Attacking Darius:

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:Also of note, only the group of missiles in one pod stay grouped together (8 weapon carrying missiles, plus the Apollo controller missile). However there may be thousand of pods launched and the missiles from different pods stay as far apart as the pre-Apollo launched missiles did.

cthia wrote:I am none too sure about that, if my papers are in order (sorry, just finished watching an old German movie). I remember text depicting Apollo launches as being grouped tightly together. The Peeps commented on it, and I don't think that particular comment was about the individual broods. Of course, I could be wrong about that. Thus, "none too sure."

Disappointingly I cannot find the text where Apollo was first used against Haven (I ought to have it somewhere, since it is prior to Mission of Honor); however my recollection is that Republic of Haven commander (no longer Peep) noticed the clumping due to the groups of eight (since the Mark-23 E is hidden behind).

Notice there is no need to avoid dispersion, since the only light speed communication is between the Apollo command missile and its eight subordinates; all other communication between the Keyhole unit and the network of Mark-23 E's is FTL.

Found it in chapter 57 of At All Costs:

The range was almost fifty-four million kilometers, and Bogey Two was running away from TF 82 at a relative velocity of more than four thousand KPS. Missile flight time was over eight minutes, and as Giscard had demonstrated at Solon, even Manticoran accuracy at that range was going to be poor.
Except . . .
* * *
"Sir, there's something . . . odd about the Manties' launch," Thackeray said.
"What do you mean, 'odd'?" Giscard asked sharply.
"Their attack birds are coming in . . . well, 'clumped' is the only word I can think of for it, Sir. They aren't spreading out in a proper dispersion pattern."
"What?"
Giscard punched a command into his own repeater plot and frowned. Thackeray was right. His own outgoing missiles were spreading out, distancing themselves from one another to reduce wedge interference with their telemetry links to the ships which had launched them. Everyone's missiles did that.
But the Manties' missiles weren't.
"Query CIC," he told Thackeray. "I want an analysis of this pattern. There's got to be some reason for it."
"CIC's already on it, Sir. So far, they don't have any explanation."
Giscard grunted in acknowledgment. Actually, he realized, the attack missiles were spreading out, just not the way they should have. They were coming in in discrete clusters, spread across an attack front which would bring them all in simultaneously in the end, but making the trip in relatively tight groups of about eight or ten missiles each.
No, he thought as a preliminary analysis from the Combat Information Center came up as a sidebar to his plot. They're coming in in clusters of exactly eight missiles each. Which is stupid, since they have twelve missiles in each pod!

Yep, I think that is the one I recall. Wrong am I. Thanks.

I still think extended firing g-torps should be effective as CMs. Or barricade wouldn't have been possible either because of the same distances between missiles. Even though the torps wouldn't be traveling as fast as barricade's missiles, the RMN missiles would be accelerating quite quickly into the bug zappers.

Ok. Ok. I'll give up the ghost on this one too.

But I don't have to like it.

Jonathan_S wrote:If you know roughly where the minefield is I'd think nukes in "boom" mode would be more effective that PDLCs or energy mounts.

Wedge + PDLCs seems like a bad idea because minefields are wide enough that you're likely to eventually end up surrounded by mines.

Bolding mine:
Mines in space... seems wholly a plot crutch if you asked me. Seems only useful for WHJ's with fixed infrastructure way out beyond the hyperlimit.

My statements in previous post and your statements are so bogged down by gargantuan assumptions we could literally fill an entire chapter or two in a book with them trying to "define" them .

I/you are assuming/defining a mines range, on station duration, ability to accurately maneuver, target acquisition, ECM computing, cost, ease of maneuvering into position are so vast it is frankly nearly impossible to even begin.

Lets just start from the last. Ability to maneuver into position... Seems completely an absurd joke in a world of MDM's.... which brings up cost as we need a gobsmakking amount of them to cover typical approaches for area denial and having Trillions of these floating around seems rather like a waste of money/resources. Uh,.... Cost for what capabilities? Seems the obvious question... and WHY are we paying money for these instead of missiles? ~Which we already have an assembly line setup where we have to supply fusion plasma to operate them, but at least they have extended range... and if this is a mine which does NOT have fusion plasma to power it... how the HELL does it get power to operate a presumed Laser/Graser for distance work?, let alone for 3seconds . And how on earth is target ACQUISITION going to happen again?

All the above before one even defines distance of lethality with ability to punch holes in naughty ships.

