PD weapons can't target other PD shots

and this bothers me.

I had such small-to-medium sized plans, and they were dashed upon the unforgiving monoliths of reality when I discovered that there is no way for a point-defense turret to target the shots from another ship's point-defense turret. All I wanted was a continuous wall of explosions between two ships, and for the ship with more PD-guns to slowly gain the upper hand, pushing the detonation zone closer to its rival until finally the enemy is encompassed by fiery death.

But no.

Try using submunitions to make a shot that the other PD turret will shoot at, that should work.

Just an idea

I love this forum. I can phrase something as a rant and still get a solution.

Thanks Crusader Alpha.

Of course, anytime. Thanks for making me think (Which is hard much of the time anyway)

...it didn't work. I tested this out with home-built wëaps and oütfs and it didn't work. Well, that is, the PD-weapon fired fine; its shots submunitioned into the guided weapon fine; the guided weapon fired toward the closest target, either incident missile or PD-targetable ship, but it didn't act guided. That is, it flew in a straight line and couldn't be the target of PD-weapons.

I think this qualifies as a bug: submunitioned weapons retain the guidance of their parent shots.

Qaanol, on Jun 23 2005, 10:23 PM, said:

...it didn't work. I tested this out with home-built wëaps and oütfs and it didn't work. Well, that is, the PD-weapon fired fine; its shots submunitioned into the guided weapon fine; the guided weapon fired toward the closest target, either incident missile or PD-targetable ship, but it didn't act guided. That is, it flew in a straight line and couldn't be the target of PD-weapons.

I think this qualifies as a bug: submunitioned weapons retain the guidance of their parent shots.
View Post

I think the problem is that the submunition doesn't actually acquire a target. Sure, it can launch in the direction of the nearest target but that doesn't mean it actually targets it. Since the parent shot is not a homing type it passed on it's lack of a target to the sub, so the effect is the same as if you launch a normal missile without first acquiring a target.
But how about making half the weapons on the ships non-PD? Then the PD weapons target the non-PD ones and all are destroyed.

Qaanol, on Jun 23 2005, 04:23 PM, said:

...it didn't act guided. That is, it flew in a straight line and couldn't be the target of PD-weapons.

I think this qualifies as a bug: submunitioned weapons retain the guidance of their parent shots.View Post

I think it's just a bug in PD submunitions. Normal unguided weapons sub-munition into guided weapons perfectly, but not PD weapons.

Edwards

I know it sems silly, but what if you made it submunition again into another PD weapon? Here's my thinking: If it submunitions into a regular weapon, it is vulnerable to PD weapons from the other ship. The same is true for the other ship. If the shots sub into a second PD weapon that went farther, they could target the enemy shots in the middle stage while they were vulnerable. I don't know if it would work, but it's a theory.

EDIT: This assumes that the shots would be targetable by PD shots, which doesn't seem to be the case. What if half the turrets were PD and the other half were regular?

This post has been edited by orcaloverbri9 : 23 June 2005 - 10:13 PM

I will try the double-submunitioning tonight. My plan is to have a PD weapon shoot at incoming missiles and small craft, for the shots from that weapon to submunition into unguided projectiles, and for the unguided projectiles to submunition into homing missiles. If that doesn't work I will try PD->homing->homing and see if the third iteration can be targeted by enemy point-defense systems.

I do not believe it is possible to make a PD-weapon turn into a non-PD one. I haven't tried the reverse, and I don't plan to.