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Spoilers and possible Errors in House of Steel eARC

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Re: Spoilers and possible Errors in House of Steel eARC
Post by solbergb   » Tue Feb 19, 2013 9:18 pm

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They might also be doing something like putting the nodes on the bottom if the first stage, and at the top of the countermissile stage to maximize distance between nodes. That might explain the need to put both smaller warhead and a countermissile drive on the second stage.

But we really have no idea why they're doing it. If the reason we don't have two stage missiles is the nodes on the first stage blow out even cold nodes of any potential second stage, we don't have any idea what might cause that NOT to happen. I'm postulating "enough distance" from first stage node as an explanation for the oversized Andie drives and the cataphracts in absence of a "grav shield" approach that the Manties and presumably Haven are doing. But something else might be going on (eg, a faraday-cage like thing around the second countermissile stage on cataphract that uses a bulky physical substance instead of a gravitic lens to block interference with the second stage nodes..such shielding substance is shed when the first stage goes dark)
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Re: Spoilers and possible Errors in House of Steel eARC
Post by JohnRoth   » Tue Feb 19, 2013 11:12 pm

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BrightSoul wrote:I rather got the idea that the Technodyne missiles have 2 missiles strapped together with the actual attack bird portion having a smaller sprint drive on it. Essentially, no wedge overlap on the actual drive nodes, two entirely separate drive systems that don't overlap instead of the overlap of the Manty system that requires the baffles.


I had the impression they were designed and built on Darius: they're using Technodyne as a blind. Technodyne may have the plans now, but IIRC, Filaretta twigged to the fact that his missiles came from Mesa.
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Re: Spoilers and possible Errors in House of Steel eARC
Post by Relax   » Wed Feb 20, 2013 12:32 am

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Actually, the Paper trail originated from Mesa. The missiles he noted were simply "en route."

Besides, it wouldn't be all that smart to have an obvious missile production line of said missiles in Mesa Orbit when their original strategy was for Mesa to be thrown away, or at least the possibility of Mesa to be lost.

I think we can all guarantee that neither Mesa, nor Technodyne actually produced said missiles. Now Technodyne may have a missile line producing them or starting to anyways just to cover. I think we can all assume that MALIGN has crude DDM per ToF on par with the Andies.

JohnRoth wrote:
BrightSoul wrote:I rather got the idea that the Technodyne missiles have 2 missiles strapped together with the actual attack bird portion having a smaller sprint drive on it. Essentially, no wedge overlap on the actual drive nodes, two entirely separate drive systems that don't overlap instead of the overlap of the Manty system that requires the baffles.


I had the impression they were designed and built on Darius: they're using Technodyne as a blind. Technodyne may have the plans now, but IIRC, Filaretta twigged to the fact that his missiles came from Mesa.
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Re: Spoilers and possible Errors in House of Steel eARC
Post by Jonathan_S   » Wed Feb 20, 2013 6:12 pm

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BrightSoul wrote:Solbergb, Shannon had some advantages that the Sollies don't. Her Navy had actually faced them in combat and had a better idea of what they were doing. She may very well have figured out the baffles herself from wreckage or debris from the earlier conflict. Either that or she got the idea from Erewhon. On the other hand the Sollies have nothing to start with.
Even if Foreaker didn't find these baffles (note to self; find time to read House of Steel) just finding enough wreckage (or getting enough intel) to make it clear that there was more than one drive ring, in relatively close proximity, on the same missile body would give her a big clue on how to start looking at the problem.

The knowledge that an approach is possible often is all you need in order to duplicate it (or at least close enough)

solbergb wrote:They might also be doing something like putting the nodes on the bottom if the first stage, and at the top of the countermissile stage to maximize distance between nodes. That might explain the need to put both smaller warhead and a countermissile drive on the second stage.
We know with the Cataphract approach the second stages are a lot smaller. One possibility is that the area inside the diameter of the active nodes is naturally shielded from the active wedge. A smaller CM-sized node ring that could fit in that volume might not interact with the 1st stage wedge.

That could also explain why the Cataphracts appear to be a true 2 stage missile (where the (large) 1st stage seems to be dropped after use). You couldn't hang onto it if a lot of it would be outside the nodes of the 2nd stage; they'd shred it on start-up if it hadn't already been jettisoned.

(Now that speculation still wouldn't explain what the Andy's were doing; but there's no reason both groups have to be running into the same issues)
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Re: Spoilers and possible Errors in House of Steel eARC
Post by solbergb   » Thu Feb 21, 2013 2:18 am

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Huh. An internal stage. Instead of stacking like an Apollo moon-shot, you are thinking an outer shell for first stage, and inner shell for second stage.

