kzt wrote:If you cannot detect, much less localize, a spider ship it is totally unimportant what the weapon is you intend to use against it. Because you won't ever get to use that weapon.
Indeed. And without a sidewall or wedge, a spider drive ship will be a fairly easy kill with
any missile or anti-shipping energy weapon. (Heck, it may come out of it poorly if you could slap a counter-missile into it.)
They do have point defense, as a kind of forlorn hope, in case someone sees them to shoot at them. The greater standoff range of laserheads will make them a bit better against that than a contact nuke. But in any case, the huge hurdle is just finding the things to attack them at all.
When I first saw the subject line though, I was thinking it was going to be about spider drive missiles with contact nuke warheads - the idea being, if the missile cannot be detected effectively, it's got a decent enough chance of getting a close, up-the-throat or -kilt shot at the target to make the contact nuke warhead worth it. The much lower acceleration of a spider drive missile would be an issue but tolerable, especially if you can arrange attacks against relatively non-evasive, unsuspecting targets, which spider drive units should be able to manage. There may be something to that one, but the prevalence of bow walls and stern walls on recent Manticoran and Grayson units (and likely near-future Havenite and Beowulfan ones) would make that a bit less promising.
