New passive defense system

Howdy all,

Its been quite a while since I suggested a new weapon (as in "and now for something completely different"), if I have; I don't recall what it was, but it was probably stupid or ignorant in some way, but here goes...

This is something I've been considering since ToF, using in tandem with heavily modified BCP's for hostile wormhole assaults, since the pearls make it plain DW considers BCP's a tactical dead end, and SDP's are too valuable to risk, etc.

It started with using a tractored pod to generate sidewalls, which could be carried in hyper or as needed, then detached and recovered when no longer required.

But given that missiles generate impeller bands that are impenetrable, and these are around a kilometer on a side (or is it ten km on a side?), that 'tame' missile drives could be used to provide the extra layers of close to distant 'sidewalls' for a ship.

These are not Ghost Rider drones, they have a simple military role to block laserheads.

Their acceleration need generally only match the warship they are in formation with, either above or below the wedges until incoming missiles are close, so drone drives might all that's needed, though I'm mainly considering 'just' modified missile drives.

Given the brevity of pod engagements, only a few minutes of power might be all that's needed to be effective (a second launch might be needed for extended engagements), while an RD drive could be recoverable, to be refueled and refurbished, expendibility is a major consideration.

Given the smarts drones and Apollo Command Missiles have demonstrated, the on board AI's ought to be able to handle the mission parameters.

They should be rather smaller than RD's or missiles since they don't need the recon sensor suites or warheads, so more can be carried in each dedicated pod.

Depending on cost, they could use either capacitor or fusion power, as they're not expected to last long.

They could operate from just beyond the ship's wedge, coordinating with the ships defensive fire, before turning perpendicular to the wedge (parallel to the sidewalls) to interdict any laserhead, and possibly out to the "CM-PDC gap"; ~100,000-200,000 km out.

Depending on the numbers launched these might form 'walls' or barriers to incoming missiles that didn't see them because of their stealth, or their proximity to the far more powerful ship's wedge.

The outer group might be launched with attack missiles, so their wedges are lost in the attack wave's clutter, so when they slow to 'stealth cruise' speed, no one notices, even if they have good RD's nearby, etc.

If RD drives are used, their extra time (~45seconds) to get on station could be a limitation, but pre-planning is the answer.

They might eventually carry ECM to suck missiles in before making their abrupt turns or rolls to use their wedges; but their primary purpose is to prevent laserheads from getting any hits through to the ship.

Granted any collision between missile wedges will vaporize both missiles, but it is the neutralization of laserheads that is the object of this system.

The potential to ruin missile attacks would push better AI's and sensors for standard attack missiles, until such were available, attacks themselves might be deterred.

The 'block' pods or individual units could be tractored to the ship's hull or stern hammerhead, and launched or released immediately upon emergence from a wormhole (while taking severe evasive action), in conjunction with other missile pod and RD launches...

Of course that means a return to energy weapons... :-)

Can anyone recommend a good name ?

Best wishes,

L

We've seen a little bit of this, but using ships to cover throats/kilts. Honor saving the Queen's Yacht, a few battle scenes with screen doing this, and a scene in the new E-Arc short story that is kind of along these lines, except with ships. It's limited though, and is hard on the ships doing the screening.

I think there are a variety of issues using missile-sized wedges for this (like how the wedges work - on until they burn out), which is probably why countermissiles are used in this role, instead of some kind of wedge-screen.

I like the idea.

Just to make it seem to technologically reasonable and to get an impeller wedge that would be large enough to block a large field, I'd suggest that your "Shield Drone" should be about the volume and mass of a missile pod or about 2,000 to 2,500 tons.

Team this up with a PDLC Drone of comparable mass and you've got a way to signficantly upgrade the defensive capability of various ships, including the much maligned BC(P).

(Namelessfly's shelter for Homeless BC(P)s is still open. Manticore and Grayson are still welcome to send over their cast offs so that they can be preserved, modified using tech similar to the above, then used to kick the shit out of someone who desperately deserves it)

If this type of system is going to be used an extended engagement the protected ship is going to lose a lot of stuff.

How do they maintain situational awareness? Or for that matter Controlling your own missiles is going to be a huge problem. The interposed wedges are going to play havoc with the line of site for sensors and FC links.

