Spaceships: Missile launchers and their individual mass

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

A 'slugfest' of missiles between broadsiding titans, or a situation where missile lock-ons are relatively rare (maybe up to a dozen per combat at most), nasty if they hit, and result in a pilot spending quite some while and effort on evasive manoeuvres in order to avoid destruction, are almost impossible to implement using standard rules.

You might be able to make the slugfest of titans work if your ships have enough HP compared to the missile hit. If you used large ships with the Spaceships 3 Damage Reduction option and something to rule out nuclear weapons (Nuclear Damper fields, for instance), you might be able to make it happen. I haven't looked closely at the numbers, but missile damage grows slower than ship HP so big ships have better ability to tolerate hits.

The latter is supportable to a degree too. If you have small fighters they have relatively little space to carry huge missile volleys. Each 16cm tube is a Major Battery at SM +4. For good pilots on ships with a decent maneuver rating, dodging can be an important part of the defense, and evasive maneuvering gives a precious bonus to that. If you use reactionless drives on ships to limit the effective range of missiles, it might even make sense to design small craft with combined missile and non-missile armaments. Maybe.