Lord Skimper wrote:I don't think you understand the numbers here. Yes the can shift position a little bit. But we are talking about a swarm of missiles not many in the good old days, but now 10,000 of thousands. 3+ missiles deep perhaps.
If these missiles are a 1000 km apart but if your shifting hundreds of klicks maybe 5000 km apart.
Now a 100 tall and a 150 wide that's is no less than 100,000 km by 150,000 km but more likely 500,000 km by 750,000 km. 15,000-20,000 km deep.
Homing in on 50 ships less than 25,000 km x 25,000 km x 5,000 km in size.
From a similarly sized number of ships.
At a 1.4 times distance the range of the outmost missiles will be 250,000 km to 1 million km less range plus a like wise amount to get back to their targets. While those heading straight in will be 500,000 to 2 million klicks ahead of the outer most missiles.
Now if they go streaming in dodging is out of the question either way as they approach their targets they will come streaming in. Again being picked off by the counter missiles.
Finally the missiles are moving very fast they don't move to attack, the missiles go sailing past their targets then turn to get their shots off or have an off axis warhead. Like modern anti tank missiles, which fire down out the side / bottom as they fly over a tank.
Likewise the defending ship is rolling and imposing its wedge after the CM launch. Then leading the PD firing and holding on. The missiles go right past in less than a couple seconds. They need to get within 25,000 km to fire their laser heads. Guess where in the wedge the ship is. The ship wedge will likely flatten out as the speed decreases to keep from flying into the other ship 5000km away at 500 g's. And the closing speed needs to be factored in. It is a wonder anything ever gets hit.
Commodore Oakius wrote:Remember Sisca (zisca?) Not sure of the spelling, but it was in "At All Costs." And the "popup" manuever for the same book, I think. The popup was when Manticoran missiles popped up over the triple ripple, show that missiles can move more then just a little one way or another, considering the coverage of the triple ripple area.
Lord Skimper wrote:Triple ripple was always a problem. It sounds good but either the ripple is too small or the missiles turn too much. Its a good story to read but not so good to work out how it was avoided.
70,000 g works great if you have been accelerating at 500 previously. But when it was 70,000 all along, it doesn't matter. It will let you move a fair distance but the percentage will still be quite small. Plus anyone behind you will smack into you. It isn't like a fish at a steady speed it is a fish moving at 40,000 mph. It can't just turn. Said fish gains an additional 420 mph every second. If it tried to stop it would have to swim the other way for about 100 seconds and travel 20,000 or so miles. Swimming in a circle that circle would be about 80,000 miles in diameter. Not 8.
You know, while I seem to recall misstating a response in an earlier post
), it really would do some good for you to actually look at what's going on here as described in the books.
First, missile acceleration at launch. Missile acceleration at launch is designed to get them clear of the firing ship's wedge
and of one another as rapidly as possible. Missiles are launched on diverging tracks to get separation before they bring their wedges up. They are fired through sidewall "gunports" which open in the sidewall just long enough for the missile to pass through. Those gunports are at least 10KM from the side of the ship and the physical launcher is "connected" to the sidewall by what is, in effect, an extended grav driver which helps push the missiles' velocity upward. They are fired in a single salvo instead of being staggered because it allows the gunports to be opened and closed simultaneously, thus imposing a briefer window of vulnerability in which a Bad Thing Incoming is going to find a hole.
Second, your example seems to posit that missiles must be running exactly parallel to and shoulder-to-shoulder with one another or something else equally silly. A missile salvo comes in on a front, as a cluster, not as a wall in space. The missiles in each ship's individual salvo are
fired simultaneously; no one ever said (at least I'm pretty darned sure they didn't) that they
light off their drives simultaneously. They don't. They light off in a tight but staggered
window so that they are coming in separated along three axes: "height," "width," and "depth." This means they are, in fact, also staggered in time on target, but the interval is so brief that the target is forced to consider them all a single salvo. Laser warheads --- and it was only the laserhead which brought the missile back from the tactical dust heap --- have a standoff range of about 30,000 km. If they were attacking in a 2-dimensional wall (which seems to be what you are positing), that wall would measure 30,000 x 30,000 km, or 900,000,000 kilometers. If there were 10,000 missiles in that wall, all coming in at exactly the same time, each of them would have 90,000 km of its very own. They are also coming in stacked in
depth, however, with the rear missiles in the salvo in effect waiting for the ones in front to be picked off (or fire) before firing their own laser heads, which broadens (or deepens, depending on how one wants to look at it) the "attack basket" significantly. Moreover, quite a few of them are deliberately fired to cover aspects covered by the target's wedge at the moment of launch in case the target rolls ship. That is, some of them are intentionally "wasted" as insurance against the target ship's evasive action.