I don't know that this has ever been mentioned before. Or if it was and I missed it and I am just regurgitating something I heard before.

For what it is worth,
T2M

I proposed this idea a couple years ago on the bar. The passive neanderthals over there basically poo poo'd it since DW didn't specifically write it into a book like the naysayers always generally do.

I pointed out that instead of using pathetically low kill ratios for CM's at extended range it would make far more sense to shoot(use said tonnage) said CM with its 1km wide wedge and have it stand in the gap perpendicular to your ships wedge. Have it spin on its axis or whichever orientation required to keep it on station. This would be right at the EDGE of your own wedge. Not 100,000km away. The coverage at such extended range is 0, nada, zilch, zippo. Even at only 150km from your ship, its still a VERY small number and HUGE number would be needed, BUT: if you used them in conjunction with your Task Force Formation then they could be very useful especially as RMN ships have Keyhole and can fight on their sides.

I figured such a low acceleration CM would be either 1) less tonnage as it doesn't need the acceleration or 2) longer endurance for same tonnage. Notice they are not reusable, just like CM's. I think trying for a reusable package is a Huge amount of tonnage that is generally not all that effective, when your ship can only haul around so much junk. 200 tons times a thousand of these buggers would put a SERIOUS dent in your offensive capability.

What this does is force said incoming missiles to take oblique shots instead of perpendicular shots at your sidewall. Protecting, 'covering' said perpendicular aspect of said broadside is key. Thus, said sidewall is far more effective at negating the energy hitting your ship or deflecting said laser completely. Leave the angles from say 30 degrees and more open with said gunports for CM fire to go through.

OBviously if you wanted to use your Grasers the shields would be in the way. Also, one could use said shields in wall of battle formation as well if it does come down to a graser duel. You would not have to "roll" your ship as this takes a bit of time with SD's, rather just move the overlapping shields out of the way. This means you would get your shots in Far before they would and be able to anticipate their moves. This method is pretty much only applicable when you have a LOT of SD's present with which to make said shield wall as you would have to carry a GINORMOUS amount of them to cover.

This also forces the enemy to concentrate more of their missile laser heads in the "chink" areas not covered by said wedges. This means that said terminal performance of said MDM's is far more predictable as it blanks out whole sectoins of space that said computer can ignore and instead concentrate on the chinks where they and you know a kill shot MUST come from and thus your own CM fire and PDLC fire is able to achieve a far higher efficiency of kills per round expended or PDLC discharged.

You would keep said "shield" as close to your own wedge as possible. If your ships wedge runs over said 'shield' who cares, they are expendable just like a CM.

This tactic is also very easy to accomplish due to Keyhole and RD's. Since you don't have to worry about "permanent" gunsmoke of said shield with Keyhole present said Shields can be 'permanent' during battle. Effectively this is what Keyhole already does as it has its own impeller and is DD sized or larger for KH2 module, but they are NOT expendable like the far smaller far cheaper mini CM's where their wedge is created to be as large as possible.

No, its not perfect. An SD's wedge broadside is huge. Though the numbers quoted in the wedge geometery need to be shrunk due to the great resizing or has DW put the cabosh on resizing the wedges as well? I forget.

When you are expending 7000 CM's to kill a measly 1100 MDM's at Solon where said CM individually weigh in at 12 Tons or more like 20 tons for the newer M-31 and M-33 Etended range missiles we are talking a lot of wastage of tonnage here and anything that would increase said kill ratio from its pathetic 7:1 or we can say that reality is closer to 4:1 unless the plot needs otherwise like say at Monica where they managed near 2:1 CM to Missile kill ratio if one compares the number of missiles killed to the very crude guestimated CM's launched... then this would be a good thing.

Small enough and light enough to be used on all ships. Forget about reusability at the moment.

B

I proposed this idea a couple years ago on the bar. The passive neanderthals over there basically poo poo'd it since DW didn't specifically write it into a book like the naysayers always generally do.

Opinions are like the buttocks: everybody has one and nobody thinks theirs stinks.

Potato wrote:

I proposed this idea a couple years ago on the bar. The passive neanderthals over there basically poo poo'd it since DW didn't specifically write it into a book like the naysayers always generally do.

