Stupid Apollo Tricks

Little bit roughish but.

Rather than putting a normal head on a missile, place a PDLC.

Then optimize the control missile for targeting on comming enemy missiles.

With a little care, the flight of missiles can interfly multiple incomming waves on enemy missiles, thinning each wave at least a little by shooting them with the PDLC.

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interesting, not sure how practical given that missile is a single use item and PD are meant to be used repeatedly, but interesting none the less

Annachie wrote:Little bit roughish but.

Rather than putting a normal head on a missile, place a PDLC.

Then optimize the control missile for targeting on comming enemy missiles.

With a little care, the flight of missiles can interfly multiple incomming waves on enemy missiles, thinning each wave at least a little by shooting them with the PDLC.

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Even a small PDLC (DD size) is enormous. You can't fit a PDLC onto a Ghost Rider recon drone, which is larger than any missile currently being used (about twice the size).

lyonheart wrote:Hi Jonathan_S,

Excellent points as usual, but the problem I've always had with 4 drive missiles is that there just isn't enough rime or velocity left to be worthwhile.

Since RMN triple drive MDM's accelerate for 9 minutes at 451 'G's per second, their terminal velocity is .81 C [243,000 KPS] or 90% of the .9 C limit for all things human built, let alone capitol anti-ship missiles, so the 4th drive could only accelerate to just less than 27,000 KPS at most [just under a minute at 451 'G's], for 811,800 km; which is pretty paltry range however low the acceleration.

L

Yeah, the straight line performance doesn't seem to justify a four stage missile.
Only thing I can guess that is that, due to the extremely long range they anticipate using them at, the four stage is supposed to apply primarily lateral acceleration to curve the vector around to actually achieve target intercept. (Likely after a long high-speed ballistic coast) <shrug>

lyonheart wrote:Hi Jonathan_S,

Excellent points as usual, but the problem I've always had with 4 drive missiles is that there just isn't enough rime or velocity left to be worthwhile.

Since RMN triple drive MDM's accelerate for 9 minutes at 451 'G's per second, their terminal velocity is .81 C [243,000 KPS] or 90% of the .9 C limit for all things human built, let alone capitol anti-ship missiles, so the 4th drive could only accelerate to just less than 27,000 KPS at most [just under a minute at 451 'G's], for 811,800 km; which is pretty paltry range however low the acceleration.

L

Johnathan_S wrote:Yeah, the straight line performance doesn't seem to justify a four stage missile.
Only thing I can guess that is that, due to the extremely long range they anticipate using them at, the four stage is supposed to apply primarily lateral acceleration to curve the vector around to actually achieve target intercept. (Likely after a long high-speed ballistic coast) <shrug>

I always assumed the fourth stage was akin to the anchor leg on a relay team. A strong anchor at end of race - end run maneuverability.

You'd think at some point above about 0.7C the ability of counter-missiles and PDLCs to generate an intercept on any kind of target would fall off dramatically.

Think of the effective engagement envelope of counter-missiles as a truncated cone (okay, approximately a frustum for you sticklers of terminology). As the closing velocity of the target gets larger, that truncated cone is going to get much shorter and somewhat skinnier (because of the difficulty of intercepting a "crossing target").

You have a similar problem with PDLCs, which presumably need to be focused on the target for a finite time period.

That has two interesting effects -- the first is that there is diminishing returns to put in additional drives, as the difference in difficulty of intercepting a target at, say, 0.7c versus 0.9c probably isn't large enough to matter tactically. The other, more interesting in my opinion, is at some velocity it starts becoming feasible to go for contact hits. Yes, the odds of getting a contact hit are probably still very low, but a hundred ton missile at 0.9c has a kinetic energy in the petaton range -- so all you'd need is one hit to vaporize even the largest and best-armored SD. You wouldn't even need a warhead.

Actually, I'd hate to be on a ship where a 100-ton missile hit my wedge at 0.9c. I don't know what the actual effects would be, but I doubt it would be very pleasant for the ship in question. That is a lot of kinetic energy and it would have to go somewhere. Probably the most likely effect is that it would shake the ship a lot harder than the inertial compensator could possibly handle, which would turn the humans on the ship to goo.

My mistake.

A 100-ton missile at 0.9c has a kinetic energy of about 900 gigatons. That still seems more than sufficient to blow any SD to quarks.

The difficulty in generating an intercept at high velocity seems overrated. The velocity is a vector and the missile can only slowly change it. And since the main sensors are the grav sensors, they can see this all happen in basically real time. Moving faster just gives the incoming missile less time to modify their vector.

Edit: You should also keep in mind that a sidewinder missile circa 1958 using really simple electronics is perfectly capable of calculating in real time an intercept course against a jet fighter that can maneuver much more effectively than a Honorverse missile can. It isn't computationally complex and doesn't require the Honorverse bank of computers to guide it.

kzt wrote:The difficulty in generating an intercept at high velocity seems overrated. The velocity is a vector and the missile can only slowly change it. And since the main sensors are the grav sensors, they can see this all happen in basically real time. Moving faster just gives the incoming missile less time to modify their vector.

Two things.

First, the textev talks about using radar and lidar to track incoming missiles. That doesn't seem to be effective at all. I agree that gravitic sensors make more sense for tracking incoming missiles.

Second, even if you use gravitic sensors to track incoming missiles, you need to get that data to the counter-missiles. That is a light speed connection. A light speed connection to a counter missile when the missile is coming inbound at 0.7c and can still generate vector changes at well north of 50k gravities seems hopelessly arthritic.

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:Second, even if you use gravitic sensors to track incoming missiles, you need to get that data to the counter-missiles. That is a light speed connection. A light speed connection to a counter missile when the missile is coming inbound at 0.7c and can still generate vector changes at well north of 50k gravities seems hopelessly arthritic.

See the drawing of a lasing rod that was in one of the books. Look at the size of the grav sensor shown. So no, the CMs have the grav sensor on them.