Alternate Space Missile Defense/Options

[AlphaMirage]

I think we can all agree that the way anti-missile systems are treated in space combat is perhaps a bit to powerful and significantly threatens any smartly designed (not by the SLDF or Clans) Warship by effectively making them immune to missiles until you exhaust ammo (or HS capacity). I want to take a poll to see what option you forumites might prefer and if you have any thoughts on the matter.

Option 1 - Limited firings to say 1-6 missiles per round for each bay, this still makes saturation fire possible given enough launchers while providing plenty of protection against small volumes of fire without To-Hit modifiers like other PDW.

Option 2 - Capital Scale AMS option that weighs more and has heavier ammo that can take down the much larger capital missiles. That way a big Warship can make itself to immune to missiles but at least has to spend more warload to do so than the 100-200 tons or so you'd normally need.

Option 3 - AMS gets a bonus to-hit for each attempted intercept but can otherwise fire like any other PDW as many times as you'd like. At least that way many missiles will still be stopped but it allows for leakage from bad rolls.

Option 4 - Missiles get tougher and more damaging as a result. Capital missiles weigh as much as tanks and move incredibly quickly they shouldn't be easily destroyed by some mech-scale AMS or even some Sub-Cap Lasers. Either mech scale AMS gets reduced like other PDWs or the missiles have 3x Damage and resultant armor making them even more lethal to their preferred prey, Aerospace Fighters, while being more difficult to manage for Warships.

[Primus203]

I would say a combination of all four options like option 1 each point defense would have a limited amount of firings due to limited amount of coolant able to be moved through an area.

Like option two there would be multiple PD the current laser AMS and shell firing AMS would be listed as Micro AMS on warships having the most limited amount of firings and more limited range than current but have a bonus to hit over other non capital weapons. In this vein there would be the Small, Medium, and Large PD which have increasing amount of firings and range but also notably increasing tonnage and heat output.

Like option three the bonus to hit but no unlimited fire rate.

Like option 4 More capability for the missiles they should be something to worry about.

As you can see Alphamirage this is something I feel strongly on as you have helped me with many of my fleet designs and it got to the point I completly dropped missiles from fighters and ships becuase of how absurdly many it would take to get through a decent PD screen.

[Daryk]

Large raid sizes are the solution to heavy AMS.  Why is that a problem?

[PuppyLikesLaserPointers]

For reference, if you want to stop a full 70 points of capital missile barrage, you only need 234 AMS(3x234=702). For IS LAMS it needs 819 DHS on each uses. Packing 78 LAMS(you only need 78 on each location, for with this you could use 234 LAMS against all locations) on a location of a dropship only costs 70.5 extra tonnage on each location, for it's not so difficult. And only a dropship can do this - while EVERYONE through the course of the missile can react with their own AMS individually.

[AlphaMirage]

Large raid sizes are the solution to heavy AMS.  Why is that a problem?

Is it though? To my understanding all Capital Missiles are treated as individuals for PD not just a Flight (Weapon Bay) of them. Although I believe that T missiles and any incoming Nukes are all individuals.

Either way say I had 12 AMS in an arc, I can basically hard kill or impose a +4 to Hit (by dealing 4 Capital Damage) to every missile(or Flight of Missiles)/ton of ammo*12 Heat Capacity I have greatly limiting their efficacy. 1 ton of AMS and 6 tons of DHS is enough to basically neutralize a 100 ton Kraken and its 220 ton Launcher making them almost worthless except as Ortillery. If damage were halved like other PDWs that would only be a +2 and not enough to kill a Killer Whale and White Shark so that's more reasonable (since those ones have the nukes).

For reference, if you want to stop a full 70 points of capital missile barrage, you only need 234 AMS(3x234=702). For IS LAMS it needs 819 DHS on each uses. Packing 78 LAMS(you only need 78 on each location, for with this you could use 234 LAMS against all locations) on a location of a dropship only costs 70.5 extra tonnage on each location, for it's not so difficult. And only a dropship can do this - while EVERYONE through the course of the missile can react with their own AMS individually.

You just need double (or 4x if damage was halved) the stuff I listed above to basically make it impossible to hit so you don't need to even hard kill these missile flights with that much ammo or heat capacity.

