely help them soak fire.  Id suggest filling them with your standard AMM  for simplicities sake, and setting separation range to somewhere between 50% and 75% of the AMMs max range.  If your ASMs have ECM, make sure you put none on your decoys, to also entice fire to head for those instead.

Ideally, you want the target to get a pass at your AMM swarm, then be in reload when the actual ASM enter the PD basket.

There is a lot to influence all of this though, including the depth of the basket, and how many intervals your missiles will be inside of it.

  • Intervals in basket
  • Accuracy of PD
  • ROF of PD components
  • ECM consideration
 

Offline Brian Neumann

  • Vice Admiral
  • **********
  • Posts: 1214
  • Thanked: 3 times
Re: Missile flak
« Reply #3 on: April 30, 2014, 10:50:31 AM »
I have managed to make decoys work with large missiles.  The main trick is to have the decoys be a little bit faster than the original bus/asm missiles.  The second trick is to have the decoys release before the targets fire the first salvo at your missiles.  This way the fire is split among all the decoys right from the start.  It also helps if you have armor on your primary asm's as well.  They will tend to survive about 1/2 of the hits on them (assuming 1 point of armor).  By having the decoys be just a bit faster they will be prioritized when your targets determine which missiles to fire at. 

An alternate to having large bus style missiles is to have small missiles that have the same range, and are faster than your primary asm's.  Fire a salvo of your asm's, then fire a couple of salvo's of these smaller missiles.  Depending on your timing you can get the smaller missiles to arrive just before the bigger missiles do.  This will tend to eat up the defenders ability to target multiple salvo's of counter missiles on each of your salvo's as the interval between your salvo's gets squashed.  This is a tricky tactic that you really need to know how to figure the time to intercept.  There are a couple of spread sheets that people have done on this board that will help with this however.

Brian
 

Offline Jorgen_CAB

  • Admiral of the Fleet
  • ***********
  • J
  • Posts: 2822
  • Thanked: 673 times
Re: Missile flak
« Reply #4 on: April 30, 2014, 01:35:41 PM »
To be honest if you play against the AI there is no real need to try and game the system since the AI can never react to such designs and you are perhaps just making it too easy for yourself (my opinion). If you did it against a human you would in general be up against a layered defence which could deal with it more efficiently. Secondly it is much cheaper to armour your missiles than using small decoys. An armoured missile are allot cheaper than the one that contain a few decoys. If your main missile is larger than size "6" then you also encounter the problem that it will be visible by the enemy much sooner then your smaller decoys and so can potentially be fired at long before they either deploy the decoy or before the decoy is ever detected.

A size 10 missile with two points of armour have the same chance to survive as if you put two size one missile decoys in it (unless the decoy is much faster). Each missile that hit it has a 0.33% chance to destroy it. In reality systems would probably be intelligent enough to concentrate their AMM fire on the biggest missiles first and the smaller missiles last, so it is almost like cheating to use a flaw in the game mechanics against the NPR... ;) ...everyone can do as they think is fun and neither way is wrong, but simply putting armour on the missile will generally be cheaper and easier to do.

If this was for real I'm pretty sure a ship could fire a very large salvo from regular launchers and then all missiles would merge into one single large salvo that arrive at the same time. It would not be very hard to program the missiles for go slow in the beginning and wait until all missiles travel together (more or less) and then arrive to overwhelm the enemy defences. Things like this can be done today so I see no reason why it would differ in the future.
 

Offline Gabethebaldandbold

  • last member of the noob swarm
  • Lt. Commander
  • ********
  • Posts: 242
  • Thanked: 30 times
Re: Missile flak
« Reply #5 on: February 09, 2016, 05:30:16 PM »
Jorgen, since you already mentioned ablative armour, how much armour do you think one would need to make a long range pd waster(you know, a missile "imune" to AMM)
To beam, or not to beam.   That is the question
the answer is you beam. and you better beam hard.
 

Offline AL

  • Captain
  • **********
  • A
  • Posts: 561
  • Thanked: 18 times
Re: Missile flak
« Reply #6 on: February 10, 2016, 01:40:19 AM »
I was under the impression that missile armour was only effective against laser pd fire; can someone confirm it works vs missiles and other point defenses?
 

Offline 83athom

  • Big Ship Commander
  • Vice Admiral
  • **********
  • Posts: 1261
  • Thanked: 86 times
Re: Missile flak
« Reply #7 on: February 10, 2016, 06:43:34 AM »
It does. That's why I sometimes like to make my AMMs with 2 warhead strength.
@Gabe, you can never make something 'immune' to something else. However NPRs like to fire AMMs a lot so unless you have a fast missile with a few layers (to make it worthwhile), it wouldn't matter that much. Alternatively, you could make a slow size 50+ torpedo that has a crazy/stupid amount of armor and can take even ASM fire without batting an eye.
Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.
 

Offline Gabethebaldandbold

  • last member of the noob swarm
  • Lt. Commander
  • ********
  • Posts: 242
  • Thanked: 30 times
Re: Missile flak
« Reply #8 on: February 10, 2016, 02:42:30 PM »
Quote from: 83athom link=topic=7104. msg86222#msg86222 date=1455108214
It does.  That's why I sometimes like to make my AMMs with 2 warhead strength.
@Gabe, you can never make something 'immune' to something else.  However NPRs like to fire AMMs a lot so unless you have a fast missile with a few layers (to make it worthwhile), it wouldn't matter that much.  Alternatively, you could make a slow size 50+ torpedo that has a crazy/stupid amount of armor and can take even ASM fire without batting an eye.
I have played strategy games enough to know that there is not such a thing as imunity, what I meant is something stupidly resistant, so. . .  do you think that 5 layers will do against precursors?
To beam, or not to beam.   That is the question
the answer is you beam. and you better beam hard.
 

Offline 83athom

  • Big Ship Commander
  • Vice Admiral
  • **********
  • Posts: 1261
  • Thanked: 86 times
Re: Missile flak
« Reply #9 on: February 10, 2016, 03:36:01 PM »
I have played strategy games enough to know that there is not such a thing as imunity, what I meant is something stupidly resistant, so. . .  do you think that 5 layers will do against precursors?
Eh, good enough. I was thinking like 10 layers, but 5 i good as well.
Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.