Donkey LAC carriage

Had a thought. Shannon Foraker developed a specialized pod, the donkey, for towing missile pods. The donkey received beamed power from the ship and used it to tractor other pods and (I take it) itself to the ship. (Alternatively, the ship might tractor it, but I think part of the point was to get over the ship's tractor limitations too. Nested donkeys could still do that though.)

So, I was thinking - a larger, more powerful donkey, perhaps with Manticoran power systems, could possibly be used to enable LAC carriage by standard warships, with LAC's replacing the towed missile pods.

You'd have to secure the LAC's for high acceleration and keep the crews aboard the ship - it's essentially just an upgrade of the Masadan trick of towing their LAC's to Yeltsin in _Honor of the Queen_ - and there wouldn't be a provision to repair or maintain the LAC's this way.

The point would just be a way to transport LAC's system to system less ineffectively by standard warships, or by freighters but in a readier condition than they would be as cargo. For that matter, while you wouldn't have the LAC ready to go immediately after arriving in a system, you would be able to get it going pretty quickly, which may be useful for protection from pirates deeper into the system.

Ideally they would be kept close enough to be towed inside the wedge still and prevent loss of acceleration, but even if that's not possible (particularly if you're stringing out a lot of them), it may be worth it on enough occasions to keep such "super-donkeys" around.

I'm not sure what the purpose of this is. The donkey was needed only because Haven wanted to trail a larger number of pods, and only for the duration of a battle. Ships, even freighters, already have enough tractors to hold a few LACs. How many LACs are you talking about hauling? If it is more than the ship can tractor by itself, then it is probably too many to fit inside the wedge. Which means that the ship would be extremely slow, especially if it is a freighter.

I don't see what huge advantage this gives over David's idea of having LACs clamped directly to the hull, inside the compensator field, and fully manned.

It's an interesting thought, but I don't think it's a viable option, for several reasons:

1) LACs are a hell of a lot bigger than missile pods. I don't think we have hard numbers on the mass of a loaded pod, but a set of 10 Mk 23s (or 8 Mk 23s and an Apollo control missile) won't mass more than 1,500 tons. I doubt the pod would mass more than the missiles it carries, so that's no more than 3,000 tons for the loaded pod. By contrast, modern RMN LACs come in at over 20,000 tons, so that's 7 pods to 1 LAC. I doubt you'd get more than 1 LAC per donkey, so you'll need to be towing a lot of them for a worthwhile LAC force.

2) You'll have no easy way of servicing the LACs, let alone reloading their missile magazines. CLACs insert the missiles through the muzzle of the launch tube, and use pressurised LAC bay so maintenance can be done in shirtsleeves - donkey-carried LACs would have to be serviced by EVA, and the missiles reloaded the same way.

3) Getting the crews to their LACs will be difficult - they'll have to be ferried out there in pinnaces or cutters.

4) I don't think the donkey was intended for long-duration use. I'm not sure if there's textev either way, but I didn't get the sense that Second Fleet were towing their donkeys all the way from their assembly point to Manticore-A's hyper limit - I suspect that the donkeys and their pods were carried in ammunition ships most of the way, to preserve the SD(P)s magazine space for a full pod load after the donkey salvo was launched, and deployed to the warships only for the last leg of the journey. This could have been done in an nearby empty system or in deep space out of range of Manticore's long-range sensor arrays. It could even have been done in hyperspace - we know small craft can operate in hyper as long as they're not in a grav wave, which suggests that EVAs and pod transfers by tractor beam should be possible too.

SWM wrote:I'm not sure what the purpose of this is. The donkey was needed only because Haven wanted to trail a larger number of pods, and only for the duration of a battle. Ships, even freighters, already have enough tractors to hold a few LACs. How many LACs are you talking about hauling? If it is more than the ship can tractor by itself, then it is probably too many to fit inside the wedge. Which means that the ship would be extremely slow, especially if it is a freighter.

I don't see what huge advantage this gives over David's idea of having LACs clamped directly to the hull, inside the compensator field, and fully manned.

Also, I doubt something towed at a distance would be safe to bring into a grav wave.

But as long as you're avoiding the grav waves (and talking about Manticoran/Grayson LACs which have pretty high endurance and acceleration) why bother towing them in hyper. (whether clamped to the ships hull or towed remotely) You'd still need a starship of some sort to jump the LACs up into hyper, and to provide long range navigation there, but the LACs are capable of using their own wedges to stay in formation with the freighter or warship.


