The 8000km/s 15k ton contact showed up again, but this time I had a newly built task group ready for it. I approached it at 1/5 speed (1250) which cut my thermal to 187. At 65m km I turned on active sensors and fired a volley of 40 size 4 WH12 missiles. Figuring that would destroy it, I had my ships hold their fire. A few minutes later the ship's PD shot down 2, and the other 38 hit the target. The ship had at least a level 3 armor rating, so my WH12 missiles didn't penetrate on the first hit (although they open up a nice 2 wide hole in level 3 armor, I need a 16 WH to get damage through it). Most of the missiles don't seem to do anything, but the last set of 5 (was 8 sets of 5 from 4 ships with 2 fire controls each) managed to blow an engine and cause a secondary explosion.
The 456 damage worth of missiles slowed the ship to just under 4000 km/s, so I didn't have to worry about keeping up with it. I had one of the ships fire another volley of 10 missiles, figuring it had to be near death by now. This time the PD only managed to kill one, and the other 9 finished off the ship. Costed me 50 size 4 missiles, but now I don't have to get constantly interrupted by detecting the thermal contact.
The ship never did stream atmosphere or release life pods, so I'm thinking it was a precursor robot ship. My salvage ship managed to pull 4 Magnetic Confinement Fusion Drive E5 off of it, but since I just finished researching that drive it won't help my research efforts. Shame I didn't pull the sensors off it, it must have had a really nice thermal and my sensor tech is lagging due to not having any good sensor scientists.
-edit- Heh, my magazines are internal armor instead of being an explosion risk. I'm using size 1 capacity 16 magazines with 5 HTK and only a 3% explosion chance. Seems like they scale upward badly, size 1 can hold 16 with 5 htk, but making a size 2 with 10 HTK (comparable to two size 1s) only holds 28. Seems weird to have magazines with only 4 missiles in each, but unless theres something I'm not seeing it seems to be the best design philosophy in Aurora. Just the magazines in my warship makes up 65% of the internal HTK. 250 HTK from the 50 magazines, 130 from the rest of the components.