Torpedos, which is the new best design?

Hey guys. Just trying to get caught up on torpedo tech, but are small torps now better than large? Obviously, if you can use rotors, etc, you can launch a ton from a large ship, but the servers I play on disable those.

Anyone have links to some of the better large/small updated torpedos out there?

 

Go small block, iron ingot stacks, air-bust torpedoes

 

So in other words a... shrapnel torpedo?
No wait, Frag Torpedo!

 

Sensor triggering a bunch of small grid warheads (like 50-100) seems to be the most amount of damage you can do per unit of mass if you're trying to keeping things smallish. A 10 ton missile can delete a couple hundreds tons of an enemy ship if you can get it inside or directly against the hull. The hard part is going to be sensor ranges and finding a reliable method of getting the missile through turret defenses. Using two sensors with overlapping fields improves reliability significantly especially if you have one towards the front and one towards the back to give it some nice redundancy.

Having a script to trigger all the warheads on the grid is also preferable over using a warhead group as there are often issues with groups being retained when printing missiles/torpedoes.

 

Small grid blade torpedos, with connector as iron ingot container (doubling up as fueling port). The tip needs to experiment a little to weird slope armor configuration to ensure 100% destruction of the connector to release payload.
--- Automerge ---
If the connector breaks and release the iron ingots, it deals tons of damage.

 

Put a warhead and sensor in there, no need for connector as you weld them you can attach them to ship cargo with small convevoyrs so you can just put small ship containers. warhead/sensor activation ensure the cargo is destroyed 100% of the time.

 

As you can prolly guess, people are going to argue about what is the optimal torpedo/missile. It's why I don't try.

 

Ore bombs are probably the best bang for the buck in terms of cost, damage and ability to actually penetrate point defenses. They can be countered with some armor designs and gravity shielding though.

The huge warhead stack is also great, but they just don't survive well against point defenses since they vapourize if you nick one of the warheads with gat fire.

I stick to lobbing huge stacks of rods off my missiles. Cheap, overmatched versus almost any ship and still perfectly deadly even if the missile is intercepted.

 

When I use torpedos, I just stick to heavy armor, blast door tipped rods on a fast craft.

 

Ore/ingot can be devastating, however I always end up trying to use them in that one specific patch that breaks ore/ingot weapons. So, I usually stick to a large ship blast door missile, because you know, it's reliable. Hmm can I truly call it a missile when it contains no onboard computers, and no means of self propulsion? I guess giant projectile would be a more accurate term.

 

The connector is required for script to fill in ingots after automated welding.
--- Automerge ---

Theres 1 patch where inventories are not released when containers are destroyed. That 1 broke the ore damage completely, but still does quite some damage as the missile contains batteries and gyros which adda substantial weight.

 

The best design is not the most powerful but it would be the design that is most robust against possible future changes to the game.

There are torpedoes that are older than mass blocks and thruster override that still pack a punch.

 

I think the best PMWs are the ones that can actually hit their targets. Most people, including myself test against static targets, often with the guns off initially.

In actual practice (if we ever even get meaningful organic PvP combat that supports any of these ships), the target will be maneuvering and shooting back. It's easy to simulate the shooting back by turning on the guns, but not the maneuvering.

Lots of PMWs are still dumbfire and the rest of us are all basically using Whip's script or Well/Alysius's LIDAR script. If either or both of those guys throw in the towel and future updates break said scripts we'll all be reduced to flinging rocks at each other again. Is Rdav still working on his stuff?

Dumbfire PMWs are great, but they can only realistically be considered ambush weapons or anti station weapons. Any asshole with a gravdrive can move even their superheavy capship out of the way if you release a dumfire playload at 800m.

 

Yeah, now that we have magboots its a good time to finally get rid of the artificial gravity/mass blocks FOREVER muahahahhaha! as i've been asking since day 1 three years ago.

