New Manty ship ideas.

I always thought the wedge on a ship SD was huge. I realize the hammer head itself is pretty small couple plus long city blocks wide but the Ghost ride drone is supposed to be quite small, with a wedge that would also be fairly, in comparison, small. Presumedly the wedge of an SD is 10,000 to 100,000's of metres in length and oval and fairly wide. As such the throat of a wedge would be pretty big. Measured in the 10's of 1,000's of metres wide?

A ghost rider wedge would be 2-3,000 metres wide?

Lord Skimper wrote:Pg 288 A Rising Thunder

Line 26 hardcover.

"It just got worse and worse, he thought. She must have had her platforms practically inside his wall to get that kind of information, and his sensors had never ever seen the damned things!"

Sigh.

Unless I've suddenly forgotten the English language, I do not see 10,000 kilometers in there. But hey, what's this in Chapter 23?

Marceau was staring at his own console and looked, if possible, even more surprised than she felt. He looked down for another moment, then raised his eyes to hers.
"Another transmitter just came online, Ma'am," he said. "It must be some kind of relay. It's less than ten thousand klicks out from Warshawski!"

And also let me point out the key operative word in your quote: She must have had her platforms practically inside his wall to get that kind of information.

"Practically". As in, "close, but not quite". As in, "hi, this is a tiny bit of hyperbole to impress upon you how close these things are."

If those platforms, which our best of the Sollies couldn't see, can get that close, with laser heads. Those platforms could punch out and ship before theother ship knew what happened. Let alone putting up active jamming to totally befuddle any sollie.

AAC:

"We should have realized that sooner or later they were going to strap weapons onto their recon drones. They've demonstrated they can operate them deep inside our defended areas with virtual impunity, and they probably took a certain pleasure from applying a variant of the same technique Saint-Just used to destroy Elizabeth's yacht in Yeltsin. The bad news is how close they can get them; the good news—such as it is—is that, even so, they can't get them all the way into attack range in stealth. They still have to get into range to execute their attacks, and not even Manty stealth systems can hide them during the last hundred thousand kilometers or so of their runs. They don't have the sort of acceleration rates missiles do, either, and to be used properly, they have to attack virtually from rest, or else they can't loiter until the proper moment. So they have relatively low closing velocities when they come in, and they can be engaged by counter-missiles and standard point defense, now that we know they're out there. Our intercept probabilities won't be good, especially given how little warning we'll have between the moment their drives peak and the moment they reach attack range, but we can probably cope with the threat."

Dazzle and dragon teeth while the laser heads take out the ships or at least the pods. Although one wonders about a point defense laser cluster for taking out missile pods. And any missiles someone might fire.

Filareta's missile pods. Albeit Technodyne missile pods. Could be eliminated all at once. Katana Point defense clusters are powerful enough to knock out other LACs they should have no problem taking out pods or other sensor drone platforms as well as any fired missiles. Which will still be moving pretty slow, compared to their final run speed.

Perhaps a ghost rider platform is not big enough for a point defence cluster though?

As I said upthread, PDLCs are far larger than any missile.

Given the size of a ghost rider missile though, about half the size of a Shrike or Katana, one would speculate that it could carry either a point defense cluster or an energy torpedo or graser.
http://honorverse.wikia.com/wiki/Missile

I knew I saw ghost rider missiles somewhere.

...Wut?

Seriously? A LAC is nowhere near half the size of a MDM. Even simply looking at the tonnages could have told you that.

EDIT: That size comparison chart is pre-Resizing. They are a lot smaller now.

Duckk wrote:EDIT: That size comparison chart is pre-Resizing. They are a lot smaller now.

Whoops, I missed that. But you're right, I went back and double-checked.

That's diagram is the missile zoom in from the hull comparison chart from the very beginning of Ashes of Victory; and the ship side still has the old scale with an SD being 3,200 m long -- not the 1,502 m corrected length.


(For what it's worth I stuck a couple warning notes in the wiki so hopefully those will stay and I'll see them the next time I forget that chart's wrong)

1) MDMs cannot be made to enter a wedge. Wedges are 200-300 km wide at most and half as deep from the throat to the ship itself. An MDM is moving at over 100.000 Km/second by the time it reaches the enemy so it has, at best 1/400 of a second to change course before it crashes on the opposite wall. At 100.000 gravities, at 1/400 of a second, it can change its course a bit over a kilometer, nowhere near enough to ram the ship.


2) A 90-kiloton ship had 14 energy torpedoes. It follows to reason that a single ET mount could be downsized to fit a vessel around 6 kilotons, assuming you manage to power it. It cannot be fit into a missile weighing 200 tons.

Belial666 wrote:2) A 90-kiloton ship had 14 energy torpedoes. It follows to reason that a single ET mount could be downsized to fit a vessel around 6 kilotons, assuming you manage to power it. It cannot be fit into a missile weighing 200 tons.

