[Spaceships] A reevaluation of missiles and point defense

[SuedodeuS]

I just reread the description of hardened from the basic set, and now I see that the lowest it can make an armor divisor is 1. So, yeah, impact warheads are, in fact, useless - at least against military craft.

This changes when force screens come into play. Because I don't see any option for hardening force screens, impact warheads have a better chance of making it through to strike the actual ship. Of course, if the purpose of the attack is to weaken the shields so that a bigger weapon can be brought to bear, I'd say proximity warheads are the way to go.

I don't suspect reactionless drives to change combat too much. Certainly, higher acceleration craft become more affordable (since you don't have to buy antimatter fuel!), but since we've mostly been ignoring price concerns, that doesn't play much of a role. Of course, the decreased storage space for fuel can mean more PD, although I suspect some of the space will need to be used to actually power the reactionless drives.


So far as sub-tertiary mounts are concerned, there certainly is some good justification for allowing them. Because I rather like fighters, however, I'd probably shy away from them. It's kind of hard to justify from a realism perspective. Maybe that many weapons requires such a ridiculous amount of maintenance that it's actually more effective to just limit out at tertiary, or maybe armored warheads are sometimes used.

Of course, I'm not expecting quite the haphazard use of nukes Ulzgoroth indicates. I'd expect them to be used when each one has a high chance of hitting - such as after PD has mostly been destroyed. If I come up with some armored warheads (probably some semi-ablative dDR and 1 HP), all tactical nukes would be of that type.