For some reason, I feel like you described all of these beam missile turrets that I have been amassing for several days now, quite perfectly.
So much so, that I will take extra precaution when loading the racks of cores to not spell the word "chaph"... Chaffee Chafe "Chaff" wrong and make a fool out of myself, for that would be embarrassing.
But you maybe right, I will remain cautious and possibly reevaluate this threat in the days to come.
Make no mistake, I do think swarm missiles are a situational weapon. Their range and speed is inferior to missile/beam setups, the individual missiles have a lot less impact, they tend to cause horrible friendly fire in fleet battles and I'd never use them to farm pirates off a station because some of the missiles would go for the station and keep spawning new pirate waves, eventually ending with me getting crushed under the sheer amount of pirate ships (or crashing the server).
Swarm missiles are very situational. Unfortunately, they are made exactly for situations like the one you face as an individual contestant in Blood and Steel.
- You are locked in the same sector with your opponent, so range does not matter, you cannot be kited.
- You don't have friendlies to worry about, only hostiles to shoot.
- Swarm missiles don't give a single damn about your target running jammer or even cloaker.
In a situation like this, you will figure out the other advantage of swarm missiles compared to, for example, missile/beam setups:
- A missile/missile/explosive array with 100% support and effect will have the same DPS as a missile/beam/explosive with same block count and support+effect ratios. However, takes a lot less power to fire, and has a lot shorter reload time. Granted, the per-missile damage is lower on the swarm. However, you don't have to manually lock on, and won't be thwarted by jammers.
- Missile/beam turrets are a good alternative to swarm missiles as long as you have still more than 50% shields on your main ship. When things start getting nasty and shields drop below 50%, turrets will start going down. A ship-mounted logic auto-swarm array will keep firing until the ship's shields drop to 0 and a lucky hit goes through the armor, systems and hits either the main missile computer or the logic. Which, usually, lets you fire a lot longer.
- The sheer number of missiles launched each volley act as their own chaff, overloading point defense as they did in the first season of Blood and Steel. Each ship
Sven_The_Slayer annihilated, had point defense turrets. Mine had 12 of them. Did they have any effect? Not really. Even with shared shields, once you reach the magical 50%, the next swarm that hits you, even if your PD takes out 50% of the missiles, will annihilate your tiny point defense turrets.
