Missile frigates

[HoodedWraith]

I know there are a lot of missile heavy loadouts for the vehicles that VS has, but one of my all time favorite craft has been a relatively lightly armored light cruiser with a rather large loadout of lighter missiles (enough to punch through a capital ship's shields if enough make it through PD and ECM). Since I first started writing them up for various pencil and paper game mods, I've made them somewhat slow and lumbering, but with a staggering number of birds in the air with each salvo (the typical cap ship we use fires about 15 torps per broadside, these suckers are smaller and dump anywhere from 20 to 30). They'd be quite expensive to actually own (special missiles or some such, that way they wouldn't require that many tubes) because you'd be restocking between each encounter, but as a vessel to watch in cap ship duels it would be rather epic.

Envision a pair of battlegroups exchanging fire, a handful of Clydesdale-equivalent cap ships exchanging beam fire, and then suddenly missile contrails spout from what appeared to be innocent cruisers which strike and cripple one of the cap ships and force one battlegroup to retreat.

I'd even be more than happy to sit down and figure out basic numbers (size, hardpoints, armor [though I don't have a solid grasp that part quite yet]) if it was an idea that was worth trying.

Like I said before though, the missiles would have to be nonstandard (though readily available if you have the cash) because it just wouldn't work to have that many actual tubes. I haven't noticed link fire, either...

Maybe a set of "heavy" missile slots that act like several individual small missile slots. This is all off the top of my head, I just decided to throw this down in the dev forum and see if anyone liked the idea.

Edit

I didn't see a reason to give this its own topic, so I figured I'd just add it to my current topic.

I also noticed a distinct lack of EW-specific boats, whether it's jammers, ecm screening units to mask emissions from bigger units, etc. Those would be pretty cool to see, and better than just saying "make ew birds for my missile tubes" or something. Light armament, light armor, loaded with mostly different ECM packages, maybe even a close range "weapon" that fired a hugely concentrated pulse of jamming emissions to temporarily fry a target's systems (like the EMP torps, but in a spread beam?).

Yet another edit

Since I don't currently have a scanner, I think I need to dig out my old free 3d modeler and throw together a couple meshes of the missile boat just to get the idea across, but I don't know if I've still got it, nor do I remember if it had a texture setup to go with it. If not, I honestly have no idea how to properly throw it together. Mostly this is just an experiment in giving new ideas for the developers to play with, since I've never been good enough with real code (VB doesn't count, I was a web design major in college before I left and VB was one of my required courses, wasn't really all that hard compared to C++) for making my own game/flight profiles, and I'm not all that good at designing things based simply on description. That's part of the reason I'd started a pencil and paper company (we'll be releasing the simplified core free online, and then advanced play etc etc, so we're not a real print company), because I really have to work off of my own imagination to really give something that.. extra flair.