ERIM

Of course RD's armed with all of 3 CM's isn't exactly a good option either... At least all 3 have a high certainty of knocking out a missile each as they have pseudo FTL whereas CM's at long or even medium range do not. Of course if rational folks get employed at BuWeaps, they will allow their FTL RD's to talk to their normal CM's fired from ships obtaining vastly higher hit percentage and placing CM's on RD's will be quite dumb other than specific situations.

Of course if rational folks get employed at BuWeaps, they will allow their FTL RD's to talk to their normal CM's fired from ships obtaining vastly higher hit percentage and placing CM's on RD's will be quite dumb other than specific situations.

No it's not stupid.

even with a 100% intercept rate and a fairly sedate MDM can come in at somewhere around 0.5C. They'll slash across the current 3.8 million Km CM range in 25 seconds. That's enough time for exactly 3 counter-missile launches and Eighth fleet at First Manticore demonstrated an ability to control 1600 missiles per ship. There's simply no conceivable way a ship can carry enough CM launchers. As Honour herself says in ART the wallers need an ability to extend their interception envelope beyond the current 3.8 million km. But if your going to do that without increasing the size of CM's unduly you have a serious issue on your hands. By my math you need the range performance approaching that of a dual drive CM with a first stage that can be stepped down in the same way as attack missiles, (i.e. about a 34 million km range), to make it work. And that's against the ship launched appollo's. Go for the system defence birds and it gets even longer, even if we assume a capped velocity of 0.9c you need about 45 million km which would need another major hike in acceleration and/or endurance values.

Carl wrote:
No it's not stupid.

Simple math time: FTL RD is well north of 250tons. Probably closer to 500 by now. Now add CM's cannister(50tons)onto it.

Total Tonnage call it whatever you wish, but north of 300tons for 3 or maybe 4 CM's. 100tons minimum per CM... and then you have NO MORE of them.

What tonnage would allow you to fire NORMAL missiles with FTL? or 2 stage CM one low drive + 1 high drive using normal RD's for FTL? Lets call this mini cap fed short duration CM 50tons for extreme range. Uses half power and then goes ballistic + sprint drive.

So, 250++ FTL RD tons + unlimited CM fire verses 300 tons and 3 or 4 CM's.

Lets go for an even number of 100 CM's required at extended range. 100/4 = 25 of your CM cannister FTL RD's for a tonnage of 25*300ton = 7500tons. Probably is more likely 10,000tons for a mere 100 CM extended range missiles. Of course they fire them and then they are useless.

On the other hand we have say 10 FTL drones talking to fired 50 ton CM's. 2500 to 4000 tons of Drone able to 100 to 120CM's.

Nice and even isn't it? Yes, I picked 100 with malice aforethought. What is the cycle time of CM launchers? Call it a nice even 10s. Fastest is 8s via AAC. So, it takes all of 100s at longest to launch the 100 CM's. How long does it take for the CM's to dawdle out to 8Mkm? A heck of a lot longer than 100s. Therefore far more CM's can be fired and engage via the use of FTL than by equipping RD's with a mere pittance of cannistered CM's.

Lets take an engagement of 30Mkm. Flight time for DDM's currently is roughly 360s. So, in that time if one had DDCM with a cycle time of 10s/salvo, one can fire off 36Cm's/CM tube compared to your 4 on the FTL RD drone. If I am being nice, I will state you could probably even dump 2 Cannisters of CM's.

So, 8 verses 36... DO we even need to run the numbers for MDM or Apollo which could DOUBLE the number of CM's/tube you could launch if they are DDCM? DDCM would be roughly 30s high g nose and a 30s half power low g. So, 30s via HV rule at 1/2 power turns into 90s at half accel achieves a tidy 5Mkm under normal power, then goes ballistic followed by 30s at normal power. Achieving 8Mkm distance.

8+Mkm distance is required because this allows you to see what missiles you missed, and then fire ANOTHER CM at the missed MDM, instead of guessing how many CM's it is going to require to kill an MDM and going for saturation instead of precision.

See here for DDCM I am being very generous in tonnage. "We" think a normal CM is roughly 20tons@75s@130,000g. Was giving an additional 30tons for 2nd impeller and ability to go half speed. Somehow that has got to be extreme overkill for tonnage for a DDCM.

Enjoy playing with the numbers and assumptions.

