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Theemile wrote:Actually, The Solarian League PASSED on the Laserhead - the version shown to them was anemic and unable to thwart standard sidewalls in the 1830s. The Andermani picked up the tech and developed it further and deployed it in a capital missile in 1869 - Manticore's tech gathering network put them on the trail and they developed it independently in ~1870 making them #2 to field the new laserhead in their mk 19 capital missile.

The Solarian League was the last major power to field the tech in the late 1880s.

David has said that the SLN has become very conservative in fielding weapons tech; due to the size of their fleet, they don't want to start a weapons revolution where a majority of their fleet is outdated and requires replacement or costly refurbishment to face off with smaller powers. So, the SLN sees NOT developing technology as important to maintaining it's powerful position as developing it.

Now you may say, "we are discussing missiles, not ship parts". At this time, the cost of missiles equaled the cost of the carrying ship, most of the time. The thought of replacing all their current missiles was a daunting task for the SLN - enough so that they would not do so until they were satisfied that 1) the tech really was superior, 2) was necessary to win future combats and 3) was mature enough that it would not be replaced several times in a short period as the technology matured.

Which is why they got their butts kicked in 1923.

Also navies have a tendency to design their ships to defend against weapons equivalent to their own. The (often unstated) rational is that you're trying to make your weapons the best and you have the most information about them, so its more practical to show the design is balanced and able to defend against attacks it can dish out.

Under that logic if the SLN adopted the laserhead not only would they have to update all their missiles; but they'd have to start designing warships around armor optimized against laserheads and refitting existing ships based on point defense that could stop missiles beyond 30,000km. (So immediately junk all the autocannon; but also shift the defensive balance towards CMs and away from PDLCs. That requires extensive changes (unless you do a half-ass rush job like Aegis; which is unlikely to be acceptable in peacetime) to the ship. More holes in the armor for more CM tubes; enlarged or additional CM magazines, more CM fire control links, etc. So a change in missile is also, almost inevitably, a change in ship design too.

Theemile wrote:Actually, The Solarian League PASSED on the Laserhead - the version shown to them was anemic and unable to thwart standard sidewalls in the 1830s. The Andermani picked up the tech and developed it further and deployed it in a capital missile in 1869 - Manticore's tech gathering network put them on the trail and they developed it independently in ~1870 making them #2 to field the new laserhead in their mk 19 capital missile.

The Solarian League was the last major power to field the tech in the late 1880s.

David has said that the SLN has become very conservative in fielding weapons tech; due to the size of their fleet, they don't want to start a weapons revolution where a majority of their fleet is outdated and requires replacement or costly refurbishment to face off with smaller powers. So, the SLN sees NOT developing technology as important to maintaining it's powerful position as developing it.

I'm not disputing that. In no way would the SLN want to upset the cart, for the reasons you described. But once they realised the cart was being upset anyway, despite their best efforts to keep the status quo, they'd have no option but to invest heavily. And with the deepest pockets of anyone around and a reputation to maintain, they'd go above and beyond everyone else.

So take the laserhead: they passed on the original design because it was anaemic. Even if they knew it wouldn't be so, their institutional baggage would have told them to not invest in it. If they're smart, they develop a skunkworks programme that does develop those technologies in secret, but I doubt they'd think that far in the late 19th century PD -- in Travis' time yes, as exemplified by the BB, DN and SD.

However, once the Andies and others did develop the technology and started showing results for it, the SLN had to invest on their own laserhead production and retrofitting their ships and their tactics against those laserheads. At their leisure pace, I'm sure, as 2000 SDs have a quality of their own. Once their production is up and running, they'd start rolling out laserhead-capable SDs by the dozens every year, more if they felt the need to go on a replacement drive.

And my point is: where are those new SDs going to be assigned? Sol. At the scale that the SLN operates, they can start late and still beat everyone else to the finish line. If they wanted to, and showing off for the politicians on Earth is a good motivator -- gets them more funds they can divert into the proper pockets.

