Saganami Island lessons: the Battle of Manticore

dreamrider wrote:
Keyholes have impellers and Wedges.

So, BOINK.

When did Keyhole platforms get impellers and wedges?

dreamrider[/quote]

Since DW said so. Also, look at Keyhole drawing. Can see em on the left end. (EDIT(both drawings on BCL/Invictus)

Belial666 wrote:

Relax wrote:They are sending Video of all things via FTL, and yet cannot send simple position vector data... Ug, I'll try not to barf over the pathetic absurdity of the "science".

Missiles don't target by position/vector data. They do the following;


1) Get as many position/vector changes as possible for the enemy target, preferably all of them that sensors can see while the enemy is dodging at rates faster than any human cound think under variable acceleration shifting at less than hundredths of a second.

5) Fire at enemy future position so that by the time your laser beam has taken 1/2 second to reach enemy, the enemy, after moving tens of thousands of kilometers and after a hundred minor acceleration changes, arrives at the point you decided to fire

-1, Yes, missiles do target by positional vector data from the mothership along with with onboard sensors, otherwise they do not even reach attack range(laser rod deployment). Those positional vector data improves resolution the closer the missile gets as its own sensors trump data from the mothership.

Zero, why not actually do the simple time stamped math and then prove to yourself that any amount of "randomness" makes any difference at all? It doesn't. When your vector error band both for the defender and attacker is greater than any "randomness", the "randomness" vanishes into obscurity. Beyond that, simple math shows, it is impossible for the ships to outrun a missile at 500g. DO THE MATH. Look at my previous posts in other threads. I JUST showed it, once again, in the three stage vs two stage missile thread.

One, missiles drop their wedges inside 150,000km of the ship being attacked. Only "randomness" here is position of the ship hiding behind its sidewall that cannot be determined outside the sidewall besides guessing.

Two, a missiles' body orientation slightly different than the laser rods matters not a whit as long as in cone of nuclear fury. Only their laser rods thrusted outward on their own vectors who orient themselves to the ship, not the missile itself. See back of Storm From the Shadows drawings I believe.

Three, is no such thing as random dodge pattern in missile combat. This is not even true in atmospheric missile combat. Thing called gravity puts the cabosh on things. Why this is true for impeller wedge combat is that wedges seem to climb/dive, yaw, and spin at different rates and everyone knows it. Spins fast, rotates slowly in comparison and obviously takes even longer to start rotating one direction only to go 180 degrees different. Of course at the closing speeds MDM/CM's are traveling at, light speed sensors are completely useless. Once again, do the time stamped math. Put your assumptions for rotation rate, sensor resolution per distance at the top of your Excel, etc program. Graph the solutions for sensor resolution required and rotation rate for missiles with wedges of 10km.

Then contemplate, if missile wedges are 10km, how the holy bleeping #$(*@ does a ship shoot 100 of these buggers out its broadside every 8s without the wedges colliding. Certainly cannot have "salvos" as described in the books. Stream? Yes. Salvo? No. Calculate the initial launch velocity required and the acceleration required comes to a tidy million g's or so depending on your assumptions.

Relax wrote:Then contemplate, if missile wedges are 10km, how the holy bleeping #$(*@ does a ship shoot 100 of these buggers out its broadside every 8s without the wedges colliding. Certainly cannot have "salvos" as described in the books. Stream? Yes. Salvo? No. Calculate the initial launch velocity required and the acceleration required comes to a tidy million g's or so depending on your assumptions.

I think of it sort of like firing a bullet through a tube 10 yards in front of the rifle, but with a tech-driven, guaranteed 1:1 correlation between the movement of the tube and the rifle barrel's aim. Think of it as the size ratio of a .17caliper high speed bullet and that tube 10 yards away without the bothersome pressure wave caused by the atmosphere, vs. a multi-meter long missile being fired through the wedge X distance away from the ship, and keeping in mind that missiles have their own form of "initial compensator" that takes the g-forces on the missile body WAY down. Otherwise the -G rates quoted in the Honorverse are not possible anyway...

My reading -- but I don't remember which book(s) -- is that "up until recently" in the Honorverse, missiles were only launched through ports that the RFC's tech design allows to be put through the gravitic bands, and that the firing rate quoted is basically the "how much time it takes to move missile X into the tube which puts it through the port?" then a "grav driver" accelerates the missile through the port and outside the wedge. When it reaches distance X outside the ship's wedge, the missile brings up it's own impeller an off it goes.

That's why a ship had to turn "broadside" to fire originally. Then those durn Manty neobarbs went and designed around that problem, first with the towed pods, then ship launched pods, and now that infernal "fire slightly behind me" 120 degree off bore capability that allows a Sag C to fire what used to be superdreadnought size salvos and a Roland DD to "stack" a battlecruiser size salvo without ever reorienting in space.