Opinions are like the buttocks: everybody has one and nobody thinks theirs stinks.

Well, no, they poo poo generally without giving any reasoning behind it except, "there is no textev" as if they are brainless. Oh wait... nvm won't go there.

Ok, some basic thoughts on this.

1. You'd need a ship drive, not a missile drive. A missile drive is "turn on and it stays on". Such a thing won't synch with the movement of the ship to be defended.

2. Presumably the point of doing this with an unmanned drone is because it'll ablate during a missile storm from over/under/side hits at a rate not desirable for a typical LAC or DD screening unit. Without a human at the controls, it's probably going to die faster than, say, using LACs in this role. It might also be easier to spoof in some way, causing it to get out of position, or worse, send the wedge into the mother ship.

3. There is the problem that any wedge that stops incoming missiles also blocks your own sensors, in particular offensive fire control and any countermissile/PDLC activity you might wish to do. This makes the tactic far more desirable for a side at a range disadvantage, when you can't do much in the way of offense anyway. Keyhole equipped ships, and to a lesser extent ghost-rider-drone equipped ships can mitigate this to some extent if they're designed to fire missiles and countermissiles "off-bore".

4. To avoid wedge fratricide, there has to be some gaps between the wedges that missiles could slip through.

It may be that the size of a drone that can generate a useful sized warship-style wedge and stay synchronized with the defended starship is large enough and/or expensive enough to be impractical. This seems likely to me but I am not willing to entirely rule out the idea, as we have seen screening ships behave this way on an ad-hoc basis.

1) not sure on the missile drive verses the ship drive type. I am sure there is an engineering bias one way or the other for missile burn out duration compared to acceleration. Don't need 100,000 g's just under 1000.

2) Why would they be dieing left and right? Missiles aren't running into them if you keep them by the ship anyways. Lasers that wouldn't harm the ship could kill them I suppose.
2a) Yea, I agree completely about the LAC's as part of said 'shield'. We went around this a while ago about task force formations.

3) Why would they run into each others wedges? A simple nodal command signal for a local 'GPS' fixes this along with a station keeping profile for different types of formations and formation movement orders. Its not as if they are trying to be 60m off the edge of the ships wedge. Nav systems can easily do that today, especially for the duration of a space battle even if they don't have position meters in 2000 years. Even today we have position meters except they are huge in comparison to accelerometers and their accuracy stinks in comparison even though one has to integrate acceleration twice to get position thus compounding errors.

4) Sure, chinks. Huge chinks. I see this more of addition to General Task Force Formation with LAC's "above and below" as DW states them. Add in these "passive" slow CM's or reusable drones.

The real question is the mass penalty worth a higher kill percentage for PDLC and inner CM fire as this would concentrate the number of missiles that can hit your ship into a smaller region of space.

Also, I don't see this as working in single ship duals at all as there is FARRRRRRRR too much area to cover in such battles. Only in task force formations can I see this being viable.

solbergb wrote:Ok, some basic thoughts on this.

1. You'd need a ship drive, not a missile drive. A missile drive is "turn on and it stays on". Such a thing won't synch with the movement of the ship to be defended.

2. Presumably the point of doing this with an unmanned drone is because it'll ablate during a missile storm from over/under/side hits at a rate not desirable for a typical LAC or DD screening unit. Without a human at the controls, it's probably going to die faster than, say, using LACs in this role. It might also be easier to spoof in some way, causing it to get out of position, or worse, send the wedge into the mother ship.

3. There is the problem that any wedge that stops incoming missiles also blocks your own sensors, in particular offensive fire control and any countermissile/PDLC activity you might wish to do. This makes the tactic far more desirable for a side at a range disadvantage, when you can't do much in the way of offense anyway. Keyhole equipped ships, and to a lesser extent ghost-rider-drone equipped ships can mitigate this to some extent if they're designed to fire missiles and countermissiles "off-bore".

4. To avoid wedge fratricide, there has to be some gaps between the wedges that missiles could slip through.

It may be that the size of a drone that can generate a useful sized warship-style wedge and stay synchronized with the defended starship is large enough and/or expensive enough to be impractical. This seems likely to me but I am not willing to entirely rule out the idea, as we have seen screening ships behave this way on an ad-hoc basis.