New Manty ship ideas.

Rakhmamort wrote:To deploy a LAC, you will need crew for it. I'm sure manufacturing 1 million CM pods won't be a problem for GA. 1 million LACs means 10 million crew slots. Care to go 5 million pods? 10?

I am not suggesting LACs being able to fire off all the CMs in all the CM pods they are towing. The use of the CM pods is to extend the number of CMs available for a LAC to fire. And I did say 10-12 of them in a pod right? I'm sure LACs can control that much because they are designed to fire off 20 attack birds in 15 seconds or so. If they have control links for those plus the capability to defend themselves, then firing and controlling 10-12 CMs would be within their capabilities easy.

If you want to increase endurance, you're probably better off designing a new LAC's with increased magazines, and a LAC can hold much more missiles than single pod, so saying one should build the same number instead makes no sense. Besides, build costs are getting dominated by the cost of the missiles, so pods are not much cheaper than LAC's, compared to the total costs.

Whitecold wrote:If you want to increase endurance, you're probably better off designing a new LAC's with increased magazines, and a LAC can hold much more missiles than single pod, so saying one should build the same number instead makes no sense. Besides, build costs are getting dominated by the cost of the missiles, so pods are not much cheaper than LAC's, compared to the total costs.

And how long does it take to refill a LAC's magazines, not to mention docking/undocking maneuvers in the middle of a battle?

Whitecold wrote:Rakhmamort, official only meant it has never been built in the story, so there is no text evidence on size etc.

But in the end the main problem of a CM pod is why not just build more LAC's in the first place? A LAC is optimized to control its own missiles, and not more, so existing LAC's can't use them efficiently.
The bottleneck is fire control, and the short engagement window against MDM's, so more birds without an upgrade to go with is a waste of resources. And if you cram additional targeting systems into a LAC, something else has to go. Given that a Katana is already nothing but a CM/Viper launch platform, this would compromise its existing abilities, which gets you back to square one: Why not just build more LAC's?

To be fair I believe we're discussing using CM pods to provide sustained LAC anti-missile fire. That wouldn't take additional fire control because each LAC isn't launching more CMs. It can just (theoretically) launch the same number of CMs per minute for longer than it's onboard CM magazine would last.

Of course that doesn't address the fact we've never seen pods that can launch only some of their missiles (I'd expect Newton to raise his head; if you throw some of your CMs out the front the pod should start heading the other way at a fair clip; unless solidly tractored or carrying onboard drives to counter that acceleration)

And the pods would still be vulnerable to the same proximity kills that every towed pod is. Which works against using them to prolong the anti-missile engagement - tow two or three pods and you'll likely lose the 2nd or 3rd to enemy fire before you've managed to get to their CMs.


Now a pod would be smaller than a LAC, so conceptually towing pods of CMs behind a LAC would give you more missiles that bringing a second LAC. Of course the second LAC is more survivable, and can also let you fire double the CMs (if needed), plus brings additional PDLCs to the party. So it's a more capable platform.

Rakhmamort wrote:Nope. You can't extend your LAC cover very far from your wall. You can send your drive equipped CM pods farther out. You can even send them vs salvos designed to skirt/avoid your LAC screen (or even pull them out of the ideal position to support your wall).

Onboard CMs can already reach the edge of effective fire control. There's no point in launching CMs from further out unless you've also pushed forward units to control them.
LACs out there with the CM pods might work. CM pods on their own won't because the wall can already launch more CMs than it could control AND can launch CMs as far as it can control.

Prox kills only affect pods outside the wedge because. For this purpose the pod would be inside the sidewalls and the anti-radiation fields. So nope, would work fine. You use a tractor to hold it. Grav launchers are supposed to be pretty big, but I'd suspect that you could just use 'horror' hydraulics to move the CMs into the launcher since want sustained and not burst fire.

Jonathan_S wrote:Onboard CMs can already reach the edge of effective fire control. There's no point in launching CMs from further out unless you've also pushed forward units to control them.
LACs out there with the CM pods might work. CM pods on their own won't because the wall can already launch more CMs than it could control AND can launch CMs as far as it can control.

Hmmm… I think - Ghost Rider CMs with FTL links able to intercept the incoming salvo at practically any point! That’s my guess for what he has in mind next. Wouldn’t take much to adapt existing GR FTL relays for CM use. Then you don't need the LACs to position themselves in vulnerable positions out front.

MAD-4A wrote:Hmmm… I think - Ghost Rider CMs with FTL links able to intercept the incoming salvo at practically any point! That’s my guess for what he has in mind next. Wouldn’t take much to adapt existing GR FTL relays for CM use. Then you don't need the LACs to position themselves in vulnerable positions out front.

So how do you get a CM out to 20 million KM?

And better yet, how do you plan on positioning a mesh of FTL relays inside the systems you are planning on attacking?

kzt wrote:

MAD-4A wrote:Hmmm… I think - Ghost Rider CMs with FTL links able to intercept the incoming salvo at practically any point! That’s my guess for what he has in mind next. Wouldn’t take much to adapt existing GR FTL relays for CM use. Then you don't need the LACs to position themselves in vulnerable positions out front.