SharkHunter wrote:

Relax wrote:Then contemplate, if missile wedges are 10km, how the holy bleeping #$(*@ does a ship shoot 100 of these buggers out its broadside every 8s without the wedges colliding. CertainSNIP

I think of it sort of like firing a bullet through a tube 10 yards in front of the rifle, but with a tech-driven, guaranteed 1:1 correlation between the movement of the tube and the rifle barrel's aim. Think of it aSNHIP

I asked people to do the math, not blather what everyone was already TOLD and knows in the books.

Relax wrote:Then contemplate, if missile wedges are 10km, how the holy bleeping #$(*@ does a ship shoot 100 of these buggers out its broadside every 8s without the wedges colliding. Certainly cannot have "salvos" as described in the books. Stream? Yes. Salvo? No. Calculate the initial launch velocity required and the acceleration required comes to a tidy million g's or so depending on your assumptions.

It's not a hundred. It's 37, maximum (On the Gryphon-class SDs. Nike-class BCs top out at 25).

Further, let's assume that Honorverse shipbuilders are not idiots, and that they are aware of the need to avoid wedge fratricide. So, what's the trivial solution here? Could it be slightly divergent launch paths? Or is that too simple?

The solution is a combination of divergent paths and slightly different launch velocities. By the time the missiles reach wedge ignition range, they can quite easily be scattered across a 3-dimensional region with no wedge too close to another. Kzt, do you really expect us to show the math on this trivial question?

SWM wrote:The solution is a combination of divergent paths and slightly different launch velocities. By the time the missiles reach wedge ignition range, they can quite easily be scattered across a 3-dimensional region with no wedge too close to another. Kzt, do you really expect us to show the math on this trivial question?

Hey, don't blame me for this!

]

Relax wrote:Then contemplate, if missile wedges are 10km, how the holy bleeping #$(*@ does a ship shoot 100 of these buggers out its broadside every 8s without the wedges colliding....

--snip--

I asked people to do the math, not blather what everyone was already TOLD and knows in the books.

I've played with the math before to my satisfaction, but not tried to pin it down to the nth precision, but do this math before you say we're blathering: at any appreciable fraction of C, and a tube launched salvo of "specified size" and a spread of X degrees, how many milliseconds apart and by how many degrees angle, do those missiles have to be fired to achieve your required separation? At lower speeds, of course the angle of the ports firing and activation timings have to be further apart -- but that is an easily calculable function.

Point being, at 6MM kilometers targeting range or so, there's nothing that requires unworkable math to sequence 20-30 missiles per side of the ship into time on target salvos. The off bore firing capability online in PD1922 makes it even easier.

It's also why RFC's counter missile salvo timings make sense, and why even the SLN admiral Crandall who'd done everything she knew how in terms of "tactically correct SLN doctrine to insure the win" knew that her fleet was toast the moment that 10th Fleet launched the Mark 23-E guided missile storm on her SD's.

Relax wrote:
Since DW said so. Also, look at Keyhole drawing. Can see em on the left end. (EDIT(both drawings on BCL/Invictus)

When did RFC say that? Not doubting it happened, but I don't remember seeing it. I can see what you mean about the drawing, the Keyhole platforms in the drawings of both the Nike and the Invictus in House of Steel have what looks very much like an impeller ring at the stern. However, I can't see why they would have one. Every description I can remember seeing of the Keyholes described them as tethered platforms, held in place by a tractor beam and pulled inside the mother ship's wedge if needed for protection. You can't run a tractor beam through a wedge, or a power supply beam or data link for that matter, so if the Keyhole had a wedge it would have to be oriented in the same plane as the mother ship's. That would make using it to provide fire control while the mother ship rolls wedge against enemy fire impossible - the Keyhole's wedge would cut off it's view of the target.

Dafmeister wrote:...Every description I can remember seeing of the Keyholes described them as tethered platforms, held in place by a tractor beam and pulled inside the mother ship's wedge if needed for protection. You can't run a tractor beam through a wedge, or a power supply beam or data link for that matter, so if the Keyhole had a wedge it would have to be oriented in the same plane as the mother ship's. That would make using it to provide fire control while the mother ship rolls wedge against enemy fire impossible - the Keyhole's wedge would cut off it's view of the target.

True. I think all tethering is done through the sidewall, for example all the way back in OBS, we read:

On Basilisk Station wrote:The tactical board flashed as his ECM sprang from standby to active, and two fifty-ton decoys snapped out of their broadside bays, popping through specially opened portals in Fearless's sidewalls. Tractors moored them to the cruiser, holding the driveless lures on station to cover her flanks, as passive sensors listened to the incoming missiles, seeking the frequencies of their active homing systems, and jammers responded with white noise in an effort to blind them while fire control systems locked on the small, weaving targets.

Keyhole(s) [both versions] are super sophisticated versions of the same, designed to extend the decoy/ecm and missile control functions even further away from the ship, as the gravitic emissions from the wedge cause less interference. That allows all sorts of new niftiness to be crafted into the tactical hardware.

The next evolution in this sequence are the Loreleis which are even more advanced in terms of decoy ability and are not tethered at all, so they can be off the attack line from a stealthed force, like in Filerata's folly. Basically those just have to be signal "line of sight" to a controlling Keyhole OR other distributed platform or ship.