Leonard Detweiler SD size

Another thing about the size and "capable of standing upto other capital ships" thing...

the whole MAlign weaponry is seemingly based around stealth weapons. Graser torpedo is great when hitting targets from surprise, like the various shipyards. But against a ship that can roll ship, and already has active laser clusters & counter missiles... it'd be easy to pick off enough of the torpedos.

The MAlign missile pods are based off the same point that both sides of the GA used for their pods, but the missiles are also going to be inferior (there wasn't any active war to pressure-cook their R&D).

A Lenny Det's going to have to have a pretty large size advantage to make up for the fact that most to all of it's ranged offensive firepower is going to be at best slightly below par, to Grand Alliance. And since the Grand Alliance is primarily missile throwers now, the Lenny Det could have enough SD grasers to wipe out 2+ squadrons in one shot. Wouldn't matter at all, because it has to get in range for those grasers to work, and it's slower than GA SD's.

Somtaaw wrote:Another thing about the size and "capable of standing upto other capital ships" thing...

the whole MAlign weaponry is seemingly based around stealth weapons. Graser torpedo is great when hitting targets from surprise, like the various shipyards. But against a ship that can roll ship, and already has active laser clusters & counter missiles... it'd be easy to pick off enough of the torpedos.

It's possible that the graser torpedoes are just one munition of several that they can roll out - not even counting their own missile pods. A similar one may be a spider-drive bus for a bunch of impeller missiles. If the bus doesn't get noticed on the way in, it could release the missiles close enough that the flight time is short enough that active defenses won't have a lot of response time.

A graser torp may have a chance at a gown the throat or up the kilt shot on a maneuvering ship, especially if the graser torp isn't localized well enough in time and/or has other torpedoes such that maneuvering to interpose a wedge against one exposes a tender part to another.

Mind you, bow walls and stern walls really complicate that, but it's plausible that the MAN designers did not know about such things when they conceived graser torpedoes. We're running interpretations based on supposing the Alignment isn't idiots on the one hand but not omniscient on the other.

Another possible alternative munition is a laserhead torpedo - basically a huge stealth laserhead missile. It could carry a large number of very powerful laserheads. It'd be tremendously vulnerable to CM's or PDC's if spotted, just like the graser torp, and would have a shorter stand-off range perhaps, but it'd have the size for tremendous electronic warfare capability to avoid being spoofed by decoys, and may be able to project laserheads before launch to get around the target and shoot inward from a variety of angles. The essential difference from the graser torp is being less dangerous against a target that cannot maneuver, but better able to handle decoys and spread fire to get good shots on maneuvering targets.

The MAlign missile pods are based off the same point that both sides of the GA used for their pods, but the missiles are also going to be inferior (there wasn't any active war to pressure-cook their R&D).

Generally inferior, yes. I wouldn't say that their R&D hasn't been pressurized: they've been well aware that they've been preparing to take on the whole remainder of human civilization for a long time. What they haven't had the benefit of is actual experience, and responding to a real, inventive, responsive enemy.

A Lenny Det's going to have to have a pretty large size advantage to make up for the fact that most to all of it's ranged offensive firepower is going to be at best slightly below par, to Grand Alliance. And since the Grand Alliance is primarily missile throwers now, the Lenny Det could have enough SD grasers to wipe out 2+ squadrons in one shot. Wouldn't matter at all, because it has to get in range for those grasers to work, and it's slower than GA SD's.

I think if the MAN were counting on energy range combat still for the LD's, they'd be the idiots we're assured they are not. If they really had been building huge capital ships that would dominate a combat range that just does not happen anymore, we'd have read a lot more about the terrible investment they'd made in the wrong navy - like the Navy of God's early galley fleet in the Safehold series.

1) Nobody knows where the MAlign capital is, or even its core systems, while they know where everyone else's capitals and systems are (mostly). So they don't need to catch the enemy fleets in a race: they can force them to defend stationary positions because once a single LD has taken up orbit around a planet and the defenders refuse to engage it, it can demand the planet's surrender.


2) I wonder how many PDLCs one needs to reliably counter a given number of missiles. Shrike-Bs have 3 superdreadnought-type PDLCs on their nose, which is maybe 10 meters wide. On a broadside that's 1250 x 250 meters, one could put in over 9.000 PDLCs.
Even using some kill numbers the Sollie PDLCs got against the Manties (16 BC-sized PDLCs per missile kill), that's still 600 missiles stopped. I am fairly sure the MAlign can do a lot better than that.