If you think about it thoroughly, they dont belong in this game at all, lore wise and gameplay wise, this is a simple fact.

 

Be advised that blast doors on small grid cause the torpedo to bounce off the target harmlessly

@OP:
Also, TOW missile guidance ftw
Can't be spoofed and requires some skill which makes hitting stuff rewarding

 

Explosives stacks nukes versus ground targets.
The explosion does not kill you if you are inside a station. But station falling inside a 100 m deep hole and bouncing does.
Also wrecks moat exposed functional parts like turrets.
sadly not very cost effective

 

It would be interesting to see a long range torpedo/missile duel done between ships ~ 10 km apart. Evasive maneuvers and point defense allowed, but ships have to stay within ____ km distance of their starting locations.

 

10km is very short range... maybe say 25-30 ?

 

Oh regarding air burst.... If a container contains 3K ingots and smashes into a ship, it will create a large hole and damage. If the container is purposely destroyed to release the floating ingots to hit the target, it will just bounce off most of the time if the ingot is less than 10K.

Very weird indeed.

 

Collision damage for floating objects was nerfed pretty heavily several patches back. I think some of it had to do with being able to accelerate floating objects to over 400 m/s, could also have been your ingot storm .

When the ingots are inside a cargo container they are treated as part of the mass of the initial collision. Collision physics seems to be heavily reliant on the sectional density of the the projectile as well as it total KE. Iron ingots are extremely dense compared to HA. A small cargo container filled with ingots on 1-1-1 has a mass of 1033.5 kg (8.27 g/ml). A small grid HA block of the same volume is 112 kg (.896 g/ml, it should float?). And this is not even touching on the cargo clang portion of the impact which is caused by some of the ingots actually spawning inside the armor of the target after the cargo container is destroyed.

 

To add to what Jonny said, when you break a cargo container, you lose about 40%-50% of items placed in large stacks.

 

For what i have seen larger containers allow larger stacks to spawn. I got 15 k explosive stack out of largest container is this affected by grinding the block?

 

It would be boring if grav drives were allowed. Just make a wall of missiles with a block of thrusters and a huge grav drive and you can beat any "real" ship.
--- Automerge ---

Grinding doesn't destroy/damage the stack unlike blowing it up. The only way you can damage the stack with a grinder is hitting the floater after it's been set lose when the container went poof. Explosives explode, other stuff gets turned into scrap.
--- Automerge ---
Also, just tested my missiles and it appears that small grid on large grid collision has been significantly nerfed. My missiles aren't spectacularly nearly cutting ships in half anymore.

 

10 km is 1.7 minutes at 100 m/s, but 25-30 km is 4-5 minutes. Perhaps people would be OK with the tension of waiting a bit longer for hits? I wanted it to be far outside turret range, but within visual range for some peoples guided missile designs.

Good point. Perhaps more restrictive rules on max velocity/acceleration of the launcher ship? I just wanted to make unguided weapons non useful by allowing some movement, while preventing people from fleeing at top speed while tailgunning.



Other thoughts:
1. Is such a missile duel usually going to result in mutual destruction?
2. What if we introduce an asteroid or two into the situation? Can anyone's tech fly around a corner and reacquire a target?
3. Will some of the missiles collide at the halfway mark? Are anti-missiles feasible in this game?

 

The last time I checked, the components inside the container does not reduce in count when container is grinded, collision destroyed or explosion destroyed. Is it a survival only thingy or there is a setting to config the % preserved?

 

I dont know. Maybe there is some max stack size.

 

Kinetic damage = Great for penetrating armor
Warhead damage = Great against functional blocks

Warheads (large block) have a 25 meter radius of damage. The damage radiates from the block in a sphere. Each ray has a specific damage potential. If it destroys the first block it encounters, the ray continues with whatever points remain until it reaches another block or the extent of its radius. The drawback to warheads is that they are easily destroyed by incoming fire. If they detonate prematurely, your missile is toast. It will also set off other warheads in proximity creating a chain reaction. To reach the target, warheads have to be protected with armor. However, this armor absorbs damage. So it's necessary to stack multiple warheads inside a missile in order to effect a reasonable amount of damage.

