[nerfman]

"If you have "partial" damage to your hull, and have shields regenerated, that partial damage will come out of the hull and go into the shields."

Ouch, that is a little buggy, but understandable based on the other threads that address armor and damage in general. I always wondered why individual component damage wasn't tracked. It takes less memory to do it the current way (by assigning a pointer to the Last component damaged and recording the partial damage independent of the actual componenet), but sure does lead to some wierd game effects.

Personally, I think that missiles should have a % to hit (or miss). There should be components that give a negative percetage (like ECM), jammers if you will. The seeker itself would be rated by a percentage that reflects how good a terminal manuever and how hardened vs soft kill (jamming) the seeker is. All these things go into a modern missile engagement and could reasonably be modeled here (if missiles actually had to hit %'s).

As far as it not being "fair" to missile shooters, there are work arounds, namely increased salvo size. Ideally, if two forces were at roughly the same tech then the missiles would have say a 80% (or maybe higher) chance to hit each way. But if one team had much better jamming/ECM, then they would benefit from getting many more soft kills (missiles that miss due to jamming). I find it odd that electronic warfare in this game effects direct fire but not guided munitions when in real life the opposite is generally true. Bullets can't be jammed and ship mounted sensors are more powerful/agile/and backed by more powerful computers. They can be jammed, but jamming a tiny little missile seeker that is very close to you is a lot easier than jamming a whole ships sensor system when it is most likely much farther away.