Small Pods.

Belial666 wrote:Even if the LACs originally can't, just limpet a drone on them and now they can. Run a power feed from the drone to the LAC and now the drone will have a lot more power to play with, too.

The LACs are already short of power, to the point that hte fission reactor has run all the time to keep the capacitor rings charged, and you want to add another drain on them. Marvelous

fallsfromtrees wrote:The LACs are already short of power, to the point that hte fission reactor has run all the time to keep the capacitor rings charged, and you want to add another drain on them. Marvelous

The LAC can already run at full acceleration. If you have it run at 2/3 acceleration to mimic a normal ship, then you're going to be using less than full power.

The capacitor rings are used in short-range combat when the bow walls and grazer are used, plus when the LAC starts up.

Belial666 wrote:Even if the LACs originally can't, just limpet a drone on them and now they can. Run a power feed from the drone to the LAC and now the drone will have a lot more power to play with, too.

That won't work directly. That decoy need's to play ECM tricks with it's own wedge to simulate the grav signature of a warship.

But in theory you could beam power to it like an old style tethered decoy; just fly in formation where you've to a clear shot to beam your power.


That assumes that onboard power is the only thing that has short life on a decoy. It's not impossible that playing those kinds of wedge tricks is hard on the nodes and burns them out after relatively short periods of time. Say, an hour or less.

fallsfromtrees wrote:

Belial666 wrote:Even if the LACs originally can't, just limpet a drone on them and now they can. Run a power feed from the drone to the LAC and now the drone will have a lot more power to play with, too.

The LACs are already short of power, to the point that hte fission reactor has run all the time to keep the capacitor rings charged, and you want to add another drain on them. Marvelous

Missing the point, I think. Consider how they're using Roland DD's to try to eventually slow SD's after Spindle as the example for towing / tractoring mass ratio abilities as a benchmark.

In any approach designed to play the "I'm a bigger ship" fake card towing a decoy and two pods, just for the fun of it, the fission pile in the LAC isn't doing anything except powering the wedge. Zero power to sidewalls, bow walls, weapons capacitors, etc. All they' be doing would be holding station on an a bigger warship no longer under full accel or decel. aka, at the stated reduction to 20% of the LACs acceleration capability, towing big ugly stuff out the back.

The moment anything comes there way requiring defense, whatever they're towing gets cut loose to bring everything else on line, like BatRon-1 at First Hancock.

SharkHunter wrote:Missing the point, I think. Consider how they're using Roland DD's to try to eventually slow SD's after Spindle as the example for towing / tractoring mass ratio abilities as a benchmark.

In any approach designed to play the "I'm a bigger ship" fake card towing a decoy and two pods, just for the fun of it, the fission pile in the LAC isn't doing anything except powering the wedge. Zero power to sidewalls, bow walls, weapons capacitors, etc. All they' be doing would be holding station on an a bigger warship no longer under full accel or decel. aka, at the stated reduction to 20% of the LACs acceleration capability, towing big ugly stuff out the back.

The moment anything comes there way requiring defense, whatever they're towing gets cut loose to bring everything else on line, like BatRon-1 at First Hancock.

Once again, you are thinking of the impeller as a reaction drive. It isn't. Just having the impeller wedge up with no acceleration uses almost as much power as using max acceleration.

The weapons don't draw energy from the generator; they draw energy from the capacitors because the generator can't give them enough energy.

A LAC just flying along ballistically with wedge and rad shielding up is using most of the energy from the generator. There isn't enough leftover to do what you suggest.

SWM wrote:Once again, you are thinking of the impeller as a reaction drive. It isn't. Just having the impeller wedge up with no acceleration uses almost as much power as using max acceleration.

The weapons don't draw energy from the generator; they draw energy from the capacitors because the generator can't give them enough energy.

A LAC just flying along ballistically with wedge and rad shielding up is using most of the energy from the generator. There isn't enough leftover to do what you suggest.

Arguable in terms of towing because otherwise I don't see why Honor would have left pods with the first generation LACs carried by Wayfarer. I will punt on the decoy question, because those have the fusion core of a larger ship to drive them most of the time and no one has told us how much a drone has to weigh or what it's power requirements are to pretend to be a battle cruiser, (Flag in Exile [FiE]) Atlas Liner (Honor Among Enemies [HoE]), or whatever....

So somewhere in the middle... Per "House of Steel", the fission pile is capable of driving the Shrikes and later at about 16% faster than the series 282 used in HoE. The fission pile also charges the capacitors, so let's give it maybe a 50% over power besides the wedge. On another thread, a Mark-16 pod was estimated at 2.2K tons. I'd suspect that's where the 3:1 tow ratio comes from by the way. I'm considering the power budget available for the "LACs plus beta-square nodes" on a ship 1/4 the tonnage of the original HMS Fearless, which was 80 years older and could carry an amount of missiles AND decoys.

So while I'd agree that a LAC is a toy-boat PT-109 equivalent as a tug, aka it can't do anything ELSE, like towing those pods to any effective speed from a standing start, but that's not the argument. All it takes is enough energy to "catch the pods" dropped by the cruiser-- which presumably has got to it's desired point in space and isn't pouring on accel or decel, and the net energy required is zero plus drag at speed only. So it uses it's energy over-budget to achieve that, instead of charging the capacitor banks for the extra shields and weapons.

All the LAC is really doing in this scenario is giving those missile pods an anchor point far enough from the parent cruiser (which is likely still controlling them the same way the GNS Isaiah MacKenzie did at Elric) to trigger a "holy s---, where did those come from?" response in the opp force command structure, and then they're likely playing beat street to fit back into a combined missile defense umbrella -- while using whatever significant portion of the pile's energy they need to charging their capacitor banks to full for the bow wall, stealth and ECM countermeasures, tiny point defense clusters, etc.

