Missiles: Do they ever miss???

Nitram Draw · #1 May 4th, 2001, 09:43 PM

SJ,
I think stauration or area damage would be a great idea if it could be added. If missiles could have two damage Ratings, one for a near miss and one for a direct hit then they would be more dangerous. A direct hit could do tremendous damage to armor and internals.
For a nuke warhead they do not do a lot of damage as you pointed out.
Unfortunately this would require missile accuracy to be added (i'm ducking now

) along with some other changes.

[This message has been edited by Nitram Draw (edited 04 May 2001).]

Suicide Junkie · #2 May 5th, 2001, 12:29 AM

quote:
SJ - didn't see your Last post.
Can you elaborate? I don't really understand what you are getting at. Thanks

Well, any object in SE4 can determine any target's location down to a single combat square. (however large or small that might be).

For the nuclear warhead in the CSM & the antimatter in the Plasma missile, your attack could cover the entire square.
With the antimatter or fireball spread out over a large volume, you get less damage on average, but the sheer power of the weapon allows moderate damage to everything.

The nuclear CSM does only 75 - 200 damage or so. That's not much (a weapon & a few engines) destroyed for a close nuke strike or a splash of antimatter. But if the damage is spread out over the combat square, then the hit would be guaranteed.

quote:
SJ,
I think stauration or area damage would be a great idea if it could be added. If missiles could have two damage Ratings, one for a near miss and one for a direct hit then they would be more dangerous. A direct hit could do tremendous damage to armor and internals.

Oh, yeah. I've been a long-time proponent of adding "splash" damage types.

type 1) Misses do 1/4 damage
type 2) every object within X squares takes decreasing amounts of damage

with a type two warhead, you could hurt multiple ships at once!

[This message has been edited by suicide_junkie (edited 04 May 2001).]

Dracus · #3 May 5th, 2001, 01:15 AM

Just for kicks:

Maybe the missles don't home in on heat, transmissions, radio signals, or radar.
maybe they home in on the fat, lazy loudmouthed guy down in the engine room that keeps talking to everybody about how he would like to shag a waitress back planetside, that would never give him the time of day. Or maybe they home in on the uncleaned bathrooom down on deck 4.

[This message has been edited by Dracus (edited 05 May 2001).]

nerfman · #4 May 5th, 2001, 02:00 AM

Snipes, I mean engineers loud mouthed and foul? What navy are you talking about.

SJ - So you mean like area effects, like able to damage a tight group of ships?

Along those lines, a missile that worked like a FASCAM round would be cool. You would target a space and it would fly there and discharge a cloud of mines all over the area. I don't know how realsitic it is, but it would be a cool tactic for a missile heavy fleet to delay a dirct fire fleet from closing. Of course I don't think you can target empty spaces right now, so.......

Suicide Junkie · #5 May 5th, 2001, 02:22 AM

quote:
SJ - So you mean like area effects, like able to damage a tight group of ships?

Along those lines, a missile that worked like a FASCAM round would be cool. You would target a space and it would fly there and discharge a cloud of mines all over the area. I don't know how realsitic it is, but it would be a cool tactic for a missile heavy fleet to delay a dirct fire fleet from closing. Of course I don't think you can target empty spaces right now, so.......

Yeah, the Nuke could be an area effect weapon, and bLast an entire square, even if it can't precisely locate the target...
It would be a Type 1 splash damage weapon, that always misses, but always does some damage.

Like you said, a mine scattering missile could spray tiny mines out as it flies, so any ships in squares that the missile crosses take 10-20 damage. You just fire the missile at the farthest enemy ship, and a bunch of bystander ships inbetween you two get hurt.

This would be a form of Type 3 ("linear")splash damage

If you had some sort of really wide-acting weapon, you could damage all objects in the 8 squares around your target. It would probably have to be a really high tech weapon to have a bLast that large (size of a moon picture!)
This is Type 2 splash damage.

Type 1 splash damage is the "misses do damage" thing.

[This message has been edited by suicide_junkie (edited 05 May 2001).]

Marty Ward · #6 May 5th, 2001, 03:10 AM

Nuke AAA! Area damage should do great against fighters too. Lob one into a group of them and fighters in all adjacent squares could possibly take damage.