I assume the Peeps probably didn't try that variation in HotQ because 1) the Masadan LACs had much shorter endurance and they didn't want to waste most of it simply getting to Grayson and 2) those LACs had much lower accel than the Peep warships.



Overall, even though you could do this I'm still not sure why you'd want to. I wouldn't send LACs raiding without CLAC support to provide maintenance and ammo. But if you're just sending them to defend a system why bother self-deploying. Simply pack them into a freighter and ship them (or if it's time critical dispatch a CLAC to play delivery truck). (And most of the time it'll take more time and planning to get their support base set up than to deliver the LACs, so they aren't normally your bottleneck)

SWM wrote:I'm not sure what the purpose of this is. The donkey was needed only because Haven wanted to trail a larger number of pods, and only for the duration of a battle. Ships, even freighters, already have enough tractors to hold a few LACs. How many LACs are you talking about hauling? If it is more than the ship can tractor by itself, then it is probably too many to fit inside the wedge. Which means that the ship would be extremely slow, especially if it is a freighter.

I don't see what huge advantage this gives over David's idea of having LACs clamped directly to the hull, inside the compensator field, and fully manned.

I'm not thinking in terms of a huge advantage - more one that's just large enough to bother with the production of a system that shouldn't be a large technical leap or great expense.

If most ships have the tractors and power to tractor inside the wedge all the LAC's they'd even want to try to carry, then it's moot - unless you could carry many more for only a tolerable loss of speed outside the wedge. I don't have the numbers to make that call; I've just been under the impression that space inside the wedge would be less of a limiting factor than tractor beam count/power, and that towing some outside the wedge _might_ be possible in fairly great numbers without terrible loss of speed.

Freighters particularly may well not have lots of tractors or power for them, making a donkey a kind of useful "tractor pod" for them when they would have a use for it. On the other hand, if a freighter isn't stuffed with cargo, it may be able to put the LAC inside a cargo bay and have it readier for service.

Dafmeister wrote:It's an interesting thought, but I don't think it's a viable option, for several reasons:

1) LACs are a hell of a lot bigger than missile pods. I don't think we have hard numbers on the mass of a loaded pod, but a set of 10 Mk 23s (or 8 Mk 23s and an Apollo control missile) won't mass more than 1,500 tons. I doubt the pod would mass more than the missiles it carries, so that's no more than 3,000 tons for the loaded pod. By contrast, modern RMN LACs come in at over 20,000 tons, so that's 7 pods to 1 LAC. I doubt you'd get more than 1 LAC per donkey, so you'll need to be towing a lot of them for a worthwhile LAC force.

Granted. It'd be a lot larger than a pod donkey.

2) You'll have no easy way of servicing the LACs, let alone reloading their missile magazines. CLACs insert the missiles through the muzzle of the launch tube, and use pressurised LAC bay so maintenance can be done in shirtsleeves - donkey-carried LACs would have to be serviced by EVA, and the missiles reloaded the same way.

Also granted. The notion would be for transport in a _nearly_ combat capable condition - after shuttling over the crew - with a harder time servicing them accepted, just to have it available for use in-system more readily than it would be hauled as cargo (by a freighter) or at all in case of warships unable to carry so many locked up against the hull.

3) Getting the crews to their LACs will be difficult - they'll have to be ferried out there in pinnaces or cutters.

Yes. But I'd still figure that that's going to be faster than readying a LAC that's been disassembled into conveniently stored pieces in a freighter, for instance. It's just for situations in which convenient service is something you can do without, absolutely immediate service is not necessary, and having it up and flying in a short time is valuable.

Alternatively, think of it as a way for a non-CLAC to do the hyperspace transport part of CLAC duty and nothing else, or as a way to freight them around as less-unready cargo.

4) I don't think the donkey was intended for long-duration use. I'm not sure if there's textev either way, but I didn't get the sense that Second Fleet were towing their donkeys all the way from their assembly point to Manticore-A's hyper limit - I suspect that the donkeys and their pods were carried in ammunition ships most of the way, to preserve the SD(P)s magazine space for a full pod load after the donkey salvo was launched, and deployed to the warships only for the last leg of the journey. This could have been done in an nearby empty system or in deep space out of range of Manticore's long-range sensor arrays. It could even have been done in hyperspace - we know small craft can operate in hyper as long as they're not in a grav wave, which suggests that EVAs and pod transfers by tractor beam should be possible too.

That would be an issue, yes. On the other hand...