3) The Spider Drive complicates missile targeting immensely. You can't target what you can't see, let alone hit it. Even assuming a recon drone could localize a Spider well enough for missile targeting (not merely detect it), said recon drone would have to be within half a million kilometers, if not much closer. That is energy range and it is unlikely the drone will survive for long.

If the alignment is having problems manufacturing the smaller ships now I think that it is going to have mor difficulties making the big ones. Manufacturing may be their bottleneck.

The MA isnt having problems building ships, so much as they decided to take an opening 2 odd years early because of the situation. The small ships were proof of concept/test beds/training vessels while the larger ships were still being built/finished. So talking about manufacturing bottlenecks is somewhat premature


And spider ships are roughly similar to subs. Adding a bubble sidewall would be akin to a sub holding a rock concert or blaring away with active sonar. While not being able to move...

Meaning they would die rather fast.



However, even low accelerations(200G or so) is far more than enough to shift the location of your ship enough that any standard laser-head will miss at extended ranges without on the fly targeting updates.

If the missile cant see you, it might as well be ballistic. And RFC has repeatedly pointed out how easy those are to dodge.
Some will still make it from pure dumb luck if they get spread wide enough however, and that is where all the armor comes in i would imagine.


Which is part of what makes Apollo all that much more terrifying for the MA. Telemetry links measured in seconds as opposed to minutes cuts into their cloak of invisibility rather drastically.

Its not just Apollo that would be terrifying to the MAlign, but the Ghost Rider drones.

Part of how their stealth works, is by "dissipating" waste heat on the exact opposite side of the ship from known threats. Ghost Rider drones flitting about, with their stupidly efficient stealth means a Lenny Det (or a Shark) has no bloody clue which way to dissipate it's heat. Which translates into eventually cooking its crew, because it's either cook the crew, or get spotted. Either way means death (or dishonor by capture).


The only time they've come near Manticoran tech was Oyster Bay, both Manticore and Grayson branches, and we had that small thing of Sharks passing nearby the Grayson units.

JeffEngel wrote:I think if the MAN were counting on energy range combat still for the LD's, they'd be the idiots we're assured they are not.

Unless they can use their stealth to get into energy range...

Up thread we had the statement that the only upper limit on the size of the LDs would be cost...

I'm not so sure about that. For one thing, the laws of inertia and gravity are still in force so far as we know. That would mean that there would have to be some limit somewhere because the bigger something is, the more power it takes to move it regardless the design of the system of movement. Then too, while 200 gravities doesn't sound like much in honorverse terms, it is still the application of a lot of force. The bigger something gets, the more difficult to assure structural integrity with the application of force to move the structure, I would think.

Finally, although this might not be the more difficult thing to solve, stealthing smaller objects is probably simplier than larger ones since smaller objects take so much less energy to move and thus have less heat to get rid of.

So I would think there would have to be some practical limits on size even if we don't know what they are.

Don

This is a world n which commercial ships that have compensator failures keep operating after killing everyone aboard, so even commercial ships are hundreds of times overbuilt. (Iirc, What Price Dreams)

Tenshinai wrote:

JeffEngel wrote:...
Here's where the question comes up: is there any reason they can't manage a stand-up fight, if it comes to that, on account of being just ridiculously huge, with far more armor, particle shielding, electronic warfare systems, active defenses, and possibly decoys, than any impeller drive starship?
...

It has been suggested as a possible answer before yes, by myself among others.

And i think it is fairly reasonable to assume they will be at least bigger than SDs.

Probably MUCH bigger.

I agree that the LDs will be bigger than SDs -- on the outside, at least.

I think that the Lenny Dets probably only have the same amount of habitable space, or less, as a DN or SD with the difference in displacement taken up by all-around Armor at least ten times as thick as an RMN SD carries on its sides.

The armor fore and aft is probably weaker -- because of pod doors aft and graser-torpedo tubes forward.

Just a WAG, but I would not be surprised at 40% Armor and active defenses, 40% magazines and launch apparatus for pods and GTs (including tactical computers), 15% Drives (streak hyper, spider, and warshawski) and 5% crew space, stores and life support.