@Walt Thanks for reading all the stuff we dumped on you last night. Sorry I tend to megapost. It's hard to say all this stuff briefly.
Walt They already have randomized vectors, but maybe it's not not enough?
Oh, I see that now. Okay, what if the shrapnel had randomized velocities as well, clamped between certain tolerances? That would definitely make it look less uniform.
Walt I don't understand why they seem backwards to you.
Because the traditional role of flak was to fire on distant, high altitude targets, whereas PD is more like a machine gun, or like the modern CIWS, which are short range. We don't have to stick to those traditional roles in a space game, but I think flak would be better as a long range weapon.
What were the balance issues people had with PD?
Walt we need a short-range defense that can also justifiably shoot down cannons and lasers
I think PD could fill that role. I propose PD be changed to fire a small laser beam, similar to Star Trek phasers. If it's a laser beam, it would make sense to people that it could destroy cannon shells and breach the energy containment of blaster shots. It would also make more sense from a lore perspective. Why use slow plasma shots to shoot down incoming threats when you can use fast light? Additionally, you already have the art for the beam - just scale down the ion beam effect to a tiny needle laser.
LASER PD:
Shorter range than old PD, so it has a brief window to fire.
~70 degrees FOF.
Fires twice per second.
One PD zap kills a blaster shot, two zaps kill a standard cannon shell, three zaps kill a large cannon shell.
Two zaps kill a HE missile. (Maybe 3?)
Lifetime of beam effect is brief, like 100-200ms. (not a continuous beam like ions)
Cost is more expensive than old PD? $1200?
Flak would be the primary anti-missile defense that can also fire on ships, while PD is the purely defensive system that tries to zap the missiles that get through (if it's not too busy firing at cannons, etc).
I think with this style of PD, individual missiles would still have a decent chance to get through since they take more than one shot. The limited fire arc will reduce the likelihood of PD FOF overlap, making missiles less likely receive two shots from separate, spread out PDs. To guarantee destruction of a single missile, two PDs would have to be side-by-side. Those two PDs could handle two missiles per second, but only within a narrow FOF. (Alternately, the FOF could be wider, but each target require more shots.)
Laser PD could potentially destroy a fair bit of incoming turret fire. One PD counters one small laser blaster, two PDs counter a standard cannon or heavy blaster, three PDs counter a large cannon. So surface area countering the same amount of surface area.
Finally and most importantly, this setup gives BOTH anti-missile defenses an alternate role when they're not firing at missiles. Flak shoots ships, PD shoots turret stuff.
uses old jedi mind trick to persuade