Is this modification possible.
 

I have been trying to mod SRMs such that they do a lot more damage but don't have a larger explosion radius.

I have been so far unable to do so.

I have tried reducing the explosion distance in the rockets.xml but haven't gotten any results and haven't found anywhere else that might have explosion size in it.

If you've found explosion_distance modifier you can see damage modifier right next to it. So what's the problem?

Two things:
1. If you want to be sure if something works or not you have to buy one from the shop right after you modified it. Modules in your inventory keep stats from the moment when you got them.
2. Visual explosion has nothing to do with real damage radius that you want to modify.

So i think that I know what explosion distance does.

What it does is it modifies the distance to the target that the missile will explode at. I think.

The problem with modifying damage is that as you increase the damage, the radius of damage increases.

So you can modify missile damage, but when you do so you get missiles that blow up entire wings. This is another reason why the hard missile hit clicky is so strong.

I am now fairly sure that the explosion size is hard coded by explosion damage.

Which means that it is not possible to do what I want.

Edit except with MIRVs

Sorry, I didn't understand what you've done so far. You may be right. Try to ask Trucidation. He's made missile mod so he surely knows more about it.

One suggestion - you can try to change DistanceDetonator type to ImpactDetonator. I doubt it uses other algorithm but I think it's worth to try.

Where is the switch? I only see distance detonators and MIRV detonators in rockets.xml

Rockets seem to be defined by their detonator type, carcass and seeker type. But i don't see anything other than MIRV and distance detonators

Edit: and then MIRV releases normal missiles defined in the same way

ImpactDetonator is an unused type of detonator but it exists. Check the ..\Data\XMLSchema\AllModules.xsd. If you change the detonator type and remove explosion_distance line it should work.

I will give it a go. Let you know how it works out

So i gave it a go.

I think but am not sure whether or not it reduced the radius. I don't think it did.

However it did make missiles explode when engaged by active ABM. Which is both hilarious and terrible

Update:

So i went and edited this in the AI.ini file

splashDamageMaxRadius = 30;50;20

to this

splashDamageMaxRadius = 30;50;1

And that did not work

So I changed it to

splashDamageMaxRadius = 1;50;20

And that worked. But it changed the explosion distance for ALL missiles to be so small that some missiles with high distance detonation numbers would not hit the enemy (launched a tier 2 torp at a group of traders and it did zero damage despite exploding on schedule)

I do not know what the second and third entries do. They may be parameters which say how quickly damage drops off or what not. But I am not sure

So it looks like you can do what I want(which is make SRMs valuable and dangerous to enemies rather than just you since you have to deal with so many of them). But if you do you are going to have to gimp torpedo's. Since you're going to have to reduce the size of explosions.

splashDamageMaxRadius = 1;50;20

is equivalent to

splashDamageMaxRadius = 1

; is equivalent to rem

:)