Accuracy of missiles against wedgeless targets?

kzt wrote:Space is BIG, and the inverse square law is not your friend. You have to get very, very close to damage a ship.

You also do not have a relatively dense atmosphere or far denser water that effectively and efficiently converts radiant energy from a nuclear explosion in to physical overpressure that is far more intense than can be generated by ablative impulse loading.

Rakhmamort wrote:Seems to me you guys are forgetting something. Just because a sensor ghost is detected, it doesn't mean you can already see what caused it. Manticore 'detected' some sensor ghosts, they didn't know those were made by spider ships. I'm quite sure they won't be as complacent as they were before, sensor ghost = send out your patrols to investigate. What platform would be best for that? LACs. LACs see the enemy but their bigger brothers are out of range, they try to take them out themselves.

In the specific case of Oyster Bay, the first and only sign the RMN got that something happened was the hyper signature of the spider ships emerging. Since this was several light weeks out, the only option to investigate was to send a Destroyer division, because non-hyper-capable units would not be able to get there in time to do anything useful.

In other words, LACs are only useful as patrol vessels within a severely constrained radius around their bases (a couple of light hours at most). For everything else, and especially for the kind of very covert insertion a spider ship is likely to perform, you will have to send out hyper-capable units.

HOW? I just made a suggestion how.

You sure did. But, as I said above, it's a suggestion that isn't actually workable based on what we know about spider drives and how they're detected. In any case, going for a range 0 intercept with those ships is not an optimal use of those LACs, because it exposes them to a far greater amount of risk than a more traditional assault with missiles and grasers.

Rakhmamort wrote:Seems to me you guys are forgetting something. Just because a sensor ghost is detected, it doesn't mean you can already see what caused it. Manticore 'detected' some sensor ghosts, they didn't know those were made by spider ships. I'm quite sure they won't be as complacent as they were before, sensor ghost = send out your patrols to investigate. What platform would be best for that? LACs. LACs see the enemy but their bigger brothers are out of range, they try to take them out themselves. HOW? I just made a suggestion how.

Yes, you gave a suggestion how. I suggest that firing shipkiller missiles would be more effective.

The E wrote:

Rakhmamort wrote:Seems to me you guys are forgetting something. Just because a sensor ghost is detected, it doesn't mean you can already see what caused it. Manticore 'detected' some sensor ghosts, they didn't know those were made by spider ships. I'm quite sure they won't be as complacent as they were before, sensor ghost = send out your patrols to investigate. What platform would be best for that? LACs. LACs see the enemy but their bigger brothers are out of range, they try to take them out themselves.

In the specific case of Oyster Bay, the first and only sign the RMN got that something happened was the hyper signature of the spider ships emerging. Since this was several light weeks out, the only option to investigate was to send a Destroyer division, because non-hyper-capable units would not be able to get there in time to do anything useful.

I'd started to post approximately the same thought. LACs on their own would take weeks to get out to a potential hyper ghosts.

Now you could use a CLAC to move them to the general area, but that's a pretty expensive capital asset to risk jumping in near an area that's suspected to have an enemy warship in it. Jump too close to where the enemy has moved and you might just lose the CLAC and every LAC aboard; since there's a fairly lengthy vulnerable window after a jump before the hyper generate recharged and you can jump out again.


And once out there a LAC isn't that much better a sensor platform than a ghost rider drone. (And it can't carry or control anywhere near as many drones as a DD or CL can.

Using a smaller warship (the aforementioned DDs or CLs) allows the searchers to rapidly self-deploy to the general area of the sensor ghost; and they can more easily carry enough drones to flood the area the enemy ship could have moved to before they responded.

...ummmm, did anyone remember to take the Spider Drive itself into account?
We have textev (somewhere) that the power of each "leg" makes it a weapon in its own right, and it's designed to activate and move repeatedly in microsecond bursts.
A whole lot of those legs "flailing" under careful computer control would do a very serious number on incoming missiles.

"Sir, the missiles got past their counter-missiles, but..."
"But what?"
"Sir, they just kicked them to pieces!"
"What?!"

The Spider Drive may be less of a shield than the Impeller Wedge, but an argument can be made that it is a pretty good forest of rapiers...

Jonathan_S wrote:Now you could use a CLAC to move them to the general area, but that's a pretty expensive capital asset to risk jumping in near an area that's suspected to have an enemy warship in it. Jump too close to where the enemy has moved and you might just lose the CLAC and every LAC aboard; since there's a fairly lengthy vulnerable window after a jump before the hyper generate recharged and you can jump out again.

I'd say drones are going to be the most potent weapon against spider ships. Whatever ships you send to investigate, you're going to drop in a reasonable distance in-system from the suspected arrival point and then start spamming drones like nobody's business. That way your hyper-capable units aren't dropping straight into a kill zone, and your recon assets are magnified. In which case, a CLAC is likely to be your best bet.

Michael Everett wrote:...ummmm, did anyone remember to take the Spider Drive itself into account?
We have textev (somewhere) that the power of each "leg" makes it a weapon in its own right, and it's designed to activate and move repeatedly in microsecond bursts.
A whole lot of those legs "flailing" under careful computer control would do a very serious number on incoming missiles.

