X3: Albian Prelude

Missiles are expendable munitions.

Most attack missiles and torpedoes detonate to cause damage to shields and hulls. Their primary purpose, to distinguish themselves from energy weapons, is that they consume much more space and functionally cost you money to attack, but compensate by being capable of inflicting far more damage in a given period of time than a regular weapon can. A good many types of missiles cannot be bought at all, and must be hoarded from enemy kills, making them more precious as a weapon, or else simply sellable loot from a kill. Many powerful missiles and torpedoes have ranges far greater than normal lasers, making them capable of being used from “safe” ranges where a smaller ship would be vaporized by capital ship fire if they traveled into standard weapons range.

This means missiles have a large role in combat strategy, as it gives weaker ships a chance to kill stronger ships, if they are willing to sacrifice money or rare loot, or simply have the missile complexes to buy victory.

Boarding pods are a “missile” which delivers marines from the firing ship to the target.

Attack missiles have a variety of properties:

• Damage yield is the amount of damage inflicted on targets within the Area of Effect.
• Range describes how far the missile can travel, generally you want to launch at targets well within range to compensate for target movement.
• Speed describes how quickly it moves towards a target.
• Cooldown describes how much time the launcher takes between firings to prepare the next launch.
• Seeker determines how the missile acquires targets and when it may be fired: Targetted, requiring a target prior to launch or Autonomous which relies on the missile's onboard systems.
• Swarming refers simply to missiles which release multiple warheads. There are always eight warheads released. Note: warhead behavior is detailed in other columns such as dumbfire, heat-seeking, etc.
• Guidance determines how a missile tracks and follows targets: Heat seeking missiles will attempt to attack the nearest warm target, Image Recognition or Standard Guidance will follow a specific target primarily based on its appearance, Dumb-fire have no guidance at all and will travel in direction of launch without maneuvering relying on the pilot's intuition of target movement.
• Fusing controls detonation, most missiles detonate when they impact a target. Proximity fusing will detonate when the missiles gets close enough to the target, generally once it's already missed impact and is getting farther away. A few missiles may be Manually Triggered to detonate remotely, also known as synaptic triggering.

Some missiles have extremely powerful detonations which affect large areas the size of this influence is noted by Area of Effect.