Warheads aren't great against armor, especially heavy armor. You can set off multiple warheads next to heavy armor and it will survive and prevent the damage rays from penetrating the enemy hull. Anything that's exposed: turrets, connectors, thrusters, cockpits, are extremely vulnerable to warheads. But against a virgin ship, you're going to need a lot of them to deal effective damage.

Kinetic weaponry obliterates armor. But the sphere of damage is small, not much bigger than the diameter of the weapon. As each block collides, it collides at a slower velocity than the one vaporized in front of it. The wider the weapon, the faster it will slow down. Ore, components, etc. can also be used. But depending on the server's settings only a fixed number of floating objects can exist at any one time. So your shrapnel bomb may lose its effectiveness unless it can deliver its payload at the latest possible moment as the server deletes the oldest floating objects first.


I prefer using kinetic weaponry to penetrate into the ship and using warheads to destroy defenses and thrusters. My favorite weapon right now is the "Ball Buster" that I made. It will unleash 12 inert gyroscopes once the LCD at the tip is damaged or destroyed. I've placed a decoy right behind it to attract fire. Centripetal force spins the gyros away at a rate of one every 20 clicks or so. Even if the missile is destroyed in a rain of fire, damaged merge blocks will release as a function of their damage. Gyroscopes are some of the hardiest 1x1x1 blocks in the game. Almost no amount of turrets can destroy one in 8 seconds of fire. So they are almost guaranteed to survive impacts. Not even a warhead can vaporize one in one blast. When twelve gyros hits double layers of heavy armor it just blasts right through.

For warheads, I use the same trick as above, except the front of the missile contains a decoy and switches on a side thruster and detaches from the missile. The decoy draws away turret fire for just long enough for the main charge in the back to get close enough to do its job.

I don't worry about expense when constructing a missile. It costs what it costs. Missiles are much cheaper than capitol ships: yours or your opponents. Losing one is a huge loss in time and material. I go for what's going to inflict the most damage in the shortest number of volleys. Your opponent is going to jump away if they start taking too much damage over time. It's best not to give them the opportunity to get away or getting away clean.

 

My favorite kinetic weapon currently is a large ship blast door projectile that has 4 sides and one center, each prong has 5 blast door blocks. The side are not attached to each other, or the center, except by one heavy armor block at the back. The end result is the projectile will break apart inside the ship and make a hole that is considerably larger then the missile itself. If it doesn't penetrate all the way through, then it randomly veers of in another direction which takes out a large portion of the inner ship. It's so successful due to the fact that the heavy armor block will get destroyed before all of the prongs do, which means the remaining prongs will move independently of each other once inside the ship.

 

My primary missile does this in small grid format however it uses a warhead at the base of a very large rod cluster to break them up so that they are all independent penetrators.

This missile used to do absolutely insane damage over a wide area and over-penetrate anything on the workshop. A few spaced missiles would nearly cut battleship size ships in half. Now the missile is doing much less damage since they obviously implemented some stealth physics changes to grid collisions. It's a heavy but cheap missile and thus still pretty effective, but it is no longer quite so spectacular.

I suggest everyone check the performance of their PMWs since the latest round of patches.

I still find warheads are shit since you lose so many of them in the process of an attack. I'd rather just get dirty with gats and rocket batteries at that point. PMWs simply don't make fast, heavily armed and armored gunships designed for knife fighting obsolete.

 

I've made some further improvements to the Javelin.

Small grid warheads are not shit

Gfycat of weapon testings vs Vanguard

Pictures of weapon effect on Vanguard and "Jhora"

The "Jhora" had exceptional point defenses which forced me to armor the decoys a little to get the nuke to the target.