Third, starship and impeller wedges and fratricide. Missile wedges by Honor's time are a
lot more powerful (and bigger) than they were 400-500 years earlier. This gives them better accel, a better compensator effect, longer burn time, and the ability to "shield" one another from counter missiles by (in effect) sweeping a broader volume on their way inbound. (The "rear" missiles of the salvo are at least partially in the protective shadows of the "lead" missiles of the salvo, as described above.)In other words, it makes them somewhat better targets as individuals but also "plows the road" for the rest of the salvo coming along behind them behind them because of the staggered wedge light-off at launch. In the earlier period when missiles used wedge contact to kill enemy ships, they also had to
face one another (that is, expose the throats of their wedges) at the moment of firing, and the same thing was true for missile defense. That is, ships were one hell of a lot more vulnerable to "down the throat" shots than they are by Honor's time. One reason missiles fell out of favor and were replaced by energy armaments as the weapons of decision was that fire control and missile defense both got a
lot better, as did sidewalls. The defender no longer had to expose his most vulnerable aspects in order to get shots at the incoming, the attacker no longer had to expose
his most vulnerable aspect in order to get shots at the defender, and the probability of a missile surviving to get close enough to attack a sidewall plummeted. Hence energy weapons powerful enough to burn through sidewalls became the real shipkillers, at least for capital units, until the introduction of powerful, reliable laser heads.
Finally, you clearly do not understand what is involved in missile evasive movement and dispersal. I've already mentioned the fact that missile dispersal appears to include at least two dimensions you weren't allowing for (i.e., depth and time). As for maneuver,
of course they can dodge and weave without "running into" one another. I never said they could stop, nor did I ever mean to imply that they could suddenly negate their base vectors. They can generate Delta V only relative to that base vector, but that's quite enough to make them difficult targets for counter missiles which are coming at them at equally insane velocities and with self-targeting sensors which are nowhere near as capable as those of the ship which launched the CM. And missiles are well aware of where other members of their same salvo are located --- at least while they're in range of their launching ships' telemetry links --- while each missile is equally capable of altering heading at the same acceleration as every other missile in the salvo. That is, they are not suddenly going to slam on the brakes and get rear-ended by one of their fellows. One reason accuracy goes down once the links are cut is that the missiles are no longer talking to each other (courtesy of wedge interference). Their ability to maneuver
as a salvo is reduced, and as they go into terminal attack mode, they are also (in the absence of telemetry links; another reason Apollo is so important) limited to whatever evasive maneuvers were programmed into them as of their last contact with their links. This limits the effectiveness of their evasion and also leads to a higher degree of fratricide as they lose track of where the other members of their own salvo are relative to themselves. I've always visualized the missiles as individual nodes in a dispersed targeting constellation but with the difficulty that their own propulsion system cuts holes in their data net. In this respect, the launching ship acts as a clearing house which distributes information from
all the attack missiles' sensors (which allows a much richer "map" of the target) while simultaneously updating them as to the positions of other members of the same salvo which may not be able to communicate directly with them. The light-speed limitations build up to a point at which the updates to the birds come in too late to do much good or become worse than what the shipkillers' onboard systems can do based on their last stored updates and what their own sensors can "see" as they close. That's the point at which the launching ship cuts the link and hands off to each missile's autonomous control, at least pre Apollo.
And as far as the "triple ripple" defense is concerned, the goal is simply to turn the attack missiles
sensors away from the ripple to prevent them from being blinded before they reach final acquisition range. In that sense, they angle above or below the triple ripple, but their base vector is going to take them straight through the ripple's zone no matter what, and I never intended to imply differently.
