Are missile pods obsolete?

Relax wrote:

SWM wrote:As was stated several posts above Honor Harrington specifically stated in IEH that the brand new capacitor MDMs could have a ballistic phase between drives. This was the very first model of capacitor MDM, so it has been part of the design from the very beginning.

Then we should have seen it in the books. Been throwing MDM's around for a very long time.

Why would we have seen it? It was a stated part of their capability; but operational use during Buttercup showed that even at their 65 million km (3.6 lm) powered range MDMs already exceeded effective control. So ballistic phases to increase range was a technical capability without an immediate operational use.

It wasn't until you had Mk16s trying to range with Mk23s that there was a recurring operational use for the ballistic phase. Even Apollo doesn't need it until you team it with enough FTL Mycroft relays to maintain an FTL link for significantly farther than normal powered range.

Jonathan_S wrote:Why would we have seen it?

Zanzibar followed by BOMA.

kzt wrote:

Relax wrote:Zanzibar? You mean the retcon where he effectively said the absurdity that RHN birds could hit infrastructure from outside the hyper limit and yet we have RHN units a few chapters later who do not do the exacdt same thing to Manticore... Yea. I called that pearl a giant pile of stinky CYA BS when he posted it.

Missiles and their plot usage goes whichever way the wind is blowing. So honestly I could see it going both way depending on the exigencies of the plot.

Pretty much....

Here is the recap of the Zanzibar battle in At All Costs. Hamish is talking to Honor. Bolding is mine.

At All Costs, end of Chapter 38 wrote:
"About as bad as it could have been," Hamish replied. She looked at him, and he sighed. "He came in with four full battle squadrons of pod-layers, and their battle squadrons are still eight ships strong. He also had a couple of divisions of carriers and at least two battlecruiser squadrons to support them, and although we'd reinforced heavily after Admiral al-Bakr's fiasco—and I use the word deliberately," he added bitterly "—it wasn't heavily enough. He hit the defenses like a hammer, and he started right out by sweeping the asteroid belt with remote arrays of his own, followed by LAC strikes on our predeployed pods. Not only that, he'd brought along fast colliers stuffed with additional missile pods. He left them tucked away in hyper, came in just far enough to draw our mobile units away from their own support bases, and engaged them at long range until both sides had burned most of their ammo. Then he pulled back across the limit, reammunitioned, and came right back in before we could replace the expended defense pods or get our own pod-layers back in-system to rearm. It was a massacre."

So no, Adm Tourville did not attack from outside the hyper limit. Missile wedges have always been set it and forget it. Now, with MDMs, you can set one drive at full accel and another drive at half accel, but you can not change the wedge strength once started on a particular drive.

Kizarvexis wrote:So no, Adm Tourville did not attack from outside the hyper limit. Missile wedges have always been set it and forget it. Now, with MDMs, you can set one drive at full accel and another drive at half accel, but you can not change the wedge strength once started on a particular drive.

You obviously have missed the thread where David explained this in great detail. This was in response to my arguing that you would have to be a complete idiot to get ambushed in this way, given that the hyper limit is typically 10 to 20 light minutes from the planet and there really is no reason to do anything that gets you out close to the hyper limit, much less being critically low on ammo. For example, look at the exchange be ratio at BoM, even out numbered horrifically RMN missiles are so much better then RHN missiles that Home Fleet killed 1/2 of the attackers, so obviously the Zanzibar defenders would have had to shoot themselves pretty much dry.

But no, David came back with the answer that the RMN came out to fight near the Hyperlimit due to the RHN methodically obliterating the orbital industry and infrastructure of Zanzibar from outside the effective range of RMN missiles and the RMN hence had to run out to the hyperlimit in order to drive them off.

Think about what that implies for a minute: this means the RHN is so damn confident of their missiles that they are willing to target orbital infrastructure around an occupied using significant ballistic segments (otherwise the RMN would have been able to effective shoot back - right?) for the purpose of achieving a minor tactical advantage. So they must therefore consider that the chance of an edict violation when shooting at the orbital infrastructure around an occupied planet for greater than 60 million km is so small as to not count. Remember that if you kill the industry around the 3 occupied planets in Manticore then Haven doesn't achieve some minor tactical advantage, they WIN THE WAR.

Oh, and the RHN used the donkeys to reload fast and deliver huge, massive salvos, which nobody noticed or felt was worth reporting to Intel.

Very minor nit...
--snipping--

kzt wrote:Oh, and the RHN used the donkeys to reload fast and deliver huge, massive salvos, which nobody noticed or felt was worth reporting to Intel.