That actually makes sense...what little we know of impeller tech might allow for a "Dead zone" inside the ring.

I actually think the Andies were either doing an entirely different approach, or were just doing a very inefficient version of whatever Haven did. Whereas the Cataphracts are something entirely different. But we don't really have any idea. I'm just guessing.
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Re: Spoilers and possible Errors in House of Steel eARC
Post by kzt   » Thu Feb 21, 2013 3:04 am

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The Andies were suspected to have inside sources in the RMN R&D complex IIRC.
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Re: Spoilers and possible Errors in House of Steel eARC
Post by solbergb   » Thu Feb 21, 2013 3:18 am

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The Andies talked a good game but they didn't actually have all that much when the RMN got to see their goodies.

By War of Honor they had
1. Good stealth tech. On par with RMN, maybe better
2. Some FTL communications, probably better than Haven but not up to RMN levels
3. A dual-drive missile that was as big as haven triple drive missiles, with the range of a MK-16
4. Probably pretty good raw EW on their ships and missiles, given how good their stealth tech was
5. Greater standoff range on missiles (50km rather than the 35km RMN was using)
6. Bolted on half-missile pods on light combatants
7. Some kind of upgraded LAC, but clearly nothing as game-changing as a Shrike or even the Havenite LAC designs
8. SD(P)s to use their crappy MDMS

Here's what they didn't have
1. Any kind of defensive doctrine to handle podthrowing salvos. Not the decoys of Ghost Rider nor the CM swarms of Foraker.
2. Offensive penaids like dazzlers/dragon teeth, nor any plan for dealing with Ghost Rider decoys (based on the Hellbarde fight, where Jessica Epps started out out of range of her own single drive missiles and was able to close and mostly get the better of Hellbarde before a magic-BB killed her)

It was kind of a "Cargo Cult" navy...based on anecdotes of Buttercup without much hard evidence. The most obvious stuff (FTL com, MDMs, SD(P)s, pods in general and trying to improve a LAc) yes. The less obvious stuff (all the decoy doctrine, the offensive EW platforms, fission plants to give lacs a huge power budget, a plan to deal with thousands of missiles per SD incoming) not so much. They did what they could, and pushed tech they were already good at further, possibly getting ahead of RMN in a couple areas.

But...hell the Greysons provided more tech innovations just from their isolation. The IAN ships were just plain inferior. Better than nothing, sure, but I'd have bet on a Haven Batron to kick the ass of an IAN Batron, and make it look easy, before the IAN got Alliance tech.
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Re: Spoilers and possible Errors in House of Steel eARC
Post by CMac   » Thu Feb 21, 2013 1:32 pm

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IIRC, the two stage Technodyne missiles were first used in the attack on Torch by the former StateSec that Mesa were buying as mercenaries. The missiles were described as a CM with a laserhead strapped onto a normal missile and used as a second stage. That's why they were so effective, they started in as a normal SL piece of crap missile, then instead of going ballistic suddenly did a much higher speed attack run starting just outside of CM range. This unexpected high speed attack run made the first waves of them achieve a much higher attack rate as it severely degraded the defenses of Rozsak's Mayan fleet.

Does the new eArc answer why Manticore missiles still have stages? It doesn't really make sense to me that once they were able to put the super dense fusion reactors on board that the missile would still have staged drives. Why not use a single drive for the entire run since it now has a fusion reactor powering it, just like a ship does.
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Re: Spoilers and possible Errors in House of Steel eARC
Post by KNick   » Thu Feb 21, 2013 1:41 pm

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Missile drives burn out in approximately 180 seconds. They are not turned off, they die due to component failure. It is not a matter of power provided as it was with the capacitor driven model.
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Re: Spoilers and possible Errors in House of Steel eARC
Post by crewdude48   » Thu Feb 21, 2013 1:45 pm

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Because in order to get the crazy high acceleration that you get for missiles, the drive nodes burn out. Once that happens, the nodes for the second stage activate. They could make nodes that work for longer periods of time, but they would only have the speed of an RD. We had a discussion on this a while ago.

CMac wrote:Does the new eArc answer why Manticore missiles still have stages? It doesn't really make sense to me that once they were able to put the super dense fusion reactors on board that the missile would still have staged drives. Why not use a single drive for the entire run since it now has a fusion reactor powering it, just like a ship does.
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