Offhand, seems cheaper to just turn LAC'sShrikes into remote controlled mines if you asked me, as said mine will have to roughly be the size of a Shrike to actually make a difference against warships and not just civilian merchants or DD's. At least it has the mission endurance.

IF a LAC is massive overkill(though we are told Cerberus had Graser mines and I believe other places in other books as well), I can't honestly say a mine is going to be any smaller than a Pinnace or assault shuttle massing around 500tons due to mission duration issues. At which point... once again... fire control and placement issues rear their ugly heads. Why Manticore/Haven/Sol/Beowulf/Galton all used missile pods and external fire control positions.

Mines other than for WHJ's are utterly dead and gone. As for clearing them, just takes time and a DD could do the job most likely. A Shrike could after all. Has sidewalls, mines don't.

Relax wrote:Mines in space... seems wholly a plot crutch if you asked me. Seems only useful for WHJ's with fixed infrastructure way out beyond the hyperlimit.

My statements in previous post and your statements are so bogged down by gargantuan assumptions we could literally fill an entire chapter or two in a book with them trying to "define" them .

I/you are assuming/defining a mines range, on station duration, ability to accurately maneuver, target acquisition, ECM computing, cost, ease of maneuvering into position are so vast it is frankly nearly impossible to even begin.

Lets just start from the last. Ability to maneuver into position... Seems completely an absurd joke in a world of MDM's.... which brings up cost as we need a gobsmakking amount of them to cover typical approaches for area denial and having Trillions of these floating around seems rather like a waste of money/resources. Uh,.... Cost for what capabilities? Seems the obvious question... and WHY are we paying money for these instead of missiles? ~Which we already have an assembly line setup where we have to supply fusion plasma to operate them, but at least they have extended range... and if this is a mine which does NOT have fusion plasma to power it... how the HELL does it get power to operate a presumed Laser/Graser for distance work?, let alone for 3seconds . And how on earth is target ACQUISITION going to happen again?

All the above before one even defines distance of lethality with ability to punch holes in naughty ships.

Offhand, seems cheaper to just turn LAC'sShrikes into remote controlled mines if you asked me, as said mine will have to roughly be the size of a Shrike to actually make a difference against warships and not just civilian merchants or DD's. At least it has the mission endurance.

IF a LAC is massive overkill(though we are told Cerberus had Graser mines and I believe other places in other books as well), I can't honestly say a mine is going to be any smaller than a Pinnace or assault shuttle massing around 500tons due to mission duration issues. At which point... once again... fire control and placement issues rear their ugly heads. Why Manticore/Haven/Sol/Beowulf/Galton all used missile pods and external fire control positions.

Mines other than for WHJ's are utterly dead and gone. As for clearing them, just takes time and a DD could do the job most likely. A Shrike could after all. Has sidewalls, mines don't.

I don't know that anybody's produced a mine with a 3 second firing endurance. The only thing we know for sure can do that is the graser on a graser torp.

All the RMN (and presumably Haven) mines we know of power their laser exactly the same way a missile's laserhead does - they detonate a grav pinch fusion bomb and direct the resulting energetic particles into lasing rods. As such they should have the same standoff range as a missile's laserhead -- same warhead tech.

Now, around the junction, the RMN also has remove energy platforms. Those are some kind of big power source and a normal laser or graser. Slow firing because the power source still isn't enough to directly power the energy mount and needs to spend time charging up a capacitor with enough energy to be discharged by firing one shot. But at least they can be reused. Those energy platform I believe are normally operated by the fire control of the Junction forts, rather than being left in any kind of autonomous mode.

But yes, most of the rest of the things you mention are unknown. We're told in SVW that mines normally are placed just around specific areas like junction, or around a military station or fort. They're not emplaced randomly in deep space in some even grander, and even less sane, version of the WWI US obsession with the North Sea Mine Barrage (literally trying to lay a mine barrier across the exits of the North sea to keep U-boats out of the Atlantic. It took stupidly large numbers of mines, cost over twice as much as a new superdreadnought, and failed to have much effect). Sarnow managed to exploit the RMN's new FTL sensor net and comms, plus some careful navigation, to lure the Peeps through a recently laid deep space minefield. But it was just happenstance that those minelayers were even available and without that far quicker intel and communication he wouldn't have been able to get them out that far to secretly lay a minefield while still outside of the Peep's sensor range.

