New Manty ship ideas.

The pre great resizing missile chart which we assume are twice as big as pictured. Show the Ghost Rider missile shaped thing being 10 or 20 metres long. The warhead itself is rather small, although weather it is in the tip of the missile or side mounted one doesn't know. Modern missiles don't fly into targets anymore they fly over and shoot downward out of the side of the missile at the top armour. Very good against Tanks.

Modern ICBM missiles have not one warhead but multiple, many of which may be dumbies. No need to have dedicated ew missiles when the ew warhead can be mixed with the real laserhead warheads. And by modern I mean since the 80's or earlier.

Remember a missile that is twice as big is not twice as long & twice as wide / tall a round...but just one of these or a 26% combination.

Twice as long twice a round is 8 times bigger.

Missiles are mostly power drive with a smallerish warhead. Making them slower makes the payload space larger. Make the tube bigger slower and stealthy say 3 times around this makes the same length missile 9 times as big say 3 metres in place of 1 and 5 to 10 metres long. In place of 3-5. One can carry / deploy 9-18 warheads in every missile. Mix ew and weapon warheads and every shot counts. Every shot is easy to control. And the missile tube is three times as much in diameter but with only one albeit slow compared to other missiles, still 7-10 times faster than a ship, missile to control. 10 to 20 times as deadly with a deployable outside of CM / Defense range using every advantage and without being able to see it. Plus reusable.

Fire three such missiles at a target 6 ew warheads and 21 laser head clusters of 7 rods each. Be it a laughable from the enemies POV fast launch. Or a hidden stealth slow launch, which they will never see coming.

As for loiter time for deployed to a system the system defense pods which you say have a many month loiter time the same larger deployed stealth GR missiles could likewise stay on point for many month. As for only having a loiter time of a ship missile of a month this is only 10,000 times that of a normal missile. One might consider that a great advantage.

This is not a powered pod, such a thing could have not 8+1 missiles but 50 to 100 warheads. 100 of these and you have the entire missile load of an Invictus. Perhaps that would be the better Mycroft.

As for needing more than 150 ships yet you only have 50 systems all with Mycroft. 150 escorts each capable of defeating any raiding craft and able tto blend in with freighters. Add a second ship if not an ACE then a FF CLAC. Full FF sized with 100-150 LAC. Depends what kind or type. 50 HighlanderX and 50 Shrike / Katana. Or 150 Shrike... A LAC can do everything a DD can do in a system. And many things they cannot. Add a Nike and there is nothing a DD can do better. A FF CLAC can do everything with its LAC and in 100 more places. Simultaneously.

1 FF CLAC can patrol 10-15 systems with a strong presence in every system all the time. Add a Dispatch boat to each system and there isn't anything a DD can do better.

A raiding force hits those systems patrolled by a Wolfhound or Avalon or a squadron of 8 of them. 50% chance 1 ship is in system. 25% if operating in pairs.

A FF CLAC has 8 LAC in each system. 2 Highlander 2's, 6 Shrike. A dispatch boat then runs for the FF CLAC for reinforcement. Perhaps one of your Avalon does this. Leaving the other behind. Of course it runs for help from the other ships in the systems. There are 8 in pairs so in the time to get to a FF CLAC it gets to 2 other CL. Sends them and goes for 2 more CL. 3-5 times as long to assemble 8 CL. Or for a quicker response a FF CLAC is called for, comes barrelling into the system with full SD Wedge and 30-50 LAC, the others are deployed. It may be a bluff in itself. But the raiders see a SD show up. The thing is the FF CLAC is unarmed but the LAC are not. The raiders either run surrender or get killed. When 2 more CL show up while the 3rd in system is battling hiding or has been destroyed already, big deal. Even a Sollie raiding force can attack 3 Avalon. 1 FF CLAC or a Nike or Both? No.

Skimper, your rambling in the last two posts is so erratic it is impossible to actually understand what you are trying to say. All I can get out of it is that you are still trying to push drone-based MIRVs and so-called "fast freighter" CLACs. Other than that, I can't tell exactly what you intend to say.

Regarding MIRVs. You are correct that there is nothing in Honorverse physics precluding the possibility of MIRV warheads. It is not a new idea. It would clearly have to be considerably bigger than existing missiles, and almost certainly a lot more than merely twice as large. But we don't have enough information to know what would be necessary for it. Your speculation on the details is pulled out of thin air.

Manticore already has drones with warheads. It is appears that there is only enough room for a single warhead in the drones. So a drone MIRV would also have to be considerably bigger.

Regarding your CLACs. PLEASE stop using the term FF for Fast Freighter. FF means Frigate. You have not explained why this design is better than existing CLAC designs. The only difference between your design and existing CLACs is that yours have no armor at all. The cost of the armor is trivial compared to the cost of the ship as a whole, so it is not noticeably cheaper or faster to build. So why would Manticore build one?