So how do you get a CM out to 20 million KM?

And better yet, how do you plan on positioning a mesh of FTL relays inside the systems you are planning on attacking?

Nah... you just need CMs the size of an ACM.

MAD-4A wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Onboard CMs can already reach the edge of effective fire control. There's no point in launching CMs from further out unless you've also pushed forward units to control them.
LACs out there with the CM pods might work. CM pods on their own won't because the wall can already launch more CMs than it could control AND can launch CMs as far as it can control.

Hmmm… I think - Ghost Rider CMs with FTL links able to intercept the incoming salvo at practically any point! That’s my guess for what he has in mind next. Wouldn’t take much to adapt existing GR FTL relays for CM use. Then you don't need the LACs to position themselves in vulnerable positions out front.

A Ghost Rider drone is much larger than an MDM, let alone a CM. How small do you think that they can make FTL links? They had to make a missile twice as big AND take out basically EVERYTHING just to get a two way link into it. Now, if you used just an gravitic receiver, and had no transmitter or a light speed link back to the firing ship, it wouldn't drive up CM sizes to much. At a random guess, probably about twice the size as they currently are.

On the other hand, sending FTL signals to the Apollo missiles requires the use of the Key Hole platforms. There are always going to be many more counter missiles flying about than ACMs, so you would need many many more FTL control links than anybody has ever dreamed of.


If you want my guess, the next step in missile defense would be something that the board has dubbed the "Naginata." A Naginata is a Japanese sward that is basically a Katana mounted on the end of a 120-240 cm (4-8 foot) pole. The weapon system would be an unmaned drone smaller than a Katana that had CMs, CM launchers, FTL transmit/receiver, and an Apollo level AI.

They would be hauled by a CLAC, and posted beyond where the LACs are, closer to the enemy, and would stay in communication with the fleet with the FTL links. The fact that they are unmanned would allow them to accelerate at least a thousand g's faster than the LACs, making it harder to send flights of missiles around the defense. The AI would control the CMs flights, and even if they were not as effective as human controlled CMs, they would still bring down the size of the salvo that the LACs and the ships would have to deal with.

So no powered pods, no CM pods, no FTL CMs, but a system that has elements of all. A bit more expensive, perhaps, but, I feel, much more effective.

MAD-4A wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Onboard CMs can already reach the edge of effective fire control. There's no point in launching CMs from further out unless you've also pushed forward units to control them.
LACs out there with the CM pods might work. CM pods on their own won't because the wall can already launch more CMs than it could control AND can launch CMs as far as it can control.

Hmmm… I think - Ghost Rider CMs with FTL links able to intercept the incoming salvo at practically any point! That’s my guess for what he has in mind next. Wouldn’t take much to adapt existing GR FTL relays for CM use. Then you don't need the LACs to position themselves in vulnerable positions out front.

No such thing as Ghost Rider counter-missiles or counter-missiles with FTL links. The smallest FTL comm they've been able to make so far requires a missile the size of the Apollo command missile. Granted, that is an MDM. But that probably means that a counter-missile drive FTL comm command unit will be several times the size of a normal counter-missile. Certainly you will not be able to get an FTL comm into an actual counter-missile; you'll need command missiles just like Apollo. And remember that the Apollo command missile follows closely behind the cluster of missiles it is controlling. That is not practical for counter-missiles, which are deliberately spreading out to cover widely spread attack missiles.

The concept of FTL controlled counter-missiles has been suggested before. Some have suggested combining it with multi-drives. It might work, and might be the direction RFC plans to move. But it is not nearly as easy as you suggest. Adapting FTL comm to counter-missiles will be difficult.

SWM wrote:The concept of FTL controlled counter-missiles has been suggested before. Some have suggested combining it with multi-drives. It might work, and might be the direction RFC plans to move. But it is not nearly as easy as you suggest. Adapting FTL comm to counter-missiles will be difficult.

I was about to put forth a (known to be) horrifically inefficient way to do that [Apollo AMC with a CM grafted on it's nose Cataphract style. Too big to fit in any existing pod or tube, too expensive to actually use. ] But while writing up a tongue-in-cheek post about that I had an idea. (Which probably isn't fully fleshed out; so I expect to get some good feedback on everything I managed to overlook)



One efficiency you might be able to pull off today, to get an FTL link CM, is to make the CMs FTL receive-only.

I suspect the majority of the mass and power needed for an ACMs is for their FTL transmitter. But even at 3+ million KMs shipboard sensors can see the CM and it's target well enough that you don't necessarily need to get realtime data back from the CM.

And you might well be able to squeeze a decent receiver into something not horribly larger than a current CM (since the receiver shouldn't be much more than a rear facing grav detector with some software post-processing). If so I suspect you could get acceptable results simply broadcasting updates 'blind' to the CM in such a way that you didn't need to wait for ACKs or sensor feed back from it.


Obviously that assumption would need to be tested. But even if it's wrong an half FTL setup should still cut the latency enough to boost intercept probabilities to the edge of the current powered envelope and beyond. (Assuming of course that the fleet's keyhole's generate the additional grav pulses to talk to them, and that you don't get into a "white-out" situation from too many transmitters too close to each other)