Even that 6000 tons is probably a somewhat optimistic; the ship engineering systems don't seem to scale all that linearly at the small end.
But you're certainly right that it can't fit in a 200 ton missile.

Another factor that has not been mentioned. Filareta's arrival was know weeks in advance. If it was me, using the long-term endurance of Ghost Rider drones, I would have had them sitting along his projected route into the system, much like a minefield. Programmed to shut down as the fleet passed, with no active emissions and no wedge, they would be nearly undetectable. Any radar return that they did have would appear much smaller than they actually are. Small enough to be thought to be another piece of junk. Even if one was hit by a wedge, it would be barely noticeable. In that case, it is highly likely that Manticore could get one within 10,000KM of his ships.

KNick wrote:Another factor that has not been mentioned. Filareta's arrival was know weeks in advance. If it was me, using the long-term endurance of Ghost Rider drones, I would have had them sitting along his projected route into the system, much like a minefield. Programmed to shut down as the fleet passed, with no active emissions and no wedge, they would be nearly undetectable. Any radar return that they did have would appear much smaller than they actually are. Small enough to be thought to be another piece of junk. Even if one was hit by a wedge, it would be barely noticeable. In that case, it is highly likely that Manticore could get one within 10,000KM of his ships.

Assuming, of course, one had near-infinite amounts of such drones available. The problem is that even if you have a rough idea about where on the hyper limit your opponent is going to make translation, you're still talking about a really, really big area in which he can appear (And that is of course assuming that your opponent will play along with your projections and expectations, which is doubtful as well).

The E wrote:

KNick wrote:Another factor that has not been mentioned. Filareta's arrival was know weeks in advance. If it was me, using the long-term endurance of Ghost Rider drones, I would have had them sitting along his projected route into the system, much like a minefield. Programmed to shut down as the fleet passed, with no active emissions and no wedge, they would be nearly undetectable. Any radar return that they did have would appear much smaller than they actually are. Small enough to be thought to be another piece of junk. Even if one was hit by a wedge, it would be barely noticeable. In that case, it is highly likely that Manticore could get one within 10,000KM of his ships.

Assuming, of course, one had near-infinite amounts of such drones available. The problem is that even if you have a rough idea about where on the hyper limit your opponent is going to make translation, you're still talking about a really, really big area in which he can appear (And that is of course assuming that your opponent will play along with your projections and expectations, which is doubtful as well).

It depends on the tactical situation. There are only a few near-optimal solutions for a fleet action; deviating from them reduces the effectiveness for no gain because it gives the defenders more time to react.

Now, if you're talking about single merchant ships trying to evade commerce raiders lurking about the hyper limit, you've got a completely different situation. You roll the dice to pick a random approach vector, because the commerce raiders have to stick close to the known least-cost access routes.

The E wrote:

KNick wrote:Another factor that has not been mentioned. Filareta's arrival was know weeks in advance. If it was me, using the long-term endurance of Ghost Rider drones, I would have had them sitting along his projected route into the system, much like a minefield. Programmed to shut down as the fleet passed, with no active emissions and no wedge, they would be nearly undetectable. Any radar return that they did have would appear much smaller than they actually are. Small enough to be thought to be another piece of junk. Even if one was hit by a wedge, it would be barely noticeable. In that case, it is highly likely that Manticore could get one within 10,000KM of his ships.

Assuming, of course, one had near-infinite amounts of such drones available. The problem is that even if you have a rough idea about where on the hyper limit your opponent is going to make translation, you're still talking about a really, really big area in which he can appear (And that is of course assuming that your opponent will play along with your projections and expectations, which is doubtful as well).

If a heavy cruiser such as Gauntlet can carry enough Ghost Rider drones to cover the ecliptic of a single system, how many drones are carried by 200 SDs? There should be more than enough to cover all the likely approach routes. Also, we are talking about the home system, which surely has plenty of drones of it's own deployed.

KNick wrote:Another factor that has not been mentioned. Filareta's arrival was know weeks in advance. If it was me, using the long-term endurance of Ghost Rider drones, I would have had them sitting along his projected route into the system, much like a minefield. Programmed to shut down as the fleet passed, with no active emissions and no wedge, they would be nearly undetectable. Any radar return that they did have would appear much smaller than they actually are. Small enough to be thought to be another piece of junk. Even if one was hit by a wedge, it would be barely noticeable. In that case, it is highly likely that Manticore could get one within 10,000KM of his ships.

Filareta was never really a threat. He might have been if there had been actual suprise on his side, but he never had that luxury. While it's never a good idea to underestimate the enemy, it's also not a good idea to be wasteful in your munitions deployment when your munitions are limited.