Challenge: Micromissiles

That would make it a better challenge but then it just becomes an engine building contest and not much else, aside from maybe what droptank config you go for. Ultimately missiles challenges like this don't allow for too much variability.

I thought I'd try to be clever by using plasma for compactness, made this, then looked at the acceleration and burn time...





Isn't it cute though?

Generally you want missile engine gimbals to have a low angle...around 5 degrees.
More and you will get unstable flight paths.

Gimballed engines should have high RPM so that the missile can respond quickly and not fall into continuous overcorrections.

Sub 1s turn rates, especially combined with the above two problems can again lead to unstable guidance.

3 ungimballed engines of about 1/3 the thrust of 1 gimballed engine ( assuming you are shooting for a certain accelleration ) Generally leads to a stable missile.

Well, I said I was going to work on a non modded version using F/H propulsion, here it is:

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Not sure this still counts as "micro", but it has, in testing, proven quite capable of overcoming laser based weapons. It lacks in killing power to some extent due to being a KKV, but is excelent at crippling vessels (i.e. destroying fuel) making them easier to kill using weapons more capable of more widespread damage. The armor penetration properties are excelent though. It is capable of expending its dV in the intended engagement range of 100km and has a TTI of less than 30s at that range. When fired at a laser frigate in groups of 5, 3-5 missiles would hit in almost all cases in which the missiles were on target and as little as 2 would reach the frigate with decent reliability (even one would, on occasion, be enough). There seems to be some issue, though, where the guidance system decides to veer off. This seems to be the result of the high gs and high relative velocities. I've minimized this as much as I could, but it still happens occasionally. To use the missiles, they have to be set to homing in combat, as I use blast launchers to set the max engagement range and thus the game treats them as drones.

I made a missile that has twice the payload, 600 m/s more dv and more armor as well as a slimmer diameter than the current winning design, while costing a bit over half as much. I'd be surprised if anyone was able to beat this with a NTR design, since Fl-H rockets are so cheap by comparison. With Fl-H the engine costs nothing and the fuel is cheaper than methane as well.



It has 1 cm of graphite aerogel with an added 0.5 mm PTFE cap in the front for extra laser protection. It should survive lasers quite well as long as it faces the laser, since it's so slim and the PTFE cap should survive a few glancing hits. For the engine I used a standard AE F-H engine modified a bit to make it slimmer.

relevant stats below:

Mass: 22.4 kg
Cost: 33.6 c
dv: 10.6 km/s
acceleration: 13.6 g -> 116 g
burn time: 33.1s
turnabout time: 0.898s
diameter: 14.5 cm
cross section: 406000 mm²
payload: 1 kg TNT-Lead flak bomb

Edit: here's a video as proof that the missiles actually work and can kill things dead.

You know, looking back my KKV wasn't realy up to scratch. For 414c, the 5.8cm of silica aerogel and 13.5Km/s of dV that the M5 Striker got, it didn't perform as well as it should have. And as there seems to be some new posts, I thought I'd post my latest design. So heres my newest moddel of micro-KKV, a true micro missile (as micro as they can get with a 1kg guidance package) derived form my current latest gen KKVs:

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The first obvius improvement is price. At just under 30c this thing is dirt cheap and its 11.4kg mass isn't that high either. This allows for a more versetile deployment (which will probably have been obvious to everyone but me). The main advancements in the M11 over the M5 are the engine and the armor scheme. The engine is part of a newer generation of F/H chemical rockets, which have been optimized to 5Km/s exhaust velocity and around 1.3Kg₀. While no major developments have been made in the engine, the further optimization of these super light engines allow for this tiny missile to have 22.3g₀ wet and 165g₀ dry acceleration and a burn time of just under 20 seconds. Howerver, the major inovation in this latest generation of missiles is the armor scheme. The M5 was usually disabled when it turned (or jittered, as the homing algorithms would have it), exposing its unarmored (relatively speaking, all my missiles have a 1cm graphite aerogel layer to help against nukes) side and destroying the fueltanks or engine. The new genetation of missiles has a multi layer ablative layout, that use layers of silica aerogel that progressively cover less of the vehicle. This means that, even at relatively extreme angles (for an incoming missile, geting hit directly in the side by laser frigate at a right angle will still result in almost instant disabling), at least several layers must be penetrated in order to penetrate the armor. At the same time the frontal armor thickness is retained. The M11 has only 2 layers due to the way armor works in the game (the missile its based off of, the M10 Viper, has 5 1cm layers), but the new layout dramatically improves survivabilty. 10 of these will take out a missile frigate and 5 are enough for a gunship.