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[Üstad]

A capital exclusive hullmod should allow smaller ships to reload their ammo by coming near the hullmoded capital ship and waiting there.

Though during the battle it could be very problematics with the AI. They should only consider it when they are safe and for the player this behaviour should be turned off by default. With something like automatic orders mod play can allow this behaviour automatically, assuming you're familiar with the mod.

It's just a suggestion. I would be glad if I contribute this game somehow, so here it is who knows maybe it's a good idea. 

[Schwartz]

Cute idea, but you ever try ferrying live warheads on a pulley from one ship to the other while both are maneuvering and in combat? You'd have to sit still, lower shields, expose loading ports on both ships. Not to mention presenting an extremely juicy target in the missiles themselves.

It would also have to be balanced against Afflictors / Reapers zipping over to the enemy, unloading all torpedos and zipping back to load up. Missiles are currently balanced against being limited (most of them), with the only exception of missile reloading ship systems on dedicated missile ships. I'm thinking from the required AI changes to the changes in playing field for missiles in general, this would be difficult to balance and not at all an easy addition to the game.

[Megas]

This is a reason why I often call fighters better missiles than missiles.  Need unlimited torpedoes? Bring an Astral!  Need Sabots for Odyssey? Get some Longbows instead of filling your missile mounts with pods.

[Shad]

There have been a few of these threads. I completely agree, all missiles should regen as a standard, with very rare exceptions.

The current situation where the most basic fighter in the game (Talon) can regenerate its swarmers, but a battleship for some reason can't is just strange. This is what leads to the the the popularity of all Reaper Afflictor - other designs are just not worth it.

To add to that the AI is prone to wasting missiles and once you weather the initial barrage, all that OP becomes dead weight.

[Mondaymonkey]

The current situation where the most basic fighter in the game (Talon) can regenerate its swarmers, but a battleship for some reason can't is just strange.

Bad argument. Not because you are wrong, cos' you are right. I mean, what you say is rather a reason to nerf a fighters (especially bombers), than buff a rockets with regeneration.

However, I do not think regenerated missiles are totally bad idea. First of all there are lot of a "small" missiles, who works in swarms. Why not increase their ammo, or add a slow steady regeneration? I mean, we have salamanders, they are infinite, why not else? Not a torpedo, off course.

Do not wish player to abuse missiles? Decrease a CR with each shot based on a rocket type and hull size. I mean, you can almost free launch swarmers on a cap, but some frigates will malfunction if tried to make a second/third/fourth harpoon salvo. And for the reapers, why not just make them almost as dangerous to fire as to catch? I mean, sector is dying, ships and ammunition more and more looks like a scrap, why would firing a tinkered nuke be a safe thing?

[Thaago]

Missiles are currently in a pretty good state as the most powerful weapons in the game. Them reloading in general would require some pretty extreme rebalancing or the game would become a whole lot more deadly, for both sides.

I think this suggestion would be a neat thing for a logistics focused semi-combat capital: perhaps it is teleporting ordinance directly into the racks of the ships nearby? That would be a neat thing to build a fleet around, as long as the ship itself was rather vulnerable for its deployment cost. The AI is a bit problematic though, because with regenerating missiles ships should be firing them much more frequently... hmm can weapon tags be changed on the fly? If the new capital's reload system also changes the weapon tags that could do the trick. Its a neat idea!

This is a reason why I often call fighters better missiles than missiles.  Need unlimited torpedoes? Bring an Astral!  Need Sabots for Odyssey? Get some Longbows instead of filling your missile mounts with pods.

They are extremely differently though. Bomber wings fire in irregular waves and need to overwhelm an enemy, which may be easier or harder depending on their state. Interceptors and heavy fighters swarm around their target firing guns. Neither of those are how any missiles (except maybe the annihilator rack) behave: the comparison is just not true.

[Mondaymonkey]

teleporting ordinance directly into the racks of the ships nearby?

Why not just:

teleporting ordinance directly into the racks vital subsystems of the enemy ships nearby?

[Grievous69]

I don't get how some keep saying that fighters (bombers here) carrying the same exact weapon, with same exact stats as you put on your ships are WEAKER. Fighters have much longer range, are faster, usually have some decoy flares around, and most importantly they don't risk ***, if they blow up who cares, new batch coming in right up. Sure a ship may fire more missiles but the bigger ones still have long reloads, so it's still a wave if you look at it that way. and the overwhelm part is just wrong, usually the missiles fired from single ships get knocked out by PD, not the fighter ones coming in almost point blank.

Regenerating missiles is a completely normal thing as we have those already in the game and I've seen lots in mods, they're not even close to broken. The cooldown just has to be long enough, that's all. Because personally, going out of ammo in half of a fight is such a stupid feeling, and don't give me that ''but you took out more ships faster so the enemy forces are now thinner'', yea but that doesn't mean much when the enemy forces are 4 times as big as your fleet. If a goal is to kill the enemies quickly then SO is perfect for that.

