Honorverse ramblings and musings

Theemile wrote:
Another limitation is maneuvering under a wedge still requires thrusters - and Missiles aren't exactly lousy with excess hydrogen bunkers for making plasma. Corkscrewing would require a massive side delta v, while passing through the cloud of missiles in less than a second. Any maneuvering will mostly likely end up with the missiles spread out with odd vectors, and little remaining RCS fuel.

Do we have text-ev on that? Because ships can turn using their wedges (it's bizarrely slow, but they can do it). Shrikes need to use thrusters once they raise a full bow wall, but otherwise can maneuver on wedges.

And of course once a missile's wedge goes down it needs to use thrusters to get the lasing rods out in from of the bomb and aimed at the enemy. But I don't remember a missile needing to use thrusters to change heading while under power...

Jonathan_S wrote:

Theemile wrote:
Another limitation is maneuvering under a wedge still requires thrusters - and Missiles aren't exactly lousy with excess hydrogen bunkers for making plasma. Corkscrewing would require a massive side delta v, while passing through the cloud of missiles in less than a second. Any maneuvering will mostly likely end up with the missiles spread out with odd vectors, and little remaining RCS fuel.

Do we have text-ev on that? Because ships can turn using their wedges (it's bizarrely slow, but they can do it). Shrikes need to use thrusters once they raise a full bow wall, but otherwise can maneuver on wedges.

And of course once a missile's wedge goes down it needs to use thrusters to get the lasing rods out in from of the bomb and aimed at the enemy. But I don't remember a missile needing to use thrusters to change heading while under power...

On the Mk 16 diagram in SoV, there are 8 RCS groups on the exterior of the missile body. There is a fairly decent sized RCS fuel tank behind the fusion reactor. I'm not certain what else they would be used for.

Obviously for maneuvering when the wedge is down, in order to reorient the missile body prior to deploying the laser heads.

Potato wrote:Obviously for maneuvering when the wedge is down, in order to reorient the missile body prior to deploying the laser heads.

Pretty large fuel reserve for <1 sec of maneuvering.

I suppose a related question is how big must something generating a wedge (such as a ship) be in relation something else (such as a missile) to destroy the smaller thing without itself being destroyed.

A DD or CA taking an enemy missle on it's wedge (physical impact vs laser head beam) clearly should disrupt the missile to bits.

Counter Missles are much smaller than anti-ship missiles and don't have warheads, just relatively simple guidance and relativly strong impellers for both speed & to destroy their target. It's the wedge of the CM that is the thing that destroys the target.

Barricade is using the RMN MDM missile wedges to destroy the SLN weapons. My guess is that you trade one MDM for one SLN missile. Expensive (vs CM's) but you take them out VERY far away from your ships, well outside the engagement range of your own CMs or laser clusters.
That was one of the things that was working on the mind of the SLN commander. Why was the RMN commander spending capital ship weapons to intercept the SLN weapons? Ok, it's a plot device, but it does cause the SLN commander to worry and come to the wrong conclusion- which is what Scotty is working at as well as keeping him distracted. The misdirection is to miss the pod deployed missles the CW's LACs layed out. Scotty is acting as if he believes he has a much lighter force than the SLN.

In that engagement, the Cataphracts had already gone ballistic by the time they were intercepted. There was no trading one-to-one of MDMs for Cataphracts.

Potato wrote:Obviously for maneuvering when the wedge is down, in order to reorient the missile body prior to deploying the laser heads.

Or possibly also to adjust course and/or keep the sensor pointed at the target during any long ballistic flight segment.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Potato wrote:Obviously for maneuvering when the wedge is down, in order to reorient the missile body prior to deploying the laser heads.

Or possibly also to adjust course and/or keep the sensor pointed at the target during any long ballistic flight segment.

If you look at the ranges and the velocity of ships in the honorvers you are talking about a few arc seconds. Not enough that you will need to change your pointing.

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Or possibly also to adjust course and/or keep the sensor pointed at the target during any long ballistic flight segment.

If you look at the ranges and the velocity of ships in the honorvers you are talking about a few arc seconds. Not enough that you will need to change your pointing.

Still pretty trivial pointing change, but it's more like 2800 arc seconds and "a few" if you're lobbing a Mk16 out to 65 million km.

Drive 1 burns out at 7,302,960 km, you coast for 36,514,800 km, and drive 2 kicks in to cover the last 21 million km or so. During the 450 seconds it takes to coast the 36.5 million km a ship accelerating perpendicular to the missile at 500 gees can displace about an additional half million km.

A right triangle 36.5 million km long and 496,125 km tall has an angle between the long leg and the hypotenuses of 0.778° (or 2800.8 arc seconds). Still, yes, don't need much reaction mass just to track the target even if your sensor's field of view is less than +/- 3000 arc seconds - I should have done the math first rather than after you prompted me



You would need more fuel if you wanted to play games with altering the missile trajectory; but there doesn't seem to be much need unless you're worried about a Barricade style intercept during your ballistic phase.

Vince wrote:

cthia wrote:One of these days I am going to read up on trolling if only to satisfy your insistence that I'm a troll. If there are facts that I missed, I missed them because I'm human and not a techno geek, not because I'm a troll. Benefit of the doubt from you, once or twice? Don't always assume the worse.

Can't hyper out? Both parties were threatening to do so. Tamaguchi was running for the limit and Ginger's contingency was threatening to microjump to bring Tamaguchi to bear.

Not saying you're incorrect inasmuch as I'm at a lost -- my less than stellar understanding of the tech, you see. Hence, the reason for positing the question.

At any rate, why waste the surviving missiles of Barricade when they could still be used? They were perfectly capable of receiving new orders, despite what their original mission was.

I suspect that a (the?) reason while the Barricade missiles still had plenty of time on their drives, they were too far away to be retargeted (remember, no RMN ships in the battle had Keyhole I, let alone Keyhole II--which is the only platform that mounts FTL fire control transmitters for ships).

That does bring an interesting proposition to the table. What does Keyhole ll actually do for Barricade?

It should certainly add the ability of the missiles to retarget if they are still in play. The effectiveness of the tactic should also increase from the finer control and data.

Of course, my original scenario light months ago suggests the ability to target missiles under power.