So, what all this means is that their mines had to be old-fashioned contact nukes? Which would be no bigger than capital ship missiles, but more than likely no more than two-thirds the size?

The problem is they they don’t really have pockets that deep. Well, at least after the embezzlement and all is taken into account. They don’t buy much hardware, it mostly goes into personnel.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Theemile wrote:Actually, The Solarian League PASSED on the Laserhead - the version shown to them was anemic and unable to thwart standard sidewalls in the 1830s. The Andermani picked up the tech and developed it further and deployed it in a capital missile in 1869 - Manticore's tech gathering network put them on the trail and they developed it independently in ~1870 making them #2 to field the new laserhead in their mk 19 capital missile.

The Solarian League was the last major power to field the tech in the late 1880s.

David has said that the SLN has become very conservative in fielding weapons tech; due to the size of their fleet, they don't want to start a weapons revolution where a majority of their fleet is outdated and requires replacement or costly refurbishment to face off with smaller powers. So, the SLN sees NOT developing technology as important to maintaining it's powerful position as developing it.

I'm not disputing that. In no way would the SLN want to upset the cart, for the reasons you described. But once they realised the cart was being upset anyway, despite their best efforts to keep the status quo, they'd have no option but to invest heavily. And with the deepest pockets of anyone around and a reputation to maintain, they'd go above and beyond everyone else.

So take the laserhead: they passed on the original design because it was anaemic. Even if they knew it wouldn't be so, their institutional baggage would have told them to not invest in it. If they're smart, they develop a skunkworks programme that does develop those technologies in secret, but I doubt they'd think that far in the late 19th century PD -- in Travis' time yes, as exemplified by the BB, DN and SD.

However, once the Andies and others did develop the technology and started showing results for it, the SLN had to invest on their own laserhead production and retrofitting their ships and their tactics against those laserheads. At their leisure pace, I'm sure, as 2000 SDs have a quality of their own. Once their production is up and running, they'd start rolling out laserhead-capable SDs by the dozens every year, more if they felt the need to go on a replacement drive.

And my point is: where are those new SDs going to be assigned? Sol. At the scale that the SLN operates, they can start late and still beat everyone else to the finish line. If they wanted to, and showing off for the politicians on Earth is a good motivator -- gets them more funds they can divert into the proper pockets.

But they... didn't. Yes, they started updating the ships in the reserve with autocannon, but they kept building the same SD designs - Scientists and Vegas. The missile launchers in their latest BC designs, the Indefatigable Flight VI and Nevadas, have a fire rate of ~30 seconds, down from 45! A 1900 Reliant had a salvo rate of 8 seconds! Nearly 4X the salvo rate!! The software on Solarian missile defense systems wasn't sufficient to track missiles at the speed or numbers Haven Sector ships could throw.

I'm not saying the SLN didn't make any changes, but they made them slow, and few of them. The Andermani, was was not at war until 1920, made far more iterations thanS the SLN did. 50 years after the Laserhead hit the streets, the SLN was just making fleet changes which we saw in the late 1880s or 1890s in the Havenite sector powers.

cthia wrote:So, what all this means is that their mines had to be old-fashioned contact nukes? Which would be no bigger than capital ship missiles, but more than likely no more than two-thirds the size?

The issue with contact nukes as mines is that they've got a danger radius, against warships, of about 30 - 50 times smaller than a laserhead style mine. (And unless lucky enough for a ship to ingest one down the throat without noticing you also need more hits because the first few mines "waste" themselves burning out the sidewall generators before they have a prayer to start inflicting damage to the hull) OTOH a lucky BB where a ship nearly rams the mine with its forward hammerhead without noticing - well that explosion is going to do a lot more damage than any laserhead could pray to do.

