New Anti-Missile tactic

You would need to place the relatively small missile wedge effectively stationary realative to both your ship and the missile you are defending against. That might be somewhat of a challange given that the missile is maneuvering and ususally so is your own ship. I don't recall counter missiles having a lot of variable speed control.

The whole idea of using a counter missile against an incoming missile it to use it's wedge to destroy the weapon before it detonates.

Brigade XO wrote:You would need to place the relatively small missile wedge effectively stationary realative to both your ship and the missile you are defending against. That might be somewhat of a challange given that the missile is maneuvering and ususally so is your own ship. I don't recall counter missiles having a lot of variable speed control.

The whole idea of using a counter missile against an incoming missile it to use it's wedge to destroy the weapon before it detonates.

And that's assuming there's only one missile coming at you.

crewdude48 wrote:We routinely refer to this as "turtling up." As kzt said, missile would be a very bad choice for your shields. I could see, long term, a development of some sort of defensive drone, in addition to a keyhole type platform, that would provide this type of cover.

The biggest problem would be that a counter is rather easy. Instead of huge waves of missiles, you use large waves of missiles with a steady stream in between the waves. This way, when the enemy turtles up for the wave, they loose track of the stream. When the turtle comes down, they have very short to no tracking time on several missiles, regardless of when it comes down. This is a very expensive option, but I think it would be very effective.

Yep, it's the sort of technique that works best against a single alpha strike (like back in the towed pod era). Losing tracking and defensive fire against the much lighter follow up missile wave might well be worth everyone surviving the initial heaviest pod launch.


Plus since you're blocking your outgoing CM and PDLC fire, so there's nothing to stop the incoming missiles from reaching firing positions ahead and astern of you. And you can't easily turtle behind wedges ahead and astern unless you're willing to cut your accel to 0. (Because they'd have to be oriented roughly perpendicular to your ship, and so unable to accelerate with it)

Randomiser wrote:I thought that when you lit up a missile's wedge it went 'elsewhere' in a great hurry at one of two predetermined accelerations. Any textev for the ability to adjust a missile wedge's acceleration while it's in action?

I think it was in the appendix to SVW, but somewhere it's stated that Manticore doesn't use hardwired "high" and "low" acceleration settings for their missiles; they allow the tac department to select arbitrary accelerations. (Now whether those go as low as only several hundred gravities wasn't addressed. And once a given missile drive has come up at one accel it's locked in there for it's operating life)

Dafmeister wrote:*edit* amended the calculation


A superdreadnought's wedge is 300km across. It's throat is about 190 km deep, the kilt is about40km deep.

http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Harrington/100/1

By my admittedly back-of-a-fag-packet calculation, you'd need over 350 missile wedges to cover one side of the SD's wedge, which would have to be replaced every nine minutes even if you used MDMs, and which have to be kept close enough together to prevent laser heads finding a gap in the wall but far enough apart to avoid their own wedges intersecting and blowing a 200 square kilometer hole in the wall, beside a ship accelerating at about 5 kps squared and maneuvering around its base course.

Good luck with that.

you don't need 350 missiles to block a huge swath of the vulnerable sides... since the minimum height of the wedge (for an SD) si 40 km long, you can have the defensive missile wedge activate just outside the sidewall area but inside the SD's wedge. you don't need to cover every meter of 'open' side area with a missile wedge. you only put your perpendicular 10km missile wedge as near to the ship as possible to minimize the angles where hits would be possible.

just imagine how small the ship is compared to its wedge... 1km long ship in the middle of a 300km wedge. putting a 10km 'shield' 20km away from the side of the ship blocks a whole lot of angles from where shots can hit the ship.

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as for these wedge generators 'keeping' up with the SDs speed missiles can boost up to 90Kps, what's a measly 5Kps acceleration that it has to keep up with? I'm also quite sure that the wedges can stay up even if the missile isn't accelerating otherwise, the 'new' LACs would have been very easy kills once they stopped accelerating, turned on their bow walls and turned to fire their grasers.

