Anti-pod 'spoiler' missile attacks

Now one of the most interesting parts of the Shannon doctrine for missile warfare is the deliberate use of 'dirty' nuke warheads to irradiate 'soft' targets and render them combat ineffective.

Soft targets include things like LACs, drones, decoys, missiles and missile pods.

So far in SDP v SDP engagements we tend to see either side rolling out huge pod 'stacks' and then firing them in huge salvos - overwhelming the opposing side's missile defences.

Why don't they use a small proportion of their offensive missile capability (5-10% maybe?) to fire missiles designed and targeted at destroying PODs laid by the opposing SDP? This may also include trying to irradiate hull-tractored pods etc. Mix in a small number of shipkillers to try and confuse their defense as much as possible etc.

Is this workable? Or does the low density of these spoiler salvos render them 100% interceptable short of their effective range?

The idea is to put the opposing commander in a constant 'use it or lose it' situation so he or she can never stack up a 'killer' pod salvo and has to fire a 'stream' of missiles instead.

Hmm, I'm not really sure LACs are counted as soft targets. They have some shielding, and they also have a wedge and sidewalls. More over, they aren't, typically, kept in a powered down state, lying dogo in space. If they are in a low power mode, they're moments from bringing up their wedges if there is an inbound flight of missiles.

But to the main point, I think that the prime reason they don't try something along these lines in an SD(P) versus situation is that it wouldn't be terribly effective. Pods are rolled and fired quickly during battle. There is not, typically, a large build up of pods between salvos. At least not once the first wave is launched. They stack pods before the first wave, passing them off to everyone else to control, then fire the largest wave they can handle. After that it's a just fire them as fast as you can kick them out the back hatch.

If you had enough time to set up multiple large salvos before the initial engagement, the nukes might have some value. I don't think that by the time your first salvo with the 5-10% dirty nukes in it got there, that I would still have many pods hanging about unprotected.

If you're talking about small salvos between bigger ones, the SD defenses would chew them up. It might work once or twice. But once word got around, it'd be ineffective.

Fireflair wrote:Hmm, I'm not really sure LACs are counted as soft targets. They have some shielding, and they also have a wedge and sidewalls. More over, they aren't, typically, kept in a powered down state, lying dogo in space. If they are in a low power mode, they're moments from bringing up their wedges if there is an inbound flight of missiles.

But to the main point, I think that the prime reason they don't try something along these lines in an SD(P) versus situation is that it wouldn't be terribly effective. Pods are rolled and fired quickly during battle. There is not, typically, a large build up of pods between salvos. At least not once the first wave is launched. They stack pods before the first wave, passing them off to everyone else to control, then fire the largest wave they can handle. After that it's a just fire them as fast as you can kick them out the back hatch.

If you had enough time to set up multiple large salvos before the initial engagement, the nukes might have some value. I don't think that by the time your first salvo with the 5-10% dirty nukes in it got there, that I would still have many pods hanging about unprotected.

If you're talking about small salvos between bigger ones, the SD defenses would chew them up. It might work once or twice. But once word got around, it'd be ineffective.

Good points.

One of the things I was thinking about was back in the day when 30-40 million kilometres was considered effective MDM range.

So maximum range is around 60-70 million kilometres, why not send the occasional spoiler wave between entering maximum range and closing to effective range? There is certainly time and 'space' to do so after all. It costs relatively little in terms of missiles.

BobfromSydney wrote:Now one of the most interesting parts of the Shannon doctrine for missile warfare is the deliberate use of 'dirty' nuke warheads to irradiate 'soft' targets and render them combat ineffective.

Soft targets include things like LACs, drones, decoys, missiles and missile pods.

So far in SDP v SDP engagements we tend to see either side rolling out huge pod 'stacks' and then firing them in huge salvos - overwhelming the opposing side's missile defences.

Why don't they use a small proportion of their offensive missile capability (5-10% maybe?) to fire missiles designed and targeted at destroying PODs laid by the opposing SDP? This may also include trying to irradiate hull-tractored pods etc. Mix in a small number of shipkillers to try and confuse their defense as much as possible etc.

