I've got to ask, how many missiles per salvo are you envisioning?
Because as you note, it's salvos, not missiles, that give effect. RoF is voluntary. It's
stupid in setting, but I'd seriously consider only firing one missile per gunner per turn regardless of turn length or number of available tubes in order to not waste colossal amounts of very expensive ammo.
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Originally Posted by Michael Thayne
I've thought about that. How well it works might depend on scale. The tactical combat scales that seem to work best for realistic ships seems to be either 3 minutes / 100 miles or 10 minutes / 1,000 miles. In the latter case, missiles will cover about three times as many miles per round, and it's fairly easy for them to zip straight through the "defense in depth" in one round unless the attacker is massively outnumbered, and "the attacker is massively outnumbered" can make things easy for the defender even without clever strategies.
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You realize that this problem is
entirely an artifact of the tactical system dropping the wait and attack functionality (and the time granularity of course), right? The missiles are going to 'overfly' the screening craft at point-blank range. There's no simulation justification for not being able to shoot at them while they do - it's just the rules decided not to deal with it.
Perversely, it's possible to beat that problem by counter-firing ballistic weapons (although the timing may be brutally restrictive). This probably isn't effective, since guns are inaccurate and missiles are too costly (unless you use missiles above the minimum allowed size on the attacking side). But it could let you force an attack roll when the missiles are hopping over your weapon platform's location.
EDIT to add: What actually could be viable here is use of nuclear counter-fire. Except that that entirely stops working if you don't use 10-mile hexes, so never mind.
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Originally Posted by Michael Thayne
Wait a second the "defense in depth" strategy, even when used with assumptions maximally favorable to it, doesn't solve the 2% miss chance problem AFAICT. It can solve the problem that vs. proximity detonation warheads, sometimes your odds of stopping all 10 sub-munitions is even worse than a 2% miss chance, so you have incentive to fire before the sub-munitions are released (i.e. when the missile is still at least 1 round away from the target in the tactical combat system).
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That is a plus that I hadn't been thinking about in this go-around, yeah.
I don't see how it doesn't solve the 2% miss chance, though. Defense in depth means that the missiles get attacked (at least) twice - once by the screen and once by final point defense. The latter only needs to engage the 2% that survived the screen.
Although this does bring up an actual, once again perverse, benefit of large missile salvos. A 900 missile salvo (one tertiary battery in 10 minute time, if it doesn't run out of ammo first) can be stopped by a single point defense gun...but it
cannot be stopped by any reasonable amount of screening guns, because those chip away at the 900, not at the hits that arise after the ballistic attack roll. You need 100 screening hits before you even give the missiles -1 to their attack roll!
(Of course, 900 separate single-missile salvos would be even harder to stop, but there's no way the rules permit that from less than 900 tubes.)