Now there are some contact nuke style mines. Cerberus has some for use against small craft. But small craft are vulnerable to the blast from far further away than a warship with its sidewalls up. (And small craft are very hard to target with a laserhead, and you wouldn't want someone to be able to clear your minefield by sending pinnaces in to sweep the mines)

Theemile wrote:But they... didn't. Yes, they started updating the ships in the reserve with autocannon, but they kept building the same SD designs - Scientists and Vegas. The missile launchers in their latest BC designs, the Indefatigable Flight VI and Nevadas, have a fire rate of ~30 seconds, down from 45! A 1900 Reliant had a salvo rate of 8 seconds! Nearly 4X the salvo rate!! The software on Solarian missile defense systems wasn't sufficient to track missiles at the speed or numbers Haven Sector ships could throw.

I'm not saying the SLN didn't make any changes, but they made them slow, and few of them. The Andermani, was was not at war until 1920, made far more iterations thanS the SLN did. 50 years after the Laserhead hit the streets, the SLN was just making fleet changes which we saw in the late 1880s or 1890s in the Havenite sector powers.

The Andermani were/are not stupid. First of all, their cultural background compelled them to keep abreast of all the technological breakthroughs as evidenced by their productising the laserhead before everyone else. More crucially, the war between Manticore and Haven was not a surprise to anyone (except politicians in Manticore), so the Andermani most definitely paid attention to the developments in that war. When your noisy neighbours start shooting at each other next to you, you can't help but pay attention!

The SLN, on the other hand, no doubt did a piss poor job at catching up. By 1900, the MAlign infiltration was pretty deep and we know they didn't send any observers to the first war at all, both as a result of that infiltration and of their own arrogance. So without direct data on what was really cutting edge, their best just wasn't good enough. And yet, the Scientist is not a bad ship, for a 1900 design.

HoS says the King William class (1877) was designed for laserheads and could sustain 1 missile per launcher per minute for 2 hours. This doesn't mean it had a cycle time of 60 seconds, but it probably is close to that. Another factoid is that though the King William was designed to carry laserheads, the design didn't completely take into account being attacked by laserheads. That didn't come until the Anduril class in 1889 and especially with the Victory class in 1892. From that, I would say that the Scientist is roughly comparable to the Anduril and lagged behind the Victory.

We should instead compare it to a DuQuesne-class. The PRH did not have the Manticore tech base, so they were using Solarian designs and technology as much as they could. So it's actually pretty likely that the DuQuesne, which acquitted itself pretty well during the pre-Buttercup phase of the first war, was directly comparable to the Scientist. Though I expect that Haven, having actually used their ships, knew a few things that the SLN didn't and applied that to their designs (like doubling the number of missile launchers).

For the SLN, that was not a problem, because the quantity would make up for the deficiencies in quality. They could afford a design that was 900,000 tons lighter than the Victory and 300k compared to the DuQuesne class (according to the HoS figures, which differ from the wiki).

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Theemile wrote:But they... didn't. Yes, they started updating the ships in the reserve with autocannon, but they kept building the same SD designs - Scientists and Vegas. The missile launchers in their latest BC designs, the Indefatigable Flight VI and Nevadas, have a fire rate of ~30 seconds, down from 45! A 1900 Reliant had a salvo rate of 8 seconds! Nearly 4X the salvo rate!! The software on Solarian missile defense systems wasn't sufficient to track missiles at the speed or numbers Haven Sector ships could throw.

I'm not saying the SLN didn't make any changes, but they made them slow, and few of them. The Andermani, was was not at war until 1920, made far more iterations thanS the SLN did. 50 years after the Laserhead hit the streets, the SLN was just making fleet changes which we saw in the late 1880s or 1890s in the Havenite sector powers.

The Andermani were/are not stupid. First of all, their cultural background compelled them to keep abreast of all the technological breakthroughs as evidenced by their productising the laserhead before everyone else. More crucially, the war between Manticore and Haven was not a surprise to anyone (except politicians in Manticore), so the Andermani most definitely paid attention to the developments in that war. When your noisy neighbours start shooting at each other next to you, you can't help but pay attention!

The SLN, on the other hand, no doubt did a piss poor job at catching up. By 1900, the MAlign infiltration was pretty deep and we know they didn't send any observers to the first war at all, both as a result of that infiltration and of their own arrogance. So without direct data on what was really cutting edge, their best just wasn't good enough. And yet, the Scientist is not a bad ship, for a 1900 design.