Is this workable? Or does the low density of these spoiler salvos render them 100% interceptable short of their effective range?

The idea is to put the opposing commander in a constant 'use it or lose it' situation so he or she can never stack up a 'killer' pod salvo and has to fire a 'stream' of missiles instead.

Prior to the invention of the SD(P) what you are advocating was the standard tactic to use against SD's that were towing pods. Typically it was the defender that would fire off a salvo aimed at where the pods were to force the other side to fire them off early, before they have their best firing solutions.

However after the invention of the SD(P) that tactic is less effective since the pods inside the SD(P) are not vulnerable and they just drop them off out the doors off rails and the pods self stabilize IIRC, so it doesn't take that long to stack a salvo.

Now you also need to look at how much time there is between when the attacker shows up and when they get into range of the defender: hours.

These ships don't drop out of hyper and in 10 mins are in combat. The attacker has hours to stack the initial salvo prior to getting into effective range and the simple fact is the RMN/GSN has the longest effective range so they typically get off the first shot. So you will not really be able to force the RMN/GSN to fire off the salvo that much earlier than they want to. The following salvos are typically not as large if two MDM powers are fighting each other, however in the case of the Sollies vs RHN, RMN/GSN or IAN that is not the case since they cannot get into their own range to stop the stacking.

In fairness to the OP, there are a number of references to SD(P)s firing double- or -triple stack salvos, but even there there aren't huge numbers of pods lying around for extended periods. I believe the standard firing rate for an RMN/GSN SD(P) is one pattern every twelve seconds, so even in a three-pattern salvo the first pods won't be exposed for more than about 24 seconds before the third set is out of the doors.

In addition, SD(P)s are all equipped with tractor beams to handle a lot of pods, so the first patterns in a stack are probably towed inside the launch ship's wedge and radiation shield until it's time to let the missiles go.

BobfromSydney wrote:The idea is to put the opposing commander in a constant 'use it or lose it' situation so he or she can never stack up a 'killer' pod salvo and has to fire a 'stream' of missiles instead.

Unless you can do something to drastically reduce engagement range, your spoiler salvoes will not have a great effect, given that there will be several minutes between your launch and your missiles actually arriving. Once the initial salvos have been fired, you're generally in a "use 'em or lose 'em" situation anyway; diverting missiles from attacking ships to attacking pods will only reduce the effectiveness of the overall salvo (and given the transmission lags involved and the general stealthiness of a pod, probably not very practical anyway)

boballab wrote:

BobfromSydney wrote:Now one of the most interesting parts of the Shannon doctrine for missile warfare is the deliberate use of 'dirty' nuke warheads to irradiate 'soft' targets and render them combat ineffective.

Soft targets include things like LACs, drones, decoys, missiles and missile pods.

So far in SDP v SDP engagements we tend to see either side rolling out huge pod 'stacks' and then firing them in huge salvos - overwhelming the opposing side's missile defences.

Why don't they use a small proportion of their offensive missile capability (5-10% maybe?) to fire missiles designed and targeted at destroying PODs laid by the opposing SDP? This may also include trying to irradiate hull-tractored pods etc. Mix in a small number of shipkillers to try and confuse their defense as much as possible etc.

Is this workable? Or does the low density of these spoiler salvos render them 100% interceptable short of their effective range?

The idea is to put the opposing commander in a constant 'use it or lose it' situation so he or she can never stack up a 'killer' pod salvo and has to fire a 'stream' of missiles instead.

Prior to the invention of the SD(P) what you are advocating was the standard tactic to use against SD's that were towing pods. Typically it was the defender that would fire off a salvo aimed at where the pods were to force the other side to fire them off early, before they have their best firing solutions.

However after the invention of the SD(P) that tactic is less effective since the pods inside the SD(P) are not vulnerable and they just drop them off out the doors off rails and the pods self stabilize IIRC, so it doesn't take that long to stack a salvo.

Now you also need to look at how much time there is between when the attacker shows up and when they get into range of the defender: hours.

