I suppose in real life the alternative would be to sell them to some lesser power, but that’s only really an option in a multi-empire setting.
'tis the volatility of the military-industrial complex. Stockpile too much, and you leave yourself with too much waste. Stockpile too little and you don’t have enough time to start ramping up production once you’re in need of a steady supply.
Have folks actually confirmed that the “fire at waypoint with a missile that has active sensors on-board” actually works? I recall hearing concerns that the missiles fired this way don’t actually track targets properly, but I have no idea what’s what.
A use for outdated missiles that I can think of would be using them on enemy commercial shipping and stations. Have some listening posts/buoys to work out which bodies they are using, gas giants would be my first check. And take them out at the body or travelling to it. They should have a lot less PD with them for outdated missiles to still work well.
I use them to soak up AMM spam before advancing into range.
Soaking AMM spam certainly works as a use for the truly long ranged obsolete missiles. And since they have warheads, the enemy has to respect the threat. Otherwise, decoys that don’t have warheads can serve the AMM soak just as effectively and far more cheaply in terms of construction time and storage space.
But that is an RP matter, as the AI still fires AMMs at missiles that do not contain any warheads. Nor would I want the AI ignoring missiles that don’t have warheads, because those could still include sensor missiles that get details of the smaller fleet elements that would not otherwise be detectable at range.
Well, as an update to the stealth ship design we did manage to get to the homeworld of some random NPR we found and fired off our missiles without detection (I ended up sticking an AWACS on all my jump stealth ships)
These are third generation stealth ships, titled the Erebus Model III (A being the standard variant, J being the jump variant). We have 32 stealth ships in total (28 A variants, 4 J variants) which came into the system as 4 squadrons of 8, but for ease of control I grouped them into two fleets of 16 (which is how I organized them in terms of admin anyways)
Each squadron (8) carries 211 size 10 torpedoes with a size 36 warhead.
Ok maybe that was a bit overkill.
But hey, mission against an actual NPR successful.
Martian foundries are going to get real busy building these things
It is not overkill, it is dialing it in ]; )
