Any mods have aircraft carrier or air base units in them?

[Min3mat]

Tomahawk cruise missiles can change their course or track targets etc, IIRC. Very sophisticated missiles. He wants a launchable missile that you can guide (i think! x))

[Fanger]

we already have that, its called select the target, and wait for the unit to fire, it then proceeds to the target.. guidance and all..

[mehere101]

Ballistic Missiles fire in high arcs the way we currently have, Cruise Missiles follow the terrain to the target.

[Fanger]

eh no... cruise missiles fly at a cruise altitude (hence being cruise missiles, they cruise) until they approach the target, then they begin a sequence of popup/jink manuveres to attempt to confuse any anti missile defences, Granted this cruise altitude is usually low to the ground...

Other missiles have a different attack pattern...

IN all honestly missiles that fire ballistically compared to terrain following would have no effect on gameplay, aside from visual..

[AF]

I can imagine terrain following missiles would be silly as they'd have to be slower thus easier to shoot down, harder to engineer, require more feul, larger maneouvering systems, better sensors, bigger cost, reduced likelihood of hitting target, a reduced impact gained from dropping from a great height.....

[Peet]

They fly low to avoid radar.

[Argh]

^What he said.

Ground-hugging missiles are designed to hit targets that are extensively defended by AAA. The newest generations are also quite stealthy, and are unlikely to get shot down, period- probably the biggest threat is hand-held AA missiles, but you'd need to shoot quite a few to get a hit, because they're so small, fast, and don't give off nearly as much heat as a full-sized warplane. Maybe someday, when AA lasers aren't just science-fiction, they'll be able to engage them... if they can detect them in time.

They are subsonic, pilotless kamikaze aircraft, basically.

As for damage... while they certainly make use of kinetic energy, the latest generations also make use of shaped charges to penetrate hard targets. And they can carry nuclear payloads, up to the 100-kiloton range or so- more than enough to wipe out most cities

I doubt if they will get used much in the future- instead, we'll probably use reusable drones to deliver glider bombs close enough that they can power-glide to their targets. Stealthier, and cheaper, too. Each time a Tomahawk is used up... that's a million dollars, plus the several hundred thousand used on tech time and spare parts to keep them ready all the time. They aren't exactly cheap, considering that they aren't super-powerful weapons, if carrying conventional explosives.

And no, Tomahawks cannot change targets in mid-flight (although the U.S. military and several others do have stuff that can). They're preprogrammed, and these days, they use very sophisticated terrain maps and GPS to guide themselves to their targets. You wouldn't want them to be able to change course, once launched- an enemy could sabotage your missiles and send them right back to you, or detonate them in mid-flight.

[SpikedHelmet]

Drones have relatively limited range. At the moment, the only efficient tool for destroying hard targets from 1000+km away is cruise missiles, or bombers -- however a ship is simply more logistically efficient as it can simply park off a coast and lob hundreds of cruise missiles at hundreds of targets. With today's technology the use of drones would mean they'd have to be deployed within several dozen (perhaps 100-200?) km from the target.

And using a ship is cheaper than a bomber. A bomber, you have the same cost per missile, the same maintenance, but also the maintenance and cost of the bomber itself which, unlike the ship, has only that single duty to carry that missile.

Once the Ion Cannon Project is finished, though, it'll be a different story.

[MadRat]

You can't define multiple interceptible missiles, which is why I'm looking for alternatives. You can shoot down units. I want a shootable unit for a cruise missile, not an ICBM unit. I really don't want to use a unit because I want it to be launched from a launcher. I don't want a ballistic missile unit, I want a ground-hugging flying missile. This is purely for my own tastes when it comes to both cruise missiles and sea skimming anti-ship missiles. YMMV

[MadRat]

And no, Tomahawks cannot change targets in mid-flight (although the U.S. military and several others do have stuff that can). They're preprogrammed, and these days, they use very sophisticated terrain maps and GPS to guide themselves to their targets. You wouldn't want them to be able to change course, once launched- an enemy could sabotage your missiles and send them right back to you, or detonate them in mid-flight.