If Mine range is ~equal to a mere Laser warhead from a missile, then mines are truly and utterly USELESS and beyond easy for a PDLC on a ship to deal with them.

We have Cerberus where mines were said to be difficult to take on with a warship unless they were careful.

If range is a mere 30,000m and PDLC range(200,000km) let alone LASER/GRASER fire is ~500,000km +++ then there is no way in this universe nor the Honorverse said mines have a laser head with a attack range of 30,000km let alone a stand off attack range of 60,000km(Manticore) and are "difficult" for a warship to take on without being careful.

Before Mike was captured by Haven, she had missiles if not pods ejected from her ship that were then uses as non-contact mines by having them be overrun by the Peep ships and then fire up the engines to be attacking the Peeps from behind. In that sense she laid a moving minefield in the path of her opponents .

Mines have been all sorts of things. Where you have a current -in a river or regular tide flow- you can take two explosive devices on rafts and connect them together by a rope. The idea being that the two rafts would possibly end up on either side of a ship and, with the rope being stopped by one end of side of the ship, the mines would swing in against the hull before detonating. This does get somewhat iffy if your depending on a slow-match fuse on each device but it does let you drift the devices down,

The classic horned globe mine with contact detonators comes in multiple types. What they would have put in the North Sea would be anchored and just float (below the surface but there is the whole challange of changing depth with tidal change and the practical effect of tidal current causing the mines to ride lower in relation to the bottom as they were trying to be dragged "down current" by the flow. The next bit is that the mooring lines were hoped to snag on passing U-boats and so drag the mines into the hulls.
The alternative was used in things like harbor defenses (think Charleston, South Carolina) where mines as well as anti-submarine (and so also torpedo) nets were deployed. They could be shifted by net tenders to allow shipping to pass. The mines were set to detonate two ways. 1st was contact, but the 2nd was command detonation. The command variation let you use mines with the same effects (hopefully) of depth charges to cripple or kill a sub with the explosion or it's pressure wave causing the hull to fail.
It was a static field with everything moored and tended.

The other type of mine was the magnetic system. It didn't depend of the ship hitting it, it was deployed so that when a ship -metal hulled- passed over it, the mine would detonate and use the shockwave and pressure displacement to break the hull. Same effect as using a torpedo with the same detonator type to pass UNDER rather than hit the hull and break the ship's keel as wall as buckling hull plating to flood and sink it. The Magnetic were harder to sweep as they could be laid on the bottom in relatively shallow water and moored so they were lower than the draft depth of their targets and harder to engage with sweeping gear.

Submarines would be used to seek into the traffic lanes of harbors etc and drop mines. Hopefully-for the sub- they would be out into more open water before anything hit their little presents but would also have a chance to torpedo someting responding to or trying to get away from the scene of any explosion.

Of course, sea mines don't always stay where they are placed and, like land mines, quickly develop into more of a "to whom it may concern" weapon since it's isn't choosy about whom they blow up. It's more that the sea mine might seem to come looking for you instead of waiting patiently for you to walk across it.

Relax wrote:If Mine range is ~equal to a mere Laser warhead from a missile, then mines are truly and utterly USELESS and beyond easy for a PDLC on a ship to deal with them.

We have Cerberus where mines were said to be difficult to take on with a warship unless they were careful.

If range is a mere 30,000m and PDLC range(200,000km) let alone LASER/GRASER fire is ~500,000km +++ then there is no way in this universe nor the Honorverse said mines have a laser head with a attack range of 30,000km let alone a stand off attack range of 60,000km(Manticore) and are "difficult" for a warship to take on without being careful.

Cerberus backed their mines with "hardened missile launchers on each of Hell's three moons." And here's Tourville's description of it

In Enemy Hands wrote:There wasn't a single manned fortress in the entire star system. Shoals of mines—old-fashioned "contact" nukes designed to kill small craft as well as the laser buoys designed to shoot LACs and starships, and both seemingly thick enough to walk across—surrounded the planet and its moons, seeded with more sophisticated and modern energy platforms for good measure, and he suspected there were ground-based missiles on the planet, at least, if not on the moons. Taken all together, Hades must have had the raw combat power of a full squadron of superdreadnoughts . . . but all of those weapons were remote-controlled from Camp Charon.

Another random description of mines.