"Sir, the missiles got past their counter-missiles, but..."
"But what?"
"Sir, they just kicked them to pieces!"
"What?!"

The Spider Drive may be less of a shield than the Impeller Wedge, but an argument can be made that it is a pretty good forest of rapiers...

I seem to recall that the 'spur' from each spider drive projector is shorter than a laserhead standoff distance.

If so then they might do something against a missile trying straight on ramming attack, or a contact nuke, but I doubt they'd (except by purest luck) do anything to the lasers from a laserhead.

BarryKirk wrote:What would a KE weapon at 90% light speed that put out a shotgun pattern of depleted uranium rods? Basically the same ammo as used by the main gun on an M1 Abrams tank, except at considerably higher velocity and a scatter pattern of them.

Bad idea. DU-ammo even today have issues with the most modern armour because they tend to snap apart when hitting, which turns the hit from a slice into a protracted *splat*.

While on a greater scale that will be less noticeable, instead of a single "big bang" you probably get a stretched but less intensive explosion. And with the absence of a counterforce(like atmosphere), depending on the armour, more or less of the force will be lost to open space.

You´re probably much better off using large steel spheres.

The advantage of DU is that you can get a lot of weight out of a very small penetrator. In space, with no real limit on the size of the "gun", that becomes irrelevant to the extreme.

Especially when the best way of accelerating it would be a railgun or similar, and then you need ammo that can be used, and DU can´t be used.

BarryKirk wrote:I'm thinking those penetrators wouldn't hurt an impeller wedge or sidewall, but each one would penetrate right through the toughest particle shielding and armor in existence. The total KE of each rod would be several Megatons.

Particle shielding? Maybe, we don´t really know how it works. It´s quite possible that it could negate a lot the speed of an incoming projectile, or it might as well not be there at all.

Armour however? Present day development into molecularly engineered armour is already at the point where KE penetrators might be rendered inept.

By the H-verse time, it may very well be to the point where the outer layer of armour pulverizes most KE projectiles and spreads the impact force so much that only a small portion of armour is even damaged.

Belial666 wrote:What the title says - how accurate are even Apollo missiles against stealthed targets dodging at 300 gravities that don't have wedges?

The absence of wedges actually makes it easier, as the wedges hides the ships very effectively.

Belial666 wrote:An Apollo missile must use lightspeed sensors to locate such targets instead of gravitics and thus is subject to both lightspeed delays and limited by the much reduced sensitivity of such sensors (compared to gravitics).

Where was it ever claimed that non-gravitics had WORSE sensitivity? Effective range is limited yes, but from everything i´ve read, i would say gravtics are the less sensitive and accurate sensors. They just make up for that because all other sensors are nearly useless much of the time.

Belial666 wrote:Say that such a missile can first detect such targets well enough for the information to be accurate at 300.000 kilometers. Coming in at half the speed of light, it has a mere two seconds for its systems to analyze the information, separate it from possible decoys, get a firing solution, maneuver towards this firing solution, deploy lasing rods and maneuver them into position with reaction thrusters and then fire.

Which is EASY compared to trying to predict where inside a wedge a ship will be, a wedge you can´t look inside of until you already have to be in the process of firing the shot.

Belial666 wrote:Accuracy of missiles against wedgeless targets?

Probably quite good as long as you can find the targets to shoot at first.

The wedge-less target dies a quick death, not just because the wedge is 50% of the armor, but because it is also it's own "smokescreen", same with the sidewalls. First reason is that without the wedge, the target ship can't change speed or direction. Makes it pretty easy to find if you've already spotted a ship under impeller drive and in motion. Which is why ships try to set up ambushes where they're either not moving or already moving before the opp force shows up. Then ships play games with decoys, drones, etc. to try to get lost among the faked impeller targets, asteroids, or any convenient celestial bodies, etc.

Next problem is that it takes the wedge time to form. You can't just flick it on and have it at 100% power taking all that nasty energy away from the ship. So you gotta have it up to stop ANYTHING. Once it's up, however, we read about the Wedge being impenetrable by any form of energy, and warships have 'a wedge inside a wedge" that keeps an enemy from reading through a single wedge to localize the ships, which don't have to sit right smack dab in the middle of the wedges that they generate.

In OBS, Honor is frustrated because about all CL-56 Fearless can do to avoid Sirius' missiles is to squirm around inside the wedge, which gives the PN ship WAY too good of an opportunity to take her out. Why? because by "this point in time", the laserhead's gravitic mirror plus "missile head aiming computers" is accurate enough to get an 'energy blast shot' capable of destroying the ship or at least maiming it at fractional C speeds. Even then, it wasn't easy, right?

Given that it's supposed to be about a 300:1 guess volume wise within a wedge as to where a warship ship is actually sitting that's why a "down the throat" or "up the kilt" shot is so valuable, the missile's targeting computers don't have to guess. So, no wedge = no guesswork required. No defense against the energy output of the laser head.

Dead ship.