Some questions on Spaceships

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Rysith

Having a missile that counters an opposing, larger missile gives a ship a larger envelope in which to perform the intercept, and allows dedicated counter-missile ships to free up mass on other ships to mount more anti-ship weapons. It might end up below the resolution at which Spaceships operates, but in principle having a missile that could engage multiple opposing missiles may be useful - something like a 32cm laser head that can engage up to 16 incoming missiles.

What does a larger envelope actually do for you, though?

You don't need to be using missiles for one ship to provide cover to another. Any space weapon has range that trivializes the size of ships and the space between them needed to stay out of each others' way. It might be possible to have a defensive missile ship provide cover to ships in a separate maneuver element. But that would require relatively long-legged (and thus not cheap) countermissiles and some reason for actually having separate maneuver elements.

You don't want to try to engage incoming missiles with a single beam each - unless you're using the Missile Shield rule, I suppose, but at that point you definitely don't have any need for antimissiles. VRF (improved) lasers delete all incoming while barely even trying.

Originally Posted by Rysith

You make it less gigantic and hypervelocity. Consider a missile intended to close at high speed and shower a target ship's engines (or other subsystem identified on or after launch) with 2cm kinetic projectiles while missing with the main body, gaining accuracy from the close approach but attempting to leave it drifting in space rather than a sphere of expanding plasma. It should even be possible to adjust the relative velocity of the projectiles depending on the desired probabilities of damage / crippled / destroyed results. That might be veering into the territory of tube-launched single-use drones rather than missiles, though in some sense there isn't much difference between the two.

Yeah, that's not a missile, it's a drone. And it probably doesn't want to be closing at overly high speed, that limits engagement time and (greatly) increases the damage done by the impactors.

Frankly, it's not clear why it's a drone rather than a armed cutter with boarding parties. If you wanted to disable the ship mostly intact, presumably the next step is boarding, ideally conducted as quickly as possible after the disabling.