Ton for ton missiles are on the same damage efficiency as the N-Gauss (the most mass inefficient) which does not have the possibility of interception and the same Extreme Range bracket. So either they are meant to be Anti-Aerospace (in which case give them all a seeker bonus or damage boost considering a Barracuda weighs as much as a Sparrowhawk which can do the same damage repeatedly) or Orbit-to-Surface (in which case give them all the Teleoperated Missile bonus) weapons.

[PuppyLikesLaserPointers]

Well I was refer how the 'official' rules works right now, to let the others compare with any alternative solution of their own. Anyway, it shows how easy it could be exploited.

Personally I want something other than what you have suggested, but anyway the guaranteed immunity is somewhat weird, indeed. As the uselessness of AMS on ground needs a fix as well.

edit: And I understand the reason of the confusion; I was got ninja'd by Daryk. :( I wasn't intended to make the calculation only for his own.

And while I do want something other but there is no good concept of my idea for now, which was the reason I was not aware of the new reply.

[AlphaMirage]

Well I was refer how the 'official' rules works right now, to let the others compare with any alternative solution of their own. Anyway, it shows how easy it could be exploited.

Personally I want something other than what you have suggested, but anyway the guaranteed immunity is somewhat weird, indeed. As the uselessness of AMS on ground needs a fix as well.

Feel free to post your thoughts. These are just the ones I thought of, I remain open to other options and ideas.

[Mechanis]

My preference is "a little of column A, a little of column B"; with standard AMS being able to fire 6 times per bay (remember that Space turns are 6x the time length of ground turns) but also making them properly directional flack as their description implies; that is, each activation affects all missile attacks along the same vector. And if anything, I would can the damage reduction for other PD weapons altogether, rather than extending it.

This would, of course, be extended to the ground version (each activation slaps all attacks from one arc) so it's not an active waste of tonnage that has almost zero effect.

Because AMS is not "I am going to elegantly snipe down one missile at a time with precise shots" the way it's depicted in MechWarrior, it's a Space Future Phalanx that goes "missiles can't hit me if I turn the air between me and the launcher into bullets"

[DevianID]

I always hated the part that AMS can engage infinite missiles each turn.  I think if you get rid of that rule, which makes zero sense anyway, AMS is a lot better balanced.

So if you need 234 AMS to take out 70 capital damage of missiles, well you need 468 AMS to take out 140 capital damage of missiles.  The AMS needs to run into prohibitive bay penalties to block a second volley, instead of 234 being the final number needed to scythe down near limitless capital missile volleys from different directions at the same time.

Now, a more out there solution would be to make AMS act as % reducing item, with diminishing returns.  If you do this, then you can keep AMS as something that engages limitless missiles in a turn, but the damage reduction never reaches 100% with a single bay.  So, you would take your AMS damage (say its the 234 for 70 capital damage), and you would add your AMS damage and the missile volley damage (say its a smaller volley of 30 incoming damage).  You would reduce the volley by 70 (your damage)/100 (your damage + incoming damage), so 70%, turning the 30 damage Volley into 9 damage.  A 70 damage AMS would likewise reduce a full 70 damage capital missile volley by 50%, and each Kraken missile of 10 damage would get reduced by 7/8, down to 1 damage.  You would need 2 AMS bays to kill a single Kraken missile, as the first AMS bay of 70 would reduce the Kraken down to 1 damage, and the second bay would further reduce this damage which would round to 0.

[idea weenie]

I always hated the part that AMS can engage infinite missiles each turn.  I think if you get rid of that rule, which makes zero sense anyway, AMS is a lot better balanced.

So if you need 234 AMS to take out 70 capital damage of missiles, well you need 468 AMS to take out 140 capital damage of missiles.  The AMS needs to run into prohibitive bay penalties to block a second volley, instead of 234 being the final number needed to scythe down near limitless capital missile volleys from different directions at the same time.

Now, a more out there solution would be to make AMS act as % reducing item, with diminishing returns.  If you do this, then you can keep AMS as something that engages limitless missiles in a turn, but the damage reduction never reaches 100% with a single bay.  So, you would take your AMS damage (say its the 234 for 70 capital damage), and you would add your AMS damage and the missile volley damage (say its a smaller volley of 30 incoming damage).  You would reduce the volley by 70 (your damage)/100 (your damage + incoming damage), so 70%, turning the 30 damage Volley into 9 damage.  A 70 damage AMS would likewise reduce a full 70 damage capital missile volley by 50%, and each Kraken missile of 10 damage would get reduced by 7/8, down to 1 damage.  You would need 2 AMS bays to kill a single Kraken missile, as the first AMS bay of 70 would reduce the Kraken down to 1 damage, and the second bay would further reduce this damage which would round to 0.

