Post your designs here!

this is actually pretty funny, i have an analogous design in use as well, laser CIWS ships are a great tool.

Had some fun optimizing too. Got a good 406kps one. Other friend got a 1.01Mmps one (yes, megameters a second). Needless to say, the sandbox scenarios don't really work so well with them.

You and you friend better keep the Gunnery Chief on speed dial

Here's the design screen on the murder machine posted earlier.  Hope it helps you sort out the issues with coilgun math.

Drones are vulnerable to lasers, primarily because they kill their radiators. So, what if you could hide them completely?




This drone interposes armour up to about 20-30° from the front, making it difficult to kill with lasers. This is achieved primarily through the use of a nuclear reactor with correspondingly higher output temperature and therefore smaller radiators. Sadly, the higher reactor mass requires almost triple the mass.

On the other hand, you're gaining a drone which is pretty resistant - on my tests, three out of five made it to point-blank range against the laser frigate at a closing velocity of 1km/s. The only issue is the far earlier disabling of the weapon, so I decided running some more tests. One (un-screen-shotted) example used five armoured turrets instead, and they managed about four to five seconds each with weapons intact. Better, but still possible to improve.
In addition, I'm not that happy with lethality - interestingly, accuracy is too high, resulting in the bullets entering and exiting through the same hole when using focused fire. Some more optimization is necessary, as is armour optimization.

On the gripping hand, I handily beat the Venus Defense mission with about twentyfive of those (and a few beam drones built on the same design for cleanup), which is slightly over half of the complement of one of the three Escort Carrier Mk. II I brought.

Looking for some close range defense against missiles and drones. Started with the flak missile, chopped and souped it up, and the nuke seemed to work better. Against drones, worked great. Quick enough to get to them before they can even open fire. Been able to launch multiple salvos in fact. However two bug I'm trying to figure out. The small bug, once targets are in range, it keeps launching till the magazines go dry, so you have to turn in on just long enough for reasonable response then shut it off. Not a huge deal. The big problem, against missiles, the warhead detonated the moment its launched. Almost seems to target the launching ship. Always looking to share, and looking for advice.

The problem with using missiles defensively is that they're not really "targeted" the way ships are; they are basically ships that happen to explode into things. Which means that you can't focus on them firing at an incoming missile swarm; instead the "seek heat source" behavior will go for the biggest heat source (modified by distance maybe?) and missiles are cold compared to their big radiating mothership.

It's an idea I'm still okay with playing with, however, especially for dealing with high speed hyperbolic intercepts by big missile swarms. You can't trade on a missile for missile basis with cheap flak missiles - they're less expensive and less massive - but these types of things might make good final defensive options to defeat swarms as they converge. I'd be interested to play around with the detonation range and yield as well. I suspect you'll need to be less than 50 meters to ensure a kill, but that's not too hard if you're directly between the enemy and their target. I'd recommend at least some armor, though, both to counter escorting drones with lasers, and to prevent fratricide if you launch several of these things.

Part of the problem here is that what's viable against a dumb AI isn't against an event remotely intelligent human opponent. Things like suckering a missile swarm by sending a single missile of your own against it wouldn't fly against a real person, who would just cancel the missile's orders, spread out a little, and/or try to actively evade your missile's interception. Past a certain point, testing a lot of missile and counter-missile tactics requires the ability to play both sides in an engagement.