thanks, Stormbringer! that was awesome. still, the problem child of the gryphon remains for us owning our first missile cruiser. It's too bad there's no large sized regenerating (non-mod?) missile launcher in the game.
That's not really a problem. The Gryphon is probably the best ship to put non-regenerating missiles on, because it has an autoforge which means that limited-ammo missiles are much more cost effective on it. Also, it's a cruiser and even with mods, most regenerating missiles have some weaknesses that makes a Gryphon with only regenerating missiles punch under its weight. Most large mounts are very very powerful, and you have 2x the ammo most other ships would be paying for.
I don't use Gryphons much myself, but a fun build which uses all-limited ammo that I'd suggest for the Gryphon based on 30 minutes of simulator testing in a random mission that rolled a Gryphon:
This build for a Gryphon doesn't take into account bonuses from officers or extra OP from technology and can solo 3 enforcers or two eagles under AI control. Under human control it can probably kill a large number of frigates, but piloted by the AI it tends to heavily overkill with the sabots. With missile skills, it will be even better, and in campaign you will probably have more OP than this.
Why sabots? They are a high damage single projectile (good for breaking armour) with kinetic type (good damage against shields, its type has poor performance vs armour but is somewhat made up for by the high damage projectile). The sabots are only really vulnerable during their initial drifting stage since once in the second stage where the sabot fires at high speed PD finds it very very hard to intercept them. Most AI variants and even most player-fitted PD ships can't intercept any significant number of these if you are manually controlling the ship and fire them from longer range, unless they have integrated point defence AI and tac lasers.
The keys here are that it has a long range HE weapon to restrict enemy ships' freedom of movement (they will put their shields up, hopefully this means they are less likely to swarm you) and get in some free hits if a ship survives a sabot volley, it has all of its missile racks in a group with a weapon that is
linked but not on autofire to make the AI volley its sabots instead of conserving them. I chose two needlers because it means you waste fewer sabots because the needlers will drive up their flux instead of using sabot ammo to do it.
The initial volley will probably consist of 27 shots (3x4 round volleys from the medium mounts, and all 15 from the smalls), totalling around 20250 kinetic damage, with <1000 kinetic damage from the light needlers firing. The damage to hull will be lower due to armour but the initial volley will break up the ship's armour. The second volley from the mediums is ready to go just about at the point where the smalls have finished firing, so the initial sustained burst can be up to 39 sabots, which equals about 29250 kinetic damage from the sabots in a perfect scenario where they all hit (43870 with Missiles 10 on the pilot), and 2-3 volleys from the light needlers for a bit less than 1k kinetic damage each (against lighter ships the later volleys will be hitting bare hull if the ship survives; they will do almost no damage if the enemy ship armour-tanks them though) in the same time period.
This ship carries 156 sabots by default, assuming a reload from zero ammo, although the AI will tend to waste the last 15 or so sabots from the medium-sized pods by reloading early. With missile specialisation 5 on the piloting officer, it will have 12 more. The ship is more or less useless after these are spent (it is slow and fragile, and will lose battles to a line combat destroyer or even a rare strong frigate) but with this missile load it can delete a number of ships reliably from an early to midgame fleet even under AI control.
Downsides: after it spends its initial missile load its total armament is 2 needlers and a heavy mauler, which is less armament than some frigates can carry in a more vulnerable hull. Against fighters or ships with drone systems the AI will spend its precious sabots firing at them, so you might want to fly it yourself in those situations. It will lose hard to any enemy ship that has enough flux capacity or heavy armour to survive your initial sustained burst. A heavily armoured cruiser like the Dominator (especially with its burn drive to get up close) will eat it for breakfast, as will many other ships that have longer range guns, although admittedly the same is true against most Gryphon variants. Suggested uses for extra OP for this ship would be Integrated Targeting Unit and probably Unstable Injector.
EDIT: mehgamer pointed out in Discord that this sabot build isn't actually very efficient for what you're buying (which is true: flux-efficient damage builds should include more HE finishers and kinetics in the medium ballistic) and suggests that the AI is more effective with the default Fire Support variant Gryphon than this build, and recommends the Archer as a better option for experimenting with sabot-based gimmick builds
EDIT EDIT: Soren (creator of the Dassault-Mikoyan mod - check it out it's cool) suggested two good builds he's using atm, although he hasn't got ECCM/Expanded Missile racks yet due to not unlocking them in the campaign these screenshots are from:
For fleet actions, preferably with some sort of escort to watch its back if you need PD cover from many enemy missiles (he suggested a Centurion with taclasers + integrated PD AI, or LR PD):
For hunting pirates and assorted other smaller low-tech ships:
EDIT EDIT EDIT:
Oh wow, thanks for the shoutout Alex massive tl;dr: Consider using limited ammo missiles.