Introducing an idea for an anti-missile defense system for XL torpedoes and XL cruise missiles accompanied by some minor tweaks to the XL missiles on the 2 sometimes lacking capitals in EVE.
The Phalanx CIWS would be based on an 800mm autocannon, which can be fit on any capital ship but only one at a time.
The Phalanx CIWS (read as “sea-wiz”) would be able to shoot in bursts of 8-10 seconds using an entire clip of autocannon ammo (the projectile turret ammo we already have, followed by a reloading time of 15 seconds.
It is up to the pilot to use the sea-wiz at the right time.
Changes to the XL missile system give XL cruise missiles a speed increase of +150% (of the current value) missiles speed and -25% flight time (of the current value).
XL cruise missiles get +50% damage and XL torpedoes + 20% damage.
All XL missiles lose the explosion velocity and explosion radius attribute.
The Phoenix and the Leviathan can no longer lock subcapitals whenever they have XL torpedo launchers or XL cruise missile launchers on.
However the rapid jesus launcher remains unaffected, since you rapidly deploy standard battleship torpedoes.
That would hopefully make XL cruise missiles more popular and deadly and XL torpedoes more viable on moving targets.
Why do we want to make capital missiles so special. And this system compulsory on all caps.
Missiles are just another form of gun, they should roughly follow the same rules.
This seems like it just re-introduces an old problem (Dread/Titan blapping) while adding a “counter” that no one is ever going to use, in the same way that the old Defender Missiles were never used, and basically existed to be used by NPCs to make Caldari ships slightly less effective mission runners.
If you think they need a buff then buff them in a role that they’re actually supposed to be good at, rather than just making them able to nuke Sub-Caps off the field.
A CIWS is going to be automatic in any realistic scenario and is most easily simulated by an active tanking module rather than a turret. That way there is an opportunity cost to using a additional slot for defense.
I think the concept of a secondary or point defense weapon system for large ships has merit and real world precedent, but I’m not sure it’s worth the development effort. I’d rather see the big ships vulnerable unless escorted.
Imagine a fight in a standing fleet or whatever and you have a bunch of Phoenixes shooting XL cruise missiles from 220km away at carriers that make the life of supers with their ss-fighters very hard.
You can’t warp your sieged Phoenixes closer to the carriers and since those carriers are moving only 25-30% of the damage those missiles could do is being applied and it takes those missiles still a very long time to get there in the first place.
So my thinking was to give those xl missiles an edge that subcapital missiles don’t have.
Like flying a Barghest in a class 6 black hole wormhole.
I did try that 3 years ago but radiation guns were more important than ship balance.
The idea of a Phalanx CIWS was forming in my head for some time now but the more I thought about it, it could (no longer) cause some problems.
However full application on capitals, citadels and pocos would not cause many problems.
While true, those values would still be calculated and the less things that need to be calculated the more CPU time is freed up for other things.
In a tidi system it would cause less stress to the hamsters if you have only to calculate (grouped XL missiles volley hp) * shield / armor / hull resistance.
So… You think the missile velocity/Sig calculation is more intensive than your phalanx calculation would be? Really?
Because your system would basically make missiles the best cap killers as auto hitting massive damage. Which would in turn make the phalanx a compulsory module unless you knew already they didn’t have missiles.
Where as changing the numbers so the exp vel actually can hit ships of tue same class properly…
That I don’t know. The idea is that the sea-wiz would be a turret shooting a fast heavy drone with close to zero transversal approaching a ship.
Let’s imagine the sea-wiz would have a base range of 25km optimal and 60-75km falloff, only influenced by the autocannon ammo you put inside.
For arguments sake, the sea-wiz has an ammo clip size of 320 units of projectile ammo and a damage multiplier high enough to kill one XL cruise missiles with 3-5 units of projectile ammo.
You coast in a minmatar carrier at 220km away from 5x Phoenix which are in siege and the missiles speed + flight time would give a maximum of 250km.
I imagine there will be distance checks every second and the turret damage RNG does what it usually does and you shoot down 11 XL cruise missiles while coasting at 200m/s because you have an afterburner on.
Or you have a fairy god mother, granting you a successful missile defense of all the incoming missiles.
If you look at a level 5 Phoenix with XL cruise missiles, the cycle time of XL cruise missiles is like 5 hours and 55 minutes or so.