These ships don't drop out of hyper and in 10 mins are in combat. The attacker has hours to stack the initial salvo prior to getting into effective range and the simple fact is the RMN/GSN has the longest effective range so they typically get off the first shot. So you will not really be able to force the RMN/GSN to fire off the salvo that much earlier than they want to. The following salvos are typically not as large if two MDM powers are fighting each other, however in the case of the Sollies vs RHN, RMN/GSN or IAN that is not the case since they cannot get into their own range to stop the stacking.

Besides, everyone can see each other fire. so at Max SDM range, you have 3 minutes from when you see the enemy fire to continue to roll pods and fire back - for MDMs it's as much as 9 minutes - when you are talking about 12 second rolls, you can roll as many as 42 salvos before firing and still have 30 seconds to spare.

Now, using Mistletoe has interesting implications..... if you could move a handful of mistletoe drones to shaddow a fleet coming in and wait until they had deployed their pods for the initial salvo then hit them all simultaneously.

A tactic that might work would be to have your dirty nuke salvo detonate not at the enemy pods but right in front of the intial enemy missile wave. It depends how spread out it is and how wide the area of disruption of each nuke might be. You'd basically be using each missile as a huge, long range counter-missile with the chance of hitting multiple enemy missiles with the same shot - especially for something like Apollo with it's control missiles and "clumped" patterns.

There are exceptions. BoM is an exception. Home fleet assumed that the acceleration drop of 2nd was due to pod deployment outside the wedge, so naturally they responded to this by ignoring it. After all, what could possible go wrong if you allow a force that massively outnumbers you to spend as much time as they need to set up the battle they came here to fight?

Theemile wrote:

boballab wrote:Prior to the invention of the SD(P) what you are advocating was the standard tactic to use against SD's that were towing pods. Typically it was the defender that would fire off a salvo aimed at where the pods were to force the other side to fire them off early, before they have their best firing solutions.

However after the invention of the SD(P) that tactic is less effective since the pods inside the SD(P) are not vulnerable and they just drop them off out the doors off rails and the pods self stabilize IIRC, so it doesn't take that long to stack a salvo.

Now you also need to look at how much time there is between when the attacker shows up and when they get into range of the defender: hours.

These ships don't drop out of hyper and in 10 mins are in combat. The attacker has hours to stack the initial salvo prior to getting into effective range and the simple fact is the RMN/GSN has the longest effective range so they typically get off the first shot. So you will not really be able to force the RMN/GSN to fire off the salvo that much earlier than they want to. The following salvos are typically not as large if two MDM powers are fighting each other, however in the case of the Sollies vs RHN, RMN/GSN or IAN that is not the case since they cannot get into their own range to stop the stacking.

Besides, everyone can see each other fire. so at Max SDM range, you have 3 minutes from when you see the enemy fire to continue to roll pods and fire back - for MDMs it's as much as 9 minutes - when you are talking about 12 second rolls, you can roll as many as 42 salvos before firing and still have 30 seconds to spare.

Now, using Mistletoe has interesting implications..... if you could move a handful of mistletoe drones to shaddow a fleet coming in and wait until they had deployed their pods for the initial salvo then hit them all simultaneously.

One factor we don't know is how far a dirty nuke can standoff from the pods and still take them out. That makes a big difference in how effective small salvos (or even super long range salvos) might be.

If you've got to get within 100,000 km (twice the range of an improved laser-head) you're most of the way through the targets defensive zone. You need pretty accurate fire and a large salvo to hope to put missiles in that close. So there's no chance to light them off outside of your (normally) effective MDM range.

OTOH if you could miraculously achieve that effect from 1.5 million km you'd barely touch the edge of most targets' CM envelopes. And that ludicrous range makes would make super-long ranged shots more practical.


But I bet the standoff range is much closer to the former (possibly even less than the former). Honorverse tacticians (by and large) aren't idiots. I'm sure if it was easy to strip pods away while at extreme range that doing so would have become a part of the normal routine; simply to prevent people from deeply stacking pods successfully.