Defeating massed gun drones?

Cannot target the drone launch device because drones are usually launched on the strategic map so the carrier is not in play. My experience is that lasers are fairly ineffective against well-armored drones (e.g. 5-10cm of silica aerogel on the turret, thickened amorphous carbon radiators)--are 14 1MW lasers that much more effective than, say, 1 500MW laser? And rail guns versus drones is almost always a losing battle; they can hit you long before you can hit them effectively.

My recommendation would be more/larger nukes; you are looking to fry radiators more than the armor itself (which means you may need shots from multiple sides, depending on the extent of their redundancy.

Hundreds of flak missiles intercepting them before your vessel gets into play. Flak missiles can be very light and cheap,making them extremely spammable. My 'main' war vessel carries 1000 custom flak missiles (in addition to other weapon systems, like a 1 GW laser, and 100 custom gun toting drones).

So far, I can't really hard counter my own gun drone + missile drone combo. Not with a simple solution at least. So I guess your best bet is to not let them get near you!

I'm gonna think out loud here. Bear with me.

The issue we have is overwhelming concentration of effective firepower. We need to mitigate this. Possibilities include:

• Reduce the total amount of firepower (destroy drones)
• Disperse firepower between more targets (counter-drones/decoys)
• Reduce effectiveness of firepower (improve armor or evasion)

There's been a lot of theory about option #1 already. We can most easily make a drone combat ineffective by A) destroying its weapon, B) destroying is power generation, or C) killing its mobility.

A and B imply lasers. C implies a projectile kill of the tanks, or a delayed nuke which damages the drones' engines. I think I'd lean towards the AOE engine kills, if it were me, by enabling the delay mode on my nuclear missiles.

I don't consider option #3 above to be a realistic one. Drones outmaneuver capital ships and armor suffers too much heating and weakening from repeated impacts to reasonably weather a projectile storm like the one you're talking about. So my recommendation (maybe!) is target proliferation: increasing the number of targets the enemy drones have to chose between, in the hope that they split their fire.

If the enemy drones will target other missiles/drones, this is easy. If they're configured to only target ships, the counter-drones can still perform mission #1: engaging and destroying other drones before they reach your main fleet. Their projectile weapons will be able to punch through the light armor that most drones carry, which will score mobility kills that prevent the enemy's drones from getting weapons on target.

So...a layered defense, I think. High-acceleration, high dV nuclear missiles set to delayed detonation to knock out engines, with slower, small, throwaway/single-use drones to score more kills. Lasers can then focus on drones that survive the first two countermeasures. Railguns optimized for accuracy against small targets at long range with their max range disabled may help, too, but in my experience the tapered nose of drones and the small cross-section makes rails pretty ineffective until it's too late.

1 for 1 exchange of enemy drones for defensive missile seems to work OK. The concept remains sound even after potentially fixing the poor targeting algorithms. Especially with the new limits on fuel tanks and engines. You can get 10kg frag missiles that cost 50cr or less. The smallest drones will be larger than the smallest missiles because they require power generation, weapons, radiators, control, fuel, and engines. Missiles do not require many of those, so you can carry more missiles for equivalent mass.