EDIT: 36 missiles fired/tube would nearly completely empty the current stocks of CM magazines of the newest CA/CL/DD class ships. We do know for ROLAND DD: It has 40/CM tube. Does SAG-C have more? I also rounded to 10s/salvo instead of the known 8s for ease: 360s/8s = 45 salvos. You get this number since DDCM are able to shut down drive when you tell them to and therefore time on target is a simple rate problem against incoming salvo size. After all you have 360s to calculate it even against DDM.

Carl wrote:No it's not stupid.
There's simply no conceivable way a ship can carry enough CM launchers. As Honour herself says in ART the wallers need an ability to extend their interception envelope beyond the current 3.8 million km.

Its whittling DOWN the herd of MDM's that is the problem, therefore need for extended range allowing each missile tube to fire far more CM's. But anyways: Lets go with new additional CM's to fire against known misses:

... Uh simple math time

Time for CM for minimum engagement. Call it 200,000km from ship. Drive time with 0 initial velocity = 17.5s. For giggles lets round up to 20s. 20*0.9c = 5.4Mkm. For a single salvo. Go one salvo up: Add 8s adds 2.1Mkm or 7.5Mkm. So, 8Mkm range allows 2 follow on salvos for missed birds PLUS all the already fired CM's against birds you already KNOW have no CM's targeted on.

Um, your 34Mkm or 45Mkm is screwed up. Believe you forgot a power of 10 in there somewhere.

Regarding your first post. I'm honestly not sure how heavy the current generation DDM's and MDM's are but someone back thread stated that a DDCM would be about the same size as a DDM Mk16 because of the volume cost of capacitors.

Unless something really weird is going on a recon drone shouldn't be any bigger than a DDM since ghost rider is launched from shipboard tubes per echoes of honour.



As for this bit:

Its whittling DOWN the herd of MDM's that is the problem, therefore need for extended range allowing each missile tube to fire far more CM's. But anyways: Lets go with new additional CM's to fire against known misses:

... Uh simple math time

Time for CM for minimum engagement. Call it 200,000km from ship. Drive time with 0 initial velocity = 17.5s. For giggles lets round up to 20s. 20*0.9c = 5.4Mkm. For a single salvo. Go one salvo up: Add 8s adds 2.1Mkm or 7.5Mkm. So, 8Mkm range allows 2 follow on salvos for missed birds PLUS all the already fired CM's against birds you already KNOW have no CM's targeted on.

Um, your 34Mkm or 45Mkm is screwed up. Believe you forgot a power of 10 in there somewhere.

I've no idea what the heel your talking about.

You've got 1600 missiles coming in in one salvo to stop with one waller plus screening elements. depending on drive setting an MDM will cover a 34 million Km range counter missile envelope in between 150 and 180 seconds. Thats enough for between 18 and 22 CM launches. So somewhere between 89 and 73 Cm tubes, (rounding up to nearest whole number). That accounting for extra tubes needed for misses, and scaling of attacker capabilities is a reasonable number IMO.

You might arguably be able to cut it back a bit. But there's a practical limit on how much.

Ah, I see we have a horizon limit problem. As in you do not know the tonnages listed in the books. Thats alright just means you get the fun exercise of rereading.

Known tonnage: DDM(Fusion)MK-16 94tons, Old SDM light CL missile 74tons. Old 60s CM 12tons. Medium age FTL RD:250tons. I believe we also have tonnage for ERM CA laser head at 78tons? We have drawings by MaxxQ. Roughly half the missile is nothing but laser head with capacitors etc the rest.

1) Size of missile is directly proportional to its capacitors run time. Or close enough.

2) Just because an impeller missile ring is CAPABLE of running for 60s on max does not mean you must supply 60s at max power settings.

3) Since this is a DDCM, using 30s of power followed by a BALLISTIC phase, followed by another 30s of power would be equivalent to OLD STYLE CM's. They were all of 12tons. The only addition would be a 2nd impeller ring which obviously WOULD increase the tonnage. I gave an absurd 50tons to this DDCM even though the old CM was 12tons and ran at full power for 60s. Newer CM's run at full power for 75s at 130,000g. I see no reason why one could not run at half power(65,000g) for 90s for your first stage of CM or 30s@130,000g just like normal, or simply use all 60s of capacitor power available and never use the 2nd stage at all for close in work.

A DDCM with 60s capacitor run time SHOULD be about 20tons or same size as current viper or smaller CM. After all it has no laser rod, nuclear bomb, grav field pinchers etc. After all I just proposed a runtime total of 60s, not 75s with the addition of a 2nd impeller ring and the ability on the first impeller ring for half power. Heck, DDCM should weigh LESS than a viper.

