Some questions on Spaceships

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

There SHOULD be variety of missiles. For instance countermissiles should cost about a fraction per salvo of a shipkiller (or why didn't they throw them at the other formation in the first place).

It's fairly hard to justify countermissiles rather than point defense beams or cannon. (Except for countermissile nuking.) You could have 16cm countermissiles used to shoot down larger 'shipkiller' missiles, but it's difficult to make larger shipkillers useful.

A 'short ramge' missile that cut off half the mass and probably 2/3s to 3/4s of the delta-V would be a helpful option, if you do want to use missiles for defensive fire.

Originally Posted by jason taylor

Missiles for delicate stuff like gunboat diplomacy, policework, and piracy should be more surgical.

How do you do 'surgical' a gigantic hypervelocity impactor?

Originally Posted by jason taylor

Conversely shipkillers should have better armor penetration capability than either countermissiles, or missiles made for light units or for skirmishing (the latter two can often be the same model). There should be different warheads like EMPers, Nukes, Laserheads, recon (and possibly conterrecon) drones, different attack plans and so forth. Some of these can be several apps put in the same guidance computer as options. But at the least there are reasons to have different sizes to make an expense worth the target.

No Spaceships kinetic weapons have useful penetration factors, assuming warship armor is hardened.

The text has nukes and laser heads (though it doesn't really give instructions on how to play out the laser heads), and EMP missiles seem like a dubious proposition. Nobody's stopping you having drones, but drones aren't really missiles. SS5 does have sensor drones that are stated as missile replacements, though they're intended for exploratory/scientific use, not tactical recon.