I think there are a number of problems with the basic concept. But if you were going to do it, much better to use drones than missiles. You don't have to keep replenishing the drones, you can reuse them in the next battle, and you don't have problem with slowing them down enough to keep pace. There's no reason to use missiles instead of drones. The concept of using drones for this purpose has come up several times.

Rakhmamort wrote:as for these wedge generators 'keeping' up with the SDs speed missiles can boost up to 90Kps, what's a measly 5Kps acceleration that it has to keep up with? I'm also quite sure that the wedges can stay up even if the missile isn't accelerating otherwise, the 'new' LACs would have been very easy kills once they stopped accelerating, turned on their bow walls and turned to fire their grasers.

We don't know enough about how missile drives work but, despite Manticore's avoidance of hardwired accel settings, I wouldn't be at all surprised if RFC told us that for whatever reason they can't be dialed down to only 0.53% of full accel.
(Potentially some minimum possible accel inherent in their design, or insufficiently fine control to set accelerations that accurately, or something)


But like SVM said, might as well use drones. We already know they can keep station on ships, their wedges are just as impenetrable to lasers, and their drives last indefinitely so you're not constantly cycling in new wedge 'plates'. The downside is you can't launch them from missile tubes (and they cost more*), but if you want to go for a turtle defense I think their advantages outweigh their downsides.

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* though if you build dedicated drones for this without all the stealth and sensors of a ghost rider recon drone that cost should come down a fair bit

Jonathan_S wrote:

Rakhmamort wrote:as for these wedge generators 'keeping' up with the SDs speed missiles can boost up to 90Kps, what's a measly 5Kps acceleration that it has to keep up with? I'm also quite sure that the wedges can stay up even if the missile isn't accelerating otherwise, the 'new' LACs would have been very easy kills once they stopped accelerating, turned on their bow walls and turned to fire their grasers.

We don't know enough about how missile drives work but, despite Manticore's avoidance of hardwired accel settings, I wouldn't be at all surprised if RFC told us that for whatever reason they can't be dialed down to only 0.53% of full accel.
(Potentially some minimum possible accel inherent in their design, or insufficiently fine control to set accelerations that accurately, or something)


But like SVM said, might as well use drones. We already know they can keep station on ships, their wedges are just as impenetrable to lasers, and their drives last indefinitely so you're not constantly cycling in new wedge 'plates'. The downside is you can't launch them from missile tubes (and they cost more*), but if you want to go for a turtle defense I think their advantages outweigh their downsides.

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* though if you build dedicated drones for this without all the stealth and sensors of a ghost rider recon drone that cost should come down a fair bit

The problem with this wedge plate being up all the time is that the ship that has it, can't use it's broadside weaponry. It might be fine with Rolands and pod-based ships during long range duels since their main armaments are at the hammerhead/s.

Of course they can use their broadside missile mounts. A drone has 5000-10,000 gs of acceleration. Ship has at most 800.

Simple math time. I will let you do it to figure out how long said wedge boy takes to "get out of the way". That assumes of course you cannot simply rotate 90 on said RD and let the missiles initiate their wedges at 25km from the ship instead of 15km. Launch>Sidewall>between RD wedge>wedge initiation

Relax wrote:Of course they can use their broadside missile mounts. A drone has 5000-10,000 gs of acceleration. Ship has at most 800.

Simple math time. I will let you do it to figure out how long said wedge boy takes to "get out of the way". That assumes of course you cannot simply rotate 90 on said RD and let the missiles initiate their wedges at 25km from the ship instead of 15km. Launch>Sidewall>between RD wedge>wedge initiation

Well, if you think it's not too complicated to make a couple of drones accelerate/decelerate to open/close the broadside area of a ship (in 20 second cycles or whatever is the missile tube's rate of fire) while maintaining station with the ship, then by all means, make it a drone. All I am proposing is adding an independent wedge to make the 'vulnerable' side areas less vulnerable.

Rakhmamort wrote:
The problem with this wedge plate being up all the time is that the ship that has it, can't use it's broadside weaponry. It might be fine with Rolands and pod-based ships during long range duels since their main armaments are at the hammerhead/s.

Except that the 'wedge plate' also blocks the ship's sensors and its communications with its recon drones, neither of which can penetrate a wedge.