Mark 23-E Lite?

Another reason to develop a DDM control missile, even without FTL.

We know from textev that FF is going to go into the "commerce raiding" business bigtime. After a couple of convoys get hit, , if a particular style of HMMC freighters were altered to have maybe one bay that can carry an amount of "pod dropping modules" then even one Roland DD can gain a whole lot of punch in a hurry. Given that a Roland can control a stacked salvo of 12, if those channels are linked to control missiles at 1:13 that's a BC kill per salvo, before the Roland even has to use it's own missiles.

Yeah I know, no merchie wants to be in the line of fire. As an example wouldn't you want Pirate's Bane plus a DD able to coordinate a convoy protection battle sequence WAY before the FF ships could close? and it would be "hazard pay plus" for the ship/crew carrying the pods, making it worth it for them to do so.

SharkHunter wrote:Another reason to develop a DDM control missile, even without FTL.

We know from textev that FF is going to go into the "commerce raiding" business bigtime. After a couple of convoys get hit, , if a particular style of HMMC freighters were altered to have maybe one bay that can carry an amount of "pod dropping modules" then even one Roland DD can gain a whole lot of punch in a hurry. Given that a Roland can control a stacked salvo of 12, if those channels are linked to control missiles at 1:13 that's a BC kill per salvo, before the Roland even has to use it's own missiles.

Yeah I know, no merchie wants to be in the line of fire. As an example wouldn't you want Pirate's Bane plus a DD able to coordinate a convoy protection battle sequence WAY before the FF ships could close? and it would be "hazard pay plus" for the ship/crew carrying the pods, making it worth it for them to do so.

The same goes for ammunition ships. In fact, I have some vague recollection that the joint merchant organization from the First Havenite War had some modular bays. Assuming one was for ammunition, then it can probably do the emergency "defenseless podlayer" ammunition ship routine as at Monica or Spindle already. (If the recollection is off, it's still plausible speculation or something for the near future.)

A control missile could also serve as a backup system, for a ship that suffers loss of control links but not launchers. It wouldn't, in that case, be a very large portion of the magazine space, any more than CM canister missiles or contact nukes are - just another specialty tool for niche circumstances, and supporting a whole bunch of pods (carried by that ship or another) would be another of those niche circumstances.

JeffEngel wrote:

Dauntless wrote:the big problem at monica was the lack of punch the Mk-16s had at the time. as shown at saltash if Hexapuma had Mod G's they would take nailed the BCs much easier.

A control missile for the Mk 16s may prove useful long term but currently against sollies it has to be low priority compared to Streak drive or tweaking Gravatics senosrs to detect spider drive.

Given the number of Solarian SD's and BC's, something to make DD's and CL's better able to blow them away may remain handy - just because the Alliance has and can maintain about as many very small ships as the League can wallers.

That said, I would agree about the priorities, but streak drives will be developed more or less based on the speed that Simoes can convey theory to hyper generator engineers and spider drive detection is going to be a lot of theory more than working out technical tricks for some time. While it's a far lower priority, if control missiles are going to be useful, they're not going to be competing for many of the same resources anyway. (Although - small, capable AI's of the sort control missiles need may be relevant for large numbers of recon drone-lets of possible use in spider drive detection as part of a brute force solution.)

I think the -G warhead is plenty (in the short term) to help light units beat up on heavier SLN ships -- hold open the range and land surprisingly powerful blows against weak missile defenses.


Like I said above I can see benefits of rolling out non-FTL control missiles for Mk16 pods. Trading off a little throw weight per-pod in exchange for vastly larger salvos has a lot of appeal.

But I just don't see much advantage for tube launched birds. That's because, personally, I just don't think (without FTL) that the accuracy and effectiveness is going to be sufficiently improved to justify the reduced per-broadside throw weight. And deeply stacking broadsides is more problematic that deeply stacking pod salvos -- so you're less likely to need to extra fire control from just tubes.

--combining snips--

JeffEngel wrote:A control missile could also serve as a backup system, for a ship that suffers loss of control links but not launchers. It wouldn't, in that case, be a very large portion of the magazine space, any more than CM canister missiles or contact nukes are - just another specialty tool for niche circumstances, and supporting a whole bunch of pods (carried by that ship or another) would be another of those niche circumstances.

Jonathan_S wrote:I think the -G warhead is plenty (in the short term) to help light units beat up on heavier SLN ships -- hold open the range and land surprisingly powerful blows against weak missile defenses.