The board game Starfire tried diminishing returns on point defense, and it would result in either no damage to the defended ship or an expanding cloud of debris.  There was very little in between.

The rule about each AMS only firing up to 6 times in a turn would be nice however.  Gives you a good reason to mount more AMS, but also cursing the amount of AMS when your opponent closes to engage with direct-fire weapons.

[RifleMech]

I don't play aerospace much but shouldn't each capital missile in that arc be a separate target?  So if a arc has 1 PDW Bays and is attacked by 3 capital missiles, the first missile is attacked normally. The second gets a secondary target modifier, and the third a third target modifier and so on. That way it's possible to shoot down all the missiles but they could miss some and be hit hit by them. The end result would make point defense effective but still keep capital missiles as a threat.

[Col Toda]

Any anti missile system can be overwhelmed.  And AMS is not the only point defense system.  Heavy machine guns eat fire control tonnage not heat sinks. I designed alot of fighters with Small Pulse lasers as Inner Sphere ones are point defense weapons . A normal warship engagement has a warship on one side with aerospace fighter support vs a flotilla of pocket warships with Navel C3 and a CV with a wing of fighters . Between fighter launched and pocket warship launched sub capital and normal missile by the squadren can fairly easily overwhelm the point defense and less easy the fighter cap . It takes less than 2 years to produce the non warship side and more than 2 years to replace the warship . Aerospace paradigms changed during the Jihad . Most nations and clans warships can be defeated by a Starlord Jumpship with 4 pocket warships and 2 Avenger CVs. As soon as one side resolves to do a war of attrition . Even if the warship wins it is likely  a gutted wreak . And if it loses maneuverability by crits the starlord then has the option of using the LF battery to leave or suicide next to the warship after detaching small craft with Battle Armor to capture it . After the Jihaad  the Republic peace postponed the systematic elimination of warships but the Ilkhan era it is a forgone conclusion that the paradigm will assert itself . Sub Capital weapons and pocket warships made killing real warships economical. 

[AlphaMirage]

A star lord with 6 collars can't mount an LF battery. Also why would any large ship close with it? If anything it's going to be forced to strike colors by fighters or it should jump away and save itself

HMG Point Defense bays only fire once per round (and do half damage) heat sinks and ammo for AMS are rounding errors on Warships vs the  mass of missiles they can negate.

The sub caps definitely make a difference but you are still going to lose a lot of PWS for every Warship they cripple.

[Primus203]

Its been a week or two but there is another way to balance the current AMS with minimal mods. This way would be to "borrow" the ideas in the ghost rider series of missiles from David Webers Honorverse.

The dazzler analogue lowers accuracy with jamming. But how do we model this without bulking up dice rolls you may ask as currently AMS are 100 percent accurate. The answer is that this decrease in accuracy is reflected in game by an increase in heat generated per AMS to represent them having to fire more to hit this would also increase ammo use for shell firing AMS. This would go up in tiers. Currently it takes 14 AMS to stop a Killer Whale generating 84 heat. But what if even a light dazzler missile seed raises this by 50 percent. What if a massed seeding increases this by 500 to 1000 percent. This would make it possible for missiles to get through and require in depth missile defense combining jamming and forward small craft and dropships.

The dragons teeth analogue would work synergistically with the dazzler. It generates false missiles causing AMS to waste shots. This would be reflected again by heat. Perhaps this one would use a D-12 or D-6 dice a roll of 1 would mean no increase your computers see through it. every number above 1 is a multiplier on how many times more heat is generated or ammo used.

Lastly I think that together with this Missiles need a bit more range not too much more but enough to just outrange all the other weapons which aren't guided.

[Andras]

There was a AMS change in December 2018. AMS engages by volley, not per individual missile (except I think nukes are still individual)

https://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php?topic=63819.0

We've decided to errata SO:

Capital Missile Bays: For the purposes of PDW fire, treat all missiles fired from a single bay as a single combined missile (i.e. PDW fire damages and inflicts to-hit penalties on the entire group, not against individual missiles). Similarly, the damage value of the missile flight is not reduced unless the entire flight is destroyed by PDW fire.

