n7axw wrote:I spent a bit of time doing some research. So far as I can determine, the first time pod based missiles are used in the honorverse is in "Honor Among Enemies" where Wayfarer is able to deploy them.
In the "Honor Wiki, brief mention is made of the potential for warships to carry them in their wedges prior to that, but the missile pod was regarded for the most part as impractical one shot affairs. Energy warfare was the rule of the day at the time. What made the pod practical was the ability to carry more than one missile per pod.
If someone has better, more specific info, please chime in. I would appreciate it.
Don
GlynnSteward already chimed in with the use of towed pods prior to Wayfairers.
Here's a relivant bit from "Short Victorious War"
Short Victorious War wrote:But the point at hand was that the same improvements could be applied to parasite pods, and, despite Hemphill's objections, they had been. Of course, the new pods—with ten tubes each, not six—were intended for ships of the wall, which had plenty of redundant fire control to manage them, not battlecruisers. But it sounded like Turner was finding the answer to that, and their missiles were actually heavier than the standard ship-to-ship birds. With the new lightweight mass-drivers BuShips had perfected, their performance could equal or even exceed that of normal, ship-launched missiles, and their warheads were more destructive to boot. The pods were clumsy, of course, and towing them did unfortunate things to a warship's inertial compensator field, which held down maximum accelerations by twenty-five percent or so. They were also vulnerable to proximity soft kills, since they carried neither sidewalls nor radiation shielding of their own, but if they got their shots off before they were killed, that hardly mattered.
So even though the new style pods were still one-shot affairs (they fired off the 10 missiles in on go) there were viewed as providing a critical tactical edge, especially before Haven got effective towed pods of their own. Not sure why the wiki would say otherwise.
The pods let Mantie (and later Grayson) battle squadrons swamp their opponent's missile defenses with an initial attritional alpha strike, which would kill or damage a number of their ships tilting the odds in the RMN's (or GSN's) favor.