Out of all large missiles I only use Locusts, everything else runs out super quick and is not worth it. Other sizes get more spread out choices but I usually give those to AI so they have some sort of panic button. On my flagship I either have Reapers or nothing.

[Thaago]

They are different because the cyclic fire rate is lower, you can't control the time of fire, they cost more OP and have higher opportunity costs (must have decks! usually dedicated ships, with a few exceptions), and fighters that have been killed have long down time before they are available again (and people keep saying how expanded decks is a "must have" hullmod, so I guess they are getting shot down pretty often). In exchange they have longer range and regenerate when depleted.

I'm not saying bombers are weak - a Heron or Astral is a darn powerful strike craft - but ignoring the difference between fighters and missiles and when its good to use one vs the other is an easy way to make fleets a lot weaker than they should be.

[Grievous69]

Yeah I agree that they're different but in the end it gets leveled out. So when someone claims regenerating missiles would be broken it makes me laugh. Also you can't compare OPs when one way the missiles regens and the other doesn't.

[SCC]

What fighters lose from lack of coordination (if you're trying to pump out as many torpedoes as possible and/or are in close combat), they make up for with unlimited ordnance. Just brute force your way into victory.

Main reason to take EDC is to prevent any losses from accumulating. It means more fighters have to be lost for longer, before fighter replacement rate starts dropping under pressure.

[Shad]

What fighters lose from lack of coordination (if you're trying to pump out as many torpedoes as possible and/or are in close combat), they make up for with unlimited ordnance. Just brute force your way into victory.

Pretty much this, but also fighters allow force concentration. You can stack many khopeshes on a single ship in a way that's almost impossbile to do with ships.

[Megas]

Generally, the difference between fighters and missiles is fighters can endure for the whole battle and win battles for you if you have enough of them.  For missiles, if they are like Pilums, it is a joke weapon that can blot the screen for a few minutes and maybe kill a ship before they run out of steam, while anything else that is effective runs out of ammo too quickly (except maybe Locusts with missile racks) and you deal with the rest of the ship spam with less.  At best, it is four Reaper Afflictor assassinating a high-value enemy target or two, maybe playership Aurora spamming tons of Sabots and blasting a few cruisers to death before running out and retreats like Reaper Afflictor would, or Conquest with double Locusts and missile racks slaughtering small fry and weakened battleships in round one.  Some of the really good missiles are only effective in player's hands.

In some ways, fighters behave like missiles.  They are weapons your ships can equip, and they seek out the enemy, but instead being dumb and crashing into the enemy, they release submunitions like a MIRV before returning back to the mothership for another run.  Fighters-as-weapons really blur the line.  Fighters even feel closer to missiles than ballistic or energy weapons do.

[Terethall]

all missiles should regen as a standard, with very rare exceptions

reloading in general would require some pretty extreme rebalancing

This thread has derailed evolved into a perennial different conversation about strikecraft as a game mechanic, but I'd like to go a little meta on the original point -- feel free to ignore me.

I, and I think a lot of other very nerdy players of RPGs and battle simulators like Starsector, have a really weird hoarding instinct and aversion to items/weapons with limited ammunition/charges/uses/etc. When I started playing, it took a long time for me to get comfortable with missiles. It wasn't even clear to me as a new player whether missiles recharged between battles -- I thought maybe I'd have to buy them again when they ran out, and that the weapon item itself held the charges. Adding even an extremely slow regeneration speed to missiles, like one per minute for a harpoon rack, I think might go a long way to getting new players and very, very loss-averse players to experiment with, and learn to love, missile weapons.

[Morbo513]

I think near-universal missile regen is a must at this point. If carriers can essentially print fighters, why can't basically any ship do so with missiles? In a fight between one or the other, carriers will win because as mentioned, fighters tend to outlast missiles and overall tend to not only deal out a lot more damage on their own, but also help create even more opportunities to deliver further damage - EMP-armed fighters especially.
This is where Frigates could be given another distinct advantage over larger ships - smaller ones reload missiles faster. I can't pull a good in-universe explanation for this, but for gameplay purposes it'd help them keep punching above their weight class.

The hardpoint/launcher's charges could still be limited overall, by CR would probably be easiest but a Harpoon rack could have its 3 missiles and say 27 in reserve (maybe reserves are larger for larger ship classes) - it'd have to be a protracted fight to burn through all those given a sufficiently long reloading period.

I think buffing things generally has better results than nerfing - With fighters being so powerful, and especially if missiles are going to be rounded up rather than fighters rounded down, PD and anti-missile, anti-fighter equipment capabilities would benefit from a buff too.