DDM run time is 360s. That is how much time you have to launch CM's. WHY? Because they are DDCM. You get to put BALLISTIC phase in-between stages. Which means you get to start launching CM's as soon as you see your opponent launch! So, against a DDM opponent range, you get to launch a staggering 45(8s/salvo) launches of DDCM per CM TUBE! Means even a Roland with all of 20 CM tubes can dump a staggering 900CM's into space. More than it has in its counter missile ammo racks!

In short, alpha strike problems just vanished. Now controlling all those CM's with FTL component... Will take a few irons and sewing machines to fix those wrinkles.

Carl wrote:Unless something really weird is going on a recon drone shouldn't be any bigger than a DDM since ghost rider is launched from shipboard tubes per echoes of honour.

Not going to get involved in the math for now. But you are in error here. Ghost Rider was several different things lumped under one code name. It included the new recon drones, but it also included the new ECM missiles--the Dazzler and Dragon's Teeth. These days the term Ghost Rider is usually used for the recon drones. But the Ghost Rider that was launched from shipboard tubes were the ECM missiles. Recon drones are far larger than missiles and cannot be launched from tubes.

SWM wrote:

Carl wrote:Unless something really weird is going on a recon drone shouldn't be any bigger than a DDM since ghost rider is launched from shipboard tubes per echoes of honour.

Not going to get involved in the math for now. But you are in error here. Ghost Rider was several different things lumped under one code name. It included the new recon drones, but it also included the new ECM missiles--the Dazzler and Dragon's Teeth. These days the term Ghost Rider is usually used for the recon drones. But the Ghost Rider that was launched from shipboard tubes were the ECM missiles. Recon drones are far larger than missiles and cannot be launched from tubes.

Short duration ship mimicking EW drones launched from internal tubes were first used in AoV. Though it seems the tubes used were for the capacitor MDM. Which is a good bit bigger than a Mark 16 DDM.

AoV Chapter 26 wrote:Such decoys had always been available, but only in limited numbers. The power required to sustain a convincing false sensor image of a warship in engagement range was so high that a drone required direct power transmission from the ship it was protecting. That meant standard practice had always been to deploy decoys only on tractors and in low numbers. But the same technology which had provided the power plants for the RMN’s FTL recon drones had been brought to bear on the decoy problem by the R&D types responsible for Project Ghost Rider, and the result—one of the results—was a completely independent unit with an endurance of up to twenty minutes from internal power alone, depending on the strength of the sensor image it had to duplicate. And one that could be fired from one of the new capital missile tubes, at that. Now BatDiv 62’s internal launchers went to rapid fire, spewing them out, multiplying the Peeps’ targets catastrophically with each broadside.

Not sure if that is what is being addressed here but ... thought I would throw it out there. So that it could be properly smacked down.

Have fun,
T2M

SWM wrote:

Carl wrote:Unless something really weird is going on a recon drone shouldn't be any bigger than a DDM since ghost rider is launched from shipboard tubes per echoes of honour.

Not going to get involved in the math for now. But you are in error here. Ghost Rider was several different things lumped under one code name. It included the new recon drones, but it also included the new ECM missiles--the Dazzler and Dragon's Teeth. These days the term Ghost Rider is usually used for the recon drones. But the Ghost Rider that was launched from shipboard tubes were the ECM missiles. Recon drones are far larger than missiles and cannot be launched from tubes.

This is correct. Recon drones are roughly half the size (and about 85% the tonnage) of a pinnace, and are launched by pushing them (with tractors) out the boat bay.

The term "Ghost Rider" is the overall program development name, with the individual items within that program getting their specific names later.

thinkstoomuch wrote:

SWM wrote:Not going to get involved in the math for now. But you are in error here. Ghost Rider was several different things lumped under one code name. It included the new recon drones, but it also included the new ECM missiles--the Dazzler and Dragon's Teeth. These days the term Ghost Rider is usually used for the recon drones. But the Ghost Rider that was launched from shipboard tubes were the ECM missiles. Recon drones are far larger than missiles and cannot be launched from tubes.

Short duration ship mimicking EW drones launched from internal tubes were first used in AoV. Though it seems the tubes used were for the capacitor MDM. Which is a good bit bigger than a Mark 16 DDM.

[. . .]

Not sure if that is what is being addressed here but ... thought I would throw it out there. So that it could be properly smacked down.

Ah yes, I had forgotten about them. Those are neither Ghost Rider nor recon drones, but they are indeed a kind of drone. As I recall, they also had to be powered by the ship, so they had to be tethered close by. Not at all what was being talked about, but thanks for reminding us of them.