Spaceships: Missile launchers and their individual mass

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Cuddle_Fish

This touches on something I've been wondering for awhile - missiles, if one looks at both aircraft and naval vessels, in my understanding typically aren't carried in launchers that are reloaded in operation. You don't [as far as I am aware] have a magazine of 20 missiles to go with a single launcher system,

That's not literally true for ships at least. There are or were a number of USNavy missile systems that had separate magazines and self-loading launchers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...nching_Systems

......makes it mostly "were". Vertical launch systems seem to be the modern trend but not too long ago in the era of the "twin-arm" and "sngle rail" systems there were internal magazines.

It's still probably a better option for smaller systems. The 8 cell AA missile system on the Nimitz class can be relaoded on the ship but presumjably has to be done manually. In a vacum environment that could be very inconvenient.

As to what you can do, the simple answer is ignore the issue. Spaceships is a very low detail system and whether the SM+5 Main Battery launcher is one reloadedable tube with 6 reloads or 7 non-reloadable tubes is below the system's level of resolution.