Post your designs here!

This is the Nuke Drone Operation Station, AKA NDO Station or "OH SHIT MISSILE-DRONE HYBRID MOTHER STATION". It is equipped with defensive lasers and obviously, those terrifying nuke drones.

FUNCTIONS:
1. Deploy Nuke Drones
2. Destroy hostile force nearby (will upgrade later, later.)
3. Refuel the surviving drones.

Put about 100 of them, those mighty Saturn-Uranian forces will be blown away like a leaf.

Honestly looks like something that can be easily defeated by laser resistant missile or drones.

6MW for a missile launcher seems excessive unless that missile weighs several hundred tons.

The new patch gave us an interesting new tool with drop tanks. And as is tradition, we must find ways to weaponize these tools in ways which they are not intended. Allow me to present to you, the latest in cluster missile technology. 


The drop tank:





The missile (a repurposed missile with no warhead or penetrator):







The result:  







This is a single missile on a target with 4cm boron (inner), 1.4m graphite gel, 3cm borom (outer) The missile's impact hole is somewhere in the center of the ring of drop tank impacts. It looks like a nuke went off inside the target.. not really sure if that's the result of the nitromethane in the drop tanks, or something else.



Edit: Looks like the fuel in the tank doesn't matter all that much. It appears that you get the same ridiculous internal effect with 100g of argon that you do with 100g of nitromethane. So you are better of going with fuel that's cheap and inert.

In my experience, even KKV hits cause glowing patches around impact site. Nukeflash usually glows much brighter.

This design beat Vesta.

(It was derived from experience from this failed experiment.)

(Well, mostly failed.)

... Mind you, the Flashlight 3 needs to have a better way to deal with missiles than running them out of deltaV or slowly melting them. It is also ludicrously overpowered (and thus could save a lot of weight on radiators).

Still playing with big guns, small ships...

And came up with this crewed mini-beast:



I added a few hundred kg of spare ammunition (and as a result will re-tune weapons to higher rates of fire as this method of increasing combat persistence is much more efficient than increasing weapon numbers at low rates of fire). Weight (and cost) is highly concentrated in weapon systems, so savings will be helpful.

Power is insufficient for all weapons and engines in use at once, but adequate for the continuous operation of lasers and the duty cycle of the railguns.. MPDs are hard to use while operating a reasonable sized vessel and fighting though.

Weapons are optimised for point defence range, which also gives long(ish) engagement ranges - 1 and 2g railguns staggered from 176km to 289km for 1000m^2 and 31.3km to 51.3km for 1m^2 to encourage multiple target engagements. 75g Coilgun 80.4km and 13km for 1000 and 1m^2. All weapons use the 100MW of the violet lasers, but have low duty cycles (net power input for all weapons is less than 65,000,000 to attain their combined fire).

Here is my ultra-conservative design of a missile craft.


Nor the craft itself or its missiles are crazily optimized (that is intentional), yet it has a number of features that I like.


Its armor is light, but together with reasonable component armor and bulkheads offer reasonable protection against nuclear blasts, light shrapnel and most light railguns which don't break conservation of energy. Its pointy nose, a special anti-laser armor layer and anti-laser bulkhead offer some protection if powerful lasers start dwelling on it, though if they do, that means mistakes have been made. Both types of nukes can cross 1000 km distance relatively fast and Sparrow S kinetic missiles provide so much clutter the ship itself is rarely targeted.


Nuclear missiles are meant to soften the target, while Sparrows and railguns are meant to finish-off stragglers (although direct combat is best relegated to dedicated gunships). While both Everbright and Sparrow missiles are both considered counter missiles, Sparrows can be used offensively too, while Everbright are dedicated flare missiles. The latter still need more work.

Not a powerhouse by any means, this ship is meant to be reasonably light, reasonably cheap and offer good saturation.