Sparked in part by Argh's posts on missile weapons and in part by some wacky weapon hit point levels I saw in a Freelancer mod, I decided to do some research into the "missing" missile weapons in Freelancer. I'm sure someone has done something along these lines before, but I was personally surprised to find that there was a clearly self-consistent* pattern to the missile weapon levels and damages.
By self-consistent I don't mean logical or balanced or anything else, of course.

In any case, here's the background. Standard Freelancer "jumps" some missile levels - there are level 1,3,5,7, and 9 standard missiles in both guided and unguided flavors; there are level 1,4,7, and 10 EMP missiles; and there are 2 torpedoes with no real "level" associated with them.

So what would standard missiles in levels 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 be like? Or level 2,5,6,8, and 9 EMP missiles? Or "some other torpedoes" if there were any?

The clue I used was the launcher hit points. I started with torpedoes since I was interested in them. There is a standard pattern to the Freelancer weapon hit points, where the personal hit points are level-based:

Level 1: 400 hp
Level 2: 548 hp
Level 3: 750 hp
Level 4: 1026 hp
Level 5: 1405 hp
Level 6: 1923 hp
Level 7: 2632 hp
Level 6: 4215 hp
Level 8: 4215 hp
Level 9: 6752 hp
Level 10: 6752 hp

If you look at the Starkiller and the Sunslayer, they both fit into this pattern: the Starkiller would theoretically be a level 5 (the launcher has 1405 hit points), and the Sunslayer a level 9 or 10 (launcher has 6752 hit points). This doesn't tell us precisely where the Sunslayer fits in, although since

Next we look at the unguided (missile01_markxx) and guided (missile03_markxx) missile damages, and try to compare them to torpedoes. the missiles are self-consistent - the guided version causes twice the damage of an unguided at the levels for "real" weapons. The Starkiller torpedo as a theoretical level 5 causes twice the damage of an unguided missile (2424 as compared to 1212), but the Sunslayer doesn't match the Cannonball's direct damage, so if there IS a pattern, the only place the Sunslayer could fit is level 10.

Going over to the shieldkiller or EMP missiles, we have only 2 points of comparison to the standard missiles: the level 1 and level 7. In both cases we see that the EMP missile causes 4/3 the shield damage of a like-level unguided missile's hull damage.
Level 1, 489 * 4/3 = 652
Level 7, 2091 * 4/3 = 2788
The EMP missiles also have a consistent hull damage - 1/40th the shield damage.

This suggests that we can then work out the damages for theoretical level 3,5, and 9 EMP missiles by using the same formula. We can also work out the damage for theoretical non-EMP missiles at levels 4 and 10 using the game's EMP missile data and multiplying by 3/4 (the inverse of 4/3) to get the unguided missile damage.

At level 10, the Paralyzer EMP missile causes 7824 hp shield damage. So in theory, a level 10 unguided missile causes
7824*3/4 = 5868 hull damage
And just for kicks, if we try to use THIS missile to get a comparable level 10 torpedo damage:
5868*2 = 11736
which is exactly what the Sunslayer is.

A HYPOTHETICAL DAMAGES TABLE

We can now use this to develop a table of damages; unfortunately, this does leave us without values for missiles at levels 2, 6, and 8. Whatever formula (if any) was used behind this originally, I can't reconstruct it now. It isn't a simple growth formula of any kind - the growth ratio between levels 9 and 10 is much less than 3-4 or 5-7. I finally punted and used GraphPad to do some regressions, then just picked one analysis I liked and plugged in numbers here. For the analysis I used the guided missile numbers augmented with my "calculated" versions for level 4 and 10 so all I was guessing from the regession was level 2-6-8 data. Still, those numbers are just armwaving and shouldn't be considered "consistent" because we don't know how they calculated them.

Level,Guided,Unguided,Torpedo,Shield,ShieldkillerHullDmg
1,244.5,489,978,652,16.3
2,303,606,1212,808,20.2
3,373.5,747,1494,996,24.9
4,474,948,1896,1264,31.6
5,606,1212,2424,1616,40.4
6,727.5,1455,2910,1940,48.5
7,1045.5,2091,4182,2788,69.7
8,1719,3438,6876,4584,114.6
9,2445,4890,9780,6520,163
10,2934,5868,11736,7824,195.6

BUILDING NEW MISSILE SYSTEMS
Knowing the actual damage cause by a missile is only 1 part of an actual missile system. Argh's posts about missiles are I think now a must-read for anyone developing missiles, particularly because the damage effects are complex. Understanding this complexity can help significantly with designing missile systems; there are interesting roles that have NOT been well-exploited, such as subsystem attack missiles.

For the standard missiles, however, there is a pattern to the data used for each one that can be replicated which I hope to go into later. The one critical item we're still missing for "standard" missiles at this point is the toughness data: everything else is either identical for all missiles in a class or varies in a way we can now see.