Just what does it take to bring something near a ship into or out of hyper with it? It's not a rhetorical question - it's important and I just don't know the answer. If you wouldn't bring over something outside the wedge, say, then you'd have a really awkward time of it trying to tow more than you can fit inside - you'd have to translate at zero velocity with each inside-the-wedge group of things to tow, leave them, translate back, and repeat til your whole bevy is in hyper, move, then do the same thing for each band.

And as another poster notes, if the LAC's are crewed and ready and have the endurance for it, they wouldn't need towing in hyper, just the help entering and exiting it. At that point, the donkey does become purely unnecessary for the role.

I could envisage some version of this as a quick add on fixit scheme that some unusually inventive Sollie admiral or transteller might come up with in order to close at least one of the many tech gaps they will be scrambling to overcome in the near future. A sort of very crude LAC carrier concept, not space based "aircraft carriers" but space based "barges".

Trouble with that thought is the SLN have a long way to go before they come up with the advanced LAC concept anyway so it would not do them any good in the sort term. Its unclear if the SLN even builds LACs at all given the prestige issues for big ships and mobile intervention requirements. Also they have not really encountered the LAC carrier as much as they have the MDM missiles, so it is the ordnance sector were they are going to be focusing such R&D as they can for the near future.

They might apply it to that missile pods since that at least is more feasible for them, since they cant match the MDMs they might experiment with missile volume over range.

I put up a post about the future of the Donkey concept just a few weeks back and there are some interesting thoughts here if you want to pursue other options further.

Valen123456 wrote:I could envisage some version of this as a quick add on fixit scheme that some unusually inventive Sollie admiral or transteller might come up with in order to close at least one of the many tech gaps they will be scrambling to overcome in the near future. A sort of very crude LAC carrier concept, not space based "aircraft carriers" but space based "barges".

Trouble with that thought is the SLN have a long way to go before they come up with the advanced LAC concept anyway so it would not do them any good in the sort term. Its unclear if the SLN even builds LACs at all given the prestige issues for big ships and mobile intervention requirements. Also they have not really encountered the LAC carrier as much as they have the MDM missiles, so it is the ordnance sector were they are going to be focusing such R&D as they can for the near future.

They might apply it to that missile pods since that at least is more feasible for them, since they cant match the MDMs they might experiment with missile volume over range.

I put up a post about the future of the Donkey concept just a few weeks back and there are some interesting thoughts here if you want to pursue other options further.

Thanks, I'll go looking.

I imagine the huge number of Frontier Fleet destroyers will keep the SLN from feeling a "LAC gap", and as you say, they'll need to do a lot of technical and doctrinal catch-up before they'd have a use for LAC's and really good transport and service for them.

If they were to try to put together another "Operation Raging Justice", they'd at least have the savvy now to bring a lot more screening elements. They _may_ have the savvy to realize that a low-profile, CM-heavy LAC would do a lot better as a forward missile defense than a swarm of DD's, but the swarm of DD's is what they have and I doubt they're going to be building large numbers of a new class of unit in a radical departure from the designs already available to them in the near future.

It's remotely possible that they would whip up a crude CLAC workaround and combine it with, say, fairly modern system defense force LAC's they could somehow federalize or buy. But that would still involve a lot more creativity on several levels than I'd expect - just less of it than other LAC/CLAC options for them.

I had it more in mind here as a cheaper way to get the crucial minimum function of a CLAC in a more operable form than pure cargo carriage. But it looks like the key point there is less hauling them along than it is getting them in and out of hyper (or tucked right up against the ship, if that would do for grav waves and wormholes).

It pretty clear that the donkey is outside the hyper envelope, note how 5th needed to start rolling pods at BOM, instead of instantly firing. Second, they are outside the wedge, so outside the compensator. 500+ gravities are hard on the hull and even worse on the crew.

JeffEngel wrote:If they were to try to put together another "Operation Raging Justice", they'd at least have the savvy now to bring a lot more screening elements. They _may_ have the savvy to realize that a low-profile, CM-heavy LAC would do a lot better as a forward missile defense than a swarm of DD's, but the swarm of DD's is what they have and I doubt they're going to be building large numbers of a new class of unit in a radical departure from the designs already available to them in the near future.

Although now I have a vision of them trying this and discovering in horror that the GA members have robust and effective anti-LAC or counter-LAC designs and strategy. (Katana sweeps, or Cimeterre-Beta triple-ripple attacks)

Oops, there went your missile defense.
(And that's not a knock on your idea. I think it is a good idea from the point of view of a SLN Admiral attempting to address his missile defense deficit. It's simply that we all have more information that he does and know it's still likely to turn out poorly for him)