Firing Ports tactical idea

This idea may be less relevant at this stage (post pod, long ranges etc.) But it may have had some relevance in back in the pre-buttercup days.

Now during the first Havenite war both navies started to get a good intelligence picture on the cycle rates of the opposing ship classes' SDM missile tube firing rates. This means that they could calculate pretty closely when the opposing ship's missiles would be passing through the sidewalls (through firing ports). Assuming each firing port is about 25-100ms^2 and they all open at the same time, there might be a small dip in sidewall effectiveness every 20-30 seconds or so. If missile salvos were timed to arrive at this time then either the opposing ship would have to hold fire for a second or suffer a small increase in the risk of a x-ray laser getting through unblocked by the sidewalls.

Now I know I'm only talking about a small >5% potential increase in combat effectiveness, but sometimes small margins and lucky shots are what makes the difference between winning and losing. Why not stack the odds in your favour as much as you can?

It is actually a good concept.

Unfortunately; the targeted ship gets to decide if and when to open it's gun ports to fire. With missiles incoming at a large fraction of Cee and effective, laser head engagement range limited to only a few, tens of thousands of kilometers, the missiles have only a few tenths of a second to engage before passing the target ship. A delay of only a few seconds before launching a salvo to allow an incoming missile wave to pass would be all that is needed to avoid this vulnerability.

BobfromSydney wrote:This idea may be less relevant at this stage (post pod, long ranges etc.) But it may have had some relevance in back in the pre-buttercup days.

Now during the first Havenite war both navies started to get a good intelligence picture on the cycle rates of the opposing ship classes' SDM missile tube firing rates. This means that they could calculate pretty closely when the opposing ship's missiles would be passing through the sidewalls (through firing ports). Assuming each firing port is about 25-100ms^2 and they all open at the same time, there might be a small dip in sidewall effectiveness every 20-30 seconds or so. If missile salvos were timed to arrive at this time then either the opposing ship would have to hold fire for a second or suffer a small increase in the risk of a x-ray laser getting through unblocked by the sidewalls.

Now I know I'm only talking about a small >5% potential increase in combat effectiveness, but sometimes small margins and lucky shots are what makes the difference between winning and losing. Why not stack the odds in your favour as much as you can?

Cheat.

Space the missiles out a bit. It's not that the ISLN antimissile defenses are going to stop any of them.

However, IMHO neither side can really gain from this.

namelessfly wrote:It is actually a good concept.

Unfortunately; the targeted ship gets to decide if and when to open it's gun ports to fire. With missiles incoming at a large fraction of Cee and effective, laser head engagement range limited to only a few, tens of thousands of kilometers, the missiles have only a few tenths of a second to engage before passing the target ship. A delay of only a few seconds before launching a salvo to allow an incoming missile wave to pass would be all that is needed to avoid this vulnerability.

BobfromSydney wrote:This idea may be less relevant at this stage (post pod, long ranges etc.) But it may have had some relevance in back in the pre-buttercup days.

Now during the first Havenite war both navies started to get a good intelligence picture on the cycle rates of the opposing ship classes' SDM missile tube firing rates. This means that they could calculate pretty closely when the opposing ship's missiles would be passing through the sidewalls (through firing ports). Assuming each firing port is about 25-100ms^2 and they all open at the same time, there might be a small dip in sidewall effectiveness every 20-30 seconds or so. If missile salvos were timed to arrive at this time then either the opposing ship would have to hold fire for a second or suffer a small increase in the risk of a x-ray laser getting through unblocked by the sidewalls.

Now I know I'm only talking about a small >5% potential increase in combat effectiveness, but sometimes small margins and lucky shots are what makes the difference between winning and losing. Why not stack the odds in your favour as much as you can?

namelessfly wrote:It is actually a good concept.

Unfortunately; the targeted ship gets to decide if and when to open it's gun ports to fire. With missiles incoming at a large fraction of Cee and effective, laser head engagement range limited to only a few, tens of thousands of kilometers, the missiles have only a few tenths of a second to engage before passing the target ship. A delay of only a few seconds before launching a salvo to allow an incoming missile wave to pass would be all that is needed to avoid this vulnerability.