You usually have someone yelling on comms what is on grid or intel that xyz is inbound. and don’t you usually bring smartbombs as bomb-defense or a capital neut in the fleet hangar, depending on what you will be shooting or defending against -
Remember only 2 capitals can fit xl missiles.
Capital pilots usually bring replacement modules with them, depending what your fc tells you and smartbombs are usually a good bet for dreads unless you need something else.
You could “firewall” XL missiles right now if your dreads are positioned that way.
Right now the xl cruise missiles are so slow that at long ranges > 120km any fax machine would have ample amount of time to rep any incoming damage long before the new cycle of xl cruise missiles gets launched and starts moving.
And you can still coast out of missiles range and then those missiles do zero damage.
The sea-wiz would be an 800mm autocannon with the battleship projectile turret ammo with more range and damage than a firewall.
The results show that your example is only half correct. The missiles will take about 15-20 seconds to reach their targets. However, even at full tilt the Thanatos’ take at least 80% damage, and that’s without a target painter or anything else to boost application. The fun thing though is that that’s actually almost double what the Nag or Rev can do at that range. Even with the best possible ammo they lose a ton of damage just trying to hit out that far, and if they’re using higher damage shorter range ammo then they end up doing even worse.
The effect of slow-firing capital guns on TiDi in general is tiny, and the actual calculation being done here is actually only slightly more complicated than that, since the actual damage application formula is fairly straight forward from a computer’s perspective. At best you’re saving a run or two through the floating point core of one CPU.
Also since the CIWS you envision would be an AoE calculation it would be massively more expensive, since it needs to check its activation radius against at least a subset of every capital missile currently in space in the battle.
In computing terms you’re trading a highly parallelized N O(1) calculations for some number of O(n) or O(NlogN) calculations.
Sure, but this is assuming a Carrier as the target, and a lot of Dread fights are Dread vs Dread or Dread vs Titan, where the missiles already do full damage and actually pump out a fairly solid amount of DPS for their potential range, and remote reps often aren’t a huge concern.
It seems that the reason these things aren’t being used is mostly down to the travel times involved, not their damage application, and your suggestion doesn’t do anything to shift that. If you want these missiles to get more use then I think buffing their speed would have more of an impact than buffing their damage application, since barring some hilarious shenanigans a single target painter will let them deal full damage against most targets.
Does the thanatos in the graph have links on or applied to it? Things will look different with skirmish links (rapid deployment and evasive maneuvering).
Fair point on the quote, but you still get my point. That speed increase is entirely secondary to what you’re proposing here and is not the center of your suggestion.
It did not, however applying links doesn’t change things that substantially. It doesn’t hurt the long-range gun dreads much, sure, but the Phoenix still does more DPS by a decent margin:
And a single Target Painter with half decent skills and no ship bonus still gets you most of the way to full damage. Though I concede that if it’s going from 200k out then it’s not getting the full effect, and I don’t have a good way to apply TP falloff in Pyfa.
Honestly the biggest problem missiles have in PvP, and this has been true for like the last 10 years, is perception and theory craft. In reality they’re fairly effective, and none of their innate disadvantages actually mattered all that much when they ended up a bit OP on the Drake or the Caracal or any other ship over the years.
I think if people cared to do so it wouldn’t be that hard to build fleet comps around ships like the Phoenix, there’s just very little reason to do so.
Question: should this CIWS only be able to defend against capital missiles and torpedoes, or could it be used against fighters and frigates too?
Also:
You forget about the titans, though they are usually fit with better stuff.
How do you not hit a capital ship (or a citadel)? Even if they move, they are very slow and very big targets. Attempting an actually effective evasive maneuver would most likely break the ship in half. If they are in range every weapon should hit with mostly max damage. Removing the explosion radius and explosion velocity from capital missiles seems mostly logical to me.
Since I named the thread “brainstorm”, my initial thought was no. So only the Phoenix and the Leviathan would be the capitals, shooting xl missiles.
The CIWS was intended for all carriers, faxes, dreads, supers and titans.
Since dreads can fit haw guns or the rapid jesus launcher, I thought a frigate defense wouldn’t be required.
Citadels already have an anti-missile defense, just with a different name.
Well imagine flying a thanatos. Your align time is 30+ seconds or so.
Fitting a capital afterburner propels you into warp in half the time, in my opinion it would be a good idea to have one of those at least with you in your carrier.
