[Missile part] shaped charge / hollow charge warhead

[Hector]

The suggestion

In real life, shaped charges are used when a weapon is supposed to penetrate armor despite not having high velocity rounds, for example RPGs or anti-tank missiles. I'd really much appreciate seeing something similar available for missiles in from the depths.
The way I would implement them would be a warhead that causes significant damage on the block the missile impacts on, but causing either no or only miniscule explosive damage, at max 1/5 of an explosive warhead. balancing-weise I'd suggest one warhead to be able to penetrate one single block of metal while a 4m metal beam would require three (maybe two or four if that's better balanced) shaped charge warheads.
It also might be an idea worth considering to make the 2nd, 3rd and following shaped charge warheads increase the damage less, so that a missile can't instantly destroy a 4m metal beam and shred the inside of a ship with shrapnel.

Why sould this be added?

currently, whenever missiles are built I can specialize the payload to be either specialized for taking down targets with only miniscule armor or some kind of multi-purpose payload. shaped charges would only damage the block the missile hits, limiting the amount of damage done to wood hulls significantly and therefor allow the players to build missile payloads specialized for targets with metal armor - one to three shaped charges followed by fragmentation warheads could quite possibly deliver the killig blow against targets with medium armor without being overpowered against wood targets.

[Chrozayis]

a frag can be set to penetrate with a tiny angle, if you want to pierce and put shrapnel everywhere on the inside you could try pairing your missiles so they fire piercefrag-scatterfrag-piercefrag-scatterfrag...

[Hector]

Originally posted by Chrozayis:

a frag can be set to penetrate with a tiny angle, if you want to pierce and put shrapnel everywhere on the inside you could try pairing your missiles so they fire piercefrag-scatterfrag-piercefrag-scatterfrag...

True - but since metal has a high armor value, frag warheads won't do even closely as much damage as a dedicated shaped charge would. I simply looked for something that would allow missiles to do something akin to what bullets with armor penetration would do and didn't find anything - so I wondered whether this might be something worth adding to FTD

[Chrozayis]

maybe, cannons, mod support and engines are in the queue before missiles, for piercing metal lasers are best, maybe the new railgun + frag ammo will fill your required niche

[Hector]

Originally posted by Chrozayis:

maybe, cannons, mod support and engines are in the queue before missiles, for piercing metal lasers are best, maybe the new railgun + frag ammo will fill your required niche

That sounds quite interesting. It still doesn't help me build the javelin-like anti-tank-missile I was hoping to build one day, but it sounds interesting.
Have railguns really been confirmed to be added or were they suggested on the forums by FTD players?

[Samlow]

Custom bullets like this are planned to be implemented with the upcoming Custom Cannon update. This update is currently in the works.

[Chrozayis]

"railguns are a thing, while they take up a fair amount of room on a turret, a non-railgun turret will be smaller than an old custom cannon one. The amount of space required on the ship will increase however for both versions requiring the ammo customisers and shell parts to put them all together to feed up to the turret." -khaz