MIRV/Missile Bus Doom

In many ways a strict missile bus can be considered the lower stage of a missile.

IIRC, Laser Wobble was introduced to keep lasers from fragging guns too fast, but it's just made micromissile swarms deadlier.

Missile busses will be a lot more efficient with one-salvo racks. Less mass wrapped up in launchers and ammo cans.

I'm kinda waiting for that feature before diving too deep into mirv weapons.

What kind of micro missiles do you all use in your MIRV/Bus systems? I use 500g boron flak warheads atop a Fluorine-Lithium-Hydrogen combustion rocket. It only gets ~2 km/s d/v but weighs 3 kg and costs ~60 c.

Because usually a MIRV is large enough and has enough of a dV budget that it can afford sufficient armor mass to prevent that.

Look at it this way; here are the necessary design requirements for a practical missile.  You need

1. sufficient dV and burn endurance (how long can your missile accelerate for?) to get it moving fast, for course corrections, and for pursuit.
   
2. it to be as narrow as possible and as small as possible, to prevent target acquisition by PD guns and to minimize laser damage.
3. a high-gee rocket (and therefore a relatively high-mass flow rocket) in case the target dodges.
4. sufficient armor to allow it to survive until it can deliver its payload.
   

If you read this carefully, you'll see that everything conflicts with point one.  The smaller the missile the less room it has for propellant, decreasing your dV.  The higher the mass flow of your rocket the worse your burn endurance is, and the less efficient your rocket tends to be, decreasing your dV.  Armor is added mass, period, which decreases your dV.  Unfortunately, all of this is necessary.  The bigger a missile is the easier it is to acquire as a target, the worse its acceleration the easier it is to just dodge (and, as a corollary, the easier it is to smash with PD guns), and the less armor it has the easier it is to shoot to pieces.

Now, with those considerations in mind, let's get back to missile buses.  Missile buses and MIRVs (sidenote, since the acronym is multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle I feel as though it's a little inappropriate for our purposes, but whatever, the metaphor suffices) serve one, single, overarching purpose: get the missile close enough that it can deliver its payload.  They do this in a number of ways.  First they decrease the engagement time by giving the missile a velocity boost, second, since the missile now effectively has free dV, you can afford to bulk up the armor, which will increase your survivability (fingers crossed) when engaged by enemy point defense, or, third, you can keep it lightly armored but decrease the propellant you're carrying to just what is needed to maneuver (which is what I tend to prefer).

However, why stop there?  Remember the square-cube law; as your vehicle gets larger, the surface area to volume ratio drops, which means that you can add more armor for the same decrease in dV (presuming you're using that extra volume to store more propellant instead of Snickers bars or something).  So why not add more armor to the missile bus?

Now you have a relatively tough little drone lugging more vulnerable missiles around; so why not use the added protection and bring those missiles in as close as you can before launching them?

EDIT: this further decreases the time the enemy ship has to engage your missiles, increasing their survivability again and making it even more likely that they'll ruin their day.

More often than not, my missile carrier drone get its launcher shot off in laser fire range even when armoured.

And of course, stupid flare makes everything worse.

So I made my missile carrier drone to have a frontal turreted light gun placement to either shoot off flare launcher or laser if possible.

There are? From browsing the forums, I thought ablation rate increases with intensity, then maxes out at a certain intensity threshold.