Like I said above I can see benefits of rolling out non-FTL control missiles for Mk16 pods. Trading off a little throw weight per-pod in exchange for vastly larger salvos has a lot of appeal.

But I just don't see much advantage for tube launched birds. That's because, personally, I just don't think (without FTL) that the accuracy and effectiveness is going to be sufficiently improved to justify the reduced per-broadside throw weight. And deeply stacking broadsides is more problematic that deeply stacking pod salvos -- so you're less likely to need to extra fire control from just tubes.

Combining these -- but I don't think that stacking broadsides is all that difficult. The Sag-C's had enough links to handle 128 missiles, with a broadside of only 40 tubes.

I think that Jeff's realization that a control missile solution gives superb control to a ship with battle damage is the clincher. Look at Rozak's defense of Torch, for example. Tube launching would mean that a ship with battle damage reducing their broadside to as little as 3-4 tubes and an effective Tactical section could manage the salvos from an ammo ship/freighter or another "fleet ship" whose tactical section is out of the battle (maybe gravitic sensor are gone like CA-286 in HotQ) but still has available missiles.

Another thought btw. We've sort of thought of the R&D being "either" detecting spider drives, developing streak drives -- the highest priorities vs. the MAlign, or developing new control missile variants, likely a higher priority vs. the SLN.

Why? it doesn't make sense -- one team developed the SR-71 engine and nacelle configuration, another the airframe, still another the control systems, another the recon systems, another the "human support bits", the fueling systems, etc, etc.

Somehow I think that there's enough GRAM researchers that survived because of Weyland's lucky/timely evac to have teams to do all of the above at the same time. There's no competing priorities on a per team basis, and plenty of pissed off geeks with an axe to grind.

SharkHunter wrote:Another thought btw. We've sort of thought of the R&D being "either" detecting spider drives, developing streak drives, or developing new control missile variants.

Why? it doesn't make sense -- one team developed the SR-71 engine and nacelle configuration, another the airframe, still another the control systems, another the recon systems, another the "human support bits", the fueling systems, etc, etc.

Somehow I think that there's enough GRAM researchers that survived because of Weyland's lucky/timely evac to do all of the above at the same time. There's no competing priorities on a per team basis, and plenty of pissed off geeks with an axe to grind.

And it's not like they are omnidisciplinary scientists with nothing but time and money needed to get fed to them to produce whatever goody they're asked for. A STL-only, smaller control missile is something for missile engineers to bang out, fairly easily, and fabrication engineers to work out the building of based on the Mark 16 and 23-E. Streak drives are for hypergenerator engineers and Simoes. Spider drive detectors are for... well, that one is going to draw on all sorts of sensor engineers and theorists, and that will depend on how they go about it. There's detecting the spider drive itself or active and passive sensor detection of the ship, whether or not the spider is up, and despite its very smart paint and emissions discipline.

Some small amount of the required resources at various stages will overlap, so there's some competition. But it's not much. The boffins can walk and chew gum at the same time, since they are not chewing with their feet.

SharkHunter wrote:I think that Jeff's realization that a control missile solution gives superb control to a ship with battle damage is the clincher. Look at Rozak's defense of Torch, for example. Tube launching would mean that a ship with battle damage reducing their broadside to as little as 3-4 tubes and an effective Tactical section could manage the salvos from an ammo ship/freighter or another "fleet ship" whose tactical section is out of the battle (maybe gravitic sensor are gone like CA-286 in HotQ) but still has available missiles.

Well - to be fair - battle damage to control links that leaves launchers far more intact and other systems to support firing available won't be a common variety of battle damage.

I just think, for the missile control variant, it's not a significant technical hurdle and wouldn't demand much magazine space if you're not committed to using it all the time. (A podlayer may have more use for it from its own launchers, if it can tie it into pods full of attack/EW missiles. But that introduces other complications.) And if it can be smart enough to provide a net benefit to the birds at the end, when it's too late anymore for help from the ship but not too late for help from a nearby control missile, that would be a strong argument for routine use. (The RMN can tell whether or not that's the case already from 23-E usage.)

A control missile for a bunch of CM's would be a technical hurdle, but if that could work out, it would be a great big and routine help for missile defense.

SharkHunter wrote:--combining snips--

Jonathan_S wrote:And deeply stacking broadsides is more problematic that deeply stacking pod salvos -- so you're less likely to need to extra fire control from just tubes.

