Barricade... Shadows of Victory tech... skip if unread.

So if you haven't read SoV yet, this would be a spoiler but...

I liked how Scotty and Harkness took out the SLN missile barrage in SoV, using shipkillers to totally disrupt the salvos. I'm reading this as "because the shipkillers had bigger wedges, they could essentially plow through a tight missile formation", and the SLN being so far behind the times that they could get away with it.

My thought is along the lines of "how would this work against a first line navy?" and... let's say you time it right, could the RMN use attack missiles in boomer mode to take out salvos during a ballistic phase against ANY DDM or MDM missile barrage?

Thoughts?

It's all plot. Think about the geometry.

I discussed it in detail some months ago.

I liked how Scotty and Harkness took out the SLN missile barrage in SoV, using shipkillers to totally disrupt the salvos. I'm reading this as "because the shipkillers had bigger wedges, they could essentially plow through a tight missile formation", and the SLN being so far behind the times that they could get away with it.

Actually, shipkiller wedges are designed to have as small a wedge as possible. A big wedge is easier to intercept with countermissiles, after all.

My thought is along the lines of "how would this work against a first line navy?" and... let's say you time it right, could the RMN use attack missiles in boomer mode to take out salvos during a ballistic phase against ANY DDM or MDM missile barrage?

The mode of attack - boom mode or otherwise - is pretty much irrelevant. Barricade worked because a ballistic missile has no protection against any wedge. With the fine grained control afforded by Apollo, Barricade in effect replicated the wall formation except using missiles instead of ships.

As for the utility against other first rate powers, very minimal. If said power doesn't have Apollo (like Haven during the Second War), they're not firing missiles with ballistic phases in the first place. Fire control lag is simply too great. And as we see in the First Battle of Manticore, a simple hard course change is enough to futz with targeting profiles. If they do have Apollo or similar FTL fire control, then they're not going to be playing games like Barricade.

Duckk wrote:As for the utility against other first rate powers, very minimal. If said power doesn't have Apollo (like Haven during the Second War), they're not firing missiles with ballistic phases in the first place. Fire control lag is simply too great. And as we see in the First Battle of Manticore, a simple hard course change is enough to futz with targeting profiles. If they do have Apollo or similar FTL fire control, then they're not going to be playing games like Barricade.

Yep, if we go back to the books MDMs were usually launched noticeably closer than their 65,000,000 km continuous powered range (from rest). Hit percentages were just too poor at that maximum powered range, much less the kind of range you could get by adding ballistic segments to it.

And without long ballistic segments for flight you can't get free kills ala Barricade - you'd get wedge to wedge mutual destruction instead. And, by and large, navies preferred to expend their MDMs killing enemy ships rather than trying to play kamikaze against enemy missiles.


About the only time I think a chance could come up is if the Havenites were up against a mixed force of SD(P)s and Agamemnons. If the Aggies try to supplement the podnaughts fire with their Mk16s there would be a lengthy coast phase and the BC(P) fire is potentially vulnerable to a Barricade style defense using your own MDMs. (Mind you localizing the missiles well enough, giving only lightspeed sensors and recon drone feeds, would be tricky, but at least there would be a lengthy coast phase to attempt to exploit.

Of course it's against RMN doctrine to use BC(P)s against SD(P)s -- so even there's no guarantee the Mk16s will be flying at you.


Actually, there's one scenario I can think of. A BC(P) raid against infrastructure where the system has a reasonable pod based orbital defense. Depending on the target the BC(P)s might lob in Mk16's from beyond 30,000,000 accepting the reduced accuracy against infrastructure that can't dodge in order to stay as far as practical from any MDM pods defending it.

But DDMs are about the only time I'd expect ballistic segments (until you get to Apollo's vastly increased effective fire control range)

Jonathan_S wrote:Actually, there's one scenario I can think of. A BC(P) raid against infrastructure where the system has a reasonable pod based orbital defense. Depending on the target the BC(P)s might lob in Mk16's from beyond 30,000,000 accepting the reduced accuracy against infrastructure that can't dodge in order to stay as far as practical from any MDM pods defending it.

But DDMs are about the only time I'd expect ballistic segments (until you get to Apollo's vastly increased effective fire control range)

Yeah, because actually loading the Mk23s needed for the mission would be just WRONG.

There's also the fact that the Solarians bunched the missiles to handle the fire control. A first rate power wouldn't need to do that, one missile would at most take out one enemy missile per group.

