Medium-range anti-shield missiles intended to be used in the opening round of a combat encounter to disable the shields of an unwary opponent, opening up an opportunity for high-damage anti-armour projectiles to be deployed in the immediate aftermath of the Squall salvo.
Interchangable missile pods were designed to allow for ease of rapid reloading of the impressive 20-shot Squall salvo, but the high mass of the pods and finicky mechanicals of the missile autoloaders make the process unwieldy and the timing falls somewhat below the original Domain Armada specifications. Nonetheless, the Squall is a terrifying weapon system when deployed against shield-reliant combatants as it forces a captain with insufficient point defense system to deactive their shields or submit to high shield flux which may lead to overload.
–In-Game Description
The Squall MLRS is a large missile weapon firing streams of kinetic damage missiles. The missiles are semi-guided; they align towards the target after leaving the launcher but proceed in a straight line afterwards. Like other guided missiles they can pass through friendly ships. Each missile deals 100 kinetic damage, increased to 250 if it hits a shield. Because Squalls fire in bursts, the rate of fire tooltip is slightly misleading; the weapon fires a 20-missile burst in 10 seconds(2 missiles per second) after which it takes 10 seconds to reload.
Squall is a bit of an oddity among kinetic missile weapons as it's the only one with significant endurance - even without any skills or hullmods it takes 160 seconds of continuous fire for it to completely exhaust its ammunition. This, combined with the fact that the missiles cost no flux to fire and deal large amount of damage to shields, makes Squalls tremendously effective in protracted engagements against high-tech enemies such as the [REDACTED].
On the other hand the Squall is very ineffective against armor as the missiles only deal 50 base damage against it.