Combining these -- but I don't think that stacking broadsides is all that difficult. The Sag-C's had enough links to handle 128 missiles, with a broadside of only 40 tubes.

I think that Jeff's realization that a control missile solution gives superb control to a ship with battle damage is the clincher. Look at Rozak's defense of Torch, for example. Tube launching would mean that a ship with battle damage reducing their broadside to as little as 3-4 tubes and an effective Tactical section could manage the salvos from an ammo ship/freighter or another "fleet ship" whose tactical section is out of the battle (maybe gravitic sensor are gone like CA-286 in HotQ) but still has available missiles.

Right, House of Steel tells us that with 20 missiles in each broadside the Sag-C can use offbore firing to simultaneously fire both broadsides at a given target; and has enough fire control to handle 3 such stacked broadsides.

But generating that 120 missile triple stack takes nearly a minute (18 second cycle time [per SoS]; 3*18=54). Replacing 4 missiles per salvo with control missiles would let you stack up 1080 offensive missiles (using 120 control missiles). But actually achieving that stack takes you 9 minutes.

So it takes you as long an a max powered range MDM shot to build your stack. (or a third longer than the powered flight time of the missile's you're stacking) Which means even your first salvo you risk having your initial missiles, coasting along waiting for the rest of the super-salvo to get launched, destroyed by proximity kills.
It's the time it takes to build stacked salvos from tubes that makes me call the concept problematic.


But in the scenario with a damaged ship plus an ammo carrier? Wonderful, the pods on the ammo carrier should have the control missiles in them. Already said non-FTL control missiles seem a good idea for Mk16 pods.
So you've got your fire control advantage where it's useful; - where pods let you quickly deploy and fire lot more missiles than you could otherwise control.

Jonathan_S wrote:Right, House of Steel tells us that with 20 missiles in each broadside the Sag-C can use offbore firing to simultaneously fire both broadsides at a given target; and has enough fire control to handle 3 such stacked broadsides.

But generating that 120 missile triple stack takes nearly a minute (18 second cycle time [per SoS]; 3*18=54). Replacing 4 missiles per salvo with control missiles would let you stack up 1080 offensive missiles (using 120 control missiles). But actually achieving that stack takes you 9 minutes.

So it takes you as long an a max powered range MDM shot to build your stack. (or a third longer than the powered flight time of the missile's you're stacking) Which means even your first salvo you risk having your initial missiles, coasting along waiting for the rest of the super-salvo to get launched, destroyed by proximity kills.
It's the time it takes to build stacked salvos from tubes that makes me call the concept problematic.

Perhaps a smaller stack would be better, and still a lot better than the 120 missile, one minute prep one for penetrating serious defenses. And the super-stack could, I suppose, get some defense against proximity soft kills by the ship's active defenses, although I'd not recommend counting on that if you've got a choice.

Alternatively - if the offensive control links take obnoxious quantities of tonnage, crew, surface area, and/or money that could be profitably spent elsewhere, STL control missiles as a standard item could let designers reallocate those resources to something else and leave the ships with whatever that assortment of alternative goodies is and the original effective control capacity.

--snipping--

Jonathan_S wrote:Right, House of Steel tells us that with 20 missiles in each broadside the Sag-C can use offbore firing to simultaneously fire both broadsides at a given target; and has enough fire control to handle 3 such stacked broadsides.

But generating that 120 missile triple stack takes nearly a minute (18 second cycle time [per SoS]; 3*18=54). Replacing 4 missiles per salvo with control missiles would let you stack up 1080 offensive missiles (using 120 control missiles). But actually achieving that stack takes you 9 minutes.
...

...during which time 4 SLN SD's or BC's have got how much closer to being able to get that proximity soft kill?
But then again the point isn't to generate a super stack, it's to generate smaller killing salvos WAY before the squadron trying to jump your convoy/system can range on anything you're defending. If it previously took 120 missiles to generate enough hits to take out a BC, and now you can launch salvos including a control missile 3x the hit likelihood, and 3x the damage, that's a bit over one minute per dead SLN BC, not counting pods.

If at attack squadron is close enough to preventing a bigger stack, the RMN ship is already firing 1 per 2 stacked salvo (12 missiles) or 3 per 2 stack salvo for a SAG-C (36 missiles) less pen-aids and ECM) 40 ish seconds, letting your tactical section disperse the mayhem at the most dangerous remaining targets.