Current errata as above.
https://bg.battletech.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Strategic-Operations-2020-08-06-v3.02.pdf

[AlphaMirage]

That still doesn't remove the fact that you don't need to hard kill a missile in order to negate it. You just need to impose +4/5 to-hit on them (by 12-15 AMS) to negate them since a Warship already receives a +3 to-hit from capital ECM. So the amount of missiles that you deploy are still made worthless with the investment of a few hundred tons, far less than that many missiles weigh.

[DevianID]

In the errata example, 8 capital damage of AMS provides a +8 to hit on any missile strike it doesn't entirely eliminate.  So a 70 damage missile strike or a 10 damage missile strike both get +8 to hit, and per usual AMS engages infinite missiles/turn.  At 10 capital damage, you also nuke all kraken telemissiles, and with a +10 modifier you basically turn 70 damage missile strikes into automisses.  So if anything, the errata makes AMS BETTER, not worse, as large capital missile salvos only eat a single AMS firing, so you have like 0 chance to overwhelm the AMS heat sinks. (and you shouldnt have been able to ever overwhelm the DHS in the first place, cause for the price of 1 70 damage capital missile barrage, the defending ship can have literally all the heat sinks, as AMS is still far far too efficient.)

[Primus203]

I've got a really simple conceptual method of nerfing the ability of the AMS without changing much rules. The idea is Simple right no doing a certain amount of damage increases the to hit by a point for every unit of damage. Here we simply increase the amount of damage to gain this modifier by 5 or 10 or 20 or possibly another number if you think it's better. But then you would need an insane amount of AMS bays you say. There are two ways to solve this one don't count AMS bays as weapon bays anymore they barely weigh anything so having more wont affect much. Then there is the second way the one I would personally pick. Keep the AMS bays the same but allow them to fire at whatever increased amount of times they need to get the same effect. This minimizes rule changes but vastly increases heat cost of stopping missiles letting massed concentrated barrages slip through.

[Daryk]

The way around AMS with the errata is to simply fire missiles one at a time until it's overwhelmed (ammo or HS), then cluster the shots into bays.

[Lagrange]

We discussed this topic previously here where the conclusion was something like 1, 3, and 4.

The logic was:
(a) For (4) all capital weapons should have their damage increased by an order of magnitude, since otherwise they are absurdly anemic.   Capital armor is also increased by an order of magnitude to compensate.  This means capital weapons are more deadly: getting hit by a 30 ton Barracuda missile is a 'game over' event for an ASF. 
(b) For (1), AMS should not be able to fire more often than on the ground.  Limiting the number of firings implies you want to stack up lots of AMS to succeed.
(c) For (3), the goal was to add some "realism" where AMS could miss.  This one could be sacrificed to decomplicate combat in aerospace style.

There are two design points to consider. 
(1) A missile carrier firing on a near-stationary object (like a space station) can use a bearings-only launch 10 times in a row with some thrust in-between to stack all of it's missiles so they hit in a single round.  This may be ok as stations are rather cheap for their firepower.
(2) A Thera can carry custom ASF with an internal bomb bay to launch 1000+ ASMs in a single round.  This is not ok as even with the nerfs above you still end up with something overwhelming.  For this reason, we also reduced ASM damage to 1 capital.

Using the above rules, a warship might want to have (say) 400 AMS covering an arc to cover case (2).  That's certainly possible on a warship, but it means the fire control tonnage adds up enough that you won't want to place any other weapons in the same arc as the AMS.  Sacrificing 4 of your 8 arcs for serious point defense becomes a tradeoff in design against other purposes for those arcs.

[Daryk]

I thought actual AMS didn't count toward Fire Control tonnage?

[AlphaMirage]

I thought it just didn't need gunners but I could be mistaken.

[Daryk]

Given the hour, I'll try to look it up tomorrow.

[Lagrange]

I thought it just didn't need gunners but I could be mistaken.

Not needing gunners is correct---I see it on TM page 129 in the AMS description. 

...AMS... does not require gunners...

There's nothing similar about fire control tonnage as far as I can tell.

[Daryk]

I think it comes down to whether AMS is considered a "weapon".  SO:AAR page 133 says:

Beyond these weapon limits, advanced aerospace units may mount any number of non-weapon items, with most counting only as weight and some counting as bays.

[Maingunnery]

I think it comes down to whether AMS is considered a "weapon".  SO:AAR page 133 says:

Well AMS does have a damage value, so it should count as a weapon.

If not, then AMS becomes just too exploitative.