HoS says the King William class (1877) was designed for laserheads and could sustain 1 missile per launcher per minute for 2 hours. This doesn't mean it had a cycle time of 60 seconds, but it probably is close to that. Another factoid is that though the King William was designed to carry laserheads, the design didn't completely take into account being attacked by laserheads. That didn't come until the Anduril class in 1889 and especially with the Victory class in 1892. From that, I would say that the Scientist is roughly comparable to the Anduril and lagged behind the Victory.

We should instead compare it to a DuQuesne-class. The PRH did not have the Manticore tech base, so they were using Solarian designs and technology as much as they could. So it's actually pretty likely that the DuQuesne, which acquitted itself pretty well during the pre-Buttercup phase of the first war, was directly comparable to the Scientist. Though I expect that Haven, having actually used their ships, knew a few things that the SLN didn't and applied that to their designs (like doubling the number of missile launchers).

For the SLN, that was not a problem, because the quantity would make up for the deficiencies in quality. They could afford a design that was 900,000 tons lighter than the Victory and 300k compared to the DuQuesne class (according to the HoS figures, which differ from the wiki).

David has already said that the Scientist never received any "structural" Laserhead upgrades. It is roughly comparable to the refitted Manticore Class.

For the King Williams, you are coarrect, The actual salvo time for Manticorian Cpital launchers was ~30 seconds (especially post refit), though the tactical spec was 1 per minute.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:The deceleration phase does complicate the calculation as does the weeks they spent at the high rate. I will admit that the top velocity and the time coasting at that velocity are unknowns. But, 80% speed of light is a typical max velocity in normal space, so I suspect that would be the first used (slower maximums will also be plugged into the equations, just to see what it does to the acceleration result). I will put together a spreadsheet tomorrow (though not with actual numbers) as a demonstration of concept.

I played with this a bit; assuming the total time is 6 weeks and the total distance is 4 light weeks (to the hyper limit, since a ship would hyper out at the end of its trip) and the two velocities are 0.2 c and 0.8 c, then I get the following equation:
2.8 weeks = 0.6 * t + 0.22 * c/a

where a is the acceleration and t is the time spend at 0.8 c. If the rate of acceleration is so high that the time and distance spent accelerating are immaterial, then the time at 0.8 c is 14/3 weeks and the time at 0.2 c is 4/3 weeks.

The smallest acceleration that could work is the one where no time is spent cruising at 0.2 c, so as soon as the ship decelerates to 0.2 c the pods are released and the ship hypers out right at Manticore's hyper limit.
That gives the values: a = 0.775 c/week
and t = 6 - 1.4/0.775 (in weeks) or approximately 4.2 weeks

To get this into more usual units, convert weeks into the equivalent number of seconds and get a = 384.16 m/s**2 or about 39 g. Since this was initially proposed to calculate the expected acceleration of a spider drive ship and all I found was a lower bound of 39 g for the time and distance that I assumed, with an unlimited upper bound; I do not think this was an exercise with an usable result.

Referencing the clubbing the kittens received at the Ajay Terminus in Uncompromising Honor


MINES

About those mines. Isn't it high time the concept got a makeover? MAlign style?

The poor Solly SDs sailed right into a trap set by the stealthed Shrikes and got eaten alive. The Manties should be ashamed of themselves for abusing innocent kittens that way. The Solly ships at Ajay didn't stand a chance against the avalanche of destruction targeting them in a surprise attack mere seconds away. It was so effective it was hard for the CO to continue to watch. The Manty CO simply gave orders to stop shooting to kill, and to disable them instead.

What if the MA uses the same tactic? Can't they seed their system with stealthed pods the same thirty seconds apart? That way mine fields comprised of missile pods can encompass much larger volumes of space. Wouldn't these pods be smaller than LACs; and by implication and the generosity of a malignant mind, even stealthier?