Post by skypwyth on Mar 23, 2017 21:24:54 GMT
They address that. If they do turn they necessarily present their nozzles to the ship they're targeting, and THAT lases them.
Anyways, I'm rather fond of a three-layered defense myself. Lasers at range, peashooters for terminal defense, drones (mostly sandblasters) as a forward screen.
we have only 3 cases, one of which I've never seen happen
1 turn towards the side - roughly 90 degrees towards both dangers - you are much more vulnerable from the sides even if your engine is pointing somewhere in the darknes. And as Rocket Witch said in reality there will be multiple drones from multiple angles in a multilayered defense. I actually want this to happen and usually at the same time the drone is closing in on the swarm I give the scatter order to the ship.
2 continue pointing towards the capital ship. This is what I mostly see since the drone is much colder than the capital ship and since mine only pull around 3G (I may have to upgrade that) the distance is really not that large. This is then a race between how far the missiles could get because the drone has a much less capable laser than the ship. Multiple drones could counter that. Also I usually turn the drone towards the ship to and I'm starting to boost back to make the relative speed between them smaller and to give the drone more time on target.
Case 3 never happens - point toward the drone - missies will die probably in less than a second from the ship's lasers.
What the missiles could do to counter it is to scatter at the start - which risks to ruin their intercept, but also makes the swarm a less packed target . If we were in a real situation I would probably call for multiple angles of attack but we can't do that for the moment.
Case 3 caught my attention. Perhaps it is possible to have a drone which fires a flare brighter than the fleet it is protecting just after passing through the missile cloud. The flare shouldn't need to burn for to long, probably only slightly longer than the missile turn about time.