BobfromSydney wrote:This idea may be less relevant at this stage (post pod, long ranges etc.) But it may have had some relevance in back in the pre-buttercup days.

Now during the first Havenite war both navies started to get a good intelligence picture on the cycle rates of the opposing ship classes' SDM missile tube firing rates. This means that they could calculate pretty closely when the opposing ship's missiles would be passing through the sidewalls (through firing ports). Assuming each firing port is about 25-100ms^2 and they all open at the same time, there might be a small dip in sidewall effectiveness every 20-30 seconds or so. If missile salvos were timed to arrive at this time then either the opposing ship would have to hold fire for a second or suffer a small increase in the risk of a x-ray laser getting through unblocked by the sidewalls.

Now I know I'm only talking about a small >5% potential increase in combat effectiveness, but sometimes small margins and lucky shots are what makes the difference between winning and losing. Why not stack the odds in your favour as much as you can?

Good point. And the ship should have a really solid lock on how far out the missiles are; should be simple and automatic to 'stutter' the next offensive launch for a second if there's a risk of a laser head hitting an open gunport. (Now PDLCs also require, smaller, gunports; but their defensive advantage seems worth the small risk of a golden bb coming in through their gunport; and they can't really avoid firing when missiles are within laserhead range [G] )

This is also the case with a pod layer. Given that the missiles arrive as this huge clump at (typically-BoM excepted) long intervals, why are pod layers ever caught with the pod hatches open?

Pod bay doors take a lot longer to cycle than sidewall gunports. Besides, armor is mitigation, not invulnerability. A sufficient number of hits will always breech the armor.

If I remember correctly the pods go out around once "set" per 12 seconds.

The doors weigh thousands of tons. They cannot be opened and closed quickly enough (keeping in mind that "partially opened" would likely still block the egress of the pods - very messy.

One potential improvement could be phasing the sternwall on and off to protect the pod doors when the pods are not passing through.

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As for forcing the defending ship stuttering its launch, that is fine by me. Either I have the other ship spreading its missiles out so they are not coming in a solid wave (decreasing their fire effectiveness) or they reduce their rate-of-fire from 18 second cycles to 18.5 second cycles etc. this interferes with their firing plans and decreases the frequency of missile waves I have to defend against.

I also imagine that the entire pattern of transferring the missile from the magazine to the tube, priming and programming it, activating the gravitic accelerators and shooting them out the tube, letting them coast the gap between tube mouth and sidewall is a process that is difficult to manage in the heat of battle and there seem to only be a few points where you can conveniently put the process on 'hold'. I'm relying on this to make it problematic for the opposing ship. Also if the enemy ship holds fire until my missiles go through - there is a small chance I will destroy a few of those missiles 'in the tubes' as well.

Overall the missiles will not be programmed to wait for the gaps (gunports) in the sidewall to appear. They would take their shots at the end of the their attack runs normally and maybe 1-in-40 might get a clear shot through a gunport IF the gunports are open at the time.

That 1-in-40 shot would have disproportionate effect because it would arrive at full-strength, rather than degraded by the sidewall. Only a small advantage, but I think it is worth pursuing as long as the percentage increase in effectiveness is higher than the percentage loss in effectiveness that may result from modifying the missiles flight time/flight paths to effect this tactic.

Probably needs a lot of simulator time to figure out the details.

I doubt it would make any difference. The lack of accuracy of laserheads to the degree necessary to hit a gunport is mentioned whenever gunports are mentioned.

Plus SLN ships are "weaker" than their GA counterparts anyway. They'll probably be a mission kill on something like 150-200 hits, and their less capable active defence suites will mean fewer total missiles to score that many hits.

BobfromSydney wrote:If I remember correctly the pods go out around once "set" per 12 seconds.

The doors weigh thousands of tons. They cannot be opened and closed quickly enough (keeping in mind that "partially opened" would likely still block the egress of the pods - very messy.

Let's say that you have this huge missile salvo coming at you, like as in 11,000 missiles. Which has taken your opponent a while, like say six minutes, to set up. So you see this enormous salvo heading towards you and you can tell, to within a second or so, exactly when it will arrive. Would it be a good idea or a bad idea to have the pod hatch open during that period of a second?

Is there a particular battle you are referring to where it is said the hatches were open?