MIRV as a NS Heavy Assault Launcher. How it would function: You fire it over a cluster of vehicles. The main projectile has a short range arc. At the end of its range it explodes into a number of bomblettes (say, 5 or 6) that fall down. These bomblettes function like Coyotes/Striker projectiles, except instead of tracking air vehicles they track ground vehicles. Each of these do moderate direct damage to the vehicle they hit, with little spash damage. The spread is intended to be as wide as so no more than one or two bomblettes hit the same vehicle in most cases, but there should be some skill management to the weapon: if you arc high you'll get a wider spread, if you arc low, you may do more damage to a single target, but run the risk of impacting before reaching the main projectile arming range and bomblettes fail to deploy, doing negligible damage. Intended role: It gives players a means to deal with many clustered vehicles (aka armor zerg). Lockons fail in such situations; getting a lock when targets are weaving in between each other is difficult. Dumb fire rockets are also not desirable because it means infantry getting close to a huge mass of armor just to pop a single tank. Effective use scenarios: -As designed, 1v1 (1 infantry vs 1 tank) it would be sub optimal as most of the bomblettes would not hit a lone target. -Multiple infantry versus 1 tank would be better. -Multiple infantry verses many clustered vehicles would see it used to the most effect. -Deployed against infantry it would be ineffective; with low splash damage and random spread, chance of bomblettes directly hitting infantry would be low.
One difficulty with this is that hit detection is based on the location of the shooter to the target vehicle, not where the target vehicle is actually hit. So if you stood in front of a tank, used this weapon, and rained bomblets onto the tank, chances are the game would still consider these hits against the frontal armor of the tank. Also I don't really see this is an infantry weapon... anything infantry can carry that divide into submunitions generally won't result in things that are too effective against tank armor. Instead this should be a freefall bomb given to the Liberator, sort of like the CBU-97. The Liberator should get one bomb before it has to go in for a long rearm, but that bomb should be able to do decent damage against a group of tanks. As for limiting effectiveness against infantry, the CBU-97 has a safety device that detonates each submunition before it hits the ground. So if any of the submunitions fails to find a nearby tank, it should just explode in mid-air. No harm to infantry (except flying Light Assaults maybe). Make each submunition descend relatively slowly and also vulnerable to destruction by shooting them, and you have a viable and interesting weapon for Liberators. Doesn't seem suitable for infantry though.
There was already a weapon like this in PS1, it was called the Scorpion. It was an AI weapon designed to fire over cover like rocks/parapets on base walls. The user locked on to a set distance and fired the rocket, the rocket then exploded upon reaching the locked distance, raining down 6-7 bomblets in a semi-random spread. 3 always went in the same spot, and 3 were random within the downward cone. The rocket itself did no damage, and if it hit a target or obstical before its detonation distance, the rocket would bounce off and fail to explode. It had a really sharp learning curve, but was astoundingly powerful in practiced hands.
