Just a dead-simple question: are homing weapons viable?

The question is pretty much in the topic description. I want to create a weapon for bombarding a planet, but not in a conventional sense. Rather, this "weapon" will actually be colonization pods/ships, and when they "bombard" the planet, it goes from living to dead, but the two states are reversed so that an uninhabited planet is changed to an inhabited one. The key detail is that I want the ships to always have a 100% success rate of landing on the planet, so in an ideal world, I would create them like homing missiles shaped like ships, with a low speed and excellent turning capability, just to ensure they all strike the surface and add up to the proper amount of "damage" necessary to change the living/dead status of the planet.

So, in short, can homing projectiles be anti-planet weapons?

Yes. They will however not "hit" the planet, as you cannot target planets. You will need to employ a planet-type ship at first, then switch to a spob.

Non-homing projectiles would be the simple route however. If you're set on this idea I'd be happy to help though... I like tricking Nova into doing things it doesn't normally do.

edit: Here's one approach. I don't know if this will work in practice, but on paper it should work.

1. Make sure your spob is Nav Default 1.

2. Set a planet-type dude to appear in your mission "on top of Nav Default 1". You could name it "Colonist Base Camp Location." The ship should,probably be invincible or damn near to it.

3. Set your colonizing "weapon" to have a blast radius. A value of 1 should suffice.

4. In-game, you'd target the planetary dude and fire on it. The missiles will hit it and in theory, the splash damage will hit the planet. That's the unknown here... I don't know if splash damage from a planet ship will harm a spob.

If you'd like me to mock something up and test it, I'd be happy to. Just say the word.

This post has been edited by Sklent : 26 January 2014 - 03:32 PM

So wait, is it really possible to rig a düde ship to be position exactly where the first Nav1 spöb is located? If so, then awesomely epic!

You can do this with all 4 Nav defaults actually. It's pretty sweet