Ashes of Victory wrote:Minefields were a part of almost any area defense plan, but traditional mines were little more than floating, bomb-pumped laser buoys designed to lurk until some unfortunate entered their range. Theisman had taken them a bit further, using Barnett's local yard capacity to field-modify the mines by strapping the buoys onto the noses of stealthed recon drones. They weren't very fast, and they weren't very accurate, but they had a lot of endurance and they would be hard to detect.

I assume the reason that mines aren't sitting ducks for PDLCs is their stealth. It's hard to be sure you've got them all.
Certainly at Hancock Chin's forces got a hint of the minefield at about a million km, even being totally surprised by running across one in deep space where they wouldn't be expecting one. But sensor traces clearly weren't enough to let them sweep the mines with PDLC fire before entering their range. And their base velocity was such that they couldn't avoid flying through the field, so they rolled behind their wedges to reduce the damage they'd take; but still weren't able to kill all the mines or block all the damage.

Short Victorious War wrote:Space erupted in a wall of light as the bomb-pumped laser platforms spewed concentrated fury at Chin's ships. Thousands of laser beams, each more powerful than any missile laser head could generate, stabbed and tore at their prey. The vast majority wasted themselves harmlessly against her interposed impeller bands, but there were too many of them and they had too much spread for the wedges to intercept them all.

She suffered 1 already crippled DN gutted into a hulk, 1 damaged BC killed outright, 3 CAs blown apart, and half a dozen destroyers with them. Plus of course additional damage to her surviving DNs.

But that means the entire minefield, in the most optimal possible conditions, did less damage than the towed pod strike Sarnow's BCs had landed at the start of the fight. (And much of the minefield's damage was done to the most damaged survivors of the pods strike and follow-up missile combat)

Mines are more effective for making the enemy slow down, or even to avoid an area, than they normally are for killing them. Of course that's generally true of mines here on Earth as well. And minefield that isn't covered by troops and fire is only a minor delaying mechanism.
(Though a chokepoint like a wormhole terminus is a special case because the enemy appears in the heart of the minefield - and lacks their normal defenses)

Naval mines are a little different given that a surprise minefield will likely cripple or kill at least one ship before its known - which hurts the enemy a lot more that killing one of their soldiers. But even those mostly serve to slow the enemy or channel their movements, or make them waste time sweeping the field. (Again, unless covered by other fire to prevent it being swept. In WWI the mining of the Dardanelles was effective at keeping the far stronger British and French fleets out of the Sea of Marmara, and away from Istanbul, because the guns and forts that covered it could prevent the minefield from being swept - despite those guns not being sufficient to prevent battleships from forcing their way past)

Brigade XO wrote:Mines have been all sorts of things. Where you have a current -in a river or regular tide flow- you can take two explosive devices on rafts and connect them together by a rope. The idea being that the two rafts would possibly end up on either side of a ship and, with the rope being stopped by one end of side of the ship, the mines would swing in against the hull before detonating. This does get somewhat iffy if your depending on a slow-match fuse on each device but it does let you drift the devices down,

The classic horned globe mine with contact detonators comes in multiple types. What they would have put in the North Sea would be anchored and just float (below the surface but there is the whole challange of changing depth with tidal change and the practical effect of tidal current causing the mines to ride lower in relation to the bottom as they were trying to be dragged "down current" by the flow. The next bit is that the mooring lines were hoped to snag on passing U-boats and so drag the mines into the hulls.
The alternative was used in things like harbor defenses (think Charleston, South Carolina) where mines as well as anti-submarine (and so also torpedo) nets were deployed. They could be shifted by net tenders to allow shipping to pass. The mines were set to detonate two ways. 1st was contact, but the 2nd was command detonation. The command variation let you use mines with the same effects (hopefully) of depth charges to cripple or kill a sub with the explosion or it's pressure wave causing the hull to fail.
It was a static field with everything moored and tended.

The other type of mine was the magnetic system. It didn't depend of the ship hitting it, it was deployed so that when a ship -metal hulled- passed over it, the mine would detonate and use the shockwave and pressure displacement to break the hull. Same effect as using a torpedo with the same detonator type to pass UNDER rather than hit the hull and break the ship's keel as wall as buckling hull plating to flood and sink it. The Magnetic were harder to sweep as they could be laid on the bottom in relatively shallow water and moored so they were lower than the draft depth of their targets and harder to engage with sweeping gear.