SharkHunter wrote:

SWM wrote:Once again, you are thinking of the impeller as a reaction drive. It isn't. Just having the impeller wedge up with no acceleration uses almost as much power as using max acceleration.

The weapons don't draw energy from the generator; they draw energy from the capacitors because the generator can't give them enough energy.

A LAC just flying along ballistically with wedge and rad shielding up is using most of the energy from the generator. There isn't enough leftover to do what you suggest.

Arguable in terms of towing because otherwise I don't see why Honor would have left pods with the first generation LACs carried by Wayfarer. I will punt on the decoy question, because those have the fusion core of a larger ship to drive them most of the time and no one has told us how much a drone has to weigh or what it's power requirements are to pretend to be a battle cruiser, (Flag in Exile [FiE]) Atlas Liner (Honor Among Enemies [HoE]), or whatever....

So somewhere in the middle... Per "House of Steel", the fission pile is capable of driving the Shrikes and later at about 16% faster than the series 282 used in HoE. The fission pile also charges the capacitors, so let's give it maybe a 50% over power besides the wedge. On another thread, a Mark-16 pod was estimated at 2.2K tons. I'd suspect that's where the 3:1 tow ratio comes from by the way. I'm considering the power budget available for the "LACs plus beta-square nodes" on a ship 1/4 the tonnage of the original HMS Fearless, which was 80 years older and could carry an amount of missiles AND decoys.

So while I'd agree that a LAC is a toy-boat PT-109 equivalent as a tug, aka it can't do anything ELSE, like towing those pods to any effective speed from a standing start, but that's not the argument. All it takes is enough energy to "catch the pods" dropped by the cruiser-- which presumably has got to it's desired point in space and isn't pouring on accel or decel, and the net energy required is zero plus drag at speed only. So it uses it's energy over-budget to achieve that, instead of charging the capacitor banks for the extra shields and weapons.

All the LAC is really doing in this scenario is giving those missile pods an anchor point far enough from the parent cruiser (which is likely still controlling them the same way the GNS Isaiah MacKenzie did at Elric) to trigger a "holy s---, where did those come from?" response in the opp force command structure, and then they're likely playing beat street to fit back into a combined missile defense umbrella -- while using whatever significant portion of the pile's energy they need to charging their capacitor banks to full for the bow wall, stealth and ECM countermeasures, tiny point defense clusters, etc.

I never said a LAC couldn't tow pods. David has explicitly stated that they can, and told us how much that would slow them down and reduce their stealth. All I said is that it couldn't pretend to be a destroyer. You're plan is perfectly fine, except that I don't understand why you need the LACs in the first place. You could do all of that just with the cruiser itself. For that matter, the cruiser could drop a Lorelei drone which could simulate another warship.

SWM wrote:I never said a LAC couldn't tow pods. David has explicitly stated that they can, and told us how much that would slow them down and reduce their stealth. All I said is that it couldn't pretend to be a destroyer. You're plan is perfectly fine, except that I don't understand why you need the LACs in the first place. You could do all of that just with the cruiser itself. For that matter, the cruiser could drop a Lorelei drone which could simulate another warship.

Unless I am misreading things, Lorelei's are a big ship-drone, aka likely not available to anything smaller than a Nike, [yes/no anybody? I really don't know...] and trying to pull the pods far enough away from the cruiser to simulate other hyper capable ships, my only scenario where LACs towing pods makes sense to begin with, and a back-two generation cruiser, aka not even a Sag-A.

Keep in mind that not even Haven could successfully find let alone track a current generation Manticoran DD in stealth, so what I'm kinda sorta maybe arguing is that in this mission set, the LAC skippers wouldn't really trying to stay in stealth, more to to disguise their total weight plus towed weight/ space impeller / signature [30Ktons, about half or a Noblesse- or Falcon-class DD] to something those poor Frontier Fleet sods would think to be a "Manti DD trying to hide from us but not quite succeeding. Guess those neo-barbs aren't as smart as they think!"

Then the poor sods plus the cruiser pop off a Mark 16 pod-based missile salvo at 20-30MM km big enough to permanently discourage a few of the opp force, and the rest to stop coming in system, then assist in defending the cruiser.

[shrug]Maybe you could do something along those lines. Though you still don't need the LACs. If the cruiser isn't accelerating, you can move the pods as far away from the cruiser as you want.

I still don't see the point. There's no particular need for all this subterfuge. Just blast those enemies away. You don't need to pretend to be multiple ships trying to hide. I don't see any reason to do so, especially since the enemy isn't going to be around long enough for it to matter. It feels like you're just trying to be fancy when you don't need to be.

SharkHunter wrote:So somewhere in the middle... Per "House of Steel", the fission pile is capable of driving the Shrikes and later at about 16% faster than the series 282 used in HoE. The fission pile also charges the capacitors, so let's give it maybe a 50% over power besides the wedge.

The higher acceleration of the Shrikes is due to improved compensator, not increased output power plants. The 282-class looks to have a first generation improved compensator, giving about a 5% improvement to acceleration. The Shrikes and later had 8 years or more of compensator improvements and look to have maybe a 3rd or 4th gen improved compenator; providing more like a 17% boost to accel.

Given the way RFC has told us the wedges work, it barely takes any more power to run at full accel than it does to have it up for station keeping. The extra power is "siphoned" from hyper (or maybe the alpha wall) and doesn't have to be provided from the ship's onboard power. Max acceleration with a wedge is limited only one of two things
1) The inertial compensator you mount (and it's limits are driving by the mass and volume you're trying to cover)
2) The strength of your drive nodes (old style LACs had underpowered drive nodes, presumably to save volume, and all had a max accel of about 409.3g [+/- 0.3g] - slower than some SDs!)