My reading is that the "donkey" made it's first and only appearance at the Battle of Manticore; there isn't really textev that the RHN had time to put out second massively "reloaded" salvo in that battle. The RMN knew that if Tourville reached the hyper limit, he would resupply and come back in, possibly with enough to take out the system defenses and trash the stations, which is why Kuzak moved to cut him off.

How about "are current SD(P)s obsolete?" and RFC himself has implied that they are. (It's in the pearl comparing pods vs. missiles) where he says that BuShips is looking at a better design than the Invictus (which can hold 1000+ Mark-23 pods). The SD(p) can shoot itself dry before it has a good tactical read on what it will take to penetrate first line defenses, however, so salvo density isn't the problem, sustained high rate of fire during later battle conditions becomes the overriding concern.

What that design looks like is in his "future book pocket", but considering that a "current gen" SD(p) lose capacity to fire a significant amount of those missiles if a relatively small area on the ship gets taken out. I'm relatively suspicious that the BuShips answer will be an "off-bore missile pod" firing arrangement that and increased girth to hold even more pods, etc. I'd also be VERY surprised if there aren't Mark-16G based pods that track to an ACM in the design pipeline. Perhaps the ACM's go to a tube launched arrangement with a pod or pods slaved to take up station with the ACM shortly after firing?

Plus, as KZT has suggested. Power points to keep limpeted pods charged up and ready to rock and roll for longer terms. I'd have to guess for an SD(p) that would add maybe another 2K worth of missiles to the first couple of exchanges.

We'll know soonish. (next year sometime drat it!)

Belial666 wrote:Dunno about that.


An SD-sized ship has a broadside 500+ meters long and 200 meters wide. That's 40 times the "frontage" of a Roland's hammerhead, on each broadside.


1) 480 tubes per broadside capable of firing Mark 16s or CM canisters of the same size, every 16 seconds.
2) Apollo tubes on the hammerheads.


You drown your opponent with numbers. Send a swarm of two thousand missiles (a single minute's or four broadsides worth of firing) and even with perfect kill rates on its CMs and PDLCs, the enemy will only kill half of them (assuming an Invictus SD as target). The surviving 600, (assuming its ECCM can spoof 40% even with Apollo guidance) will crush even a superdreadnought.

Defensively, same thing. 480 canisters of 3 CMs each is as many CMs as an Invictus-class could hope to fire in 10 CM broadsides and you're doing it in one.



And eventually, either MDMs will be miniaturized down to the 100-ton size range or SD tonnage will go to 12 megatons instead of 9 and you could afford to have 480 MDM-sized launchers on your ship.
(or both - I don't see either taking more than 20 years)

Ooh, I like it. Let's fire the Apollo missiles from 2 aspects, and less capable Mk16Gs (as opposed to Mk24Ds) from the other 2 aspects, then spend time and effort to get them to manoeuvre into position before sending them on their attack runs.

Currently, the presence of Apollo makes missile pods a more elegant solution.

Furthermore, you are not considering the interference from the wedges. Whilst Keyhole currently makes this a moot point, it is not beyond the boundaries of probability that a fleet or taskforce is forced to fight without Keyhole capability, at which point you once again have to slow down rate of fire.

Finally, I doubt the Mk16 launchers of the Roland will be fitted to any warship capable of mounting those launchers broadside. They are a compromised design, specifically to allow 6 of them to be mounted in the chase aspect, but sacrificing the longevity required of a waller.

It was more a "maximum possible amount of launchers" design than a "reasonably solid and workable" design.



For a more workable design;

1) MDM launchers are smaller than LAC bays.
2) SD-sized ships can fit 200+ LAC bays.
3) Ergo, SD-sized ships can fit 200+ MDM launchers.
4) Launcher cycling time is ~20 seconds.
5) Launching double broadsides of 2x 35 every 6-7 seconds prevents wedge interference and gives a firing rate of 630 missiles per minute.

Yeah, 200 bays...and damn near nothing else. Have fun taking your nigh undefended SD into a warzone and see how long that lasts.

1) Bay is 20 x 25 x 120 meters. That's 12 million cubic meters for 200 bays.

2) 9-mt ship is 36 million cubic meters. Thus volume-wise the bays take up 33% of its cubage.




What's the other 66% of the cubage for? That's way more cubage left than what a podnought dedicates to stuff other than offense. Presumably, the Aviary CLACs use it for extra ammo/fuel reloads, umbilicals, spare parts, plus extra-large living spaces since they got over 3.000 crew just for their LACs alone.

But a missile ship would have none of those requirements and could dedicate that space/mass to defense instead.