Capital Ship Missiles

[Yngen]

Some people are saying, Koolmo I think, that if you go all missle turrets on a cap ship that you are hurting yourself against other cap ships. I don't think this is entirely true.

Take my Kusari Destroyer for example. I decided to see what all the hubub was about with the upgraded missles (I had died a few times from cruiser missles in my VHF too.) So I went 3 infernos, 6 missles on my destroyer. Now, the Kusari cruiser missle does 5k hull damage, so every shot I'm doing 30k hull damage. Not too shaby, but not as much as a razor load or primary turret load in damage per second. However don't forget that the explosive radius of a missle means you are amplifying your damage on sectioned targets and damageing all of their weapons at the same time. After about 4 hull salvos you are stripping your enemy of his weapons most of the time. Add to that the virtual certainty of hitting any target with all of your missles due to their speed and tracking... Too much energy you say? That might be true if you were using a gun, which misses the target a lot. But remmember a missle is a tracking weapon and if you use it right (not a hard thing to do) you can assure a hit every time on gunboat and bigger, and at least have a 3 in 4 chance of hitting a fighter. So basically you are missing less when you use missles, transmitting a greater percentage of your energy into damage. Basically you can afford to use more energy when you use missles.

So, if you are at least compitant at dodging shots you should have no problem taking out a target of equal class with a missle loadout. Combine that with the ability to decimate any fighter in seconds and you have an unbalanced situation.

Perhaps an alternative to limiting how many missle turrets a cap ship can equip would be making them store ammo for these launchers? Make the ammo expensive and large.

Or do both perhaps, limit the number of missle turrets on a given ship, and make the turrets require expensive ammo.


Those of you with a dim view of fighting with missles in general: I understand your frustration. The very nature of missles is to take the human factor out of a fight, to reduce the amount of skill necessary. This happened in the Korean war when missles slowly replaced guns on fighter jets and there are still people in today's military with a certain romantic longing for the classic dogfighting of the first and second world wars ( I see Nightfall, Mister Blaumax himself posting now:P)

I like fighting with guns, however there are a couple of problems with freelancer and this mod that encourage people to use missles too: 1) missles come from the original freelancer game, which gives them a special place in this mod 2)Gun balance in the game is such that if one wishes to role play with their weapons and hope to be on even ground with their opponent they some times have to use missles to do it. Perhaps a problem that will be soon fixed since Igiss is balancing all the class 9 and 10s in the next version.

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[AU]Anton_Blix
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