Challenge: Ultra-budget Spacecraft

I managed to beat three gunships with this highly technical design: it technically has armor and technically it has a weapon in addition to the missile launchers.

Design blueprints for ship, launcher and missile:


My original plan was to do a high velocity intercept to avoid missiles and quickly spit out the full missile storage and then use the high acceleration to escape but that turned out to be unnecessary. Since the micromissiles can take down flak missiles easily enough, I can do a slow approach and hover at 150 km, slowly launching missiles when needed. With better rationing and some luck, the missile storage might be able to take down a fourth gunship too, but I can't be bothered to optimize so much.

Below is a combat video in two parts since I accidentally stopped recording after the missiles were done and I can't be bothered to glue the clips together.

Proof of PD capabilities:


Proof of Gunship-destroying capabilities:


Weirdly enough the missiles seem to have better accuracy against flak missiles. You'd think the gunship would be an easier target to hit but you'd be wrong!


As for points, I think I earned 3 kc * 1.03 km/s * 858 Mc = 2.65 * 10^12 c²m/s points.

For secondary score I got 3.01 g * ~10 kg * (2 or 6 depending on how you count) = 590 kgm/s² = 590 kN. Or 1.77 MN if each launcher counts as a separate system.

Your point system is pretty silly btw.

This doesn't technically qualify because I couldn't be arsed to min-max until my ΔV>5km/s, but otherwise I'm pretty sure this fits.  I present to you the Thermopylae-class gunboat.



It's less a gunboat and more of a somewhat orky missile skiff with a couple of (possibly sarcastic) nods to crew survivability.  The Thermopylae's primary armament consists of two micromissile launchers (said micromissiles shamelessly stolen borrowed from midnightdreary) with 1000 missiles between them.  They can empty that magazine in around 30s with the launch count limiter turned off (which is honestly there just to spare my poor zombie of a CPU), and pretty much shred anything unprotected a laserstar or heavy armor.  The gun is mostly just for light CIWS, though it's deadly enough to any capitals within its range.  
Armor was possibly my biggest cost-cutting area.  It basically has an Al/aerogel sandwich that only covers the absolute vitals, and even then it won't stop much more than a laser or small sandblaster.  It's enough to save the crew from stray shots, but you really just want to not get hit to begin with.  Thankfully, the missiles give you a pretty solid standoff range.

Oh, also, credit to RocketWitch for the engine, which I pulled from her China-class.  I still can't for the life of me figure out how to design decent engines, let alone hitting extremes like this.

Edit: It seems with some armor tweaks I can bring the ΔV to 5km, but honestly I don't feel like reposting the tweaked version.  Basically just swap the inner Al layer for this if you care to.
Titanium 0.01 0 0.92 1 1


Just think of the lag when every drone would launch 35 missiles per second. It wouldn't be fun.

No problem, like madmike I cribbed some designs off Steam Workshop by @midnightdrearydreary (I think?  Midnight Industries on workshop) and then I just used them as a reference.  Copying the control scheme was the main thing; I had a bunch of tiny missiles already but they were mostly KKMs intended to act as laser bait while my usual gun drones got into kill range - I honestly was barely concerned whether they could hit anything or not.

For that matter there's some sweet stuff on the micromissiles "kilocredit challenge" thread running right now.

Anyhow, good challenge, I already found some nice tweaks to some of my standard stuff I would never have bothered looking at otherwise.  I'll post my little missile skiff once I have time to make another pass over the chemguns; they're currently firing 14g (!) slugs at 1.9Km/s, but the ammo cost is actually relevant in this challenge so I want to see if I can slim that down without losing lethality.

Here's a pretty neat gun if you want to use conventional guns. 2 km/s with 940g bullet, 9 shots per second for 22.3 kc and 2.8 tons

Be warned gunships are hilariously expensive for their capability, for whatever reason.