[Rollo]

I like the idea of seekers launched by fighters and want to point some things out that I have found when playing Phoenix-D's techmod (early Versions). One has to be very careful to make them balanced. Their damage/kt/turn should probably be lower then the standard rocket pods, because they can be fired from range before the fighters can be destroyed. The Small Missile I suggested by AJC seems okay in that respect, because their damage/kt is lower and like the rocket pods they can fire only once per combat. Another thing to take into account is the tonnage, if you can fit too many of them into a fighter they will be very hard to stop, because each PDC shot will kill only one seeker (damage will not carry over to other seekers in the group). Making them too small (1kt for AJC Small Missile) will create huge seeker Groups that will be very hard to shoot down (maybe that is desired, but it can be unbalancing). Another thing is the reload, to make them a little different from the pods, perhaps a reload of 5 or 10 could be considered. Of course damage and tonnage have to be adjusted accordingly.

All those balance issues can be resolved, but one thing I have noticed with fighter missiles might be a problem. Here is part of an email that I wrote to Phoenix-D some time ago:
"... I also found an odd bug when using seeker weapons on fighters: If I didn't select all missiles to be fired in tactical combat, they would still be released, but wouldn't move because they didn't have a target. While this is not so bad, here comes the odd thing: After I have some seekers sitting in space doing nothing, all seekers fired by this or other fighter Groups would run out of fuel after moving only one space. Don't ask me why, very strange. Seeker fired by ships seem to behave normally (at least if fired by the enemy)... "

Maybe you can try and to reproduce this bug. It could be a serious problem, if the fighter missiles get too small and the AI decides not to launch all of them at once (it does that sometimes with large Groups of sats or many WPs). Humans can be notified of this bug and advised not to launch partial volleys, but the AI cannot.

Rollo