SWM wrote:<snip>
Regarding your CLACs. PLEASE stop using the term FF for Fast Freighter. FF means Frigate. You have not explained why this design is better than existing CLAC designs. The only difference between your design and existing CLACs is that yours have no armor at all. The cost of the armor is trivial compared to the cost of the ship as a whole, so it is not noticeably cheaper or faster to build. So why would Manticore build one?

The Havenite Aviary CLAC is a 8-8.5 Mton CLAC using SD nodes and Compensator (and the rest of the drive system) which is designed to carry the most LACS possible. It has virtually no armor and few defenses. It is designed to carry LACS and drop them beyond enemy defenses then leave the target area. A good glimpse of them is in the beginning chapters of AAC.

Manticore is considering such a design as a "fleet" carrier to thicken the LACS carried by a hardened "assault" CLAC which is included in part of SD fleet.

But all of these will be warships, not freighters. And Skimper, the designation for a fast 4.5 ton freighter (mil compensator, rad shields and nodes) is a JMNT Freighter.

The proper designation for what you are designing is AMC NOT FF. AMC is Armed Merchant Cruiser, and is the designation given by the RMN to a civilian hull with weapons. FF is a frigate. As for everything else in your post, you are either an idiot or a troll. My money is on the first one.

crewdude48 wrote:The proper designation for what you are designing is AMC NOT FF. AMC is Armed Merchant Cruiser, and is the designation given by the RMN to a civilian hull with weapons. FF is a frigate. As for everything else in your post, you are either an idiot or a troll. My money is on the first one.

As far as Skimper being either an idiot or a troll, the choices are not mutually exclusive. I would put my money on both.

Vince wrote:

crewdude48 wrote:The proper designation for what you are designing is AMC NOT FF. AMC is Armed Merchant Cruiser, and is the designation given by the RMN to a civilian hull with weapons. FF is a frigate. As for everything else in your post, you are either an idiot or a troll. My money is on the first one.

As far as Skimper being either an idiot or a troll, the choices are not mutually exclusive. I would put my money on both.

I agree with Vince on that. The only reason I read anything he writes is so I will understand what the people responding to him are talking about. All the good ideas come from the people trying to shoot down his inane ideas.

Just a question, how many missiles can an Apollo control missile control? I know that its current use is 1 control missile per pod. But is controlling 8 missiles the limit of its capabilities?

Rakhmamort wrote:Just a question, how many missiles can an Apollo control missile control? I know that it's current use is 1 control missile per pod. But is controlling 8 missiles the limit of its capabilities?

Unknown based on the generally available information. DW and probably people who have read the tech bible may well know more but I doubt that they will tell.

Given the nature of control links in the Honorverse I doubt that an ACM has many more than 8 of them as they require discrete hardware and the ACM is oversized to begin with so they wouldn't want to add any extra gear without good reason. OTOH I doubt that adding extra links in reasonable numbers would be hard, would just need a modified ACM.

Grashtel wrote:

Rakhmamort wrote:Just a question, how many missiles can an Apollo control missile control? I know that it's current use is 1 control missile per pod. But is controlling 8 missiles the limit of its capabilities?

Unknown based on the generally available information. DW and probably people who have read the tech bible may well know more but I doubt that they will tell.

Given the nature of control links in the Honorverse I doubt that an ACM has many more than 8 of them as they require discrete hardware and the ACM is oversized to begin with so they wouldn't want to add any extra gear without good reason. OTOH I doubt that adding extra links in reasonable numbers would be hard, would just need a modified ACM.

Remember too, that these were designed to fit in pods, which at the time of field delivery, were of a standard size to fit existing launch rails and pod bays on SD(P)s. After having to try to squeeze 8 Mk23s and an ACM into a standard sized pod myself, there's no room to add any more missiles.

The only way I can think of to add more missiles (assuming that the ACM doesn't need to grow in size to increase control channels for more Mk23s) is to make the pods thicker. This might allow another 4-5 Mk23s per pod, at the expense of the number of pods a current generation podlayer can carry. This is irrelevant for system defense pods, as those could be any size that can be delivered by freighter or whatever.

That said, I think David has mentioned in the past that there are going to be new warship designs coming out of the yards once Manticore gets production underway. I belive he said that there are some shortcomings of the current podlayer designs, and that new ones will be better, having benefitted from lessons learned. So I suppose we might see something that might be able to handle larger pods.

Don't try to get any more info out of me about this, though. I'm just as in the dark about it as anyone else here (except maybe one or two others with BuNine that have better access to David's Tech Bible - I have none at all). I'm simply speculating on what I recall RFC having mentioned once in a post, I think.

I doubt very much that any new design coming from RFC will be *anything* like what skimper keeps trying to propose.