1. They should make missile animations make more sense. Small should be two missiles two missiles together twisting around. Mediums would be 4 missiles twirling around. This would be graphical of course but would solve why small launcher have two tubes and mediums have 4.

2. I don't really get this entire idea. It sounds rather like changing missile mechanics and starting again. It is one solution but I don't see the problem that the solution is for. Launchers are meant to be heavy but simple tech with the ammo being the complex part of the weapon.

3. You can shoot weapons with F1 through F8. Space is just an alpha strick. Each weapon still performs independently. There is no way to tell if you're alpha striking or staggered fire so there is no way to make an animation for each choice. If you want to stagger your fire then do so. It does have advantages.

basicaly medium launchers look like 2 small ones glued together in a single chassis ... either make the medium ones 2 tube with larger tubes or make them actualy fire the missiles they have tubes for.

what would be cool is to launch missiles in an odd/even pattern on the launchers with each launcher being independent. that would solve 2 of the complaints. you'd have missiles launching from different tube each cycle and the staggered effect could be created by having different sub-cycles for each tube.

well the missile hit is calculated at the time of firing, as if they were instant hit guns (lasers come to mind). it is confusing. it should give a guidance error in that case just like the usual guidance errors :-)

but I like the missiles following the target bot, makes for nice drawings at times :-)

Depends on the application of damage.  If each tube, and the missile there in, has a potential damage, then each hit would of coarse take off a chunk of HP.

So say you have a four tube launcher, a missile pack for that launcher does 200 damage.  TO make it easier, client side (since server side it is just numbers any way) the UI shows each hit as applying 50hp of damage instead of one lump of 200.  That allows a staggered missile launch, but does not effect back end math.

Not true, to the server the damage would be the total damage applied to the opposing target, not the individual damage of the missiles.  The division of the damage would be a client side effect of the launcher.  So the server would have nothing to do with it.

Really, all the server would need to say is how much damage was done and if there were any misses out of the total missiles the launcher can fire.  That is about it...

I might be missing what you want here, but all the tubes on the launchers fire a missile. On the small launcher the top tube fires the first missile, when it comes to fire the next one it uses the lower tube. Same for the medium launcher start top left and works around to the last tube. Zoom in and watch the animation.

There's probably some explanation somewhere why it works like this, i like to think its due to how fast it can cycle a missile into the tube smaller launchers can load missiles faster than the medium so it only needs 2 tubes, where as the medium are slower and need 4 tubes as they load the missiles into the launcher slower.