[Phoenix-D]

"I think the size of the drones aka missiles is going to be the keypoint here. IIRC the 'Fearless' in "On Basilisk Station" had storage for about 120 missiles - for the storage for these to fit on a light cruiser, you obviously need to massivley downsize the size of the drones (and possbily use fighter size components on them)."

Correct.. and remember that there are different sized missiles. That may get me out of this jam actually. I'll make the high-damamging capital missiles pretty big, as well as the warheads, but restrict all the warheads to one per drone so you can't just load up on the more efficient per KT smaller missiles. Combine that with increased missile storage space, increased population size, reduced planetary storage, and BIG troops, and this may just work..

"My next thought is that this could work for laser head missiles, in addtion to the warhead and the engines (I think you would need to design missile specific double/triple speed engines) you could add combat sensors to replicate the effect of penaids, and ECM to reflect the effect of jammers, and if you could stack these compoenents, that would allow you to create the pure jammer missile concept Rafe Cardones nailed the Sirius with."

Already doing it..also pure armor missiles, etc. The only problem is there's no way I can see to control when they're launched.

ECM abilities do stack, and I'm using that to my advantage. The impeller wedge components do a lot of things for the ship- and they give a 65% ECM bonus EACH. But each hull has a -100% to-hit built into it. So you loose the wedge and you're a sitting duck in more ways than one.

Phoenix-D