Post your designs here!

A single nuke actually usually won't wipe the entire wave if you cancel orders at the beginning of the intercept (unless it's something silly like a gigaton nuke) because the wave will be spread out enough that some will be out of the blast radius. If the enemy was really persistent and reacting to each ordinance type optimally, it would simply drag the fight out and devolve it into using flak missiles to run them out of flares and counter-ordinance first (assuming that they use their flares up before resorting to counter-ordinance against flak missiles alone), then send in the screened drones once they're dry. I can fit 7200 flak missiles in a ship that costs 40Mc, I'm not going to run out of them any time soon.

Though technically if they're out of flares, at that point you can just continue spamming flak until they die without using the drones at all. Or use nuclear missiles. Since the main reason to use the MIRV drones over missiles in the first place is to defeat flares. Though they are slightly better at spreading damage across multiple ships in a fleet, where as standard missiles tend to massively overkill a single target.

It seems to me that you just don't like the idea of ordinance being a primary weapon.

I addressed the need to run them out of flares first. It'd be a long and boring way to wear them down, but I'm confident that given a vaguely equal cost and weight budget I could bring enough missiles to win by attrition, especially against a ship that focused on direct fire weapons and only brought counter-ordinance as a defensive measure. Technically flak missiles are the only offensive weapon I need, since enough of them will eventually bore through anything in the game (in both meanings of the word "bore" if they're stocked up). The only reason to break out exotic stuff like MIRVs and nuclear EFPs is to speed things along (and because the explosions look cool).

That problem can be completely avoided with cheap gun drones. One of my ship have 120 of them. They are lightweight and dead cheap. you will run out of megation nuke way before I run out of them. And and a squad of 5 of them can cut trough about anything.

By the way, for half a trilon credit, it is 10000 these drones plus the ship that carry them!

You don't need to armor them perfectly , just well enough for them to deploy the ordinance , whatever it is. After that the enemy switches to firing on the ordinance. I'm not sure if I was in control of the AI fleet I would do it differently since a single nuke usually overheats your radiators and your lasers stop. My attack waves usually consist of a single nuke drone , 5 kinetic ones and 5 escorts. Keep in mind that I have restricted the rate of fire for the missile/guns specifically not to kill the frame rate , otherwise they can pump ordinance quite fast , with 1.6 km/s then the missile which is around 2km/s with 18 G. More performance is possible of course this is no way a top tier system its made to be cheap , light and disposable. Gun is 600-800 kg depending on the ordinance and the missile is around 14-16kg. If point defence is good enough then just keep pumping more drones or soften the target with long range missile fire.

Guys, it's like 4 in the freaking morning here, but I found a thing. Don't know if it's been mentioned yet, but has anyone tried...I think it's borosilicate glass, as a forcer in a luncher? It must be another bug, because by lowering power input as low as possible I'm launching missiles (well, payloads) at speeds of up to 10+ km/s. At high power input it can go up to hundreds of km/s, but it's FAR to fast to be usable.

Too late to post the design, but I've got a ship with forward mounted launchers that fires 106kt osmium-cased warheads at 7 km/s. It costs 25 kW. Granted, it behaves like a spinal mount, but it's the effect of a supergun-type weapon for the price of nothing. Unless it's an already discovered bug I'll post designs tomorrow.

*edit* Units may be off, but like I said I'll post designs tomorrow. I've spent waaaay longer than I meant to messing around with this.

I've settled on using the same kind of 'double broadside' arrays myself recently, seems to work out better than massive frontal laser arrays.

Yeah the cost is an issue .  I have made the nuke warhead a LOT cheaper so the micro nuke is now far more affordable and I could fiddle with the nuclear engine for both of the missiles in order to get them to be a bit cheaper as well.  I just haven't gotten around to it.  So be it the change of the nuke warhead to a 6.something megaton nuke saved a HUGE amount of money as it now uses a diffrent fissile material.  So the newer higher yeild nuke now only cost 30ish kc!