[Spaceships] Ammo storage vs Weapon size

[Langy]

A VLS-type system only requires mass on the ship for a system to chuck the missile out of the ship before it lights its engines or possibly enough armor so that it can survive if the missile lights off engines while inside the launch cell. You also need fire control hardware, though that's likely relatively mass-cheap and you could probably just stick the fire control bits in the missile itself if you wanted to.

I'd think that this wouldn't mass more than the missile's own mass, perhaps a little more. This winds up with launch systems that mass about 50% of the system filled with missiles massing a further 50% of the system - which likely winds up with ships that have significantly more shots available along with larger salvos.

I'm not sure tube-style missiles make any sense in a system where surface area doesn't matter. Outside of things like underwater-launched torpedoes, I'm not sure anything but a VLS-type system makes sense for missiles.


Anyways, if you extrapolate downwards from 16cm missiles, you run into the same ammo mass problem still, though I can't remember what gun diameter shows the problem. It's due to the way weapon weight scales in regards to ammo weight - it's in no way linear. Not much of a problem unless you're planning on designing SM+2 or something ships, though, and that's not supported by the system.