In WWII the US also deployed pressure mines, set off by the weight of a ship overhead compressing the water columns, as well as experiments with early acoustic mines (listen for a ship to get close enough). The pressure mines advantage over magnetic mines is that they were similarly non-contact but worked even against ships that had been degaussed or simply had non-metallic hulls (like a wooden or fiberglass hulled minesweeper).

In the cold war the US also developed CAPTOR mines which house a homing torpedo that the mine launches when its sensors detect a worthwhile target - thus allowing a large area to be mined with relatively few mines.

cthia wrote:I still think extended firing g-torps should be effective as CMs. Or barricade wouldn't have been possible either because of the same distances between missiles. Even though the torps wouldn't be traveling as fast as barricade's missiles, the RMN missiles would be accelerating quite quickly into the bug zappers.

Ok. Ok. I'll give up the ghost on this one too.

But I don't have to like it.

And I don't think that's a good analogy. Not that the barricade's geometry made much sense to me when I read it either. It's one of those I've had to suspend disbelief, accept, and not look back for "jurisprudence" because it doesn't fit into anything.

But leaning into your analogy, the barricade could be compared to a bug zapper because it's an area-sweeping tool. A graser couldn't. Instead, you should compare to trying to kill insects with a squirt gun: you have to aim and hit one. You can zig-zag it to make it try to hit more, but you still have a very small cross-section with which to hit your target.

Unless they can de-focus the beam. If it's against fragile missiles, one may accept the lower power delivery and reduced range. It's a good trade-off.

Anyway, the other aspect of this is that missiles have wedges. The reason barricade worked was that the Havenite missiles were in ballistic phase in order to overcome the range gap that the RMN true MDMs could power through. As others have calculated, unless you have a very good shot, the graser will waste itself on the wedge. The only thing that can take on a wedge is another wedge of comparable or more power -- which means the barricade might actually have worked against the RHN missiles even if they had been under acceleration.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Not that the barricade's geometry made much sense to me when I read it either. It's one of those I've had to suspend disbelief, accept, and not look back for "jurisprudence" because it doesn't fit into anything.

But leaning into your analogy, the barricade could be compared to a bug zapper because it's an area-sweeping tool. A graser couldn't. Instead, you should compare to trying to kill insects with a squirt gun: you have to aim and hit one. You can zig-zag it to make it try to hit more, but you still have a very small cross-section with which to hit your target.

Unless they can de-focus the beam. If it's against fragile missiles, one may accept the lower power delivery and reduced range. It's a good trade-off.

Anyway, the other aspect of this is that missiles have wedges. The reason barricade worked was that the Havenite missiles were in ballistic phase in order to overcome the range gap that the RMN true MDMs could power through. As others have calculated, unless you have a very good shot, the graser will waste itself on the wedge. The only thing that can take on a wedge is another wedge of comparable or more power -- which means the barricade might actually have worked against the RHN missiles even if they had been under acceleration.

SLN missiles; barricade was pulled off against pod launched Cataphracts from the SLN.

The advantage of doing it against ballistic missiles is that the same Mk23s could sweep through each of the 4 incoming salvos in sequence, and then could continue on and attack the SLN BCs that launched those salvos. While you could pull off the same intercept solution against missiles that were under wedge you'd lose the Mk23's on the first impact; so you'd be trading them 1 for 1 for Cataphracts, and then wouldn't have the missiles left to attack the launch platforms.



But yeah, we spent a lot of posts back when SoV came out decrying how the proposed geometry of barricade wouldn't have worked out as written. (Kill some ballistic missiles by running sucessive waves of Mk23s through them; sure. But there's no way they should have been, or could have been, packed tightly enough for Mk23s to have gotten as many as we're told it did. That seems like it would have required the Cataphracts to have contracted to significantly less than mutual wedge fratricide range so a single Mk23 could have hit more than 1 or 2 missiles per salvo)

But even so I don't remember offhand quite how large a missile's impeller wedge is (though SoV says a Mk23's is bigger than normal, but not as big as a CMs) but I want to say its at least a couple km wide (might be more; but let's use 2). So a single CM is sweeping probably sweeping at least 1.2 square km (since the wedge angle should give you at least 600 meters of height) at a time; and only needs to pass within a few km of its target to get the wedge fratricide kill. So even with just a 2 km wide wedge it effectively covers 3-4000 times more area than even a large energy beam does.

I totally forgot that with barricade the missiles were ballistic. But that may not be my only problem.

Where exactly is the wedge of a missile located? I am under the impression that the wedge is formed at the rear of the missile.