Actually the ones developed post-GW1 can be reprogrammed in mid-flight and recieve target and command updates in midflight using encrypted one-way downlinks. But all this talk about cruise missiles is OT. I'm looking for a cruise missile unit that can be shot down on the way to its target. Eventually I might even want a ballistic missile that can also be shot down without anti-nukes, but I'll save that for a later discussion. We almost need an interceptor category field and IsInterceptable complimentary definition created to define within the current nuke/anti-nuke system to pull off what I want. I'm thinking InterceptorCategory=NUKE, InterceptorCategory=SKIMMER, etc.

[Argh]

Um, if you just want that... there are easy solutions:

1. Make a unit with a weapon that is commandfire=1, has a very short range. Then make it "fly" by setting up a hovercraft with certain parameters (see older versions of NanoBlobs- I had the Wolf using this for awhile).

2. User tells this to attack a point on the map or a moving target, and hey-presto, it'll go there and go boom.

If you want it to engage moving targets, it's only slightly more complex.

1. Make a weapon that has a small (but not teeny- say 48 or so) range.

2. When the weapon can fire at the designated target (again, you've gotta keep this thing commandfire, or it'll bork for sure), then have that weapon call the main explosion. Boom.

Can you do this with a true flyer? I doubt it. I don't think Spring's AirCAI is smart enough to handle something like this. But maybe. And there might be good scripting workarounds

Can you intercept this "missile" with specific weapons? You betcha. Just set up OnlyTargetCategories, etc.

There are all sorts of variations, but that's the basic idea. So long as you aren't tied to an OTA mindset and are willing to hack around problems, there aren't a lot of things you can't fake with Spring at this point. Would it be nice to have more interceptor categories? Yeah. I can see why it's been a low priority, though- it's computationally expensive, doing the search each frame for an interceptor, looking for the weapon it can intercept over a very large area. I seriously doubt if it would run well, if it was taken to extremes, with anti-this/anti-that. Not having it as an option kind've sucks, though. Maybe next version.

[SpikedHelmet]

What I'd like to see is the ability to have a factory build and fire weapons that are actually kamikaze planes and such, that would basically act like a nuke launcher but be... cooler. The kamikaze unit would be completely uncontrollable by the player, of course, and would only attack targets that the factory building is told to attack... you know what I mean.

[Fanger]

so what you want madrat is a more defined method of determining interceptor weapons... not some strange new way to make a new missile..

Yes the reason cruise missiles fly low is to avoid detection and thus avoid being shot down.. however since radar in spring does not function like real life radar in that targets on or close to the ground become hard to detect.. or anything of that nature, and the fact that the interceptor set up is limited means that ground hugging missiles have no point in spring, aside from asethetic properties..

Not that any of the proposed features are bad, Personally I would love to see the following available:

-Carriers that can store aircraft and launch them on command, do not have to be ships

-Kamikazi drone units that can be produced and stored in a unit and then when that unit is told to attack the drone launches out and attempts to intercept the target, said drones could or could not be shot at..

-Better defined interceptor system allowing multiple different weapons to be set up as intercetable not just missiles, and define exactly which weapons can intercept said weapons..

Id love to have the above, they would all be cool useful features...

[MadRat]

Would it be nice to have more interceptor categories? Yeah. I can see why it's been a low priority, though- it's computationally expensive, doing the search each frame for an interceptor, looking for the weapon it can intercept over a very large area. I seriously doubt if it would run well, if it was taken to extremes, with anti-this/anti-that. Not having it as an option kind've sucks, though. Maybe next version.

If you have a small set of targets and anti-targets then they search through each other. Its not computationally expensive if the data sets are small. It might drag down the game a small bit with 100 in flight, but that's no more intensive than having 100 units pathfind already.