Loren Pechtel wrote:There's also the fact that the Solarians bunched the missiles to handle the fire control. A first rate power wouldn't need to do that, one missile would at most take out one enemy missile per group.

You literally CANNOT bunch them so they can both see the target and not hit each others wedges as they maneuver.

It's been stated that no missiles before Apollo had missiles communicating to each other, so the way missiles avoid flying into each other by be seeing other missiles start to maneuver and then maneuvering themselves. Which means they have to be at least one full wedge diameter apart, and probably more like 5+ diameters.

To see the target the missile needs to not have another wedge in front of it, as they have a very hard time trying to reacquire a target if it maneuvers of out their very narrow field of view. They also cannot have another missile behind them blocking the command feed. So logically the missiles will arrange themselves into a checkerboard or honeycomb flat plane.

This allows all the missiles to see the target and all the missiles to missiles to talk to the command link and all can maneuver with minimal chance of impacting another wedge. And since they are millions of km away from the launching ship they are sub-arc seconds apart in terms on antenna pointing.

Which also means that an enemy missile passing through the formation on enemy-ship to friendly-ship axis will hit at most one missile. It's extremely hard and requires a ridiculous amount of velocity to match speed with the missile formation and proceed across it perpendicular to the enemy-ship to friendly-ship axis. That will hit multiple missiles, but it requires you accelerate to get out in front of the incoming missiles, then slows to zero and accelerate towards your own ships to match the speed of the missiles and then generate a vector that will cross the missile formation.

As I said, the geometry says this is all plot

kzt wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:There's also the fact that the Solarians bunched the missiles to handle the fire control. A first rate power wouldn't need to do that, one missile would at most take out one enemy missile per group.

You literally CANNOT bunch them so they can both see the target and not hit each others wedges as they maneuver.

It's been stated that no missiles before Apollo had missiles communicating to each other, so the way missiles avoid flying into each other by be seeing other missiles start to maneuver and then maneuvering themselves. Which means they have to be at least one full wedge diameter apart, and probably more like 5+ diameters.

To see the target the missile needs to not have another wedge in front of it, as they have a very hard time trying to reacquire a target if it maneuvers of out their very narrow field of view. They also cannot have another missile behind them blocking the command feed. So logically the missiles will arrange themselves into a checkerboard or honeycomb flat plane.

This allows all the missiles to see the target and all the missiles to missiles to talk to the command link and all can maneuver with minimal chance of impacting another wedge. And since they are millions of km away from the launching ship they are sub-arc seconds apart in terms on antenna pointing.

Which also means that an enemy missile passing through the formation on enemy-ship to friendly-ship axis will hit at most one missile. It's extremely hard and requires a ridiculous amount of velocity to match speed with the missile formation and proceed across it perpendicular to the enemy-ship to friendly-ship axis. That will hit multiple missiles, but it requires you accelerate to get out in front of the incoming missiles, then slows to zero and accelerate towards your own ships to match the speed of the missiles and then generate a vector that will cross the missile formation.

As I said, the geometry says this is all plot

Not to mention 2 LACs towing 600 pods held in 2 carriers/ reloaders can stealthily outpace a second RMN force traveling at ~600gs without being seen and drop the afore mentioned pods BETWEEN the main RMN force and a SLN force it is chasing.

The whole side story was running on 87 octane, unleaded plot.

Theemile wrote:Not to mention 2 LACs towing 600 pods held in 2 carriers/ reloaders can stealthily outpace a second RMN force traveling at ~600gs without being seen and drop the afore mentioned pods BETWEEN the main RMN force and a SLN force it is chasing.

The whole side story was running on 87 octane, unleaded plot.

There was an opportunity for an interesting battle and instead we got war porn. "James, give the natives another taste of the Maxim."

SharkHunter wrote:My thought is along the lines of "how would this work against a first line navy?" and... let's say you time it right, could the RMN use attack missiles in boomer mode to take out salvos during a ballistic phase against ANY DDM or MDM missile barrage?

Thoughts?

If your fire control can cope with your missiles wiggling around mid-flight and they can do that without taking out each other, there is no particular reason to limit the use of this concept to missiles in ballistic flight. Hit probability might be lower because the opponent's missiles can maneuver, OTOH the target is bigger (wedge/wedge contact rather than wedge/missile). It would be a one-for-one exchange with attack missiles playing counter missiles and possibly degrading accuracy at the end, but you can start whittling away the missiles coming at you pretty much right after launch. Whether this is worthwhile is a different question.